I understand what you're trying to say, but the fact remains that the truth of the Bible and the Christian faith are inseparable. If I believe the Bible is a myth, then why shouldn't the God I believe in be totally mythical as well? It is not possible to separate the two. Especially when Jesus Himself believed in the truth of the Flood and other events in the Old Testament.....my faith in Him is compromised if He is a deceiver or a liar.
This poses a terrible theological dilemma for you, and I am sensitive to it. This is why YEC leads to atheism, and is so harmful to Christianity. Many YEC fundamentalist Christians, when they realize that what they were told, or what their church holds about these actual historical events, is false, then question their entire religious faith. Since I am an atheist, and have never been Christian, I am not the best person to comment on this problem. It might be helpful if some Christians who did accept ToE (the Theory of Evolution) joined the conversation.
Science contradicts? How could it truly contradict when....hold on....let's read what you say next:
How can science truly contradict the Flood story, etc., when it can't truly prove anything??
You're contradicting yourself. You said this earlier: "What I'm getting at is that Noah's flood, YEC, etc. are easily disprovable, and have been disproven by science."
Science in general cannot prove, but can disprove. This is called falsifiability. Any theory should be theoretically possible to disprove, and the lack of any evidence that does so tends to support the theory. The hypothesis that the entire world was underwater, for example, can be falsified. The way science works is that the hypothesis generates predictions, which we can all agree on. For example, if life is only 10,000 years old, then we should never find any fossils oler than 10,000 years. Disproven.
My point is that no scientific knowledge is ever 100% certain. For example, we're pretty darn sure that the earth is (more or less) shaped like a ball. But our degree of certainly of this is like 99.99%. There are still a few (odd) people who do not believe this. And here's the problem for a creationist: ToE is in this same category. There is so much evidence, from so many different fields, of such high quality, that ToE is in the same category as The Round Earth Theory. No reputable biologists questions it any more--it was soundly established around 100 years ago. So, to reject it, you have to reject the scientific method itself.
Hold on. How can you say one minute that science disproves, then turn around and say it can't prove anything? I'm really confused. You can't have it both ways. Either it conclusively proves and disproves or it doesn't. Science as I know it, and as you have admitted, is subject to change. Therefore, when people such as yourself claim science has disproven the Flood and other Biblical events, I don't take such assertions too seriously.
What do you take seriously? Electricity? Subject to change. Germ theory? Same. Round earth? Earth revolves around sun? All as likely to change as ToE, or as that there was never a flood. We are as likely, at this point, to conclude that flood happened as that there is no gravity. Every scientist from every field find the same thing. Geologists, all acting on their own, without consulting with the paleontologists, and without a secret atheist agenda, find no flood. Archeologists--same thing. And so forth. Paleontologists. They all looked, and found no evidence for that flood. That's why no science department in any university in the world (except maybe Bob Jones or the ilk) teaches that it happened. It didn't.
At the end of the day, most science is dependent upon interpretation of data. The data itself doesn't change, but how the scientists interpret it does. That's why science is constantly changing. So, as I've said, some people's blind faith in science is just as absurd as some people's blind faith in religion.
This is what creationists would like you to believe, but in fact interpretation plays no role in scientific knowledge. Reality is not whatever we make it. That's what peer review and replication are about. Interpretation can get you hypothesis, but to establish a theory you need facts, specifically, predictions confirmed.
The kind of faith we have in science, which you say you share, is not blind. It is confidence based on hundreds of years of positive experience. I think you're ambivalent about it. You know it works, but it doesn't support the conclusions you believe. I say that, hard as it is, the only honest response is to toss your conclusions, and struggle with the resulting theological dilemma. Thousands of Christians before you have done it.
If you have time, may I ask you to read
Glenn Morton's Story? He was a YEC Christian and geologist. When confronted with the actual rocks, he realized he'd been lied to. His faith was shaken. But today he is a Christian who speaks out against YEC.
Of course science is the best way to learn about the natural world. I never said it wasn't. But it's not 100% free of error.
We agree on this. It's chock full of error. Awful lot of errors. But still, fewer errors than anything else. That's because, uniquely, science is a method for gradually eliminating errors. And flood theory and YEC are two of the errors that science got rid of over a hundred years ago. Welcome to the 21st century!
