OK, then, what about Gandhi? He certainly knew about Jesus, and certainly stayed hindu, and certainly followed 5-10 while ignoreing 1 -4, the more important ones.
Gandhi couldn't have been saved because he didn't believe in Christ as savior. To have heard of Christ and rejected his salvation takes one out of the category of righteous Gentile. It's about what you do with the light you have, and Gandhi had a lot of light that he ignored.
You also didn't respond to my observation that you were saying that yahweh was an impotent god (well, other than the mary incident).
I said God is sustainer and protector of even his human creation that spits in his face and you call God impotent for that. Such comments don't deserve a response; I ignored most of your post for that reason.
OK, back to our main topic. Faith suggested that it may be a good idea to check for testable predictions of the idea that there has been a general degradation since a purported fall, around 6,000 years ago. I said I'd get back to that. Here it is.
Such a general degradation across genomes, including both human and animal life (not to mention other kingdoms), should be detectable.
The most obvious thing to test are direct samples of ancient vs current DNA. While DNA does generally decay quickly, we do have samples that have survived. Here are some:
1. Neanderthal DNA. We have some Neanderthal DNA. While a number of dating methods put Neanderthal DNA to between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago (depending on the sample), creationists usually claim that Neanderthals are normal h. sapiens who died in or before the flood. If so, then they are at least 4,500 years old.
I need to read more about Neanderthals but I'd guess that they were post-Flood human beings myself since so much evidence of them has survived.
...So lets say we have only 40% of our good genome left. If that’s the case, then we’ve degraded 60% in 6000 years. If the degradation is linear (again, big guess), then that’s 1% loss every century. So a Neanderthal genome should have around 0 to 15% degradation.
Such a huge difference would jump out to any geneticist looking at Neanderthal DNA. Since numerous studies have been done on Neanderthal DNA, It must not be there. The researcher couldn’t hide it since other people have seen Neanderthal DNA, and more importantly, they wouldn’t want to, since such a find would gain them instant fame.
Googling the Neanderthal genome got me the information that so far they've sequenced 0.03% of it, not enough to make any pronouncements about its character. Also, the DNA is so fragmented and corrupted by bacteria that there would be no way to judge the size of the genome or of the junk DNA at this point.
2. DNA from other ancient animals. We have a huge amount of insects in amber from what creationists would consider pre-flood times. The same math from above applies here, as well as the same logic.
Well, what does the DNA from these insects look like? Math isn't important, but the genome could be interesting.
3. Frequency of disease in the fossil record. Many diseases leave visible signs in bones. Diseases have been shown in fossils across the board, regardless of age. I don’t know that a quantified study of diseased fossil frequency has been done, but since a degradation from the fall until now should show a big difference, such a trend should stick out like a sore thumb, and I’m sure it would have been found if there.
Why would it stick out? What's the condition of the dinosaur skeletons? They look pretty healthy.
4. Spina bifida in Neolithic England. The barrows around Stonehenge and similar Neolithic religious monuments are dated to around 2,000 to 5,000 years ago. Thus they should have around half of the degradation we have.
Note that creationists generally agree with those dates, since we have roman and other records showing that refer to them as past civilizations. The bodies in the barrows have a hig proportion of Spina Bifida (a birth defect). If there has been degradation since the fall, then ancient birth defects should be much lower, not much higher.
How much junk DNA do they have? The presence of a disease isn't a problem. Diseases started appearing soon after Adam and Eve I would suppose, certainly in some lineages. It's a matter of numbers. The righteous patriarchs of Genesis 5 lived hundreds of years but that doesn't mean the line of Cain fared so well, or other children of Adam and Eve.
5. Human age at death over the millennia. We have human fossils all over the ancient time frame, and the age of a human fossil can be estimated from bone growth and bone changes. These fossils do not show that ancient people lived to anything near the ages in Genesis. Instead, they show a steady life expectancy, with variation from time to time due to things like food supply. Of course, one could argue that the bone changes that we use to determine age at death simply happened later, which could explain it, but would require that kids lived to, say, 50 years and were still kids, which seems difficult on the parents.
I would guess it's a matter of numbers. There aren't that many fossilized human remains. Parts of the human race certainly degenerated rapidly, living very primitive lives in caves in Europe for instance, under difficult conditions -- that would probably have been after the Flood though.
6. Wooly mammoth frozen bodies. It has been shown that sperm frozen in animals who have been frozen whole is still potent even after a few years. This work has encouraged people to think about using frozen mammoth sperm or eggs to breed or clone a mammoth. The DNA of mammoths has been compared to modern elephants to find differences. If the degradation hypothesis is true, then the mammoths would show little degradation , and the elephants a lot as per the math above. Such a difference would again stand out like a sore thumb. No such difference has been found.
Again, they also haven't yet made a lot of progress in reconstructing the genome.
7. Dendrochronology. Dendrochronolgy, as we know, is the method of counting tree rings to look at their growth in ancient times. Tree ring series go back 10,000 years in some places (I haven’t heard how creationists explain this - maybe a good new thread topic). (Also - what do creationists say about the flying sword mentioned in Genesis 3? Where did it go? Why can’t any skeptic just go and look at it?) Anyway, with better health, trees are known to grow more, giving wider rings. If there has been a general degradation, then it would be easy to see this in the tree ring series, which would show better health in the past, esp 6,000 years ago). They don’t show this however - they show the same amount of health (with variation) today, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 9,000 years ago, etc.
The tree rings have been discussed many times at EvC. There are various theories about them.
Well, 7 is the holy number according to the numerology soothsayers of the Bible, so I’ll stop there. Just a little thought brings more of them to mind (such as how long kings lived in Chinese records, which go back 4,000 years). In all of these cases, it is possible to test the predictions of the degradation hypothesis, and the predictions don’t match the data. Maybe a good way to explain this is to say that God reached in and altered each piece of this evidence to deceive those he’s already decide to burn in hell, just as “Paul” says he would in 2thes2:11?
You are making premature claims based on very very incomplete data.
Also, records of kings and dynasties in all cultures are exaggerated.
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