So let’s say you believe in God, go to church, all that stuff. But in your studies of the bible, you count out all the years and it seems that the bible says that the earth is only 5000-7000 years old. “That’s crazy,” you say. “The earth is billions and billions of years old. Science as shown us that.”
Are you sure though?
Lets say one day you were walking along in a field, and sudden God speaks to you and says, “I’m going to create a tree in this field. Do whatever you want with it.” So POOF, there’s a tree. Nothing special about it other than how it was made. So you stare it awhile, think about how cool it is that a tree was just created. But after awhile you think, “I wonder how many rings are in the trunk.” So you cut it down, and it turns out that there’s twenty. How is this possible!?! The tree shouldn’t even have any, right? It was just created. So you decide to have it carbon-dated. Same result; twenty year old tree.
So what’s the point of all this?
Is it not possible that God created an earth that appears to be billions of years old? Since no one has ever witnessed a supernatural creation event, I think it’s entirely logical. There is only so much that science can give us. Science is, by definition, the study of only the physical world, not the supernatural, such as creation is.
Discuss 
Tags: Creationism, intelligent design, young earth
October 17th, 2008 at 11:18 am
This sounds like an excellent argument for the idea that theology can’t be used to study the Worldly, and science can’t be used to study the Divine.
Treat geology as an as-if construct. “The way we see the world, it’s as if it was formed from a mass of half-molten space debris billions of years ago, slowly cooling and subject to eons of geological processes that we can study to make predictions about how it will work in the future.”
If the ability to investigate and predict are gifts of God, then we insult him not to use them. If he created a world for us that (at least most of the time) acts within rules that we can understand, then it behooves us to study those rules in order to be better custodians of that world.
Since we cannot know when the end times will come, then it is our duty to act as if they will not come any time soon, at least as far as taking care of our world is concerned.
If you were housesitting for someone who said he would be back anytime between a week and a year, wouldn’t you spend that entire time keeping the place clean and tidy for him, because you didn’t know when he’d be coming back?
October 18th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Interesting thought! Thanks for posting!
November 19th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I’d suggest that it “appears to be billions of years old” because we’ve decided its traits must be produced by billions of years’ worth of processes. Using your tree image, we know we don’t have a twenty-year-old tree, and therefore must ask why it has twenty rings and yields carbon-dating results consistent with twenty-year-old lifeforms. A reasonable answer for the rings would be “No reason whatsoever, other than I like twenties.” A reasonable answer for the C-14 data would be “It just happens to have that proportion of isotopes. You’re the ones who associate the proportion with twenty-years-dead things.” (I would use this argument with reference to radiometric dating of the planet as well.)
I have no quarrel with using our experience as a source of knowledge with which to evaluate experimental data. The problem comes when we insist that our experience is the only such source to be used.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
The reason that it actually appears to be billions of years old are immaterial. It is our intellect that leads us to that conclusion, when looking at the evidence and using our reasoning minds.
“It’s just that way” isn’t a reasoning answer, arrived at via logic; it’s a refusal to use logic. The data that indicate that the world has been around for longer than a few thousand years is pretty convincing. Why would a creator who loves us create a world full of lies? There must be some kind of truth to it, some lesson to be learned from it, or he wouldn’t have made it that way and given us the tools to learn those lessons.
The only “forbidden fruit” in the world was on the Tree in Eden. Everything else, we are allowed to use as responsible custodians of the Earth. Why can’t science be a kind of “user’s manual” to the Earth, a way of figuring out how best to do that job?
Perhaps you’re not catching the concept of an “as if” construct? It says nothing about how the world actually is in truth; to our imperfect Human perceptions that world is probably beyond our understanding.
An “as if” construct is like a parable! When Christ said, “There was a rich man and a poor man…” he wasn’t talking about two specific people who actually existed (necessarily) but rather about a concept that can be understood by means of the story itself.
So what I’m suggesting, is that science could be thought of as a huge parable, or perhaps a series of parables, laid down within the Earth by God, to teach us lessons about how to take care of it and live responsibly within it.