DavidFilmer:
Consider the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. It’s not especailly miraculous that wheat and fish multiply - we see it happen all the time. But we don’t normally see it happen in the manner that happened on those plains. Jesus did not do something completely “unnatural” (such as create a meal from thin air), but, in a sense, he “sped up” the natural process.
Could (or, would) Jesus have accomplished this miracle if the young boy (or some other) had not offered to share his supper? Theologians debate this point, but I say no.
LIkewise, God could have, in the act of Creation, have decided to “speed up” the process. He could have created a “mature” world, with all the signs of youth, but without the actual events of youth having occured. As they say in the movies, God “cut to the chase.”
So what if we think these artifacts are eons old? That’s how God WOULD have done it, if He had actually bothered with the “insignificant” bits. Maybe He did, and maybe He didn’t - we simply cannot say for sure.
It’s a possibility. And it cannot be disproved.
God can and has certainly performed miracles, such as the parting of the Red Sea and the feeding of the five thousand. But creating a world with false appearances of eons of development would, indeed, be deceptive. The reason miracles are not deceptive and the false appearance of evolutionary development is, is because miracles stand on their own. They do not include false evidence of an alternate explanation. For example, if Jesus miraculously created 5000 fish overnight while the crowd was sleeping, produced evidence to indicate that overnight a large number of donkeys delivered the fish, then expected the people to believe it was a miracle—that would be deceptive. While faith is required to really believe, faith is difficult enough as it is. It would be against God’s nature to introduce false evidence, knowing it would mislead and deceive people.
What makes it even more untenable that God would intentionally create the false appearance of evolutionary development is nature is a primitive form of the gospel. What we learn from nature is a form of revelation, and as such, God would not introduce deception into this gospel account.
Romans 1:18-23 explains that all men are without excuse, that “for since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen,
being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” (v. 20) The natural world proclaims God—not just by its beauty, but by its order and design. What nature tells us is true. This stands in stark contrast to Bhuddist philosophy, which tells us to mistrust our senses and that the world around us is an illusion. This is not to say that our senses always perceive correctly. But it isn’t just that Bhuddism tells us that we don’t perceive correctly, it tells us there is really nothing objective out there at all. This is a lie from the pit of hell.
Given this gospel of nature—the sedimentary layers, the drifting continents that look like puzzle pieces, life forms that appear to have similar evolutionary ancestry—this all tells a story. God is revealing something of Himself in this story. It is untenable to suggest that God created all this elaborate evidence only to mislead us. And this evidence doesn’t just give us a history lesson. It is a lesson in how we are to epistemologically approach every inquiry of life: theology, philosophy, logic, physical science, biology, psychology, business…you name it.
Having said this, it is worth considering the possibility that the universe is simultaneously 18 billions years old and 6 days old. The passagle of time is not only affected by speed, it is also affected by mass. From what I understand, the mass of the universe can be calculated by the echo of the Big Bang. At the moment of the Big Bang, every atom that presently exists in the universe was confined to a very small area. After the Bang and the subsequent formation of galaxies and planetary systems, the universe has been expanding. But the reference point for the 6-day calculation of creation may be based on universe-time. Given the estimated mass of the universe, that passage of time is extremely slow–so slow that 18 billion earth years equals about 6 days. Since the first 5 “days” of creation was prior to the creation of humans, it makes sense that the account would be told from a perspective other than human and other than earth-time. The creation account in Genesis is told from God’s perspective.
You can read more about this fascinating theory that harmonizes scripture and the gospel of nature in a book by Gerald Schroeder, called The Science of God.
, the idea that anyone who rejects full naturalistic atheistic evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane, wicked, tormented, bullied or brainwashed.
