Made-Old, the Stone Washed Universe
Don't miss he Shopping Carts! Scroll down for more info. Lets talk about the made-old explanation of natural and geological history. In this, certain people of faith who think that it is spiritually important to come to a specific conclusion about the creation of the world have posited that one way to make a seven day creation (six plus a one-day vacation, really) seem plausible in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary is to state that God made the world looking old.
I believe that this is remotely possible, provided you start with the assumption that there is a God and He is an omnipotent being capable of anything conceivable or inconceivable. In this, it could be said that God created the Earth in-situ, in process, like a rolling start.
In following this theory, I might then conclude that all events that apparently happened prior to the act of creation are therefore synthetic, and manufactured. God is omnipotent, however, so His manufactured history is 100% convincing in all the ways we as lowly humans can ever perceive. So the only one who could possibly tell the difference between the manufactured history and the real history is God Himself.
As a matter of fact, this could mean that God created the universe three minutes ago, including all of our memories up to this very moment. How could we ever know? My car, contrary to the evidence provided me by Ford Motor Credit, may be brand new and my bowels may be full of food I never really ate but only think I did.
Ah, but that is getting ahead of ourselves. Lets go back to God having created the Earth about six thousand years ago sporting a stylishly lived-in look. If true, then scientists have no choice but to use the evidence and phenomena presented by God's manufactured reality in their quest to find answers and make predictions about the world around us. They must operate within the system set up for us by God. God seems to have made the artificial history completely seamless and predictive, and therefore removed the necessity of believing in his act of creation, an act for which he carefully provided us with no evidence.
That is, if He did such a thing so very effectively, then He effectively did no such thing at all. With this, I think it is possible to believe in a seven day creation, and it is possible to believe that there was no seven day creation and both are not disprovable and can be valid paths to their adherents, though I am not among them, and fail to see the spiritual necessity of holding onto either concept. Why would the salvation through the love of Jesus require that we believe in a supposed seven day creation? (Well, six plus the aforementioned one-day vacation)
But what if you believe that all of time, past and future, may have already been about to be existing all along? What if all of time was always created because it was all created at once?
Labels: Creationism, Jeans, Religion, Underpants