Could God have created the world in six literal days and created it with the "Appearance of great age"?

Question

Most Scientists have concluded that the earth formed over millions of years ago by Evolution because evolution is measurable whereas Creationism is not testable.

Phillip Gosse, a Geologist in the 1850's proposed that God had created everything with an appearance of great age. The actual age of the earth might be eight or ten thousand years, but the "ideal" age(the age which God simulated at creation) could be millions of years.

Creationist believe that when God created Adam and Eve he created them with the "Appearance of great age" because they would not have been able to sustain themselves had they been created as infants. Therefore it is logical that God and the Genesis account is accurate and reasonably consistent with faith in God's Power to actually create the world and universe intelligently. The appearance of great age given the creation of man would be consistent with a "great age" for the rest of God's creation. Therefore impacting Evolutionary Science! Genesis 1:1.

Answer 1

i don't care what scienctists say really the bible said thats what god did and i believe it... god is god and you don't have to understand it or put it into words for it to be true!

Answer 2

You know, God COULD have done whatever "He" wanted. However, I think if you start insinuating that God made fossils have properties of something millions of years old, but not really that old, just to what, trick the scientists, or something??...then you're projecting onto God characteristics of scheming and conniving...do we really want to picture God as THAT sneaky?? Just b/c the Bible says "and the first day, blah blah, and the second day...and on the seventh day he rested", does not mean that that is LITERALLY what happened!! How long is a "day"? You do know that a "day" for us is simply how long the Earth takes to rotate one time...you think the creation of the Universe was really measured in Earth time?? Somehow I doubt it. Genesis is NOT a scientific nor even historic account...it is an allegorical, metaphorical representation that helps shed light (?) on our existence...but some fundamentalists get carried away thinking "every single word in the Bible (and WHICH Bible??) is absolute literal truth". When I read the Old Testament, I get VERY concerned: if God really and truly said and meant all the crazy things that went on, it sure makes God look petty, jealous, and waaay too human. The human authors wrote what the people at that time needed to hear, but not necessarily exactly what happened...I truly wonder what God thinks of some of those passages. Yes, creation WAS progressive; it WAS (I believe) initiated by a Creator whom I call God; it WAS done slowly over a very long time; and it DID include the progression of evolution, too...perhaps not exactly as Darwin supposed it, but evolution of some kind DID occur. We just need some new, more inclusive and far-reaching theories to explain it better. Peace.

Answer 3

Creationism wallows in its inability to explain anything. Ultimately, all of science to a creationist boils down "God did it that way" and there is no need for further discussion. This is intellectual cowardice. It is a crutch for those who do not want to think, but are content to let others tell them what to believe. My God does not create artificial stuff for me to discover to test my faith. My faith is not based upon words written by men (enlightened or not) who didn't know the earth was round, much less that there is such a thing as a galaxy.

A classic example can be found in Genesis. Here the work of thousands of scientists trying to understand the origin of the universe is summarized in two pages that conflict with each other. Certainly it is simple to quote, but all subsequent questions are answered the same way (i.e."I don't know, that's the way God made it"). Simple, but not enough for my God-given curiosity(LOL).

Answer 4

If a god did all that, then he is a lying, deceitful git that I have no desire to worship. I have been brought up to respect truth. Why on Earth would I respect a deity who perpetuates such a great lie on the whole of humanity, deceiving us all about our origins and place in the Universe, giving us one book that tells the turth but surrounding us with evidence that contradicts it? A test of faith? Then he's still a deceitful swine, and deserves to have his children turn away from him, just as a human father who deceives his children about dishonest activity deserves to lose them. If the human race was created by a god, he gave us free will and an insatiable curiosity to find out about the world we live in. To do that and then plant false evidence is the ultimate betrayal.

Creationism is not and has never been science. Every single question, every contradictory piece of evidence, anything that contradicts the Bible can be answered by the untestable hypothesis that God did it that way because he could.

Answer 5

You have been misinformed. What you have to understand is that as time passes, the world moves into new times and new things, and the human understanding must constantly be renewed. God makes all things new!

Beginning about 300 years ago, the human ability to reason brought about the Enlightenment, and with it the scientific revolution. For most people, the Enlightenment brought intellectual freedom and an opportunity to draw closer to a rational grasp of the reality in which we are immersed.

THESE PEOPLE ARE THE WINNERS.

There remained and still remain, however, a minority of people who do not understand the meaning, the power, the godliness and the beauty of that rational understanding, but instead find it frightening. These people prefer to remain with their incorrect understanding that in the past there were people who had a correct understanding of things that came from supernatural sources. These people insist that their faulty understanding of the older magical sources is the real understanding, and that those who have accepted the rational way of approaching reality must be wrong because modern people disagree with what the leaders of these regressive thinkers want their followers to believe.

THESE PEOPLE ARE THE LOSERS.

The winners win and the losers lose for the simple reason that REALITY IS WHAT REALITY IS, AND NO ONE'S WISHES TO THE CONTRARY MATTER AT ALL.

Evolution is a well understood process that has little to do with "mutations" producing new species. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and all the winners accept the notion of evolution. Only the losers refuse to accept it.

Here is a web site that is easy to understand that explains in simple terms why the notion of Evolution describes reality correctly.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evohome.html

From this you will learn why the Godly, sane approach to reality is to accept the fact that Evolution explains part of the mystery of how God creates his creation, and why being afraid to accept the notion of Evolution is ungodly and based on irrational fears.

Please save your fear for fearing ("revering") God, and see if you can outgrow fearing reality. Leave the LOSERS behind, and become a WINNER. Relax, and let the Holy Spirit carry you into the real world.

Answer 6

If you are talking about logic - there is no logical reason why the entire world and all the people in it could not have been created by an omnipotent god yesterday, complete with false memories for each of us and fake dinosaur bones and fake everything else. But there is no evidence that such a thing happened.

Answer 7

The Catholic Position



What is the Catholic position concerning belief or unbelief in evolution? The question may never be finally settled, but there are definite parameters to what is acceptable Catholic belief.

Concerning cosmological evolution, the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing. Vatican I solemnly defined that everyone must "confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing" (Canons on God the Creator of All Things, canon 5).

The Church does not have an official position on whether the stars, nebulae, and planets we see today were created at that time or whether they developed over time (for example, in the aftermath of the Big Bang that modern cosmologists discuss). However, the Church would maintain that, if the stars and planets did develop over time, this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan, for Scripture records: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host [stars, nebulae, planets] by the breath of his mouth" (Ps. 33:6).

Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.

Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that "the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—[but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God" (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36). So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution.

Answer 8

Gosse's suggestion was very quickly rejected by theologians of his day (and since) because it opens up a far more dangerous idea than evolution: the idea that God would deliberately deceive mankind on this or any other issue. No theologian wants anything to do with a deceitful God!

Answer 9

Oh sure, God buried dinosaurs in the earth just to mess with our minds. He buried them just so in geologic layers and set up all these radioisotopes so that they'd look really old. He set up the light coming from stars more than thousands of light years away, so it would look like they were shining longer than the age of the universe. He set up the cosmic microwave background and sent the universe expanding and set the hydrogen/helium ratios at a certain level so that it would appear that the universe used to be much smaller and much hotter billions of years ago.

You seriously believe all that? I want some of what you're smoking. Better yet, go worship the flying spaghetti monster.

Answer 10

(physical reality) - (empirical reality) = faith

Science and religion are orthogonal. In the whole of human history across the entire planet not one deity has volunteered Novocain. It is a telling omission.

Did Yahweh carefully emplace fission halos in mica throughout the volume of the Earth? K-40/A-40 ratios and U/Pb ratios in zircons? That's a whole lot of nitpicking when Yahweh could have addressed spina bifida, rubela birth defects, cerebral palsy, trisomy-21, retinoblastoma, IN NEWBORN BABIES.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/12/henseltwins3112_228x589.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_and_Brittany_Hensel
One of your god's little jokes?

If this is your God, keep It to yourself

Answer 11

Believing in an all-powerful God, the answer has to be yes. The next question, however, must be: Why?