“If the stars are so far away and it would take millions of light years for them to be seen from
earth, why do we see stars?”
Ah yes, the perplexing problem that the appearance of age
raises for creationists.
The standard difficulty is not about whether it would have
been possible for God to cause starlight to provoke its usual reaction from
Adam’s retinas in a nanosecond rather than taking light years to travel to
earth from the moment the stars were created. Obviously someone powerful enough
to speak the universe into being could make both light and human nerve endings dance
to any tune he pleased.
No, the standard complaint is moral rather than practical;
something like “Wouldn’t it be a bit deceptive of God to bend what we perceive
to be the established rules of science?”
No.
The Belly Button Conundrum
I suppose I should develop that a bit. The creation account in Genesis seems like it has both
Adam and
Eve appear on the scene as fully mature adults. I don’t know if they had belly buttons, but if they did, these would
have presented a similar intellectual difficulty for some. I expect they did
not.
If we find the idea of fully-formed adults unreasonable, picture the
additional complexities if God had made both Adam and Eve as newborns. God
would have had to raise Adam to adulthood, since even in Eden a baby could not
find food for himself, and Adam (presumably) would have had to raise Eve. And
even that, some might complain, would have been a bit of a cheat, because
neither had really been “born” in the sense the rest of us experience. To allow
for that would have required a mother, which would mean creating someone whose
existence would give rise to all the same intellectual difficulties attendant
to creating Adam or Eve, and so on ad infinitum.
Uniformitarianism and Occasional Intervention
At some point we have to concede that in order to start the
ball rolling God had to do SOMETHING in a manner he does not ordinarily do it
today, and in fact Genesis 1 and 2 are full of such one-time events.
Animals present the same birth problem Adam and Eve do, and plant life would
not be much use to either humans or animals if it was all in the form of seeds
and seedlings. It certainly would not produce oxygen the way it does for us
today, and you couldn’t eat fruit if there were no trees yet. For all the
various moving parts of the creation “machine” to operate correctly, pretty
much everything would need to have been created in its mature form. If we
accept that for just this one special situation God bypassed years of the
normal human, animal and plant maturation process, then we can surely accept
that he could easily bypass the normal process by which light reaches us.
Further, if we are going to reject or contest anything that
doesn’t conform to a uniformitarian view of the universe, we’re also going to
have to reject the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the turning of water into
wine, and so on. Anyone who accepts a Christian worldview accepts with it God’s
occasional intervention into the ordinary processes we observe around us every day.
Appearance of Age
Like it or lump it, the appearance of age is kind of baked
into the creation cake, so to speak.
For those who don’t like it, there are plenty of belief options
out there.
Here is the problem with this whole thing. (BTW, is this a pseudo Ananimous writing in to get a discussion started or a real one :-?). The main thing that has to be realized is that God, being God, is clearly also aware of this and all similar discussions and obviously has decided to leave everyone in a lurche about topics and ideas like that. The real question for us as individuals is therefore, what was his intention for handling it that way and what are his expectations from us on how it is best handled? Any thoughts on that?
ReplyDeleteMy answer would be that he certainly built into human development this awakening and coming to awareness process of what physical reality is really like. I also have the slight suspicion that he wanted to make that process as interesting and intellectually challenging for his creation as possible (he does not want us to be bored but rather be in awe, I suspect. I.e., he is a master psychologist interested in all developmental aspects and growth of his creation that he stuck into a material universe). Therefore, it can obviously be perfectly OK to have a creationist or an evolutionary type of universe (both actually being creationist) and for us to slowly discover what is really going on. This also means that the intertwined spiritual component of reality is also being discovered alongside the material one whether or not some people will admit to such a possibility.
These are real questions passed on to me from someone who worked with teenagers at youth camps this summer.
ReplyDelete