pull down to refresh
0 sats \ 5 replies \ @SimpleStacker 8 Oct \ parent \ on: What belief did you used to hold strongly that you’ve since abandoned? AskSN
Have you heard of the "appearance of age hypothesis"? That God created a universe in motion and with physical laws, that allow us to "look back" and see age, even if it was just created?
The easiest way to think about this is to ask "When Adam was first created, how old was he?" Most people would envision that he was formed as a fully adult human male, which by our biological time keeping would put him at say 25 years old, but he would have been 0 from a chronological standpoint.
Just food for thought.
I haven't heard it called that, but I've had people use that specific argument. The first thing that jumps out at me is how it makes God into a liar. We now have a 6K year old universe that is created to look billions of years old. Why would a god create a universe to appear much older than the Bible claims it to be? At that point, he's doing everything that he can to trick us into thinking that the bible is wrong.
reply
I don't see it that way. For example, I don't think it makes God a liar if he created Adam as a fully formed adult male instead of a newborn baby. And it seems to me that any universe God could have created that obeys physical laws and motion would have an appearance of age, no matter what. And it's not like God kept the days of creation hidden from us, he actually revealed it to us in the book of Genesis. So, it's fine if you don't believe it, but I don't think it makes God into a liar.
reply
And it's not like God kept the days of creation hidden from us, he actually revealed it to us in the book of Genesis. So, it's fine if you don't believe it, but I don't think it makes God into a liar.
That's what I'm pointing out. We have a book where God creates the universe in six days, then have the genealogies adding up to something like 6000 years, depending on which you go with.
And then we have the universe we can look out and see, a universe that attests to billions of years. I don't see how you can make those two jive. If the universe appears to be billions of years old and the bible says that it's 6000, either the universe was created to appear much older than it is or the bible is wrong. Either way, God has lied to us.
reply
It's more like this, is God lying if he created Adam as a fully formed adult male who looks to be about 25, but 5 years after creation he tells someone, "I created Adam 5 years ago?"
reply
No, but only because he would have had to have created Adam in his 20s. If you drop a newborn in the woods, it dies. If you drop a toddler in the woods, it dies. If you drop a child in the woods, it dies.
Even if you drop a teenager in the woods, he'll eventually get himself killed. The universe doesn't need to be created with the decay isotopes of uranium surrounding uranium in only exactly the amount that you would get if the Earth were 4.5 billion years old. There's no reason for that, and yet, here we are. The world is full of instances like that. The universe appears ancient in ways that only make sense in the case that the universe is ancient, or there's a trickster god trying to convince us that it is.
reply