Faith Well Grounded

Space rocks...

I'm often asked if I'm a creationist. And I'm always surprized by the question. I'll clarify. If you are talking to a Christian, you are talking to a creationist. Every Christian should believe that God created everything.

But the term "creationist" seems to have been exclusively attached to "recent-creationists", or "young-Earth-creationists". There is the possibility that God created the Universe eons ago, and then created Adam intact as a mature human. It's not just a question of evolution vs. a young Earth.

Now, with the question suitably rephrased, I can absolutely answer, "I don't know."

The fact of the matter is that I'm not sure who is right about the age of the Earth/Cosmos. And the fact of the matter is that I'm not too overly worried either way. The creation account can be interpreted either way. And its truth doesn't hinge on any scientific model.

Maybe it is a description of literal days-- yom in the original Hebrew. Maybe the universe is only a few thousand years old, and God made it with the appearance of maturity just as He did Adam shortly after. But He would have had to purposefully done things such as having light travel toward us at different rates than it is now. It seems almost purposefully planned to trick us if it is young. But then again, He would also have had to have placed blood in Adam's body in places it hadn't been pumped to, so apparent age shouldn't be too surprising.

Now we're back to space rocks clanging around in my head. They're problems for both recent-creationists and evolutionists. They're kind of a "one-size-fits-all" thorn in the side.

Have you ever seen pictures of the moon close up? Notice the rugged beauty of its cratered surface. That's what Earth would look like if it didn't have all the water to cover the craters and climate to erode them. It's been beaten as badly as the moon and, though erosion has removed many of them and the oceans cover many more, we still have craters pock-marking our planet in plain view.

My question to a recent-creation model is, "when?" When did we get hit will all of those meteors? It would have had to have been between the fourth day and Adam-- some time before life was created else life would have had to have been recreated after a catastrophic impact ended it.

My questions to the evolutionist is "how?!" The probabilities of random mutation and selection giving us the almost-infinite variety we see in life is beyond my thresholds of belief. Even considering the billions of individual creatures in the innumerable generations of this scientific theory, the idea of any blind process developing the unimaginably numerous complexities and specializations we see is ludicrous. Now, throw into the mix globally catastrophic impacts that would have snuffed out almost all life on the planet several times over during this process, and you have gone from ludicrous to absolutely feeble and back again.

Man, those thorns hurt. And they show that the discussion isn't such a strict either/or between recent-creation and evolution. Maybe the Universe looks old because it is old. Maybe the creation account really isn't about literal days, especially since yom was used elsewhere in scripture to indicate an expanse of time, and poetic description was used pretty liberally elsewhere too. I don't know. Maybe God created the cosmos and let the dirt age a while before forming Adam from it.

I'm actually a little bummed to post this, my first post in quite a while, containing all questions and no answers. But I guess sometimes the questions are constructive too. I think sometimes we all need reminding that a lot of these questions will remain questions until we see things more clearly, when we actually see the Author face to face and He explains it all perfectly.

Is it all young, or all old? Was it six literal days or a poetic description of a big bang? Does it matter, since both answers require God's work? Does it matter, when He's still the author and finisher?

Either way He is still God-- awesome enough to uphold the universe and still save a wretch like me.

Be blessed...

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