It is said by Evolutionary Creation advocates that if Young Earth Creationism is true, then God “lied” by making the universe appear old. In fact the “appearance of age” is one explanation some YEC use to explain the apparent age of the universe. The argument YEC makes is that if God were to create a tree, instantaneously, and someone came along moments later, the someone may have no idea the tree was only seconds old, for a “created” tree would appear to be mature. The same logic would apply for the land masses, earth and the universe itself.
But to evolutionists, Theistic Evolutionists and evolutionary creationists, this explanation imputes to God a “lie”, that he would have left clues in the universe that make it appear to be old when it is not, deceiving…well, scientists primarily… who want to assume the age of something very old can be determined by examining its properties.
It is not my purpose here to defend a particular age for the cosmos. As a conservative Christian, I am not committed to a particular age of the most distant star, or of the necessity of a precise 24 hour day in the creation of planets or land masses, but I am committed to the historicity of Adam and his fall into sin as recorded in the Genesis account. What concerns me here is logic, for this is a curious and horribly inconsistent charge made by EC advocates against YEC.
If find it stunning that EC advocates suggest that
A) God “LIED” if the universe is young when it appears to be old,
B) But there is apparently nothing deceitful about an “inspired” text that indicates absolutely nothing about the alleged irrefutable truth of common descent!
The utter absurdity of that inconsistency ought to be enough to cause any serious reader of scripture to doubt whether EC is the least bit honest with the text of scripture.
What is the greater lie?
Is it the lie latent in a subtle set of clues allegedly buried in inferences made by a few highly specialized technicians; conclusions measured in the long slow decay of radio-isotopes or measurements of the speed of light, each revealed only through sophisticated scientific methods based on philosophical assumptions about the nature of the physical universe?
Or is the greater lie laid out in common human language in story form which explicitly and repeatedly claims that human beings are descended from a single pair whose rebellion is the cause of all death and suffering?
It is often asserted by these sophisticated academics that God revealed the Genesis story to earlier pre-scientific peoples because they would not have been sophisticated enough to comprehend common descent. Really?
Were the men who lived in the age that built the pyramids really so incapable of higher level thinking that a story of creation which simply suggested all living beings came from earlier creatures would have been incomprehensible to them? Is it more credible that instead God reveals to them a story that all humans descended from a single pair?
