Recently my surfing has taken me across a collection of discussions about Creationism and Evolution, along with the variations attached to them. A primary flaw in all of this is making it man-centered.
By “man-centered” we are dipping once again into the sin of Hellenism. Go ahead and look up that term. A fundamental element of the entire field of thought is the arrogant assumption man is the measure of all things. Those of us who claim to rely on the Bible can’t allow ourselves to yield that ground in such a debate. From the biblical point of view, God is the center of all things.
So it works like this. Was the earth created some 6000 years ago? Or for the generous, would it be more like 12,000? The biblical answer is “wrong question.” First and foremost: God created the world. His purpose is something at which we might guess (I rather like CS Lewis’s suppositions), but that is not actually revealed in any obvious way. Rather, the point is to note He is the center of any questions we might ask about the whole thing. So instead of looking at all the data you can gather, or the data you might believe you can find in the Bible, how about we look at the question using the Bible’s own philosophical bias? Yeah, it works a lot better that way.
Whatever the various reasons God might have had, at least part of it is hinted at broadly in Scripture: A place for mankind to act out a reaction to God’s revelation. From there, it’s not too hard to imagine if you find evidence of human activity in the dust of the earth, it wasn’t created that way. Just about every other sign of activity and change is “natural” by definition.
The next mistake is assuming we are capable of dating those human events for which no dates are provided in the Bible. For example, honest historians will tell you the entire dating system for events in ancient Egypt is a house of cards. Most of what we think we know about Bible History and other ANE chronologies rests largely on associating them with “known” dates of Egyptian contemporary history. Objectively, it’s very iffy. The Bible text itself pays little attention to dates, frequently using round numbers, symbolic numbers, and generally treating time measure as a silly obsession of other people, not folks in the Bible. We don’t know how to handle that, for the most part.
But even if we could pin down dates of most human activity, it wouldn’t help us much. If any part of the major catastrophes described in Genesis can be taken literally, then any system of dating based on extrapolations of steady progress are utterly silly. Most secular dating systems do this, blindly assuming digging in the dirt to find layers associated with prehistoric eras and putting dates with them is possible by simply extrapolating, as if all natural events took place at some steady pace.
The biggest kicker is this: Why does anyone assume the world was created in some pristine state? Would that even make sense? Can you not imagine God knows a thing or two about efficiency? I have to wonder: If this were my project, would I need an earth in pristine, “new” condition? There’s not much point in that, since it would not be usable in that shape. If I knew millions and billions of years of radical changes needed to take place before man could make any sense of this created world, why not just create it in an aged condition?
Lest you consider that some sort of “fraud” on God’s part, you are back in that Hellenized territory, where man is the measure of all things. God, by definition, is always Truth and Righteousness. If He did it, it’s right. Just because humans — who deny Him — are confused by the apparent aged condition of the universe is no sign He is guilty of anything. They are. I am not logically required to assume some long string of world-shaping catastrophes compressed in some short time span to suggest the earth isn’t much more than 12,000 years old. I’m assuming my God is smart enough to put stuff where it was needed, rather like the science fictional act of cloning an adult with a full adult copy.
Until it can be proved conclusively God didn’t do that, I’d say the whole question is goofy.
