Absurdities - 6000 year old earth
Here we will consider the absurdity that many believers hold to that the earth is less than 6000 years old – in particular, two questions arise.
- How should a six day creation in the Genesis narrative be understood?
- Why do some people believe the earth to be 6000 years old?
Below you will find an extract from 'A Short Book of Believer Absurdities' which addresses the question and some book recommendations and links to websites where people are discussing this or similar questions.
Extract from 'A Short Book of Believer Absurdities'
Returning to the issue of a six day creation and the literalist argument that (because God is omnipotent), this is possible, the questions that I am left with are:
- Why does God need to do this?
- Why does creation have to happen within six days?
- Why create a world in such a way that it becomes necessary to abrogate the laws of nature to achieve the objective?
Here, I am considering the way that some believers think God has worked in creating terra firma on one day and seed bearing plants on the next. The major problem with this model of creation is that it does not equate with our human experience of heat and time. Consider the following example.
Suppose I remove some food from the oven that is cooking at a high temperature. I know my meal is ready but incredibly hot. I also know that it will need time to cool down before I can eat it safely without risk of burn or injury. Possibly, I might even fan it in an attempt to speed up the process, because in my mind I know that time and the rate of cooling are inextricably linked. Now, in the same way that I know this about heat and time, I am also know that many other people understand this principle and have practical experience of working with things hot and cold. Yet, when believers ascribe to the idea that God created the world on one day and placed grass seed on it the next, it is as if they set aside this type of practical experience and with it, the ability to think in a rational way.
Now, in the same way that hot food needs to cool down before people are able to eat it, so too the molten lava (which forms the inner crust of the earth) must also obey this process. After all, it is hard to imagine that grass seed can be established when scattered onto molten rock. Of course, the stock response of the literalist is to assert that God intervenes and subverts the laws of physical nature in order that the world can be made ready quickly to support human life. But this makes no sense at all because it seems to suggest that God is influenced by time in ways that require him to work towards a speedy conclusion – in the same way that someone runs to a bus stop if they are late and fear they will miss the next one along. The literalist argument inadvertently suggests that the Creator is also reluctant or ill-prepared to wait millions of years for the processes of cooling, weathering, condensing of gases (etc) to complete, which is strange given that most followers believe him not to be affected by the passing of time.
Extract from 'A Short Book of Believer Absurdities ' to be released Bob Eckhard