Nicely put.
I keep coming back to a trick performed at a Penn & Teller show:
Teller (with Penn’s voice narrating) walks on stage, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, smokes a few times, drops it, and crushes it out.
So what? it’s just a guy smoking.
Except it isn’t.
Teller turns 90 degrees (with Penn’s voice continuing to narrate), and proceeds to show you what happened. Instead of pulling out a cigarette, he pretends to but instead reveals the palmed cig, pretends to light it but reveals the lighter is really a small flashlight flickering, pretends to smoke but reveals he’s blowing powder, pretends to drop it but reveals he actually palms it, and pretends to crush it but reveals there’s nothing under his shoe.
Ok, cute trick.
Best, on many levels, trick I’ve seen (and I personally inspected on-stage the bullet catch trick later in the show).
So...when we see someone smoking, should we consider that perhaps they’re faking the whole thing? Of course not: we apply Occam’s Razor and conclude that if we see someone smoking, that they are in fact smoking - and NOT performing an elaborate deception, or that there’s really a Oculus Rift strapped to my head and I’m sedated in a chair and I’m watching a Virtual Reality projection of someone smoking.
We’re not living in _The_Truman_Show_. Or _Dark_City_. Or _The_Matrix_. Or any movie-like environment where if we move a little off-set the elaborate fakery will become immediately obvious. While the idea may be exciting, there is no reason to believe we are in a grand simulation just to “test our faith”.
It’s easier to believe that God DID create a 27.6 billion light year wide universe of comparably immense age which absolutely declares His eternal power & divine nature, than to accept the notion that we’re inside a concocted story which appears far more majestic than it actually is, declaring eternal power & divine nature when what actually exists is orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less than what seems to be. I’ll respect & worship a God who created a universe that led to dinosaurs flourishing & becoming fossils I find today; I’ll scoff at a “god” that instead had to make something that looks like a fossil of a long-deceased being but actually isn’t, and light from distant stars that aren’t, etc, all being just part of the back story of a fiction in which we’re being evaluated for likely eternal punishment.
Yes, maybe we’re misinterpreting our perception of reality. Fine. I can deal with that as a limitation of our small soggy brains and our 3-color eyeballs trying to perceive a universe of 10^85 bits of information and an electromagnetic spectrum “from DC to gamma rays and beyond”. Time very well may be far more bizarre than we currently understand (and I’m chewing on the consequences of the notion that far-traveling light experiences zero time on the trip). But so far what we know sensibly applies & explains much of the universe, with no indication we’re radically wrong (instead, we find we understand better than one may expect). Within our limited capabilities, we can carry out experiments in a small lab and confidently understand what happens, than apply that learning to what we see (fossils to stars) and come to sensible conclusions about the nature of God’s creation.
So yeah... God could create “an appearance of age” for something that isn’t, but why would He? Why would the grand creator of the universe make something limited and bristling with false appearances? instead of ACTUALLY creating it all with a grand explosion and following brilliantly conceived rules to culminate in, well, a few idiots arguing over the Internet?
For example, we know that due to the high concentration of hydrogen gas in the early universe, the first stars were supermassive and super-hot, and that it was out of these supermassive first-generation stars that hydrogen and helium were fused into the heavier elements that make up planets and, well, us.
I don't know about anyone else, but I find the idea of God using supermassive stars as His forges to create the building-blocks of life to be pretty darn cool.
Another example: Zinc is highly water-soluable, and originaly all the earth's zinc deposits were dissolved into our oceans. That gives us two problems: 1) Most life can't exist in that much zinc, and 2) we need zinc deposits for much of our technology. God could have just removed all the zinc from the oceans and into deposits, but then we wouldn't have known that He had done it. So instead, He created an organism (I forget the name) that actually ate the zinc and gathered into colonies that eventually died. The oceans became suitable for other life, we got the zinc deposits that we need, and God not only showed us how He did it, but has given us the capacity to backwards-engineer what He did. One day we may mutate or create microbes of a similar nature that we could use to clean up the royal mess we've made of the seas.
That's just one example of a million of how the universe and the earth had to be carefully designed to support us. My biggest problem with Young Earth Creationism is that it sacrifices such valuable apologetic arguments on the altar of a very shallow reading of the Scriptures.
Shalom