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I admit that it can be a little challenging to boldly say that I believe the universe is 6000 years old. I have recently been in two conversations with two separate atheists who both consider themselves very scientifically literate. In both cases I seemed like a nut to them.

But these are both people offended at even hearing "God" in a conversation. So I welcome looking like crazy to them. 1 Cor says the gospel of Christ is foolish to those who are perishing. For some reason a lot of Christians really stumble over the 14 billion light years thing. They suggest that God would be lying to make the universe look older than it is by making it bigger than the speed of light would allow in 6000 years.

This is a strange conclusion to me. ALL miracles, by definition, defy the rules of nature. Whether it is creating matter from nothing, creating an adult man from the dust, making a day last longer for a battle, raising the dead, floating an ax head or creating strands of electromagnetic radiation 14 billion light years long.

I wonder if many Christians think got is powerful but not THAT powerful. Certainly the Pope has recently said "God is not a magician with a magic wand". What a faithless thing to say about miracles.

Agree wholeheartedly that many of us old earthers seem to go too far in thinking that if something can't be explained then it didn't happen -- that God's not able to perform miracles unless we can understand them completely. I'll back your point up further by saying I've seen it as I moved from church to church (i.e. when a small church I was in shut down, when a friend of mine got ordained and started a church needing help, when I found a church I was going to put offering money into abortion lobby and I tried to have that changed and wound up getting kicked out of doing the volunteer things, etc.). Plus there were the years I regularly attended a Baptist church while also regularly attending an at home Bible study put on by Charismatics. :)

Obviously the age of the earth wasn't the most important theme in each of those churches/denominations. But whenever the age of the earth came up, if I was in a church that believed heavily in God's miracles they were young earth believing. While if I was in a church that was pretty big about avoiding talk of miracles and stuff (without outright saying God no longer does miracles), they tended to be old earthers.

I tend to think of myself as a miracle believer (even believing in the miraculous spiritual gifts described in 1st Corinthians 12-14), but I'm an old earther. To be honest, I'm a little weird in other beliefs too. Take the miraculous spiritual gifts. Those of us with a bit of a Pentecostal bent usually believe that the initial evidence of spirit baptism is speaking in tongues, right? Not me. I've often taught people to pray for the Holy Spirit to come onto you and change you and teach you and lead you and give you spiritual gifts and whatever else, as long as in the end it's to advance Jesus' message of salvation (my Cliff notes version of Paul's teaching in 1st Corinthians 14 where he details why to desire prophesying over tongues -- edifying the church is better than just the individual). While at the same time I teach that there's a danger in trying to peg the Holy Spirit into an itinerary of gifts because 1st Corinthians 12 says that the Holy Spirit gives different gifts to different people as He darn well sees fit. That's an example where I can believe what one group believes (i.e. Pentecostals believing the Holy Spirit still gives us miraculous spiritual gifts) w/o necessarily believing all the details taught with tradition (i.e. almost all Pentecostals believing speaking in tongues is the first gift). (That might not be a good example and may be wrong for me to call it just a traditional belief, since the Book of Acts records at least anecdotal evidence for tongues being the first gift.)

Can't the same be applied to beliefs in the age of the earth? Can't one believe in the miraculous creation of God without having to also believe Usser's teaching from 500 years ago that the earth was created 4,000 years before Christ? There were a few people who taught that before Usser, but it didn't gain any traction until Usser. And even then it wasn't a big topic.

Here in the U.S. most Christians were old earthers until 1959. Again, not a major point of belief, just how someone would respond if asked. This includes even the people who believe heavily in miracles. Only the 7th Day church was pushing a young earth belief and talking about scientific evidence like we're familiar with today. But in 1959 that changed when the atheists were celebrating the 100th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species: The Case for Favoured Races. So they were pushing natural selection and such to be taught heavily in schools. Which prompted churches to decide they needed a response. Since the 7th Day church seemed to already be knowledgeable on Christian apologetics, most churches adopted their position on a young earth.

Because I know that, it makes me think twice before assuming that miraculous creation necessitates a young earth. The same with the overall clash between Christianity and science. I know that the clash wasn't always there, and that it's been brought to the forefront only since 1959 (though it's had on-again off-again points of conflict in the past). That might make the clash having been going on since before I was born, but in the big scheme of things our 2,000 year old church hasn't had a long lasting position of thinking learning of science means to disbelieve miracles.