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They reduce Christianity to a crude cult of numerology.

What's easier to believe:

1. That everything we see is just a series of chance accidents, rocks sprang to life, and evolved into the myriad of life we see today. There is no sin, no God, no moral absolutes, and no afterlife, and no design to anything we see.

2. God, who made everything in 6 days, became a man, died for the sins of the world, and raised His dead body back to life again? He is the Moral Absolute, He is Life, and He defines sin. Oh, and he will hold us accountable.

#1 is much preferred, because I get to decide right & wrong, thus, I am god. All Hail Darwininian Evolution, for it frees us from guilt!

"1. That everything we see is just a series of chance accidents, rocks sprang to life, and evolved into the myriad of life we see today. There is no sin, no God, no moral absolutes, and no afterlife, and no design to anything we see.
2. God, who made everything in 6 days, became a man, died for the sins of the world, and raised His dead body back to life again? He is the Moral Absolute, He is Life, and He defines sin. Oh, and he will hold us accountable.

#1 is much preferred, because I get to decide right & wrong, thus, I am god. All Hail Darwininian Evolution, for it frees us from guilt!

That's a pretty simplistic view of God's creation, and a very wrong one. It's probably why you have a hard time believing.

It's a sad example of how man has "evolved" to the point where he no longer is able to understand but the simplest meaning of the words of his own language.

So the choices are, believe that the universe is 6000 years old or be an atheist? Most of the Church Fathers did not spend much time speculating about obscure Bible verses, trying to enforce a wooden literalism about minor details that are not important anyway. Someone did estimate that the earth might have been created in 4000 B.C., but that was not at the center of anyone's theology. The Apostles, Church Fathers and others did spend a lot of time talking and writing about Law, Grace, Jesus and tried to keep these things central. Many people from the early Church Fathers to Martin Luther and beyond warned against taking obscure verses and making a big deal out of obscure and unimportant things.

Fundamentalism stands this principle on its head while it majors in minor things and pushes minor things to the point of legalism. So you have people teaching that you have to believe the world is 6000 years old if you are to be saved, or they have Christians anxiously reading the newspaper looking for the Anti-Christ (not reading the Bible looking for Christ), worried that if they misread the signs of the times they will be "left behind."

Amazingly in your world they are mutually exclusive. For the rest of us who do have the ability to use our brains, we see God’s work apparent in the universe everywhere we look. All created fashioned and “nudged” along according to God’s will.

So while you claim to have THE truth, you are really a far fringe element who makes the rest of us believers in God look bad because you can’t accept the universe, and our interpretation of it, using the amazing brains God has given us.

And for those of you who simply throw out “gravitational time dilation” for my Sombrero Galaxy example, PLEASE explain to me this - How can we possibly be seeing those somewhat distant “less than 100 million lightyears” without any distortion? If you look at the sombrero galaxy, we are not seeing all the light that left the stars at the same time, the light we see from the stars on the side further away from us is older than the light for those stars closest to us. So even if there is this “magical” medium which transports this light to us instantaneously, it still requires that the light at the far side of the galaxy had been traveling for 50-100K years(width of the visible part of the galaxy) before it caught up with the light on the closer side to give us this perfectly uniform image.

It’s almost as if you are saying that those stars/clusters/nebula that are < 6000 light years away from us are A-OK, but anything further has it’s light transported to us instantaneously. And without distortion I might add. Even though Einstein Crosses show how easily it is to become distorted with intervening material.

I’m sorry, but “gravitational time dilation” to explain all of the universe is a term thrown out there in lieu of using your brian. Because what is the gravitational force that increases the speed of light, yet does not distort the source from the end observer. I take the distance of < 100 million light years because I’m sure you will show examples of distortion from galaxies much further away with lots of intervening material. In fact, I’m sure you would have shown me examples of Einstein Crosses as an example.