It really does appear that the YEC view stuffs our Almighty Eternal God into a little box about the size of our puny notion of Time.
We humans experience Time in a certain limited way (irreversible linear series of moments moving past–present–future). God does not. To use Him as the authority to back up the very limited, partial human view of a "young earth" (~6,000 years) seems, er, inappropriate in the face of accumulating evidence. To say the least. At the heart of such a claim is a major "category problem": God and His Ways do not reduce to our human conceptions (no matter how brilliant) simply because He is God and we are not.
It's interesting that some commentators here favorable to the YEC thesis are aware of all the evidence piling up in support of a ~13.7 billion year old universe (If past predicts future, probably that estimate is not cast in stone). They say they appreciate the evidence, it's pretty dandy, and such like. But they maintain that the conclusions from the data are "faulty." I gather they are faulty because they do not square with the YEC perspective. No other explanation has been advanced so far, AFAIK.
And yet the burden is on them to show how the cosmological data can be interpreted differently than the way contemporary physics interprets it. This is a scientific question; so to answer with a literal reading of Genesis wouldn't cut it....
Don't get me wrong. God is the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe and everything in it, including you and me — but this is so regardless of how old or young we conjecture the universe may be from our human standpoint.
Thank you so very much, TXnMA, for your excellent essay/post!
Excellent point, I would add that in addition to the AGE of something being immaterial to the fact that it was created by God, so too is the mechanism of creation immaterial to the fact that God is responsible for its creation.
Discovering the mechanisms of biological evolution no more means that God didn't create all life any more than discovering the mechanisms of nuclear fusion means that God doesn't make the Sun shine.
You wrote: “We humans experience Time in a certain limited way (irreversible linear series of moments moving past–present–future). God does not.”
The first curiosity is, how would you possibly know how God experiences anything, much less time?
Secondly, do you think “time” is a thing or an attribute?
I do not, by the way, believe time is a thing. For me, time is a concept for the relationship between motions, just as linear dimension is concept for the positional relationships between things. I think, to treat time as a “thing” with metaphysical attributes of some kind, is hypostatization or reification. (I'll happily accuse Einstein of that mistake.)
I don't think you agree with that though, and would be interested in why not.
Finally, one other irresistible question. Do you think for God, time is reversible? (That, for example, a child could become a baby, reenter the womb and become a fetus, then a zygote, then split into an egg and sperm, etc.)?
Hope you are having a good day.
Hank
Don't get me wrong. God is the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe and everything in it, including you and me — but this is so regardless of how old or young we conjecture the universe may be from our human standpoint.
But if he wishes to reconcile his statement of faith to the cosmological data with a theory, then he cannot simply substitute the theory for the cosmological data.
God's Name is I AM.