Has God Given Us Deliberately Misleading Evidence?
Yesterday I got an email with a sincere question that I think a lot of people ask. Here is the email and my response.
Mr. Meyer,
I received a link from my cousin, that you will be giving
weekly seminars on the CSU campus. I think it is great you are doing
this, as college is a time where confusion may arise due to new facts
of science that are given to students.
There is one question I would like to ask. I see from your blog
profile that you have some experience in the field of science, which
is admirable if you are going to speak on the subject. I also see
that you support books, DVDs, and websites that maintain a young-earth
creationist view. My question is this: If God made the universe the
way it is, why has God made the evidence across many branches of
science appear that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the
universe is 13.7 billion years old? In other words, why did He
deliberately cause such misleading evidence?
This question comes with good intentions, as I am not wanting to
debate. I would really like to know your thoughts. I think we both
know this is a big question, as it impacts the credentials of Genesis,
and thus the theology of Christ Himself.
Thank you kindly,
JK
Dear J,
Thanks for your great question. I wrestled with it myself a number of years ago when I began to seriously ask about the age of the earth issue.
For me, the first question was what constraints I had to accept because of Scripture. Does the Bible allow various interpretations on age, or is a short time frame required by an honest reading of the text. Obviously, there are sincere believers that answer that question differently, just as is the case with other important doctrines of the faith. Trying to approach the subject as objectively as possible, I read and watched material from both a young and old earth creationist perspective.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that accepting both an inerrant view of Scripture and an old universe required such a loss of historical support for key Christian doctrines that those doctrines lost all connection with the real world. For example,
- Homo Sapiens must have existed for at least 100,000 years if conventional geology is correct. But if Adam as the first human was a historical person he could not have lived nearly that long ago. It is hard to accept Homo Sapiens existing before Adam who are somehow not human, i.e., not made “in God’s image”. Yet if Adam was not a historical person then I lose any real meaning to the fact that Jesus was the Second Adam.
- If the world is old then death has been the primary means to biological progress. But Scripture indicates that death is an enemy that entered with Adam’s sin.
- Genesis 1 tells me that all animals ate plants in the beginning, but the fossil record is full of carnivores.
- If the world is old then a world-wide flood could not have happened because the geologic record reveals time not catastrophe and a year long global inundation would leave tremendous evidence that is apparently not there. However, if the world is young then only a world-wide flood could explain the fossil record.
- On top of all of this, Jesus referred to both Adam and Noah has historical figures and based teachings about present issues (marriage) as well as future ones (his return) on the historicity of the early chapters of Genesis.
Eventually I concluded that the Bible presents a very complete, logical, consistent view of God, man and life if Genesis is taken as simple history. But if Genesis is allegorical then Jesus’ death for sin, his resurrection as a victory over death, and the qualities of the promised Kingdom all lose a context that explains their meaning.
Having come to that conclusion about Scripture and doctrine, I then turned to see if the case for an old earth was really as solid as our cultural paradigm claims it to be. Though I admit the idea seems strange to everyone who has not looked into it, there is actually very good evidence that the earth is young.
Probably the most difficult question in light of a young universe is that of distant starlight. But it turns out there are a host of difficult questions for the proposal of an old earth and universe. The geology of the earth fits much better as an explanation of a flood that as the result of vast amounts of time (for one thing among many, layers such as those that exist in nearly all of the geologic column are formed by rapidly moving water, not stationary seas). The presence of C14 in every tested carbon source on earth is so far unexplainable by any old earth scenario (C14 has a half-life of 5740 years and should be undetectable after 100,000 years). The new evidence for genetic entropy would seem to make a long time frame for complex life forms such as ourselves impossible.
I have looked into a long list of age related evidences that are available on the web or in books and I have found a great deal of material that 6 years of college science education never directed me to. And I have become satisfied that an honest look reveals that God did not “deliberately cause such misleading evidence”.
But one then can ask, why do we all “know” that the world is old? I’m not sure why that knowledge seems so certain. The idea of an eternal universe has been part of many cultures and goes back to the earliest Greek writings. So apparently the human mind can gravitate that way without any need for scientific support. In our own day the idea of an old universe is tied to evolution, and so is the legally required view in education and the culturally required view in all research. I think we all sense that questioning the age of the earth cannot be done as a scientific pursuit in our culture – the a priori assumption is that the question is religiously motivated and is an inappropriate intrusion of faith into the established facts of the physical world. I would say I have learned that those facts are actually not established at all.
I would also add that coming to finally believe that Genesis actually is history has profoundly strengthened my faith. This is what Peter, Paul, and all the other writers of the New Testament believed and wrote in light of. This is what Jesus believed and taught. This makes the uniqueness of human life, the sanctity of marriage, the purpose of morality, the equality yet complementary nature of gender, the brokenness of our world, and both the nearness and distance of God all make perfect sense. If Genesis is history Christianity is reality and I understand why Jesus is good news. If Genesis is not history then Christianity floats in mid air – glorious yet irrational and perhaps in this life, only internal. If time and evolution are God’s means, there is good reason to question even the miraculous claims related of Jesus.
This may be a longer answer than you were looking for, but it has been an important question for me and I think should be for many believers. It changes how I think about the One I am praying to. That has become very precious to me.
Respectfully,
John Meyer
