Just a quick question: why would God create the earth as if it had existed for billions of years, having the appearance and effects of such, when it actually was/is not? I'm not saying that God couldn't do that, but why would He? Practical joking? Anything that can be backed up with Scripture?
Hi chrisnu! The argument goes something like this:-
According to the Bible, God created the world, earth, stars, light, plants and animals etc. and man in six days. If Adam was created as a grown man, we can safely assume that the rest of the creation was in a mature form with trees, soil, rivers, mountains and the like. We know that these things take time to form naturally, so God must have created the world as a working mature system probably not fundamentally different from how it is now (depending on your beliefs). This means that God created a world that had much more age put into it than 6 days. If you believe in a literal reading of Genesis, I can't see any other way you can explain this.
If you're a nasty evilusionist, like me, you accept the scientific dates for the age of the Earth and the universe (4-5 and 13-14 billon years) and view the creation stories as a description of the nature of the creator written in the language and cosmology of the day.
If you're a YECist, the Earth is 6,000-10,000 years old and you believe the aging was a later addition, resulting mainly from the Flood.
The Omphalos hypothesis has God creating everything in mid-cycle, including geological structures, fossils and tree rings, all in the six day period using Ussher's genealogical dating of a few thousand years.
In Gosse's, day (he wrote the Omphalos book) the age of the Earth had been severely underestimated compared with modern dating millions, not billions of years. However, no one ever liked his book, because it involved having fossils buried in rock layers and people misinterpreted this to mean Gosse was suggesting that God was being deceptive. But Gosse was actually only extending his "everything goes through a cycle" idea to rock formations and he dismissed this criticism (as I have repeatedly shown).
AV1611VET's version of the embedded age idea has been crafted to avoid anything that could remotely be called "deception". The only thing it does, as far I can see, is to marry up his instant embedded age (4.75 billion years) to modern age measurements. It can't explain anything else such as fossils embedded in rock that are known to be hundreds of times older than his creation date (6,100 years ago).
Creationists continuously endeavour to find an explanation for the discrepancies between science and the Bible. Several different ways forward have been suggested (some aggressively marketed), and that has led to multiple types of creationism, all mutually exclusive!
From my point of view there would have been no need for God to have made things billions of years older that they really are, but then I don't accept creationism.