I always stipulate God creating warm raisin bread -- in the blink of an eye.
Baking it takes time.
Speaking it into existence doesn't.
This is where I have a problem. To me this is the point at which your argument becomes irrational. I can accept the premise that the universe is actually 13.7 billion years old, while at he same time having been created 6k years ago. Conceptually it seems odd, but in physics time can be a malleable concept so I can't rule your premise out.
However, universes function via a process of cause and effect, and the evidence of that process should be discernible to us. We should see remnants of that 13.7 billion year process in things such as radioactive decay. And indeed we do. So everything seems consistent with the fact that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. So far no problem, I agree with you... it's old.
But now we have to consider the second part of your argument... that the universe was created 6k years ago via a process that wasn't governed by cause and effect, but rather by God's free will. Things such as the following:
If not, how about if He instantly created oil in the bowels of the earth in 4004 BC?
This seems unnecessarily inefficient to me... that God created a universe that through the process of cause and effect could manage to exist... at least in some form for billions of years, until 6k years ago when God stepped in and miraculously created what... stars, and planets, and plants, and animals, and Adam and Eve? Which begs the question, you say that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but up until 6k years ago, what was in it?
It's quite confusing.
To deal with this confusion I've had to make an assumption, that assumption being that when God created things 6k years ago... such as the oil in the bowels of the earth, He also created the process by which that oil came to be there. He didn't just go *
poof*... now there's oil in the ground. He also went *
poof*... now there's a reason for the oil in the ground. Hence from our perspective it shouldn't look like anything out of the ordinary happened at all. We should look and see a perfectly reasonable explanation for how that oil came to be there.
And this should be true for everything that God created. As God created things He also created the process by which they came to be there... and this includes all of those stars, and planets, and plants, and animals, and Adam and Eve. As God created them He also created the process by which they came to be there. Which in Adam and Eve's case means that He also created the process of evolution via natural selection.
This may not jive with your vision of creation, but from a physics standpoint this is simply retroactive causation. In creating things God retroactively created the process by which those things came to be there, and in the end it all looks perfectly natural. No mysterious anomalies 6k years ago required. No tweaking of the natural laws. No mysterious changes in decay rates.
A perfectly beautiful, perfectly natural 13.7 billion year old universe... created 6k years ago. And the only assumption that you have to make is that the act of creation wasn't temporally bounded, it was a holistic creation of past, present, and future, all seamlessly woven together into one harmonious whole.
Well, if you wanted me to think about it... I did. Whether you agree or not with my conclusion is up to you... but I tried. I can harmonize a universe that's 13.7 billion years old with a universe that was created 6k years ago simply by allowing for retroactive causation.
