Why would God use billions of years?

[vossler]

This is for all the TEs out there:

According to most TEs and Evolutionists the earth is at least 3 billion years old. Many believe it to be 13 billion years old, but for this thread let's go with the lesser.

So, with that as the starting point God put into motion His creation.

My questions are:

1. Why would God use such an astronomical amount of time to develop His creation, especially when compared to the amount of time man (His purpose for creation) has been in existence?

2. Then we have God, the great communicator, telling us in His Word that the earth was created in six days, but He really wants us to understand or figure out that the six days of which He speaks are not literal days as we know a day to be. That each day is in fact at least a few hundred million years long! Why would He do this?

Lastly, didn't God say: 1 Cor 14:33 "For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints." For the common man to believe billions of years he would have to rely upon the expertise of a few "scientists" in order to be able to come to that conclusion. Now His creation is in the hands of these so called experts, many of which have a few billion years between them when "figuring" out how long the earth has been here.

Pretty interesting assessment. Very, very worldly and little or no biblical backup to support it. hhhmmmm....

 

[seebs]

1. It's not as if time costs God anything. This practically sounds like an accusation that God can't afford the time it would take... Problematic.

2. (Side note: The Word is Jesus.) God is not a liar, but God is a poet. Many things are explained to us in analogies, and in visions. Why send a parable with seven fat cows and seven skinny cows, when He could just say what He meant?

3. No, God didn't say that; Paul did. But in any event, consider the story of Babel.

 

[TwinCrier]

Time is nothing to God, so I don't see that as an issue. I simply rely on what God has communicated through His word. I believe the bible as i have it is God's word to me, but many don't believe that. It is to them a complicated riddle that must be figured out and made to fit with what they see in the physical.

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

1. A billion years is a fleating instant to God and a second is an eternity. Any amount of time is both arbitrarily short and long to God. He could always do it more quickly, and He could always take more time. It took that long because that is how long it took according to the method He chose. Why should we quibble with God if it appears that He took the scenic route?

2. To understand this, one needs to understand how God communicates things to us. Let's look at how God did things when He was living as one of us. In the folklore of the time, there was a story about workers being hired toward the end of the day and working so hard in gratitude that they did a whole day's worth of work. Jesus told the story differently. He removes any note of them working harder than normal in order to make the point that God does not demand a minimum amount of works, only that we need to do His work in the end. Jesus took a story familiar to His audience and changed it in a way to make a point. The story does not impact us in the same way because we aren't familiar with the original story. In the same way, Genesis 1 takes something familiar to the Hebrews (the Babylonian creation myth) and changes it to make some points (God is Creator, the Sun and Moon are created not divine, etc.). Without knowing what the original story was, people can confuse what God is trying to say.

 

[Vance]

1. Why would God use six days rather than just zap it all into existence at once? Why would God use "processes" to create Man and animals (gathering dirt, let the earth bring forth, etc), which I take as figurative descriptions of greater processes, but regardless, they were processes. It seems God uses time and processes when He has no need of doing so. Comes under the heading, I think, of God's ways are not our ways.

2. As for God telling us He did it in six days, that is only if you think the text was meant to be read as strict literal history. Here is what I wrote elsewhere recently:
Now, the real question is whether the Scripture is telling us the events it describes in literal/historical language or figurative/typological/symbolic language. Both are legitimate literary styles. Both can convey the deep and essential messages, even about past events. Both literary styles are inspired by God in the collection of writings we call Scripture. So, since all these are true, we must accept that God could have used EITHER literary style (or even one of many others if He had chosen).

Now, which did He use in Genesis 1 and 2? Let's look at the text.

1. It does not read like literal history we have anywhere else, not even any specifically historical writing in Scripture. Point to any literature meant to be read as literal history at any time before or since that reads with the same literary style as Genesis 1 and 2. Actually, Genesis 1 OR 2, since by this I mean both Creation accounts. THere we have two different styles, but NEITHER one of them match any historical writings in tone or style.

2. People at that time in the ANE were not even writing strict literal history, so the people were not expecting their stories about the past to be read as literal history. This is simply historical fact, proven by the use of these cultures of contradictory accounts side by side without any seeming disbelief of either one. If you can believe two stories which contradict in the factual details, then that means you don't think the factual details are meant to be historically accurate.

3. The Genesis 1 account in particular uses a very specific literary framework. To quote an analysis by Gluadys:

"Basically it relies on the parallelism of the creative days. As Lamoureux explains it, it begins with the reference to "tohu" (formless) and "bohu" (empty) in v. 2

Then the six days are set in parallel tables so:

Days of formation (end of "tohu")
1. Light/Dark (aka Day/Night) (some would call this the structure of time)
2. Heaven/Earth
3. Sea/Land (with vegetation)

Days of filling/populating (end of "bohu")
4 (corresponding to 1) Day/Night filled with sun, moon and stars
5 (corresponding to 2) Heaven and (water-covered) Earth filled with air and sea creatures
6 (corresponding to 3) Land filled with terrestrial creatures

Finally the account concludes with the seventh day of rest.

The parallelism suggests that the days are not intended to be understood as sequential as on a calendar, but as thematic. It is just a way of grouping things. So neither the length of day nor the order of the days has any bearing on later scientific discoveries about the time period or order in which different species appeared on earth."

So, given that there are different literary styles, and more than one can convey truth, even truth about past events, which style is Genesis 1 and 2 more likely to be?

And then, in another post:

If we are asked to write about past events, our goal would be to gather all the factual evidence and present as empirically accurate a rendition of those past events as possible. This is because as we have become more empirically minded, especially since the Enlightenment, we have come to value accounts of the past ONLY to the degree we believe they might be factually accurate. To the extent they might NOT be factually accurate, we see that account as "false" or incomplete, and basically LESS valuable.

The cultures of ancient times did not think this way at all. Even if they had the ability to tell accurate history in its details, they would choose to tell the account in more figurative, symbolic, typological styles. The basic message of the account was always more important than the details (assuming they even had the details) and they preferred a dramatic and powerful literary rendition to strict literalism. There are very few exceptions to this, and these are VERY different in style to the Genesis accounts, which follow this "substance over form" approach in very obvious ways when we get past our modern biases.

What is most important is that these cultures still believed these figurative accounts as TRUE and REAL, even though they did not expect them to be factually literal. They would NEVER have thought they were false or "just fables" or in any way less valuable as records of the past just because they did not bother with strict factual details. What they were interested in was basic truths and concepts, which were very true and even literal, but couched in powerful and dramatic and NON-literal stories.

So, this is the world the Israelites lived in. This is the literary styles they were used to and were surrounded by. So, God inspired the Genesis accounts, why would He NOT use the style of writing such accounts common for the time and culture? That is what the people would have expected, what they would have valued and what they would have believed.

And, the Genesis text itself fits this mold exactly.

3. As for God not being the author of confusion, I completely agree, which is why I think that He would not give us a text which is in direct conflict with the evidence from His Creation. Man definitely creates confusion, as can be seen in the hundreds of theological debates over nearly every passage of Scripture. We have hundreds of denominations of Christianity precisely because Man argues over what Scripture "clearly" teaches. If God had wanted to make all these texts SO clear that we couldn't dispute over it, He would have. But for some reason, He did not think this essential. Like the Westminster Confession says: much of Scripture is unclear and subject to differing interpretations, but what is essential for salvation is easy to grasp for all.

 

[Singing Bush]

Others have provided much the same answers I would have so I'll spare you repitition, but I do feel inclined to add my very, very worldly correction. No TE's believe the Earth to be around 13 billion years old. You either do not know about what you claim to speak of or you hang around some TEs that do not. Either way, it's closer to 4 or 4.5 billion years. Cheerio.

 

[Vance]

I think universe 13 billion, IIRC.

 

[gluadys]

This is for all the TEs out there:

According to most TEs and Evolutionists the earth is at least 3 billion years old. Many believe it to be 13 billion years old, but for this thread let's go with the lesser.

So, with that as the starting point God put into motion His creation.

My questions are:

1. Why would God use such an astronomical amount of time to develop His creation, especially when compared to the amount of time man (His purpose for creation) has been in existence?

You have had many good theological answers. Here is one from a scientific perspective.

When God purposed to make the universe, one thing to be considered were the properties of physical matter. How much should an electron weigh? What should the force of gravity be as compared to the strong nuclear force? In which direction should a particle spin? What electric charge, if any should it have and how strong should the charge be?

All of these things need to be determined in order to make sub-atomic particles inter-act in certain ways. They are the basis for physical laws of nature. And, as physicists have noted, they are set within very narrow parameters. If they were off by a little bit, this way or that, life could not exist in the universe.

Now, if God further purposes to use these laws of nature as the means of creating everything in the universe, then by learning about and examining these laws, we find that certain processes must take a certain amount of time.

Given the big bang as the beginning of the universe, when space, matter and time were brought into existence, we can determine that it must have taken some minutes before protons and neutrons could fuse to make atomic nuclei. It must have taken several centuries more before atomic nuclei could capture electrons and form atoms.

It must have taken still longer for gravity to draw billions of hydrogen atoms together to form stars. And since elements heavier than helium can only form in stars, it must have taken another several billion years to form atoms such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.

Really heavy elements such as lead or uranium can only form in the type of star that will eventually go super-nova. Since our solar system, and our planet contain such heavy elements, our sun must be a second or third generation star created from the remnants of an earlier super-nova that generated these elements.

So most of the time necessary to our existence was given over to creating, in the heart of stars, the elements we would need for life to exist on earth.

Of course, you don't have to assume that the laws of nature have anything to do with creation. You can assume God ignored them and just worked miracle after miracle. Nothing can disprove that.

But as you pointed out Paul says that God is a God of order, not confusion. To me, it makes sense that having created a universe built on the order of natural law, God would then use the natural law he ordained to complete creation. If he did, then the time taken was physically necessary.

 

[vossler]

Interesting and yet rather predicable responses.

Yes time doesn't mean anything to God. I think I can say we are in agreement here!

So, if time doesn't have any meaning to God then why does He tell us in a very specific way that His creation that it took six days (being so specific to include the words evening and morning) and not say it took six periods of time or a lot of time etc.. Why does He spell it out for us with the word day when He really meant an undetermined amount of time? Instead of telling us outright, God, the great communicator, according to TEs would have us look to people who "understand" nature and science to find out what He really meant. All this because the regular guy on the street isn't capable of figuring it out himself. Fascinating!!!

Vance, this isn't meant to belittle your articulate and well thought out post, but the view of history you present just can't be supported biblically.

Here is an example of where the literal reading of Genesis is supported biblically. This isn't the only one that does so, but it's pretty clear.

Exodus 20 9-11 states:

9"Six days you shall labor and do all your work,

10but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.

11"For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

Just as clearly as Genesis says six days, Exodus does too. Obviously the LORD is referring to six literal days because if He meant billions of years we'd never get a day off.

 

[Vance]

Why does he use a six day motif? See the bit I quoted from Gluadys above, first of all. When I read Exodus 20:11, I just see a reference to the same non-literal telling of the Creation. God told it in the 6/1 framework that He did for a reason, so that people would use it just as they did: as a teaching that God wanted them to rest on on the Sabbath. God also used this SAME 6/1 ratio to tell farmers to rest their fields in each seventh YEAR. That is a very good clue for us. If the ratio described in Genesis 1 can equally apply to days or years, then we know it is the framework that is important, not the length of time. Let's put it this way. If Jesus in a later teaching, referred back to the Good Samaritan, and did it in a way that would be exactly how He would refer to a actual person ("When the Samaritan helped the man on the road, he was doing God's work" or some such), would that mean that the parable was actual history?

And, no, God does not expect us to look to science to understand what He meant. He wants us to get the REAL message from the very beginning, which is something science can say nothing about because it has nothing at all to do with the WHEN and HOW of God's creative process, but the WHO and WHY. The true messages of Genesis stand OUTSIDE of what science can tell us about, and so science is not needed. BUT, if we are also interested in the WHEN and HOW God probably did it (which, again, is not the primary point of the message), then we would need to look to the evidence of God's Creation itself, since Genesis 1 and 2 simply aren't addressing that in a direct, literal way. It is only telling us about those events in a literary style that is incredibly awesome for the real message.

God created it all. God is fully in charge. God created it all with a plan and a purpose. God created Mankind in His image. God gave Mankind dominion (responsiblity) over the earth. God wanted (wants) a direct and personal relationship with Mankind. Mankind, however, has fallen into selfishness and sin, and God can not have that full communion with Mankind unless . . .

The account also gives us powerful and very REAL truths about the nature of temptation, the desire to blame others for our failures, etc, etc. A truly incredible and powerful tour de force of the POWER of God and His relationship to Mankind. Why anyone would want to see it as a strictly literal scientific explanation of the mechanics and timing of His use of that power is beyond me.

 

[TwinCrier]

...So, if time doesn't have any meaning to God then why does He tell us in a very specific way that His creation that it took six days (being so specific to include the words evening and morning) and not say it took six periods of time or a lot of time etc..

Well, because He did, but that doesn't mean that man is going to believe the word of God. Much like salvation, God has made it easy while man tries to make it harder. It makes humans feel superior when they can discover something all by themselves. To have God just tell us doesn't present a challenge.

 

[vossler]

Well, because He did, but that doesn't mean that man is going to believe the word of God. Much like salvation, God has made it easy while man tries to make it harder. It makes humans feel superior when they can discover something all by themselves. To have God just tell us doesn't present a challenge.

You've got that right.

Vance, once again you take something rather simple and straight-forward and make it complicated. Let me see if I understand you.

According to what I understand you saying:

Exodus 20:9 tells us to work 6 literal days and then to rest on the 7th day as a sabbath.

Exodus 20:11 tells us this model (Exodus 20:9) is based on a non-literal Genesis where God took 6 periods of time (billions of years) for us to formulate our work week.

Is this putting it succinctly?

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

Interesting and yet rather predicable responses.

Yes time doesn't mean anything to God. I think I can say we are in agreement here!

So, if time doesn't have any meaning to God then why does He tell us in a very specific way that His creation that it took six days (being so specific to include the words evening and morning) and not say it took six periods of time or a lot of time etc.. Why does He spell it out for us with the word day when He really meant an undetermined amount of time? Instead of telling us outright, God, the great communicator, according to TEs would have us look to people who "understand" nature and science to find out what He really meant. All this because the regular guy on the street isn't capable of figuring it out himself. Fascinating!!!

Vance, this isn't meant to belittle your articulate and well thought out post, but the view of history you present just can't be supported biblically.

Here is an example of where the literal reading of Genesis is supported biblically. This isn't the only one that does so, but it's pretty clear.

Exodus 20 9-11 states:

9"Six days you shall labor and do all your work,

10but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.

11"For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

Just as clearly as Genesis says six days, Exodus does too. Obviously the LORD is referring to six literal days because if He meant billions of years we'd never get a day off.

The problem is that the day is a day within the context of the passage, but the passage itself is not meant to be taken literally. Days are used because the thing that it was countering was in that form.

 

[Caprice]

How about looking at it like artwork, an artist will take time, so did God, who cares how long or if Genesis is literal? I somehow doubt it matters to our salvation.

 

[Vance]

The six day motif does not at all mean that even six "periods of time" were used. Augustine (who thought that God created everything in an instant) thought that God described it as "six days" simply because it would be something we could easily grasp and provide a mental framework within which to conisder the process, kind of like using a rhyme to remember something. I don't think this is quite it. Again, look at the framework that I quoted from Gluadys above. This shows that it is not meant at all to be conveying a specific chronology of events, but associating two sets of three. That is exactly how the ancients would tell about things. Some of it gets VERY complicated in the ancient writings. They were not any less intelligent than you or I, they just played that intelligence out in different ways. Whereas we spend out time focusing on getting all the details right scientifically and historically, they spent more time on creating complex literary structures, etc. Look at chiastic forms, for example. The flood story, as can be shown on this page (about 2/3 of the way down):

http://www.ualberta.ca/~dlamoure/3EvoCr.htm

You see it as straightforward history because that is what you have been trained to see by modern empiricism. The ancients would never have seen it that way, including the ancient Israelites.

And, no, it has nothing at all to do with a desire to make things more complicated than they are. It is a desire to determine the proper reading of the Scripture so we don't slip into error.

 

[vossler]

And, no, it has nothing at all to do with a desire to make things more complicated than they are. It is a desire to determine the proper reading of the Scripture so we don't slip into error.

So, you never really answered my question, at least I don't think you did. However, you did give me a more complex response that, while interesting, wasn't what I was looking for.

 

[Vance]

According to what I understand you saying:

Exodus 20:9 tells us to work 6 literal days and then to rest on the 7th day as a sabbath.

Exodus 20:11 tells us this model (Exodus 20:9) is based on a non-literal Genesis where God took 6 periods of time (billions of years) for us to formulate our work week.

Is this putting it succinctly?

No, because it has nothing to do with "periods of time", as is explained in the framework analysis above, in my first post. The framework of 6/1 need not have anything to do with the time or chronology of the events of creation. But yes, God told us about the creation process in this 6/1 framework for us to use for a work week (days) and crop rotation (years).

 

[vossler]

No, because it has nothing to do with "periods of time", as is explained in the framework analysis above, in my first post. The framework of 6/1 need not have anything to do with the time or chronology of the events of creation. But yes, God told us about the creation process in this 6/1 framework for us to use for a work week (days) and crop rotation (years).

O.K. since I'm obviously not getting it. Could you tell me what Exodus 20:9 & 11 say. If not periods of time are you just saying it is a "framework".

If this is correct, let me restate my understanding:

Exodus 20:9 tells us to work in the framework of 6 days with a day of sabbath which could be literal but it could also be in the framework of six weeks of work with one week as a sabbath week.

Exodus 20:11 tells us this model (Exodus 20:9) is based on the framework of Genesis where God used the framework of six days which could have a wide definition of time for us to formulate the framework of our work.

I hope this is better!

 

[Vance]

No, not really. :0)

Let's start from the Creation having happened, and not in any period of time correlating to six and one. God just did it all, however long it took. Now, God wants to tell us about the important truths of this creation process, but has no intention or desire to tell us how long it took or what exact methods He used, etc. But, He does want to present these truths in a literary style which will serve a number of important functions. And to meet these goals, He chose to tell it in a six-day framework (He could have chosen any number of literary style or presentations), as set out here again for your review:

"Basically it relies on the parallelism of the creative days. As Lamoureux explains it, it begins with the reference to "tohu" (formless) and "bohu" (empty) in v. 2

Then the six days are set in parallel tables so:

Days of formation (end of "tohu")
1. Light/Dark (aka Day/Night) (some would call this the structure of time)
2. Heaven/Earth
3. Sea/Land (with vegetation)

Days of filling/populating (end of "bohu")
4 (corresponding to 1) Day/Night filled with sun, moon and stars
5 (corresponding to 2) Heaven and (water-covered) Earth filled with air and sea creatures
6 (corresponding to 3) Land filled with terrestrial creatures

Finally the account concludes with the seventh day of rest.

The parallelism suggests that the days are not intended to be understood as sequential as on a calendar, but as thematic. It is just a way of grouping things. So neither the length of day nor the order of the days has any bearing on later scientific discoveries about the time period or order in which different species appeared on earth"

Now, why choose such a literary style? Well, you can question any poet about that, and they will usually say because it most impactfully got my message across, and that message had nothing to do with the actual time or methodology for Creation. Augustine suggested that it was to better help people understand the process because they might have a hard time grasping what really happened. I tend to give people more credit than that, but I do think it was told in a style that makes it easy to tell orally (the motif, the repetition, the formulaic processes), is very powerful, and provides the framework for teaching that God wants us to rest on the seventh day.

So, the 6/1 ratio has nothing at all to do with any actual time frames in the Creation process, but is used to teach us His commandment to rest on the seventh day. So, the "day" aspect is important in that regard. If God had wanted His people to rest on the 9th day after 8 days of rest, He would have told the Creation story using an 8/1 framework instead.

The fact that this is referrred to later in Exodus in a way that sounds like it is referring to literal history is not conclusive at all, as I explained with my Good Samaritan example earlier.

 

[vossler]

No, not really. :0)

Again, you've given me an interesting hypothesis but not what I'm asking for.

What does Exodus 20:9 say to you in relation to Exodus 20:11

Is verse 9 literal? If not please tell me what your interpretation of it is.

What about verse 11, you obviously don't believe it is literal. I've seen your framework analysis and find it fascinating but not helpful to learning just what you think that verse states in relation to verse 9.

Just give me the down and dirty cliff notes please.