The Nature and Timing of Creation

 

 What follows is another of my thought exercises that I sometimes like to undertake. There may be some references to Scripture, since I base my thought processes on what Scripture says, but I will not assert that what follows is strictly Scriptural.

In the beginning, God created (Genesis 1:1); in the beginning of what? It can't be in the beginning of time, because, as I will discuss a little later, time as we know it only came into existence through the creative process.

It also can't be in the beginning of God's existence, because the Bible tells us that God has always been. We understand from astronomy that the universe is constantly expanding, and though some scientists may not acknowledge this, the implication of this is that at some point in time, the universe had to have a beginning. If the universe is constantly and consistently expanding, then it cannot have always been. If we reverse the expansion back through time, there will come a point at which the universe was a single point. That point may have been a massive ball of rock and ice; we don't know. 

Scientists who are at least somewhat honest and who openly acknowledge this truth will refer to this as the point of the Big Bang; and I wouldn't argue that with them. I can imagine that when God created the universe, where there had been nothing before and which we believe is currently in the process of expanding in all directions, there was probably a pretty big BANG! But I don't think the "big bang" was the beginning of the nature that we see around us, but merely the means by which this mound of rock came to be. There is no evolutionary process that began when nothing collapsed on itself and exploded to create everything. I think that the creation that is depicted in the Bible could merely be what God enacted upon this rock, after such time that the universe came to be.

This line of thinking, that the earth existed as an undeveloped rock until such time that God undertook the creation that we read about in Genesis, leaves open the possibility that the rock upon which our foundations stand could potentially be millions of our years old, while the creation that we observe in nature is only thousands of years old, but I will posit another possibility.

We need to consider the possibility that God created what we observe in nature to have aged qualities. Adam was not created as an infant; neither was Eve. They were both created as fully matured man and woman, able to take care of themselves and to learn the intricacies of managing the Garden of Eden. They were not born as infants, since they were the first people. It's kind of like the chicken and the egg argument. There could be no egg if there was no chicken to lay it. Therefore, the chicken was created first, and has been laying eggs ever since. So, Adam and Eve were both created as fully formed, mature, self-sufficient beings.

If God was able to create mankind with aged qualities, why could He not also create the world with aged qualities. There would be a theological logic to this. God reveals Himself to us through creation (Romans 1:20), but our belief in Him is supposed to be based upon faith, not upon that which we can positively prove. So He leaves us clues that point to Him while also leaving other things that confuse us.

Scientists like to tell us that the world is millions or billions of years old, and that all life evolved from sludge. In my opinion, anybody who looks at the wondrous beauty and complexity of nature all around us and thinks that all of this came to be by happenstance and chance is just grasping at anything that they can in order to leave a Creator out of the equation. Because if there is a Creator, then there is a God, and if there is a God, then we are not the utmost of all beings but are actually subservient to another being.

What the scientists like to use as proof that the world is so very old is a process that Willard Libby and his colleagues developed in 1949 call carbon dating. This process measures the amount of radioactive carbon 14 (C14) in organic matter, like a bone or a tree, and uses that to "calculate" the age of that object by comparing the levels of degrading C14 to the levels of non-degrading carbon.

What the scientists don't want you to know is that carbon 14 has a short lifespan, relatively speaking; so short that there is no way that carbon 14 can even be used to measure time to even 600 centuries, never mind beyond that. According to my understanding, and there is room for criticism and correction here, the half-life of carbon 14, or the amount of time that it takes for carbon 14 to decompose to half of it's original value, is 5700 years plus or minus 30 years. If I understand it correctly, that remaining half takes another 5700 years to decompose another half, to one quarter of the original amount. That remaining quarter takes another 5700 years to decompose to one eighth of the original amount; and on and on and on. Basically, the farthest that an object can be dated back in history is about 55,000 years, at which point the amount of C14 that remains is something like 1/1000th of what originally existed. 55,000 years is a long time, but it is just a little bit shy of millions or billions of years. Scientists use the millions of years because that's how long their theory of evolution needs for all of the minute changes that supposedly happened in order for the world to be populated with so many different types of plants and animals. But since 55,000 years just doesn't cut it, they have to obscure the facts of their own science and tell us, "Just trust me, bro".

So why is it that scientists use this method to claim ages into the millions and billions of years? I have no idea. They may just want to use a complex method to confuse the majority of people who feel that they cannot understand the process, and thereby just "trust the science". They just expect the populace to blindly accept what they are telling us, relying on the fact that most people are too busy to look into and question their assertions.

So let's assume that the process of carbon dating is accurate, but the interpretation of the data is intentionally being manipulated. If the half-life of carbon 14 is 5700 years, and scientists have never, to my knowledge, found organic artifacts that contain no carbon 14 at all, then there is no way that there was anything alive more than 55,000 years ago. If we are to believe that dinosaur bones are millions of years old, then logically, there would be no measurable C14 remaining in those bones, which would still only prove that they are over 55,000 years old. Yet, they claim that there is still C14 in those remains, which they are using to date the fossils, which actually proves that those fossils are less than 55,000 years old. Therefore, 'dinosaurs' cannot be proven to have existed millions of years ago, but are rather proved to be much younger; like maybe around 6000 years old.

I've never heard of any fossils that have been found with absolutely no measurable C14. To be fair though, I imagine that admitting this would poke holes in the entire theory of evolution, so the scientific community will never admit if they would ever find a bone or fossil with zero carbon in it. They would have to quietly dispose of it and never mention it to anyone.

I will also state that there is, apparently, no carbon 14 in coal or oil; what are known as fossil fuels because they supposedly came about through the decomposition of ancient animals. This is taken as proof that the earth is millions or billions of years old, since the C14 from the organic animal and plant matter that supposedly makes up the fossil fuels is completely depleted. 

I offer another premise, based largely on claims that I believe were made by the founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, who has since left the organization due to ideological differences with the goals and means of the modern organization. The claim is that oil and coal are not the result of the decomposition of organic matter, but rather that the earth produces these fuels through other natural processes and is constantly producing these fuels. The term "fossil fuel" was actually coined around the 1950's in order to promote the idea that there is a finite amount of fuel available, based on the fact that there were a finite number of dinosaurs that decomposed, which drove up the price of fuels. If these fuels are not derived from decomposed organic matter, then there would not be any C14 in oil or coal, as seems to be the case. This debunks the use of  "fossil fuels" as a means to date the earth at millions of years old or more. As such, the scientific community is backed into a position where they cannot be honest about oil and coal or they will lose their premise for dating the earth and denying God's existence.

Going back to my earlier premise that the creation process that the Bible describes only tells us about the development of the earth after it was first formed, at some unknown time in the past, it could be possible that God created the universe, and thereby the rock on which we now live, about 55,000 years ago, or more, but God only developed the earth to support life and then created life on the earth about 6000 years ago as the Bible suggests.

If we consider that God has always been, is it really unlikely that God was acting in different ways, possibly even in different universes, during the time (that God exists outside of) before He ever started to develop this earth? Or has He been twiddling His thumbs for all of eternity past?

I want to be careful here. I am not claiming that I believe in a multi-verse reality, where there are numerous universes that God has created. I believe that this universe is the only creation that God loves and protects, and that human beings are the only created beings that He pursues. I have a close friend that believes otherwise, and I will never argue this matter with him, since we both base our positions on personal speculation. But, if we are to believe what the Bible says, that we will spend eternity with Him right here, on a recreated and renewed earth, then I think it is logical to presume that we are His only prized creation.

This can play with the mind a little bit. Our human brains ask what God was doing for eternity past if the earth is only 6000 years old. Was He just toying with rocks in space, having some cosmic games of marbles with Jesus? I am being facetious here, not disrespectful towards God. The trick for our human brains to perform here is to realize that God exists outside of time, therefore, time does not exist for Him. For God, eternity past lasted as long as a hiccup.

There is a video clip that comes to mind of Kent Hovind from a debate that he had with an atheist. I have posted the transcript previously in a different article, but the main gist is that the atheist asks Mr. Hovind to define God and His relation to creation. Mr. Hovind's response is that creation involves three states; time, space and matter. Since God has to exist outside of time, space and matter in order to manipulate these things in the process of creation, these things cannot have any effect on Him. My point is that our "three pound brain" cannot contain the magnitude of God, so we struggle to grasp how God can exist outside of time since we are trapped within time ourselves. Our attempts to understand this fail to grasp that time has no effect on God, so the theory of multiple universes came to be so that God had something to do before creating our world.

Consider this; if we picture God sitting in Heaven somewhere that isn't here, thereby not confined to our earth, how would He measure time? We measure time based upon the travels of the sun across our sky and the changing of the seasons. We have hours with their smaller divisions, days with their larger groupings of weeks and months, and these all coalesce into years and their larger groupings of decades, centuries, millennia, etc. Our time frames are all based upon the measurements of the movement of the sun across our sky. The sun in the middle of this solar system, this galaxy, among other galaxies, all within the same universe. Our measure of time affects only this one galaxy. Every other galaxy, if measuring time in the same manner, will have a different measure of time lapsing. So which time measurement would affect God? To coin a phrase that I otherwise detest, time is a construct of this world, though it is a construct that was put into motion by God Himself.

I want to reiterate that this is a thought experiment and that no theology should be built on my above ramblings. I base my creation theology on what the Bible tells us. The Bible indicates that the rock of the earth and the waters upon it existed as the forms which God used to create nature as we experience it today; so the rock predates the nature. The Bible also tells us that God, in the form of Jesus (John 1) undertook the creative processes and these were completed in six days. Nothing that I have stated above should be in contravention of these premises, and as such, I hope that this thought experiment does not shake the foundations of your own theology around the creation of the world, except to hopefully bring it into closer alignment with the Scriptures.

This is really just a collection of some of my own random thoughts that revolve around this world, creation and the scientific attempts to explain it. The problem is that the sciences of nature can never fully explain that which is supernatural. God, a supernatural being, created this world through supernatural means. Science will never contain or explain that. It is a matter of the exercise of faith, and the sooner that mankind can accept that and accept that there is a higher Being that we are subservient to, whether we like it or not, the sooner this world would start to become a better place over time instead of the continual physical and moral decay that we are witnessing today.