The Creation Dilemma
Moving away from the womb to another kind of womb; the Creation event. Christians tend to form two camps regarding the creation of the universe. Those who believe in a young universe based on the Biblical chronology working backwards that Adam and Eve were created about 6000 years ago and that the creation days were 24 hour periods so the universe is 5 days older than Adam. The second camp believes in an old universe, aligning itself with modern astrophysics and the universe is 13.75 billion years old and the earth is 4.5 billion years old. What is the truth?
Young earthers accuse old earthers of moving away from a literal interpretation of the Bible and pandering to godless naturalistic theories. Old earthers accuse young earthers of denying obvious scientific fact and bringing christianity into disrepute & ridicule similiar to that given to ‘Flat Earthers.’
Prior to 2009, I was a conflicted Young Earther. I knew that the universe was old because the science was convincing but I had a mental block that God, being all powerful, wouldn’t have needed billions of years and that if I acknowledged that was true, I was diminishing his omnipotence.
As the evidence continued to mount in favour of a old universe and the holes in the ‘scientific’ arguments of young earthers became more apparent, I am now 100% convinced in the validity of an Old Universe and, most importantly, that it is a perfect match with Scriptures, particularly the Genesis account. It answers dilemmas like why the sun appears to be created on Day 4 when God said “Let there be light” on Day 1. However what is really exciting is that an Old Earth viewpoint provides Christians with an evangelism tool for the existence of a personal God that is watertight, bulletproof.
Like everything in Anazao, we always endeavour to give sound reasoning for the viewpoints we hold so over the next few months we will open this can of worms and empty it out!
The Picture Above
The best photo ever taken of the Big Bang. The photons detected to make this map travelled for 13.7 billion years and are the oldest photons we can detect. They were emitted from the surface of last scattering at the edge of our observable universe when the universe was about 380,000 years old and had a temperature of ~3000 K. As the universe expanded, these 3000 K photons became redshifted and cooled to the 3K photons we now observe. The pattern of hot (red) and cool (dark blue) spots has been used to obtain the most accurate estimates of the contents, age and size of the universe.
Don’t worry! We won’t be getting this technical!