Why did God need to take such a long time to create the universe and earth when he could have created it in an instant?
Had everything have been fully created as Young Earther’s believe in six days, or even in an instant, which God could easily have done, he would have caused an incredible amount of frustration in the being he had just created in his own image.
To be created in God’s image means that we have an insatiable desire to know everything, just like our Creator. We want to know the answers to every ‘What, Where, When, How and Why’ question we can think of. An instantly created universe would mean we would constantly hit an intellectual brick wall as we extrapolated backwards to try and discover our origin.
For example:
- we would not have found out that the earth was created out of nothing, as science has now shown. It would have simply just been there.
- We would not have understood about the incredibly precise and controlled events in the first femtosecond of a femtosecond of the creation of the universe (The Big Bang) that scream of an intelligence far beyond our comprehension. It would have simply just been there.
- We would not have understood the process of how all the oil, gas and coal came to be. It would have simply just been there.
- We would not have understood, as science has shown us today, that the universe came into existence from an extra dimensional reality at least a further six dimensions higher than the four dimensional reality we exist in. It would have simply just been there.
In fact, strange as it may seem, a six day or instantly created universe would point away from God and not to God. An instantly created universe has no scientifically determinable origin and therefore mankind would think it was eternal. Hence the universe itself would become God. It will become personified. It would replace God. That is exactly what is happening today. Atheists everywhere today replace God with the universe and treat the universe as though it has a personality, a will, and a directive influence in their lives.
This was understandible before the 1960s when the predominant belief was that the universe was infinite. It is really puzzling that it is still so strong and getting stronger because we have known the universe has had a beginning for the last 60 years. Ellis, Penrose and Hawking in the 1960s proved this. Their work has rewritten astrophysics and cosmology. They have shown that the universe began from an infintesminally small point that contained all matter, energy, space and time. Essentially created from nothing.
Why then cling to the belief that the universe is infinite?