notMichaelJackson

Below is one of the more interesting claims I've heard from Creationsists. Although I'm an evolutionist, and realize the flaws in this arguement, I'd like to hear what you think (also, I'm writing this from memory).

Shpongle

Personally, I find the problem with the whole "God made everything just look old" argument, is it calls into question the very nature of our reality. I mean, sure God could have made everything look old, but then again, maybe the universe was created 5 minutes ago with everyone's memory intact.

I think I'd go schizo if I had to adopt such a position.

Albion

Right. The problem is that God could have done anything. If God created the world to look old and created conditions that we could detect by experiment to consistently appear to be a particular age, then all we can do is to investigate that appearance.

The thing is that when you give that one back to the creationists (the earth appears to be 4 billion years old, the universe appears to be 14 billion years old; of course, God could have done it all in six days 6000 years ago and just made it appear consistently old, since God can do anything), they don't like it. They want the earth to actually be 6000 years old, not to appear older. You have to agree that science shows that it's as young as the Bible says it is. In which case, I think that person's argument is missing the point.

Asha'man

I have one fundamental assumption in my life: things are what they appear to be. Without making this assumption, I could not even get out of bed in the morning, becuase I could not trust my senses enough to know that there was a bed, anything outside the bed, or even a morning.

If the universe looks old, I simply have no choice but to accept that is is old. If God wants to lie about that, he can lie about absolutely everything as well. Maybe I'm a huge purple headed tentacled monstrosity living in the sunken city of R'lyeh, but God is making it look like I am a human living in Atlanta. This path leads only to insanity.

What I find amazing is that anyone would ever accept the words in a book as being more true than the universe in front of their eyes.

Novowels

To whom should I credit my new e-mail sig?

Wounded King

:notworthy Ia! Ia! C'thulu ftaghn!

lpetrich

This argument was stated in detail by a certain Philip Gosse in his book Omphalos, published in 1857. It is an encyclopedic examination of the evidence that had emerged by then of the Earth being much older than 6000 years, and an explanation of how the created-appearance hypothesis explains every bit of it.

Its title is the Greek word for "navel", chosen on account of the conundrum of whether or not Adam and Eve had had navels, since they had not been born in the usual way. And according to the created-appearance hypothesis, it was appropriate to create them with navels.

A present-day Omphalos II would cover an enormous amount of additional territory:

• The distances of stars and galaxies
• Evidence of stellar evolution from star clusters
• Old supernova remnants and planetary nebulae
• Radioisotope dating of Earth, Moon, and meteorite materials
• Tree-ring continuity
• Annual varves in lakes, ice layers in glaciers, etc.
• Continental drift
• Fossil sequences like the equine sequence
• Molecular-evolution evidence and its sometimes clocklike behavior

Baloo

To make the analogy fit better, it would be like God created Adam, but gave him a scar on his arm and a healed fracture in his leg from a childhood tumble that Adam had never had.

King's Indian

Hello, Pete.

It gets worse. What if every time you fell asleep your self-consciousness as you experience it is extinguished, never to return? A new consciousness would be fixed up by your brain in the morning, with fresh memories of yesterday, but the "you" that was thinking yesterday was just... gone?

Ner-night!

KI.

Valentine Pontifex

This has obvious implications for the transporters in Trek and other science fiction and fantasy.