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Source: NASA |
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Source: NASA |
The Book is full of examples where The Creator used people to demonstrate his character, purposes and glory. He loves metaphors, as do eastern people.
Most western people are linear thinkers, which comes from Greek tradition and teachings.
The God of the Bible is not a linear thinker. He does what he wants, how he wants, when he wants. He is not constrained by time and age because he made those things.
People have been taught to believe the earth must be billions of years old because what they can see in the night sky is very old. As mankind has learned ways to see farther than is possible with their naked eyes, they have realized many things are many "light years" away. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, which is nearly six (6) trillion miles.
Space telescopes have photographed objects billions of light years away. Our solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, which is just one of essentially countless galaxies. The telescopes have recorded images of billions of galaxies, clusters of galaxies and weird things called "quasars."
If a cluster of galaxies is 7 billion light years away, it took their light 7 billion years to travel that distance to us.
People conclude the earth and those distant objects were created in the same instant, and The Book generally agrees with that presumption.
People also conclude the earth and those distant objects have aged at the same rate, at least that is what linear thinkers think.
But what if those distant objects aged faster than objects here on earth? How is that possible?
Well, with God all things are possible, but we do not need to rely on his ability to instantly create something out of nothing.
Weird things happen at "event horizons." Time slows down for one thing.
What is an event horizon? It is a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer, according to Wikipedia. Light cannot escape, and this is due to the presence of large amounts of mass. When a large star "dies" and stops shining, the matter of the star collapses in on itself, and if there is enough matter present a "black hole" results. This is all theory, of course, and nobody has ever witnessed it actually happening.
Black holes have been inferred by something called "gravitational lensing." The top photo of distant galaxies demonstrates this phenomenon. The same galaxy shows up three times in a ring near the center of that photograph, according to the text at the link above and in the photograph caption.
The earth with its solar system home must be young; it cannot be billions of years old. Tidal friction is making the earth's rotation slow down. The moon is measurably moving away from the earth and the sun is shrinking.
This is consistent with The Book. Its overall context and chronology support a young earth only a few thousand years old.
Modern pseudo-science's fanciful stories of "carbon dating," "geologic columns" and "geologic period" designations of rock formations are un-testable and lack objective means of calibration. They are simply made up. The question for people espousing those notions is, "How do you know? Were you there?"
I believe in the Bible and in a young earth. I also believe scientists when they show me evidence of gravitational lensing and photographs of galaxy clusters billions of light years away. I believe in an aged heavens.
Before God said, "Let there be light," there was water. Did he create all of the matter of the universe as water and have it all in one place? I believe he did. From there, he stretched out the heavens.
That much water would have been enough mass to create an event horizon, and if God expanded everything instead of allowing it to collapse in on itself, it could have been a "white hole" instead of a black hole. The white-hole event horizon would have remained at the center, where the earth was, and time would have slowed down in that region of the universe. Simple: young earth; massively aged quasars. This allows enough time for the light from those quasars and galaxy clusters to travel to the earth for us to see.
I have a book of an account by a physicist with biblical beliefs, and he convinced me this is plausible (Starlight and Time, Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe, by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D., 1994). That resource, along with others, helped me move from being a cynical "evolutionist" to a man of childlike faith. These things are not a contradiction to me; they are opportunities to believe and be at peace.
Many people refer to the earth as our "mother." She is our home, and I believe she is feminine. She nurtures us, protects us, and lets us grow.
Yehoshua (Jesus) told his apprentices about The Father, his father. The Book describes Yahweh in majestic and masculine terms.
I think I like the metaphor He may be planning...
We shall see what happens.
This is so much fun!
All glory to God.
UPDATE, July 20, 2025...
Bingo!
Thanks, LJ!