Having read the recent posts on creation and the age of the earth, I cannot but wonder whether the debate is finally an empty one. I would not stake my reputation on it, but I wonder whether the following might offer a way of getting beyond it. Could it be that God created, simultaneously and ex nihilo, everything in the cosmos fully complete and complex and, rather than giving it the mere appearance of age, gave it a genuine history, capable of being investigated scientifically? If so, then the timing of creation, from a human perspective at least, would not be a relevant consideration. To assume that God created the heaven and earth at the beginning of what we experience as history might not be the proper way of looking at it. He could just as easily have created it yesterday (from his perspective, not ours; see Psalm 90:4) and given everything, including us, not just the appearance of age, but real age. After all, God is the creator of temporality and is not bound by it as we are.
This would not, of course, resolve the issue of biological macro-evolution. As I see it, whether human beings and the higher primates (with apologies to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) have a common descent should not be deemed a confessional matter but one to be surmised on the basis of the evidence. That said, it should be obvious that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection is grossly insufficient to explain the sheer complexity of the human person, with his/her cultural-forming capacities, and the huge gap that exists between human beings on the one hand and the chimpanzees and bonobos with which we apparently share such a large proportion of our genetic code on the other. Any worldview unable to account for human uniqueness in God’s creation is faulty at a basic level.
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