From: Stephen J. Krogh (panterragroup@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 13:41:03 EST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
> Behalf Of igevolution@earthlink.net
> Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 11:58 AM
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: appearance of age and the goodness of God
>
>
> Greetings,
>
> My name is Jason Alley, and I am posting again after a long
> absence. My pastor and I were talking about the appearance of
> age argument recently, and I was telling him that to believe that
> God created a young creation that bore the marks of an ancient
> one would be deceptive, and God does not deceive. I told him
> that God, on the contrary, invites us to know him and seek him
> out through the natural world (Job, Romans 1, etc), and that this
> invitation would not make sense if we would arrive at wrong
> conclusions by so doing. My pastor then countered with an
> interesting comment that I had not yet considered. I was
> wondering if any of you had considered the following:
>
> God is good by nature, and whatever he does, if he does it,
> is good. God is incapable of evil actions. When God does
> something in our lives or in the world that we might think of as
> wrong, evil, or bad, we are in error. God is unable to act in
> this way. If we think that he has, we must remember that he is
> the standard of rightness and holiness. We are flawed. Whatever
> he does, it is, because of his nature, perfect and right.
> Therefore, if God did create with an appearance of age, that
> action is not deceptive or wrong, as it is an action of the
> perfectly righteous God. Even if it is deceptive, that deception
> is not wrong; it is righteous.
>
> What are your thoughts?
I would question the "why" of the initial proposal of "appearance of age"
view of creation. Why was it suggested as a method of creation in the first
place? Is this something that is taught in scripture? Was this view held by
the apostles or the old testament prophets? Did they actually teach this
view? When they do speak on age aspects of creation, the are simply
commenting that it IS old and not that it just looks old (Habakkuk 3:6
directly declares the mountains to be ancient and the hills to be age old
while II Peter 3:5 states that the heavens - the Cosmos: the stars and the
universe, existed long ago). Or, was it proposed simply because an
examination of the creation actually revealed not only an age greater than
Ussher's' timeline but also a history of events that supposedly never
happened?
Stephen J. Krogh, P.G.
The PanTerra Group
http://panterragroup.home.mindspring.com
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