From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Sat Oct 04 2003 - 06:24:45 EDT
Allen Roy wrote in part:
> Is it possible to create a fully functioning biosphere that
looks
> young? Can a balanced ecosystem be created to appear young?
No one's going to dispute that a day-old functioning ecosystem would have some appearance of age if its properties--e.g., thick soil, deep stream channels, etc.--were interpreted according to principles of uniformitarian geology, etc. Presumably God would also include starlight in his newly created world, so that astronomers would conclude that such light was old. No one would accuse God of lying if he included such things in his young creation. In fact if that was all there was to it, no one would have invented the concept of uniformitarian geology to begin with: the evidence for it would have been too weak.
The rub comes because of all the weird stuff unnecessary for the functioning of God's young world. This extra stuff includes such things as the fossil distributions, the galactic red shifts, the changes that lead to systematic differences in radiometric ages, etc., etc. Analyses of these things all strongly indicate great age, so this extra stuff would be misrepresenting the age of such a young world. Such things play no conceivable necessary part in a functioning young ecosystem.
If any person were to go to extreme lengths to make an object appear to be some highly specific thing other than what it was, we'd conclude that, whatever else the person might have been aiming for, his intent--if he were not just playing a joke or providing some other amusement--would have been to deceive. Why would God have provided such abundant evidence for organic evolution, for example, if it had never happened? Did he put it there just to test our faith, to see whether we would still take his revelation literally despite all the evidence to the contrary? That would be some quirky god; maybe Satan was the one who put the fossils there after all.
Such a god would lose my respect. Fortunately, God is not such a god.
Don
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