Re: [asa] The Patient Creator

> If the Universe is 14 billion years old, and humans evolved only about 300
> million years ago, then Creation existed without humans for 13.7 billion
> years. For some, this is a problem for Christian faith: “it makes no sense
> to imagine that an all-powerful God would need to devise this vast universal
> Rube Goldberg contrivance for the sake of creating life, rather than just
> doing it in one fell swoop of His mighty hand.”
>
> This argument is essentially subjective and it targets the omnipotence of
> God. The idea is that a truly all-powerful God would not have to employ such
> an immensely long, drawn out, inefficient process since He had the power to
> bring Creation into existence in an instantaneous act. Why bother with 13.7
> billion years of irrelevant history when what matters is the origin of
> humankind?

Actually, depending on how broadly you define humans, the date is
between about 5 million and 100,000 years, though of course that only
slightly exacerbates the question.

The main point is quite correct, however-claiming that humans being in
only a tiny bit of the time and space of the universe is a problem for
Christianity is based on unjustified assumptions about how God ought
to create.

C. S. Lewis's essay "The Seeing Eye" (reprinted in Christian
Reflections, among other places) takes up a number of related types of
objections. In particular, he notes that both a vast universe
uninhabited except for Earth and a vast universe teeming with life are
both invoked as problems for Christianity, raising doubts about the
reasoning in both cases. He deals in detail with different options
regarding spirituality of extraterrestrials, again noting that any
possibility is not hard to fit into Christian views.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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