@Bill_II
I heard Dr. Collins mention that point too. And he didnât believe God is a deceptive God, nor do I. You seem to be under the paradigm of 100â tree measured to be 80 years old, even though it appeared a week ago = deceit.
But I donât believe a 100â week old tree MEASURING to 80 years old is deceptive. That is our fault for measuring it, and not accepting the written truth (if there were such truth as this is an analogy). If His God breathed Word says, 1 week, than it is a week, no need to go any further and claim deceit when you canât measure it as such.
You said âDoes a tree created with a false history make God a deceitful god?â Yes and no. but where did you get false history from? I am talking about a real history. This history just so happened to have the time realm manipulated. Did God create a false history with the fish? Yes and no, the fish was a few seconds old, but it was also old enough to be called a fish and not a fish egg. Anything that is anything has to have a history to it, or it wouldnât be what it is, it would be a new thing that we havenât discovered yet, like a tree without rings. If you want to call it a false history, that is up to you. What makes it false?
But if God made a 100â tree appear that didnât have rings that went back 80 years, or roots that went into the earth deep and wide, then it wouldnât be a tree now would it? The part of the tree above the ground would fall without roots at the slightest wind, or would collapse under its own weight if it was hollow (had no rings). If you want to deceive or confuse a scientist, God would create this weird outter-looking-tree object, that didnât have historical rings or roots. What would a scientist call this object. The wood would be stronger than any steel, it wouldnât be wood. The thing that makes a scientific tree a tree is its roots and rings ect. So for God to snap his fingers (or speak like in genesis) for a tree to appear, it would have to have rings and roots. Or are you suggesting that God could not snap His fingers and create a 100â tree right in front of you if He wanted to? How many rings do you think that tree would have if He did?
That is why I used a fish example, God did a supernatural thing, and was not intending to deceive us, but He wanted to feed 5000 people with some fish from a basket-full. So He just made them appear. However, if someone wanted to measure or guestimate the age of a fish, they probably would have said 1 year ( I am not versed on fish ages). If He gave them an earthly measure-able few seconds old fish, they would have been eating caviar.
In one sense, it is pretty arrogant so say without a doubt the universe is 13.7 billion years old. However, you can say, it is measured to be that old. We werenât there, so all we can do it measure, and the most assuredly you can know, is from you faith in His writings. Though like there are errors that come from measurements, there are errors in literary writing styles. So no one can say for sure the answer. Nor is it required for salvation, nor does God want us to know this specific truth, or He would have made it known through revelation to use like He did with His Gospel/rescue plan. There are way fewer people that argue the gospel, as He knew this is extremely important and that is why He repeated it 4 times and foreshadowed it multiple more times in the OT. The whole purpose of the Bible is to first say we were created fog a relationship with God, man screwed up, separated, and God develops a rescue plan, that plan being Jesus to allow us to have a relationship with God again.
That being said, Iâm sure it will take my perceived IQ down (if it isnât low enough), but when I think of how God created the universe, I think of the scene from Aladin, when the genie speaks of âphenomenal cosmic powerâ, and you see the planets and stars and galaxies swirling around. Since God is outside of time, it like like a time lapse for Him. He created the universe in 1 day, but he had stars and galaxies (almost like a big bang) expanding at phenomenal rates and that is how a star got thousands of light years away in 1 day. If God wanted to, could he not place a star 1000 light years away in a second? But then again, you run into the ringless rootless tree problem. Sure God can do anything, but it would make much more sense (to me) and be much easier to create a star in the big bang center, and expand it and have that tree end up where it is now, 1000 light years away, in 1 day.
@gbrooks9 point 3.
How are you so sure God would not create an old tree? Jonah 4:6 âThen the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his headâ. If a scientist could measure that plant, how old would they say it was? I think some bamboo is the fastest growing plant right? ~1 inch per hour? How fast do you think that plant grew to give shade? Does bamboo created shade? Have enough leaves/branches? Creating a time lapse isnât lying, God controls time, time never changes, just how we measure it. A time lapse is the only way I can wrap my tiny brain around how awesome God is. But the fact is that God created this plant, very quickly to grow and give shade. God is outside of time, and knows the future, sure He could have created that tree as you say âthe old school wayâ, He knew Jonah would want/need shade. He didnât want to do that though.
Same as the fish, He did create an old (measured) fish.
God caused the sun to stop. At that time, we measured our days with the sun, so did time stop? Or just he way we measure it change?
Have you ever watched a time lapse of a tree growing over 5 years in 5 min? It is pretty neat to see, and that tree wouldnât be what it is today, without that time lapse occurring. It only took me 5 min to watch though, but 5 years passed by. I imagine God is (since He is outside of time) creating a time lapse of billions of years, into 1 day.
@Bill_II
I do agree that God cannot do anything that goes against any of His divine attributes. Nor can He make a square a circle. He could change a square into a circle, but He could not make it both things. He could make it appear to be both, but the very definition that we use, they canât be both. Much like when I hand you my car keys and say you can go anywhere you want. Can you go to the moon with it? No. Was I lying when I said you could go anywhere? No. When I said above God can do anything, I used that term loosely. However, I donât see why God canât do things outside of time. He surely created fish from no where which violates our law of things not being created or destroyed.
@T_aquaticus
I am not proposing that God would adjust the 14c content of a dead tree. I am suggesting that in a time lapse of this tree growing, maybe there was a tree that grew, and lighting hit it and it fell, and there was a rock in the ground and the roots grew around that rock. The tree IS human 80 years old IF you took a time lapse of things, but God 1 second old.
If you took a spring/coil, there is 1000â of steel in this coil. If you compress it, the coil is 1â, but if you stretch it out, that coil is 1000â. To a ant crawling around the compressed coil, the coil is 1000â, but to us, it is a 1â coil. Its relative. God could have made a universe/coil 1 day old, but it appears to us a 13.7 billion years old.
My theory as of why God did this? He did create us, and knows what is best for us. He wanted us to have a week to live by, and to rest on the 7th day. So he made the universe and then filled it in 6 days, rested on the 7th. However, he timelapsed it to appear to be 13.7 billion years old to the way we measure it. I understand the theory that genesis is more about a what happened, than a how, and story telling and word of mouth, and it wasnât written about right away ect. That might be right, I donât know. I just think it also has quite a bit of merit that my timelapse theory too.
I do believe the timelapse theory stopped at the garden of Eden though. The same time God stopped creating things. With few exceptions to that like that plant for Jonah ect or other miracles that God did.
So I am not sure I follow you on the fake memories of Adam with broken bones ect.? No ones knows if Adam did or didnât have a navel. A navel is used to pass nutrients and oxygen until the human can do that for themselvesâŚwhy couldnât he have had some sort of mana like yoke sack that provided nutrients while he was being formed?
If I wanted to created an art piece, a model of the earth, why can I not create one with dead trees and fossils before human time starts? Like creating a world for hours as a video game creator/devoloper, then releasing it and letting people play. I see no deceit there, God just let things play out according to the laws of physics with stars becoming dwarfs and supernovas and trees getting rings and mountains forming as plates collided, but put on fast forward or a time lapse until I was done and ready for humans to play. There is no intent to deceive the human, I just want them to live in a world with a 100â tree. But if that 100â tree doesnât have 80 year rings, then is it a tree?
A simple example to show relativity is not = deception. Earth moves at what 23000mph? in orbit? Am I lying or deceiving you when I say I am still on the earth? Technically I am moving 23000mph through space. It depends on your reference point, or what you are relative to. But God is outside of time, He has no reference point. Though he knows reference points, and He wanted the light, day 1. Relative to manâs time and the reference point we use to measure it, it is 13.7 billion years old. Relative to what God chose to use as His reference point, it was only 1 day. If God decided for the earth to move twice as fast around the sun, would we die at 50 now as opposed to 100? Only God knows that butterfly affect that would have on the universeâŚBut our cells would still decay at the same rate which is how we measure age (among other things). But we measure a year by the sun? We also measure time with an atomic clock, and we have not discovered a way to manipulate that measurement, but if a scientist put that clock in a freezer that somehow slowed the atomic clock, would time for that scientist outside of that freezer slow down? Would his aging slow down? Aging is another measurement of time, it just happens to be quite unreliable and manipulated by many various factors. What if this scientist put this atomic clock in vehicle that went faster than the speed of light, would time slow down for the scientist who put this clock in a machine? God is the one outside of time watching/manipulating how time occurs for us in these âmachinesâ. God being outside of time is such a complex thing to wrap our heads around, because we are inside time. But if God has a stopwatch going counting up (or down), the speed of the orbit (years) or the revolutions or our earth (days) or how fast our atomic stopwatch measure, could change, but His stopwatch would not change, it keeps goingâŚor isnât moving at all. He is outside of time.
I have other thoughts on evolution tooâŚbut I will leave that for another thread. But that has to do with a time lapse too. We didnât observe evolution, we are just measuring what we can. However, I am made up of many cells, building blocks. If I make 1000 lego garages and 100 lego houses and 1 lego mansions, one could find these and say they evolved because there are similarities. Or one could say, one day I wanted to build something greater than a house, a mansion, so in building this mansion, if you stopped time, you might be able to see a garage, or if you keep going and then stop time, you see a house, and if you keep going until I am finished, you see a mansion. Using cells ect, the basic building blocks of life are how every living thing is created, some took more time, some had a special designation. Sure if that was a time lapse of occurrence, one could argue that humans evolved from moneys, why not? However, if the final product was intended to be a human, then it didnât really evolve from a money or a cell, rather it was built from a cell. I think design and building is slightly different than evolving. That being said, I do believe in micro-evolution (as some call it), but I think it is more appropriate to call it adaptation. God gave us the ability to adapt to our surroundings, we can, and have observed that. But we have never observed macro-evolution, just measurements. But I could possibly be pulled into the camp of EC. I think there are too many words that need to be stretched in genesis to go there, but it is possible. What I think takes an insane amount of faith is evolution from nothing, no creator or great designer. Thought I donât believe there is anyone on this website that believes in that.
Despite all of that wordyness above, (I am terrible at succinctly presenting something), I like Occams razor, I think Dr. Collins used that in the youtube video I watched with him founding Biologos. The simplest explanation in my mind is the time lapse theory ( As far as I know, I just made it up, but apparently others agree with me?). The only thing you have to change is time (which God is outside of), all other physics as we know it are exactly the same AND genesis literally works.
Another simple explanation could also be that 1 day isnât literal. That would be very easy to believe. But why did God put so much emphasis on the sabbath, to keep it holy as God is holy and the literal sabbath God wanted to be 1 human day, and God said in Genesis that he rested, one literal human day. Why would he put so much emphasis on this one human day only for it not to be a literal telling of the beginnings and using 1 human day at a time? If I wanted to call something deceptive, I would maybe consider that to be deceptive.
