It is sort of odd how the YEC criticizes reading Genesis as non-literal yet a tree with rings representing non-existing years is a false mythical past.
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If God is willing to write a fake creation then God could just as well write a fake Bible.
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I think a fundamental flaw here is the assumption I’m hearing repeatedly over and over again…paraphrased it is , “God cannot”!
There is absolutely no limitation in a Mighty God…especially the limitation he cannot create a mature earth. Genesis clearly says, he created man. He spoke everything into existence.
If God can do that, why are we arguing about Carbon 14?
In addition to the above, if one refuses to accept a catastrophic global flood event, I see it that one is left with no other option other than the evolution model.
I find it unsurprising therefore that this website earbashes the crap out of AIG. Bring it on I say, Answers in Genesis is among a growing number of great resources in the YEC movement…long overdue.
I don’t think anyone here has said He cannot create a mature earth. I certainly believe He could have created the Universe last Thursday. The problem is what does it mean if He did? A mature earth would mean a false history embedded in the earth. Which means God lies. How do you get around this?
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This is an interesting point. God can do anything that is doable, which leaves out like making a rock so big he cannot lift type stuff. The question then becomes can God who is holy and just do something that is unholy and deceptive? I would argue that he could not, and remain Holy God. But, an interesting thing to think about.
As to if there were not a global flood, the only option would be evolution, I think Hugh Ross and crew would argue that point. As I understand it, progressive creationists feel God created the species separately but in sequence. Of course, if that happened on the molecular DNA level, it would be indistinguishable from evolution, and in fact, sort of merges with EC on the sub-atomic level and it gets into the “sustaining all things” realm.
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Or a universe with an infinite number of hotel rooms 
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Out of interest, what do you make of Hebrews 6:18-19 (NIV2011)?
“Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged.”
How do you make sense of words like unchanging, promised, oath, unchangeable, impossible? Wouldn’t you say that they sound like God has limitations upon himself. Granted some are self-imposed (promise, oath) but God’s inability of liar is a limitation of his character.
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It’s not a case of whether God can or cannot, Adam. It’s a case of what is consistent with His nature and character as described in the Bible.
As it stands, however old the earth is, it contains evidence for a complex, detailed, precise and completely self consistent history of 4.5 billion years of events with specific causes, specific effects and specific inter-relationships. If such evidence were indeed only six thousand years old, it would be the mother of all deceptions, and totally out of character for a God who Scripture tells us does not lie.
The discussion in this thread is, what would the earth look like if it actually had the appearance of being only six thousand years old. In other words, if it didn’t have the appearance of age, let alone of a complex, detailed an self consistent history. In other words, if God had actually created it just six thousand years ago in such a way as to make it clear to us all that it really was that young.
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Would God create a fake history? Would God create Earth with fossils already in the ground?
You act as if science is just a matter of belief. You forget that there is this thing called evidence.
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Then there is the little detail of the variability of reality that would have to exist for a young earth to be true. God would be contradicting himself again and again.
This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…
Jeremiah 33:25
If a person cheats on their taxes then they could just as well rob a bank of a million dollars. The sentence is not demonstrably false but it just states a brute possibility which is ultimately meaningless. It is emotive and looks like a statement only meant to cast doubt. I’ve seen a ton of similar statements by those arguing for election fraud or that Covid vaccines don’t work etc. They are not very helpful and do little more than mislead.
Vinnie
I don’t think anything about YECism is true. Just in general, I have never understood how creating a mature universe makes God out to be a liar. I think we are just so predisposed not to being duped or conned by misinformation, and we are so sure of ourselves and our scientific prowess, this bothers us. I think it is a reach but I understand why it would make some people uneasy. But I am not going to tell God he could make a tree with rings if he so chose to!
I mean when Jesus turned water into wine, must we presuppose a history where grapes grew, were harvested and fermented? I am just not comfortable telling God how he must have created the world. In no sense do I think the earth is 6,000 years old with the appearance of age. That idea is just one of a million other unfalsifiable notions.
Vinnie
And? God created a mature universe with order and a history for us to discover. When we discover it we are discovering his creative thought and mind. We are still discovering what actually happened. I don’t see the issue or how this view is not self-consistent. I think we are bringing our own cards to the table because we don’t like this notion and we are terrified of being duped by misinformation so we call it dishonest.
With that being said, I do not agree with it of course because it treats a mythological narrative as a science text book. There is no valid reason for supposing the universe was created with the appearance of age. It is an unfalsifiable hypothesis and nothing else. It is not a scientific statement or anything that can be tested. Functionally and practically, there is no difference between a maturely created universe in this sense and a mature universe. To us they are the same exact thing, indistinguishable in every single way. I just don’t think we can tell God he can’t make a tree with rings or call him a liar if he did do so. I’m not following that line of though.
Vinnie
If you’re willing to stretch to unbelievable extremes - then yes, there is ‘self-consistency’ there. Yes - God could have made everything to just appear as it does. Of course.
What I don’t think you’re appreciating (that all scientifically-attentive people can see) is just how much detailed trouble God would have gone to to “create it this way”. It wouldn’t have been just a matter of, “Oh - lets get the rings in the new trees, carefully arrange some fossils in some strata, create some starlight already enroute … Oh - and don’t forget the belly buttons on Adam and Eve!”
Uh uh. Not by a long shot. I can’t begin to list them all here, but God would have also then had to carefully calibrate constants of how much stuff is found where, how much radioactive decay occurred, what vast swaths of strata, ice cores, tree rings, etc. all look like (making sure they all cross calibrate with each other) I mean … we’re way beyond the jury unanimously finding the evidence persuasive by now. We’re way beyond noting that it merely walks and quacks like a duck. We’ve had people looking at every facet of this creature on so many fronts for centuries by now and have failed to find anything “not duckish” about it! So the only people left trying to insist that it isn’t a duck are the ones who had already decided on prior non-scientific grounds that “we refuse to see this as a duck.”
You can point to whatever last vestige of “philosophical consistency” as you may wish. Just don’t expect any attentive thinkers to be impressed.
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First, we couldn’t trust what we see in the night sky. Supernova 1 million light years away? Never happened in a “mature” universe. When we look at the stars in the sky we would literally be looking at a fake history, a lie.
The same applies to many things here on Earth. If you balance all of the isotopes in rocks so that they all give you the same age then this is a fake history of radiometric decay. The same for fossils that would have needed to be there from the very start of the creation, even though the fossils never came from living organisms. Those are lies.
Would the wine have DNA and RNA from yeast that were never there? Would the wine with a label from a wine maker and a year, even though it didn’t come from that wine maker or vintage? What would the carbon isotope makeup of the wine be, and why that ratio? Would the 12C/13C ratio be consistent with coming from a photosynthesizing plant if none of the carbon came from a plant?
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But we can’t believe any of it. That’s the problem with a God who is a deceiver.
When you look up at the night sky are you misleading yourself into thinking they are real? If you dig up a fossil, are you misleading yourself when you conclude it came from a dead organism? What purpose did God have for forming rocks into the form of animals and plants?
If God creates a fake history for no other purpose than to make the Earth look old, why can’t we call that a lie?
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Not that I want to defend YEC, because I certainly don’t, but to God all things you mentioned would be a piece of cake 
!!! We’re talking about God after all! It’s not that mature looking universe couldn’t be created 6000 years ago with the greatest attention to detail, it’s the “why?”. I imagine their answer is something like “God did it to test us”. Although why we would have to be tested in such manner, now that’s beyond me.
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If God instantly creates a universe which is identical, down the the last neutrino, identical to a 14 billion old universe, what is the answer to the question of how old is the universe, really? In my mind, from our perspective, the answer is 14 billion years. Because God created a universe that is really 14 billion years old.
God isnt creating a fake history and its plainly obvious why…each day of creation week is specifically noted…at the end of every single creation event the Bible clearly says
“and the evening and the morning were the first/second/third/fourth/fifth/sixth/seventh…day”.
vs 27 “So God created man in His own image”
28 “and God blessed them and said be fruitful and multiply…rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth”
Now the clincher is Genesis Ch 2 and it is all defined by Verse 1
“this is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord made them”
irrespective of what secular science tries to claim, it is not purely observational. Secular science first denies that there is a God, and in the absence of a creator God, it must therefore interpret these so called scientific truths from a purely humanistic point of view…ie a view without God.
Theistic evolutionists are then first and foremost influenced by a non-Godly scientific world view…they take that first as their ultimate source of all authority, then they attempt to use that world view to explain the inner philosophy of biblical writings. Unfortunately, the theology is so deeply flawed that it tears most of the pages out of the very scriptures Christians rely on for their salvation. This in my view leaves the salvation question a largely empty vessel…followers may as well immerse themselves in Scientology, as their Christianity doesn’t even follow the Christian model setout by our Creator…many don’t even believe in salvation, instead believing in what is essentially a Mormon doctrine of self elevation to a god like figure.
This is the very evil that the Bible speaks out against. It is what started all this nonsense in the first place… cue Genesis 3
vs 1 “now the serpent was more crafty than any other creature”
vs 4 “you will not surely die…your eyes will be opened and you will become like God”
I do not accept that it is reasonable to rewrite biblical theology as a means of preventing individuals from losing their faith. Jesus did not once compromise his faith in this way. It is a fallacy to use the examples of healing/doing good, or eating on the Sabbath…these were a poor interpretation of Old Testament scripture highlighted by the example Jesus gave of David eating showbread from the Tabernacle!
T_aquaticus, your claim of evidence I do not believe an honest representation of the truth.
Answers in Genesis, among an ever growing number of scientific researchers among the Christian community, is providing a vast array of evidence that stays in harmony with the biblical model…some of the scientific evidence has not only revolutionised scientific understanding but is also being viewed even by the secular community as a better explanation than existing models
I refer here to the research by Michael Behe Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines - YouTube , Dr Stephen Myer Does Science Point To God? - Stephen Meyer at Dallas Science Faith Conference 2020 - YouTube , Dr Kurt Wise Kurt P Wise, geology (In Six Days) and also Dr Andrew Snelling Skeptics Do NOT Want You to Know This About Rock Layers - YouTube.
My reply back to them would be that not only would it throw natural understandings into confusion, but it would also then derail the psalmists who fully expect that creation is a testimony of God’s handiwork, and the later apostles who also expected their audience to avail themselves of the testimony of nature for at least as far as it could take them.
So it isn’t just science that yecs are discarding, but they are forced to throw scriptures under the bus too.
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