Subject: Re: was the universe/earth created in 6 solar days ?

Date: 12 Sep 1999 15:50:18 +1000

From:  (Andrew Bromage)

Organization: Monash University

Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

G’day all.
“Taco Man” <> writes:

>The main reason I believe this is that a Million-year day creation is not a

>traditional doctrine of any Christian Church. If God really created the

>world X billion years ago, why wouldn’t he tell someone?
There are many simple reasons why not.
1. He didn’t think it important. You might as well ask why any number

of important scientific factoids, such as how to make and use

antibiotics (which you’d think was important to know) aren’t mentioned

either.
2. Nobody would have understood it at the time. Imagine if God came

to you and explained exactly how he made the universe, subatomic

particle by subatomic particle. Would you understand it?
More to the point, would it make any practical difference to your faith

to know?
The Bible simply does not concern itself with such matters. What

matters is who created the universe and why, not how it was done and

when.
>Consider 2 Peter 3:8 – But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing,

>that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as

>one day.

>Many “Christians” will call this verse into play and say that it means

that

>the 6 days of creation in Genesis are really long periods of time and not

>(as it says) literal days.
That would be a misunderstanding of 2 Peter 3:8, yes. It seems quite

extreme to question their Christianity, though.
>But notice how it says thousand, not million.
Very few ancient cultures (with a few notable exceptions) could think

on the scale of a million years. “A thousand years” is a long period

of time. Indeed, “a thousand” is used all over Scripture to mean

nothing more than “a big number”.
A slightly less poetic way of stating that verse is “time doesn’t matter

to God”. A slightly more pseudo-scientific way to express it might be

that time is a property of the universe, so if God is outside the

universe, he is not affected by time.
>Also, the very idea would have been considered idiotic up until the mid

>1800s when Darwin (an admitted Atheist) proposed the idea that the earth is

>older then the Bible says.
This thread of discussion is better carried on in talk.origins. This

is a religion newsgroup; the scientific aspects are off-topic here, as

are Darwin’s religious beliefs (which you grossly oversimplify, and are

irrelevant to the truth or falisty of his arguments anyway). For the

moment we’ll note that this is historically incorrect. Darwin did not

really propose an age for the Earth, let alone the fact that people

before him did suggest an older Earth.
>If you read the verses above you will notice that God not only numbers the

>days (first, second, third, ect), he also identifies them as having an

>evening and a morning. In Hebrew that is always definite.
Actually, that’s not the case. The fact that the same phrase is

repeated verbatim gives it precisely the character of parallelism

that you would expect to find in a Hebrew poem.
>He was not

>talking about Million’s of years, or else He would have said so.
No, he was not talking about millions of years. Or a few days. He

wasn’t talking about time frames at all.
Cheers,
Andrew Bromage