I find the whole Creationsim vs. Darwinism discussion very interesting. Did God create the world in a few days, or did it take billions of years?
I wrote a book once.
It was a fantasy story, and the world in which it took place was about 1,500 years old. It took 2 years for me to write. (It never got published. But…)
If I can create a world that’s 1,500 years old, using words, in 2 years, I’m pretty sure that God can create a universe that’s 13.7 billion years old, using stars and atoms and dinosaurs and people and quantum physics, in 6 days.
His plot’s probably better than mine, too.
Update: Whatever else I believe in, I believe in evolution. I’m curious as to why there’s no room for that and Genesis to both be right, which is why I wrote this. It was a deliberately short piece, intended to be thought-provoking but not very serious, and I didn’t have room to cover every single version of creationism.
I have a number of mails and comments suggesting that I should have taken into account the possibility that there is no God.
I wasn’t attempting to argue that there was. I might do that in a later post, but it wasn’t the aim of this one. So, please – enough with the mails.
Liz Keogh, lunivore 
That’s the “Practical Joker” God – ‘yes, it was created a few thousand years ago, and it was created to look old. I just feel that a modern universe needs that “lived-in” look, you know’.
For my money – the evidence says the Universe is ~13.7 billion years old. If it was created to look like that (and ditto the fossil record supporting evolution), then you’re dealing with a deity that is intentionally screwing with our minds. And no deity like that deserves my respect.
As for the plot – well, if you go by the Judea-Christian version, you can check out the plot in any decent Bible. And I’d be surprised if yours was worse.
God’s only a joker if you assume that He slowed down the pace of building once He got to us.
My book covered a span of about 10 years. Once I’d got the world down pat, it only took another year or so to write the plot. All those characters, living their lives… it seemed like 10 years to them, I’m sure. 😀
Sorry to be a bit blunt, but I never really got this line of thinking.
It assumes that not even there is a god, but also that in all his mighty glory and infinite knowledge, he would manage to create such a fantastically intrincate universe… and then proceed to fuck up the instruction manual so much.
For the engineering, I would give him an A (would’ve been an A+ if everyone got to control their own gravitational field as a standard feature), but as a tech writer, there’s a lot missing.
I’ve never understood why it matters to people so much. It doesn’t change our day-to-day lives. The world is here—whether it’s been here for a few thousand years or a few billion years makes no difference. As for the Theory of Evolution, it provides no practical value—just a plausible explanation of how things might have happened in the past. Well, I could note that the misapplication of “survival of the fittest” to various social and political contexts was used to justify some of the most heinous acts of the previous century, but that’s not Darwin’s fault.
I suspect that this is just a proxy argument for the real bone of contention about whether there exists anything metaphysical or not. If it is indeed a proxy argument, it’s a poor proxy as it assumes that the only choices are: that there is a single God and that He created everything and that the current version of the book of Genesis is the one true account of that creation, or that there exists nothing beyond the known scientific realm.
— Doug
God created a 1500 year old world anf left all these clues and faked evidence which pointed to a 13.7 billion year old world. The only indication that it was anything else was the bible. And he wants test everyone to see whether they trust all the material evidence that exists or that one book.
Would that be what you believe?
No.
See update…
See update…
* Just because it took you, my respectful sirenian, 2 years to create a 1,500 years world, doesn’t mean it’d take God 6 days to create a 13.7 billion years world. What is the analogy based on? Will the same scale hold for other things too?
* Darwinists started it all, by claiming that Evolution means there is no God. So (and I read the update) don’t feel bad about it.
* And of course, both can be right. However,
* evolution theory still has some unanswered questions, some actually regarding the time it takes to evolve species based on the observed mutation rates. Let’s get the science ironed out first before making grand conclusions.
Good comments. Also, don’t forget that while micro-evolution (e.g. natural selection) is easily verified, macro-evolution (e.g. creation of new species) has never been scientifically (or experimentally) verified. There are even some information theorists who have found that all experimental evidence with regards to mutations shows a consistent degrading of the information contained in the genetic code. This would be contrary to the neo-Darwinists belief that life can come from non-life.
Before the Mount St. Helen’s eruption, geologists thought that structures like the Grand Canyon must take millions of years to reach the stage we see today. After Mt. St Helen’s, we found structures like the Grand Canyon – canyons 65 feet deep, with stratified walls – built in only a few hours.