The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)

[tom]

Originally Posted by badhatharry

But how would that person explain the ongoing stuff which is based on new measurements? In the scenario we are talking about, time is compressed. 6000 years = 4.5 billion years. There are ongoing processes which can be measured which will show that the person who believes that the earth is 6000 years old is incorrect. He would then have to come up with a date in time when the process stopped being sped up and went real time. I think that would certianly be disputed by science because science relies on uniformitarianism.

I think we're not on the same page.
I didn't think we were talking about a time compression. Rather, we're talking about God creating a universe at a given moment with the appearance of age.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which God created the universe yesterday at 3:37 PM with every single molecule having the same position and moving with the same velocity, along the same vector, as our actual world. There is no scientific test we could do right now that would distinguish between the actual universe and this hypothetical one.
Now imagine that instead of 3:37 yesterday, we're talking about 6000 years ago. That's what I thought we were discussing, based on your statement:

...then God, by definition, can have made the earth look like it's 4.5 billion years old in order to test the faith of his people.

But if we're instead talking about a certain period, say T-4.5 billion to T-5000 (where T is the present time) in which the process is "sped up"... things become really confusing here. Are natural processes sped up with respect to uniform time? Are natural processes sped up because time itself is sped up? I suppose there might be an interpretation of that idea according to which there would be a real conflict with science, but I'd first have to see the idea spelled out in detail.