I haven’t written anything in several months, and then this. I acknowledge up front that this is going to be a little, uhh, outlandish, obscure, and, for most, mind numbingly stupid or incoherent. But, here it goes.
About 12 years ago, I tried to believe in a Young Earth creation scheme. I worked at it for at least half a year. I read a few books. I was a physics major at the time. I found the books to be insulting. They were written by people who were scientists in fields other than physics or cosmology or geology, folks who could leverage an impressive sounding title into sales while they dabbled in fields that were clearly not their day jobs. Not that I was the bees knees in theoretical physics – but it’s pretty easy to spot a charlatan. But I admired them for trying. They felt strongly obliged to believe that the Universe and all is in it was created 6,000 years ago and worked hard to justify that belief using some semblance of science. Having hit a few dead ends in that foray, I decided that the only way that one could believe in Young Earth creationism was to believe that God made a young Universe to look old – very much older than 6,000 years (let’s just call it 13.8 billion years, plus or minus a couple hundred million). He made galaxies way far away, all hurling away from each other for some reason or another. He made light en route, a trillion raised to the quintillion photons made in a flash, all looking as though they came from somewhere else, but, apparently, didn’t. They just were. It would be an incredible deceit, one that doesn’t seem very much in God’s character.
For a few solid years after I just ignored the problem. Then I started to ignore that I was ignoring it. Next, I started getting into real science and history a little bit again; after that decided, you know what, enough of this. And now I’m back on the path of regular science. I still have seen only two ways for someone to believe in Young Earth creationism without holding tremendous contradictions in their mind: 1) To believe that God created the Universe in media res, or 2) To be completely ignorant of science and to distrust all who grapple with scientific inquiry hence avoiding the problem of dealing with their ideas (ps, there’s no global warming).
Recently, this came up again, this time at Bible study with some really bright people who are legitimately struggling with how to synthesize the Bible with what they see in reality. When I moved away from everything looking like Young Earth creationism, I didn’t flush the Bible down the toilet as gobbledygook, mind you. While my goal here is not to explain what I actually believe, in brief, I see the creation account as being a true framework for the concepts under girding the generation of the Universe while not meant to describe the blow by blow with anything resembling scientific rigor. Much of Genesis falls into that category for me. Just as the incarnate Jesus didn’t know how to build a laser, the human authors of the Bible weren’t aware of string theory. Putting that aside, I spent the last few days trying to come up with something anyway. I was looking for a 3rd option to the Young Earth creation account; one that was a bit less implausible, one that could not have holes punched in it quite so easily, and one that didn’t ignore the Universe as we see it currently. It involves a bit of slight of hand, a bit of technicality, but I think it fits the bill.
So, what about this…
We know that the Universe is not the first thing to exist. God existed beforehand (and that’s a necessary assumption for this worldview, so you must grant me it or obviously we’re not having this discussion). Not only did God exist beforehand, but SOMETHING else did too. Angels were, prior to the creation of the world, cast from heaven to hell. So, God, angels (many of them), at least two locations. What housed this? Some spirit world, but where does that occupy with no Universe, no space, no time? Eh. Who knows. Unimportant, just know that when the Bible says “in the beginning”, it doesn’t mean “in the beginning of everything.” It just means “in the beginning of this thing, this reality in which the reader is currently living.”
What if God made many many Universes from his other-world beyond the beginning and the end of the horizon? What if he made trillions of them, boiling and bubbling, exploding and collapsing, coalescing and dissolving. There was a flash, there was heat, eventually light, then gas, then swirly collections of it. On fusion, on gravity, on nova and star dust. Ho planets and comets and asteroids and satellites. As these trillions of Universes writhed and convulsed, each every so slightly different from the other, God selected one and said, “this is the one in which I’m going to reveal my glory.”
From here, this basis, our (“the”) Universe was copy and pasted into existence. First the void, the fabric. Next the light; already en route because it was already made, just not “made”, not “real” because it was elsewhere not “here”. Then a planet, then oceans, then land, a story repeated quadrillions of times, a massive merger from an existing place into a newly created realm. Plants, here, maybe everywhere. Animals, here at least, why not everywhere else? Lastly man, he too already in progress, copied en masse with a pre-history all his own.
It’s hard to contradict such a theory. After all, this new Universe looks just like an old one. It basically IS the old one, though it isn’t. I don’t know how it all works, dimensions and whatever; the question of what exists before the Universe is part incomprehensible (as in, it’s not a valid question) but mostly metaphysics. There are problems with my idea, for instance, at what point does man become MAN? Where do Adam and Eve fit in? I’ve always liked them as the first spiritual man, the first man in God’s own image, in the image of his Son. There were men since who were not bearers of Christ’s image, why not also men before? It’s a bit herky-jerky I know, but no worse than Adam and Eve’s children moving into cities made up of who exactly?
Anyway, that’s what I came up with. If I die and learn that the Universe is 6,000 years old, maybe this is the general mechanism. At least this way, I wouldn’t have to ask, “but yeah, why does it LOOK so old,” because this at least builds in an explanation for that. Or maybe it’s 6,000 years old and the shells in the mountains are from the flood and anything else is a sort of demonic conspiracy. Consider me duped.
Words 
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