Markarado wrote:Where the hell do you get the idea that us 'strict creationists' MUST believe the world started 4004 B.C.? That's bogus. Some might, but I guarantee you that most don't believe it's possible to know the exact date. I sure as hell don't.
I agree - there are Young Earth Creationists (YECs) like Duane Gish, Old Earth Creationists (OECs) like Hugh Ross, Day-Age Creationists, Gap Creationists, and so on. It's not a monolithic set of beliefs - you should see some of the catfights between the YECs and OECs.
Again, if you believe God created the Earth in 4004BC or 4.5 billion years ago, or created the Big Bang, that's your right, and I respect that. Since I have no evidence to say otherwise, I admit freely you may be right - but however the Earth was created, it LOOKS some 4.5 billion years old, and life LOOKS like it's been here for billions of years based on fossils. And those timelines have implications for anyone making claims about how and when the planet formed.
If God did it, He could make it look 4.5 billion years old, but that sort of poses some basic questions of theology that make it a problem for most Christian groups, since it means God basically set out to deceive people (I've posted the quote from the Bible telling us to 'study the Earth', before...), which runs against most schools of theology. But if you think God indeed did just that, I can't argue with you. 'God did it' is an unanswerable claim; not a very useful one for science, but it's certainly possible.
If on the other hand you want to claim God did it usnig only naturalistic processes (as Scientific Creationists like to claim) then you have to come up with concrete evidence. And I'm sorry, but it was a bunch of devout Anglican geologists (Sedgewick, Buckland, etc.) in the 18th century who first showed that the Flood simply didn't happen like it claims in the Bible. Geologists have known for 2 centuries that there's simply no supporting evidence. But Sci Cre's keep claiming it happened, without claiming God somehow magicked away all the evidence.
--R.