bmonk wrote:
I don't worry about such solipsisms--if that's the word we want--because such a deity would be awfully close to deceiving us about what exists. And the God I believe in doesn't stoop to lying.
The same argument goes, of course, for those versions of creationism that imply the "apparent" millions of years of history encoded in the rock record was simply put there by God when he created everything 6000± years back.
Agreed - and to my mind, that's the biggest intellectual problem with "young earth" creationism.
The more we look at the physical universe - the more ways in which we study it - the more different phenomena we find that are consistent with an old Earth (and Universe), and are not consistent with a young universe (unless that young universe was created to look much older than it is).
One example: radioactivity and isotopes. If you take a pure sample of, say, Uranium 238, and measure it, you can determine how fast it decays into lighter elements. This decay takes place in steps... U-238 decays into thorium-234, then into palladium-234, then into uranium-234, and so on, until the final decay occurs and you have lead-206, which is stable. Each of these decay steps occurs at a different speed (a different "half life")... some of these elements have a half-life of less than a second, others have a half-life of millions to billions of years.
The differing half-lives (which we can measure pretty accurately) implies that if you start with pure U-238, and wait long enough, you'll end up with a mixture of these elements, in a predictable ratio - each element will be present in amounts which are inversely proportional to its half-life. These elements will be in a stable equilibrium - the rate at which an element decays into something lighter, will be balanced by the rate at which it's being created by decay of the next-heavier element in the chain. For example, there will be far more U-234 and thorium-234 (half-lives of tends to hundreds of thousands of years) than there will be radon-222 (about four days).
Now - here's the kicker:
(1) The decay chain won't reach stable equilibrium until several half-lives of the longest decay daughter have passed... at least a million years.
(2) When we measure natural uranium-bearing rock, we consistently find the radioisotopes in stable equilibrium.
So, if the Earth is very old, (2) is exactly what we would expect to see. If the Earth is young (e.g. 10,000 years or so), we would not expect to find stable equilibrium, unless the elements were initially created that way (and there's no process known to physics which would have that behavior).
This is just one example. There are numerous others - astronomy is full of them, for example. If the Earth (and the "firmament") are only 10,000 years old, there's no way in which we could see things which are more than 10,000 light years away - and yet our telescopes consistently show us what appear to be distant galaxies similar to our own, where our best estimate of their distances (based on phenomena we can initially measure within our own galaxy at much closer distances) being high in the millions of years. If those "distant galaxies" truly do not exist, or are truly not at the distances they appear to be, then they're a very very good illusion!
Genetic study of the plant and animal kingdoms is another big area of this sort of thing. The more we learn of the way DNA and RNA work, and the more animals and plants and microbes and viruses we study, the more evidence we see of the complex inter-woven "tree of life" descending from common ancestry. Either we (life in general) evolved, or the whole system of life-as-we-observe-it was recently created with a massive amount of (false!) embedded evidence of common ancestry and evolution.
Geology is another example. Yes, some people have proposed that the geologic layering of rocks is a result of The Flood, and that dinosaur bones are simply from animals which were wiped out in that cataclysm. These proposals fall apart badly upon real study, though. If you study how rocks and sediment are actually laid down during a flood (e.g. floods occurring today when we can watch them), you find them layering out in a consistent way - largest chunks on the bottom (they sink faster), pebbles and sand and clay above (they settle out more slowly). That's not what we find when we look at actual rocks (e.g. the Grand Canyon, seashores and cliffs, etc.) - we see beds of large boulders and conglomerate
on top of beds of silt-stone, clay, chalk, etc. and often multiple sets of these stacked one on top of the other. Some of the layers (e.g. chalk, from diatoms) appear to have been formed through physical processes we can see occurring today in the oceans... and which occur at a rate of thousands of years per inch, or even more slowly. There's no consistent way to see these as all having been laid down in a single catastrophic Deluge.
And those, really, are the problems I have with the Young Earth hypothesis and with Young Earth creationism. If you accept them, you either have to close your eyes to a huge amount of physical evidence, or develop a whole huge fragile patchwork of alternate explanations, or you have to conclude that the world's creator chose to be incredibly deceptive and tricky. I'm not personally comfortable with having to put my fingers in my ears and humming really loudly all the time, nor do I like the idea of God as a liar. (The latter idea is somewhat akin to some of the ideas of Gnosticism, which held that the material universe was created by an imperfect, inferior "demiurge" and that the true spiritual God would and should eventually destroy the natural world in order to free mankind.)
), and while the Catholic church may be on the decline in the US (or at least I've heard it has been), it's still the largest church body in the world. That's a lot of believers whose leader has turned away from YEC...