DAY 356
CHALLENGE
“The Catholic Church is wrong to express appreciation for scientific studies on the origins of the universe, life, and man (see CCC 283). Contrary to modern scientific ideas, the universe is only a few thousand years old. God created it with the appearance of age, just like he created Adam as an adult.”
DEFENSE
This view creates problems for God’s truthfulness.
The challenge is based on an overly literal interpretation of Genesis (see Days 90, 290, and 339). However, if we assume for the moment God did create Adam as an adult, there would be a very good reason: Human infants can’t survive on their own. If God created the first man directly from the dust, with no caretakers, as an infant, he would have died. Babies can’t even eat solid food, such as the fruit of the trees in the Garden. Consequently, God would have had very good reason to create Adam and Eve as adults.
The need to create things in a state of maturity would have extended to things Adam and Eve needed (e.g., trees already bearing fruit), but it wouldn’t have extended to other things. For example, there would have been no need to create the earth with fossilized dinosaur bones buried in the ground. Adam and Eve would have had no need of those to survive.
Consequently, creating that kind of appearance of age would be un-necessary, and it would raise the question of God’s truthfulness, since he would appear to be deliberately planting false evidence to mislead people about the age of the world.
The problem is especially acute because the night sky appears to show us events that took place much longer ago than a few thousand years, and astronomers regularly see stars go supernova in galaxies millions of light years away. If the universe is only a few thousand years old, and if God created the starlight from these galaxies a few thousand light years away so that it is arriving only now, then the night sky is showing us fictional images of events that never took place in reality.
This is not consistent with the truthfulness of God, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).