I got this comment (posted but as I've turned off comments, except from me! I re-post it; links are by me)
Well, of course the earth is old (therefore, I must be an ‘old-ager’) its about 6,000 years old. That’s old in my book!
The trouble is, we’ve been seduced by repetition that serious ages extend for billions of years, which have the effect, in my view, of distancing the creator from his creation.
Do these hyper-extended ages (HEAs) spring unmediated by human conceptualisation from the earth? Of course not. From historical reasoning? Again, no!
So their source is….
A deist pre-conception that the world must be of HEA because ‘god’ is a remote impersonal deity, care of Hutton ([and Lyell - ed.]), and the history in the Bible can be set aside tendentiously as untruthful, thus the surface form of the world must be the result of current processes operating over HEAs.
But that’s all supposition and full of assumptions about initial conditions, the rates of forces operating (e.g. a little bit of water over a long time, or a lot of water over a little time?), and who God is: more Greek than Christian in the deist conceptualisation; but anyway, an uninvolved God who is not the loving creator. So, wrong from the get go.
It is a concern that Christians who accept HEAs seem to be critically detached from the scriptures and uncritically attached to the progeny of deist ideas.
But there is also an implication that the Bible is not really concerned with such things as the age of the earth, which appears to be considered merely a technical scientific detail, or the nature of the creation, which also appears to have been passed to ‘science’ for adjudication.
However this is an approach that must deny scriptural content to proceed. It must also ignore the underlying ‘religious’ basis of the axioms of contemporary discourse in this area, and naively think that there is a neutral position when it comes to questions of creation.
The very point, I would suggest, of the creation account and its historical definition (given, for example, the chronogenealogies, which even if they could be extended by some period, go nowhere to meeting the time purportedly required for evolution of the cosmos) is to demonstrate:
(1) the means of creation: by fiat, of course, showing us the basic structure of the cosmos, as not admitting of alternative explanations that avoid the connection of man and God (unless the revelatory content is ignored, of course, which is the usual approach of even Christian commentators);
(2) that the creation occurred in terms that are congruent with the terms by which we understand and experience the world and our lives in it [thus showing that it refers to this world, and this world is the setting of God's dealing with man -- me], and
(3) the line of connection between God and man.
Demonstration being superior to assertion, and giving knowledge, whereas myth gives none.
Thus the Bible is very interested in the physical parameters of the creation, because its physicality is part of its ‘nature’. The denials that attend (I’d say ‘must needs’ attend) views that avoid the direct implications of the text refer more to a paganistic idealism of mind rather than the concrete realist philosophical frame of the Bible. Theologically, this extends to the incarnation and thence the new creation as realist events, not idealised mythic stories.
Inserting vast periods of time into salvation history immediately claims that God cannot show the connection between his fiat acts and humanity, and that mythic mystery, the ‘unknown’ stands between our creator and us; not connection, epistemic certainty, relationship and community.
Setting aside the creation as defined in the Bible invites humanity to define itself as it likes, ultimately leading to worship of the creation, not the creator. And this is exactly what we see!
My further notes:
If the demonstration of God’s founding of and the relationships with his creation is not factual, then no abductive extension can be made from it: no valid conclusions are available if the information we have doesn’t correspond with what happened.
Ironically, many commentators seek to draw conclusions about God’s creation as if the ‘demonstration’ were factual while denying that the events related in the Bible actually occurred. That is, that it provides information about actual events and relationships. Thus they assert conclusions that by their own claim have no real basis. So I wonder how they came to the conclusions that they assert in the absence of the only evidence that could promote the conclusion!
And I've just seen an article that attests to the discussion above: that students who believe in HEAs are more easily convinced of evolution's validity than those not. Of course, if you believe one fiction, you're more likely to believe the next! This was reported in Physorg.com 10 March 2010, and Evolution 64(3): 858-864 March 2010.
And more on point 2 above: that the creation revelation sets the place of God's encounter with his creation: it makes meaningful within the parameters which circumscribe our life God's contact with us in its totality; God is thus seeking us in the lives we are in: it makes the proclamation of the gospel be something that addresses our life-world, the circumstances we find ourselves in; our 'thrownness' to borrow a concept of Heidegger. It is not another world; the incarnation, being a type of reprise of the creation movement of God to Adam (ending in the post fall quest in Genesis 3:9), responds to, and rescues us as we are in this world, this world created fallen and to be redeemed.
