Space For Doubt

It wasn’t until around a year into my deconstruction journey that I stumbled into an unsettling realization.

If I were to hold true to the original interpretations of some OT stories (and the explanations given me by their proponents), I would have no choice but to accept that God was a God of deception.

Let’s take creation. If the earth was truly 6,000 years old, why would God artificially date it to appear so much older? Carbon-14 is valid back to around 50,000 years. With other radiometric isotopes, we have the ability to reach back millions, even billions of years.

I ask again, for what purpose would a God artificially date the earth’s fossils to be so old? Not only would He have to artificially date them to be “old,” but they’d have to date much differently with each species in question. Under the umbrella of Young Earth Creationism, some dinosaur species would have to be artificially dated much differently than other species. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Would God really spend that much effort in faking something?

Let’s move to a different example. Lake bed layering in sub-arctic regions.

The earth’s climate has changed a lot over the 4+ billion years of earth’s history, but we are reasonably confident that in the last several million we have had a more or less stable climate. I say stable to the extent that we had polar ice caps, a region of sub-arctic temperate area, and a warm region surrounding the equator. Similar to today, there were no doubt short periods of instability.

It is in these temperate zones that something interesting happens in lakes every year.

As the ice melts each spring in those areas, small amounts of dirt, plant matter, dust, rocks, etc. that been trapped in the ice fall down to the lake bed below.

We can take core samples of lake beds and find hundreds of thousands of these layers. Just like tree rings, they faithfully mark the passage of time, year after year.

Why would God feel the need to create built-in age in our lake beds if the earth was only 6,000 years old?

There are stars we can see with our telescopes that are millions of light years away from us. Why can we see that light? Did God create the star, and then create the light from the star all the way to earth too? How far did that created light go? Does it go forever into the void?

I’ve heard from some that God did this all to test our faith. I’ve heard that the dinosaurs were actually never real and that God put them there as a test of our faith (That one was a SDA🤷‍♂️) In each case it was an attempt to force obvious details of God’s creation to fit within a modern literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Bible is deservedly described as an inspired work. However, it was still a work of humanity. A humanity that, as of the time of the writing of the Bible, was extremely primitive in its understanding of science, biology, physics, and astronomy. A humanity heavily influenced by the surrounding cultures.

Attempting to force what we see in nature to fit within this book is silly enough as it is. To add in that God Himself intentionally is deceiving us to test our faith? That is beyond all logic.

What does that say about God and His character? What does that say about us and our view of Him?

This view has God as having acted deceitfully thousands of years prior to inspiring us to write his second book (the bible). The apparent end goal of which was setting us up with a faith test. Would we deny what our eyes were seeing in His first book, creation itself, to cling to a belief that this second book was literally textually accurate as written?

I refuse to believe in a God of deceit. A God who states many times in His second book that He loves us and wishes for us all to be saved and spend eternity with Him. Why would a God like this put such an absurd impediment on the path towards belief in Him?

To those still clinging to young earth creationism, please take a minute to reflect on this. Does this idea ring true of who you think God is? Is it not orders of magnitude easier to believe creation was simply a mythological story created for rhetorical purposes?

I recently attended a livestream of a Bible for Normal People event where Dr. Pete Enns and Dr. Dan McClellan tag teamed a “Bible Myth busting” class. One of the slides the very faith affirming and Christian Dr. Enns presented, was entitled “creation was a mythological story.” He then went into all the details of why. It’s a line of reasoning I’m well familiar with but this level of science and critical scholarship is new to many people.

For me, I will hands down use God’s first book as my go-to source for knowledge about Him.

He created something so breathtakingly immense as our milky way galaxy, yet also something so beautiful and fragile in the physics that make an intricate snowflake possible. I am left with no other option than to believe this same God is a God of immense love and trustworthiness.

Peace