I have been thinking.
I am not a person given to thinking about evolution. I don’t see the use. But, I did think about thinking about evolution and special creation this week. I have wondered about how the world could have such a deceptive appearance of great age, if it is only 6000 years old. This difficulty for the special creationist stems from some special creationist insistence that one need only posit that God put the dinosaur bones in the earth. This obviously solves the problems of the appearance of age, but it adds a greater one, eg. God is a big fat liar.
The thing got me thinking about Blue Jays. Now for thousands of years the Blue Jay has been deceiving us simple folk by “pretending” to have blue pigment in its feathers. Or has it? It would seem that if we had tried to get blue pigment from those feathers 500 years ago, before we knew how light refracted into the blue spectrums, we would have thought the Blue Jay was deceiving us and was not actually blue at all. Ludicrous, eh? But obviously our lack of understanding has nothing to do with the Jays honesty.
Now suppose, just suppose that there is some third fact, some unknown reconciliation of evolution and special creation? What if, for example, we one day find that the universe was actually only two dimensional until, say 4000 BC at which time it became three dimensional in a process that none of us ever considered.
We think that either we must have special creation OR evolution. We must have either a universe that existed with the same essential physical rules as we have today that is 6000 years old or a universe that is billions of years old. But what if there is a third possibility?
Sadly, I haven’t the knowledge of physics to advance such a concept. I don’t even know if anyone else already has. I am just wondering, what if such a thing remains to be discovered, as the color of the Blue Jays plumage waited?
Just wondering.
As an aside I will share with you an idea that DuckDuckGoose’s Grandfather taught me. I don’t really buy it, but it shows how a third way can explain how two people in apposition can both be wrong, when they can’t both be right. I often tell people this theory so that they have a distraction and quit bothering me about the whole evolution/special creation debate.
In about 1900 a fellow wrote a book suggesting that the word “made” in the Genesis accounteof creation should better be translated “said”. That is, the account is not of how God made the world in 7 days but about how he spent 7 days telling moses about it. now the Hebrew word for “made” is the same word that is often translated “said”. The key to any word’s meaning is always it’s context.Interestingly German has the same meanings for a single word. I learned in German class that “Die Kuu mached moo.” is “The cow made or said moo” Mach means made or said, depending upon the context.
The point of the book (don’t quote me, I think it was “Creation Revealed in Six Days” by J.P. Wiseman) was that the Genesis passages say nothing at all about how long it took to create the world only about how long it took God to instruct Moses about it.
That is, on the first day God told Moses about how he created the world and maded light and darkness. On the second day God told Moses how He had made the land and the sea.
So, this third way of understanding what seems such a straightforward creation account shows how limited we are in how we look at such large issues.
Personally, I am 90% convinced that there is still a major puzzle piece missing that will show that the Darwinians (and their children) were 30% or more wrong, the special creationist are 30% or more wrong, and some new idea actually nails it.Only time will tell.