How can anyone believe that the world is 6,000 years old?

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How can anyone believe that the world is 6,000 years old? A few ways:

- Belief in X is required to fit in with your family/peer group/chosen social structure. Fear of alienation is so strong that we will convince ourselves X is true despite every other way we measure truths telling us it is false. This is a subconscious survival mechanism; do what the herd tells you to do so you don't separate from the herd and get eaten by the lion.

- Unwillingness to be 'wrong.' If X is a belief you have been taught from birth and thusly adopted yourself, then to say "X is wrong" is equal to saying, "My parents are wrong, people I respect and look up to are wrong, moreover, I was wrong and went around preaching a wrong belief and insisting other people must adopt it." Our egos can't handle the admission, so the only way out is to convince ourselves that X is indeed right.

As to how one goes about convincing themselves X is right despite all evidence and common sense to the contrary - avoid asking the hard questions, avoid measuring one's own beliefs. If I tell you, "The Wizard of Oz is not real, he's just a man behind that curtain over there with fancy machinery. Go look for yourself." You can avoid the risk of 'being wrong' by not looking behind the curtain - and preventing anyone else from doing so, either at the point of a sword or by passing laws as such.

I still think Fundies were put here to test my faith. Or maybe my patience. Hard to tell.

I myself cannot believe this nonsense about the universe being 6000 years old. Actually scientific evidence suggests an age of 13.7 billion years for the universe. As far as Earth is concerned it is 4.5 billion years it takes that time for life to evolve and modern animals arrived at the same time as humans did. as far as our species are concerned humans are a great ape not an android created by a cyberneticist we have an opposable thumb because we are primates. Fudamentalists who believe in Adam and Eve can't understand if Adam was created with a navel then the presence of a navel suggests being conceived in a uterus (womb) thus he would have had a mother if he was not created with a navel then he was not fully human and not a mammal. This does create a chicken and egg scenario for the fundamentalist abrahamic (Christian, Jew or Muslim). This Genesis myth actually was created in ancient Babylon. It was adopted by the Jews around 600 BC during the exile in Babylon. So actually believing a 6 day creation which is a Babylonian pagan myth dusted down for incorporating into abrahamic belief. is not original but the Babylonians attributed the 6 day creation to the pagan god Mardok

This reminds me of about 6 or 7 years ago when I worked at a planetarium in Wyoming. After I finished running a show one night, a person that was there came up to me:
"There was a problem in that show."
"There was?"
"Yeah, it said that the galaxies and our solar system were formed over billions of years."
"Yup, that's how it happened."
"How can that be right when God created everything less than ten thousand years ago?"
"....."

Awh, come on now. Don't be so dismissive of folks who think God made the world. We're not thick you know... Well, I'm not.

I realised when I was in my teens that there were serious problems with the theory of evolution... mainly irreducible complexity, particularly at the sub cellular level. Check out a book called Darwin's Black Box, by someone who really had nothing to gain and everything to lose when he came out and said he believed there had to have been a creator. (Despite what folks wish, he's not a Christian, he's a theist though. A very reluctant theist, but that's where the evidence led him.)

I think that time and space did very weird things way back when the universe came into being... look at the cutting edge of astrophysics. Time was VERY different just after the big bang. So, I wouldn't discount the possibility that the world is both extremely ancient, and and also fresher and newer than we know.

My main advice would be, never to laugh or sneer at people who think differently from you... they might be wrong, so might you. But what matters is, are they sincere, and are they sincerely seeking? If so, you might learn something from them, as they might learn something from you.

I agree that darwin has holes in it HOWEVER, compared to the bible, darwin is perfect compared to all its flaws.

Also, Theory in Science means "How this most likely works." Since everything as is until disporven, then modified to meet the disproving. Religion is "Take everything I say at face value or else." That is why a 2,000 year old book of morals is kinda weak, while science has changed with the times.

mgran, attempting to claim that the timeline can be made to fit because "time did really different things" is arrant nonsense. You speak as if time were a separate thing from space, definable and redefinable at will! Instead, it's much akin to claiming that Columbus might have been right when he claimed that the Earth was only 5000 miles around, because "miles did really different things". A year is a year is 86,400 seconds, no matter how long ago that year elapsed.

Time is as it is, and inflationary theory has nothing to do with time - it holds that in the fraction of a second before the universe cooled enough for laws of physics to take hold, its boundaries may have expanded at some multiple of the speed of light (since at the time, there were no physical laws to say it couldn't).

[quote=Aspiewordsmith]Actually scientific evidence suggests an age of 13.7 billion years for the universe. As far as Earth is concerned it is 4.5 billion years...[/quote]
That's what I mean about fundies asserting that the Creator is a blatant liar - either that, or that Satan has creative powers at least equal to God's (either one of which contradicts other fundamentals of their theology, but that's another story).

Now, keep in mind, it's still possible to reconcile Biblical creation and big-bang theory - just read Genesis ch. 1 as allegory, designed to be passed verbally through generations of ignorant shepherds with no concept of "billions" or "millennia". Read in this fashion, it makes much more sense...

(Then you have to read large sections of the rest of Genesis as allegory as well - but I think it works better for moral instructions as allegory than as history. Read as history, God's a pretty vicious, vain, arrogant, jealous petty tyrant, I think, and no sane person would want to be like Him. Read as allegory, that's just the way people thought about Great Power at the time.)

Interestingly, nonliteral interpretations of the creation story in Genesis date at least as far back as St. Augustine in the Christian tradition. It is, moreso in light of this, often quite baffling how desperately primitive popular Christianity is nowadays.

Well, I'd suggest a good place to start would be the book I mentioned called Darwin's Black Box. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwins-Black-B ... 0684834936

You should be able to get it from the library... the guy is a molecular biologist, and despite what Christians say he's not, to my knowledge at least, a Christian. But he did come to the conclusion that the universe - or life at least - had to be designed, because of the evidence of intelligence at the sub cellular level. See what you can find out about flagellum (yes, I know it sounds kinky ) and consider the implications yourself.

We'll get onto time and space when I'm not moving house. Sheesh, I have to stop putting off packing!