Once, on a fieldtrip, we were sitting around talking about random things to kill time. Somehow Creationism came up and a couple of us ripped on the idea. To my surprise, one of my professors (a respectable geologist) jumped me for it. It could be, he said, that the world is six thousand years old...we do not know that it is not. All we know is that the
evidence is that it is old so we just assume that the evidence does not mislead us, just like a chemist doesn't assume that an experiment gave an inconvenient result because of invisible wormholes sucking out a reagent. It could be that a higher being created the world and made it look old, six thousand years ago or six minutes ago, for reasons we cannot imagine. But that doesn't matter.
Because if the Earth
looks and
acts like it is 4.5 billion years then from any conceivable practical standpoint it
is 4.5 billion years old and our mineral resources and natural hazards which geologists are hired to find and study will be distributed as such and our old-earth worldviews will help us to manage them.
[This message has been edited by gene90, 12-11-2003]
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