I am more inclined to beleive that God made it but he formed scientific law to govern the processes by which he fashioned the universe.The bible without being too complicated is in sync with every scientific cosmological fact.I admit rather than saying God created the earth 8,000 years ago.He did it methodically eons before,thus the day -age theory .He did indeed create the universe gradually since time is nothing to him in the very order the book of Genesis states.
I mean the universe has design.If I drew a picture on a peice of paper,cut it up and kept dropping the pieces from a height they would never form my name again.Unless I pieced them together like in a jigsaw puzzle. Ex nihilo creation necessitates a God. A first cause in a cause and effect paradigm necessitates God
Look at it this way
On day one the big bang all matter, forces and time created in a moment
Day two talks about the upper firmament separating from the lower one .the upper waters from lower waters.Interestinly from here one can either look at the cosmic or the planetary scheme simultaneously. At the cosmic level the firmaments could be nebular clouds of gas separating from dark matter as two distinct domains. At the same time if one thinks of strictly looking at the earth with nebular theory working …the earth as light burning hot like a star .Then the second day speaks of the gravitationally compressed ocean of magma separating from the envelope of cooler gas on the outside (which gas formed the atmosphere)
Now on the third day the bible says that the waters were collected in places as seas and separated from the land. Again at cosmic level particularly solar system look at how the planets closer to the sun are all rocky. Mercury, Venus, Earth and mars are rocky inner planets and then beyond the asteroid belt there come the liquefied gas giants Jupiter, Saturn Uranus and Neptune.
Could it be that the inner planets stand for earth and outer planets stand for water? Amazing isn't it? Look at the earth it is still forming but if the liquid ocean of magma on the outer surface cooled into tectonic land plates and the envelope of gas cooled further still with heavier elements like water falling back to earth as rain and collecting as oceans .Again you see here that the 3rd day is working for both
Now we know that for life on earth to have life there needed to be oxygen and water. Water indeed provided single celled organisms the ability to colonise both it and land. I believe the first living organisms were plants because they would need to make enough oxygen through various processes of photosynthesis for animals to thrive so again on the third day the bible makes sense that plants were made.
Remember that to God a day is like a thousand years not a literal 1000 years but that stands for a length of disproportionate time. I always believe that a day in Genesis took eons upon eons .The universe is indeed probably 13billion years old or more and as you can see all the above processes too millions of years. Why would I bring it up? Well many scholars point out to how could earth exist before sun or moon. It did not. They were all existing together and forming together but it is only because we are earthlings that earth takes center stage in the narrative. So on the 4th day as genesis says it simply alludes to the earth being life receptive and so the sun and moon are revealed to show the times and seasons to it's living creatures
Notice that on the 5ths day God created sea creatures most biologists again agree that life came from water. So sea creatures came first. I do not strictly believe that all sea creatures came from one primordial germ. I think God by miracle did create first species through progressive evolution. Maybe that is why there are transitional fossils missing.
On the 6th day again he created creatures of land. Remember man was created last. Like I think that God did create dinosaurs and I do not believe he made animals immortal ,he only wanted man to be immortal so animals probably fed on each other and were not strictly vegetarian .He created the web of life that way but humans like Adam were created after some time just when conditions were right. Moreover even if we look at it another way who is to say Adam did not live 200million years and saw the dinosaurs and other creatures die off?In the bible we are not told how long he lived in Eden or earth. He could have lived millions of years. What is interesting is that when he told him 'don't eat of that fruit or you will die the day you eat it'. How did Adam know what death was? Yet he obeyed for a while. Logically this would mean Adam knew that animals died and to him it was normal but he probably feared to die himself. Again notice he did not die in 24 hours or in the day of eating the fruit but lived for 930 years.Offcourse 930 years of existence compared to say 65 million years is a day. The bible in Daniel calls weeks days and in some books days are equivalent to years Num 14:34,Ezekiel 4:5-6 years so who knows maybe 930*52 is 48,360 years or 365 days*930 is 339,450 years. For God anything is possible.
Again how long did he live before Eve was made? I reason Adam indeed was made probably like Homo erectus from the start not like evolution says from some ape like ancestor. So he could have lived 2 million years ago or maybe even 200 million years ago and lived and then God made Eve say maybe 500,000 years ago to be like Adam. Maybe over the years he changed or slept while she was being made .she could have been like a normal woman. The children born to her could have been normal too but their races were different as they moved away from their birth place. I believe like man is very ancient and Neanderthals were our brothers .Remember also in the bible angels mated with men so maybe their children were a bit brute and could be the fossils we see today. I reckon Noah lived about 30,000 years ago and he re-began the human race with his family. I have to be honest again that estimates of time by biblical measures could be misleading so each patriarchs name in genesis could be an entire generation of humanity. In my heart I believe Noah existed about 12,000 years ago and the ante deluvian people before then. So maybe God did create mankind hundreds of thousands years ago but the flood happened only about 32,000 years ago. It's all very easy if we take Neanderthals to be sons of Adam or his progeny and not our ancestors.They are being actually a more robust and muscular type of man. Maybe Adam being a stronger more perfect being was Neanderthal. I know it sounds crazy but it's us people who draw the and think of them as hairy brutes. A lot can be assumed from a skeleton but in actual fact they could have been tall, intelligent people just like you and me today. Besides just as we have races today maybe the Neanderthals were a race and not the entire human population, even anthropologists agree that they lived alongside humans that far back in time
If indeed North American Indians and South American Indians who went to the new world are Noah's' descendants and Australian aborigines too. Then it's not possible that Noah lived 5,000 years ago. I cannot comprehend how the earth got to 6 billion on all continents just 6,000 years ago. I mean I reason all people aborigines, eskimos, latin American Indians came from Noah's sons but how could they get from the middle east to their native locations across oceans in 6,000 years. The Barents land bridge connecting Russia and Alaska was still there by 12-10,000BC.if the whole world was flooded it took lots of time to spread to their current locations. So a conservative estimate is that Noah's flood was more like 20,000 years ago. In any case Jericho,Hatal cuyuk and Jarmo settlements in the middle east are themselves dated to 7000Bc or more.
There is another argument that god created the earth eons of years ago and when Satan fell he destroyed it by flood and so the earth became void and covered with water and then he recreated everything more recently so although the earth is old and fossils show of animals that lived then humanity itself is about 30,000 years old. And Noah's flood was the second. This theory is called the Gap theory, who knows maybe it's true also.
I think evolution is a fact but it is exaggerated and the truth is scientists must not exaggerate beyond what they don't know. God did extraordinary acts of creation through instant creation or he could have used secondary causes with existing material that he created before. What I mean is like God made the universe and calibrated that clock to tick in a specific way he can wind it counterclockwise or clockwise but he lets it tick on in his designated parameters. A clock cannot have less than 60 seconds or more than sixty seconds. For God-yes for man-NO.So evolution works the same way when it reaches its limit, it goes back and starts from scratch while the minute hand or hour hand of the clock moves on progressively. This world works in cycles, the sun rises the moon goes from full to crescent, the waves ebb and tide so evolution could be that way too. Maybe we underestimate it, or maybe (and most likely we humans with our vivid imagination) overestimate it. I tend to think that unlike in the Deists view where God made the world and let it be, in a theist's view of which we Christians are he still sustains every breath we take every atom and every molecule. He controls all events so even evolution is under his control .Look at how Man evolved as races from one single pair, more like adapting to his environment. There are limits to evolution. It is probably at intra genus level. I believe if the flood of Noah did occur and the whole earth was destroyed we have to believe in evolution. We must, God did not recreate animals after the flood but through genetic variation allowed a single pair of a kind of proto family or genus evolve into species and sub species. If you notice beyond species level at genus level animals are still basically similar. So like one feline pair could have evolved into lions and tigers and snow leopards and jaguars, pumas you name it. Noah did not have to find a pair of tigers or a pair of lions to go with him on the ark. A single eagle pair could have evolved into falcons, kites, hawks maybe even owls. See so evolution is real and practical at explaining true facts of science.
