It's over a year since I wrote my post What About the Dinosaurs?, and I am back to this question. Let me restate a couple of things:
1) the account of creation in Genesis conflicts wildly with the theory of evolution; yet there is a huge body of scientific observation that supports evolution. What's the deal?
2) I do not believe that God created things the way he did to either deliberately deceive us or to test our faith. God cannot be tempted by evil, neither does He tempt anyone to sin. We screw up just fine without any help.
I used to think that God created the universe "already in progress"; this tidy little idea supposes that He made it look the way it does because He just wanted to, and if you don't get it that's your problem. Having spent the last year or two thinking about the story of creation and the fall of Adam and Eve, I think a better answer lies in the artistic nature of the Creation and the un-artistic consequences of sin.
By that I mean that God created things in the order Genesis describes; but, for reasons I consider to be esthetic, the first six days' work comes together to suggest a different order to us who are stuck in the time-space continuum and suffer from the knowledge of good and evil. By the very nature of our perspective we misinterpret what we are seeing, however sincerely we try to discover it, so long as we leave God out. His sense of composition made Him do it the way He did. Creation is an act of self-expression on His part, and He must be true to Himself.
Evolution is built on our own esthetic sensibilities, like Feng Shui. We see all these similar animals and we have learned that genes make animals the way they are, and we somewhat hastily conclude that just the right mutation randomly caused the one animal to change into the next. We ignore the mathematically incomprehensible unlikelihood of this happening because, well, it obviously did happen.
In scientific circles, this is known as the Anthropic Principle, and I think it is every bit as lame as unbelievers think faith in a living, loving God is. Whadayagonna do?
At the Bell n Pomegranate, I want to focus on things of the Spirit and how our beliefs inform our lives in this world. So settle in with a drink of new wine, and put your two cents in with mine. Just remember this is a publick house, and I expect a certain amount of civility; but that does not rule out controversy, nor even passion.
