Quote:
Originally Posted by Digging4Truth
He did demonstrate these things. This is without a doubt. But we have no idea if these things occurred the day after creation or 20 years after creation.
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I disagree. From the flow of the narrative in ch. 2, there's nothing to suggest a gap between the time God formed Adam (vs. 7) and the time God placed him in the Garden to dress and keep it (vs. 8, 15). From what we
do know, God formed Adam and immediately began interacting with him on an adult or- at the very least- adolescent level.
If this be the case- and I believe it is- then we observe a curious phenomenon with the first man Adam. Just for fun, let's say we could somehow go back in time, snatch Adam from the Garden temporarily, and transport him back to our time. Let's also say we took him to a medical facility, and had him examined: a full physical examination. Other than being found to not have a belly button, I don't think it's a stretch of the imagination to say our team of doctors would come back with test results showing that our subject (Adam) was a healthy, fit young adult- say somewhere around 20 years old. Imagine their surprise when we told them "no, actually, he's only one day old!" "That's not possible", I could hear them say, "he is obviously a post-pubescent human male approx. 20 years of age: fully comparable in development to most other 20-year-old human males on the planet."
I'm sure you see my point. At one day old, Adam would have been developmentally equivalent to a 20-year-old male, because that's how God formed him: not as a newborn, but as an adult.
God said: "For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain,
he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else." (
Isa 45:18)
I believe we are meant to take this verse at face value. When God formed the earth, he formed it to be inhabited
at it's formation. When God formed the creatures, he didn't create eggs and larvae, but the creatures themselves- fully developed. When he created Adam, he didn't create a newborn, but a man who was a fully-developed man. And likewise, I believe, when he created the earth, he created an earth sufficiently developed and geologically/atmospherically stable enough to support life at the time of its creation. Developmentally, it may
appear to be much older than it is, but just like Adam, it was not.
Although God delineates the process involved in the creation of the earth, there is nothing to suggest that this process took a long period of time, just as there is nothing to suggest Adam's creation- though a process- took a long period of time. When Adam was created, he was formed of the dust of the earth, but he didn't become animated as a living soul until God breathed into him the breath of life. Simply because there was a process involved in Adam's creation does not
automatically mean we must interpret this process to have occurred over a long span of time. God delineates the process for us in Scripture, but does not say it took millions of years, etc.
And so it was with the earth. Yes, it was a process: perhaps it was not ready for life until the completion of Day Four. But there's no internal Scriptural evidence to suggest this process took more than four literal days.
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