Books by Ian Rogers
Books by Ian Rogers
On Saturday July 7th I spent a delightful day at the Frome Festival, with an author’s table at the Small Publishers’ Fair, held in a former weaving mill. There was a large glass skylight along the length of the roof that let in light and, on this day, grilling heat. Great for tomato plants, not so good for wilting authors!
Thank you to the organisers for free bottles of water, coffees and teas throughout the day. There was a lovely patio area with tables and chairs around the café and bar. This annual event is well worth a visit if you can get there.
On a person level, I had many interesting conversations with visitors, other authors and small publishers; I encouraged passing children, with parents’ permission, to fire my homemade cannons, to the children’s great delight; I also had my first encounter with a previously unknown fan who had looked at my website; and I sold a number of books (hurray!)
One lady I chatted to was a confirmed atheist. As a child, religion had been thrust down her throat until she rejected it. Now she believes that all religions are fairy tales. Believers are welcome to what help their beliefs give them but, she thinks, they are deluded. For her, science provides the only logical and rational mind set.
I am certainly not a 100% [Young Earth] creationist, but, none the less, I put the ’antique creation’ theory to her. This goes roughly as follows:-
If God were to create an antique table, there and then, right in front of us, and then we called in scientists to date it, what would they do? They would look at the its shape and design, the worm-holes in it, the marks and damage to the surface, the patina (surface gloss due to ageing), the dendrochonology (tree ring patterns in the wood), maybe even do carbon-14 dating on it. All these measurements would show a specific age, e.g. 200 years old, because if God created an antique it would be antique in every testable way!
Therefore, if God created the Earth, whenever he did it, it would always have a history! This would be true if the world were created yesterday, last week or 4,500million years ago. You couldn’t create a world with a systematically unfolding future (e.g. the predictable way the planets circle the sun) without also giving it a past; the clock, as it were, could be run backwards.
If the Earth had been created recently (only 4,500 years ago as some creationists believe), the mountains would still have looked weathered, the trees would have had rings in their trunks, and the Dead Sea would be full of salt from apparent eons of evaporation’.
Logically, it follows that, while science is a useful ’material world’ tool, as an all-encompassing mindset it, neither it nor religion can be proved.
One frequent question at this point is: If God is conning us that the world is old when it really isn’t, doesn’t this make him a liar? There are at least two answers to this.
One. Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast and it was called ‘the best yet’. The wine, if analysed, would have had a history: the type of grape, the apparent place of growth, a period of fermentation, etcetera. Was Jesus lying when the wine was drunk and appreciated? No, he had made one genuine substance from another. If I gave someone a piece of plutonium, would I need to tell them it had once been uranium?
Two, and from a different logical standpoint: We are time limited creatures, God is not. When he created, along with the material universe, he created time itself..
As God is ’above’ time,who is to say the phenomenon of creation didn’t run both forward and backwards in time? If you have a long trough of water and drop a pebble in half way along, the ripple spreads both ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’. It is not a phantom ripple one way and a real ripple the other way! What might be the ’apparent’ history of a ’mid-point creation’ would actually have happened. What is more, we could never detect the difference.