Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'

JIM S I think it is still enormously problematic to suggest that God created Adam and Eve with a false appearance of Age.
This can be illustrated by asking whether Adam's and Eve's cells and organs had physical indicators that they had been alive for twenty (or so) years. For example, according to this scenario God presumably created Adam and Eve with adult-sized hearts. But it doesn't follow from this that these hearts bore the wear and tear of having been beating for twenty years -- he created them brand new, not with a false appearance of age. Let me reiterate that: they would have appeared adult-sized AND brand new. The claim that being created as adults means being created with an appearance of age presupposes that size and age are essentially the same thing. This is obviously false. 

Rob Bowman Another problem is that while God might make things "mature" (and therefore looking "older" than they really are), it doesn't seem likely that he would make them appear *aged* beyond their actual years. For example, God might make Adam and Eve as young adults, but he would not make them with 18 years of tooth decay or with hard callouses on their hands and feet. 

i) What does it mean to say something has the appearance of age, much less a false appearance of age? For instance, if you never saw a child before, would you infer from its appearance that the child was an immature human? Conversely, if you never saw an adult before, would you infer from its appearance that the adult was a mature human? Fact is, humans don't appear to be any particular age to an inexperienced observer.

ii) Both critics treat the body like a machine, which begins to wear out as soon as it comes into use. In a sense, car is already old if it has 100,000 miles on it, even if the car is just a year old. But is the heart of a 16-year-old like a car with 20,000 miles on the odometer? Still in great shape, but no longer as good as when it was brand-new? 

At what point does a human body begin to undergo irreversible deterioration? Is the heart of a 16-year-old like a mechanical pump that already has some wear and tear? Or does it only begin to wear out when senescence kicks in? If you could keep the teenager at 16 for 90 years, would his heart eventually wear out? Or would it keep on ticking indefinitely, so long as he stays in his youthful prime? 

Does the heart suffer from planned obsolescence? Does it have a preset number of beats? Do athletes die younger because they increase their heart rate (more beats per minute), thereby exhausting their allotment quicker? Do you die sooner if you make your heart run faster, because you used up your quota early on? 

This isn't just an academic question. If body parts and organs inevitably wear out, then a resurrection cannot confer immortality. God must repeatedly rejuvenate the saints. 

Likewise, even if God might make the light from a star reach us much earlier than its actual distance, I don't think he would make it appear that the light has been diffusing through interstellar dust for millions of years if that hadn't actually happened.

Is the speed of light designed to indicate the passage of time? Or do we simply find it convenient to treat some natural processes as if they were chronometers? 

In the end I am suspicious of all ad hoc arguments that claim that things aren't what they appear. The geocentrists in Galileo's day argued that it only appeared that moons were orbiting Jupiter. Dawkins admits that life looks designed but insists it isn't really. The YEC that the universe only looks billions of years old is the same kind of argument.

But that cuts both ways. Aren't geocentrists appealing to apparent motion? Couldn't they say heliocentricism is deceptive? 

Theologically, the question is whether that theory can avoid implying that God deliberately deceives us into thinking that the universe is older than it really is.
The analogy with Christ turning water into wine doesn't work. Christ turned the water into wine instantly, and once it was wine it functioned just like regular wine. Christ did not put the wine in bottles and label them with varying vintage dates to make it appear that some of the wine was much older than other bottles of wine.

But it's not the vintner who put a time stamp on the bottle. Rather, scientists draw inferences about the passage of time from natural processes–whose function is not to indicate the passage of time. 

The question is whether we have a justifiable expectation that these processes are reliable time-markers. Take Orson Welles reading War of the Worlds on the radio. That caused some listeners to panic. They thought it was a real news broadcast. But it's not as if Welles intended to deceive them. And who's to blame if they were spooked? Is it his fault that some listeners were gullible? Don't confuse fiction with deception. 

If all we had was the starlight problem, one of these ad hoc explanations might seem at least plausible, given one's belief that the Bible must teach an age of the universe of only some thousands of years. But the Bible doesn't teach an age of the universe or of the earth, and there are lots of other scientific evidences, independent of the starlight velocity evidence, that the world is more than several thousand years old. The YEC position must then come up with additional ad hoc explanations for all of those lines of evidence...

But if mature creation is true, then those are not in fact independent variables.