Qms:Appearance of Age
QMS: Questioning Mainstream Science
See also Beliefs about "Appearance of Age" and Beliefs re the Age of the Earth.
"Appearance of Age"
"Appearance of Age", also known as "apparent age", "Mature Creation", "Young-yet-mature Creation", and "the Omphalos theory", proposes that God recently created everything to seem ancient — thus justifying rejection of Geological calculations of the age of the Earth. (Omphalos, Greek for navel, was the title of a book in which a well respected 19th Century English naturalist called Phillip Gosse gave his answer to the question "Was Adam created with a navel?" – yes, he said, Adam would have been created as a normal mature man. He generalised this to trees, created with rings showing the appearance of age, and to the entire universe.)
This page by the American Science Affiliation gives extensive notes about various theories that have explained the apparent age of the universe in this way.
"Mature Creation"
This essay seeks to account for the obvious defect in the scheme by distinguishing between maturity and apparent age:
There is an important difference between a mature creation and apparent age. God is not deceptive and would not create things with a false appearance of age. But he did create the universe functionally mature. Careful study can show the difference.
An example of the idea of "mature creation": geologist Glenn R. Morton calculates here that a global flood would have released quantities of mercury sufficient to poison the entire atmosphere — assuming that according to the "YEC paradigm requir[ing] that there be very little sedimentary rock prior to the flood . . . because none would have been made at creation (it would be a deception to make rocks appear sedimentary which were in fact not sedimentary)". A comment disagrees:
Sorry, but creating rocks that "look sedimentary" is not deceptive since part of "functional maturity".
