quantum of bowlocks

 A man with a healthy capacity for critical thinking once said to me: "If the universe is 20 billion years old and scientists are saying humans only appeared on earth around 200,000 years ago, what was God doing all that time?"

The atheist Richard Dawkins once said: "There is a Christian clergyman who claimed to have derived the age of the universe from the Bible and set it at 6000 years old."

A comedian on British television once said: "Aren't Chrstians ridiculous? I told one that the universe was billions of years old and he said it was just 6000 years old. I asked him how he explained dinosaur bones dating from millions of years ago. He said that God put those there on purpose to test us."

Here in the present moment, I answer them all rambling thusly.

"The scientists' dating of the appearance of the human race is not consistent. It is not settled science. In regard to faith in God, I do not find it necessary or seditious or a cause of doubt to think of God as doing nothing or as having no purpose just because there are periods of reality when I'm apparently not around to experience him. I say "apparently not around" because there are understandings of the Bible scripture "before I formed you in your mother's womb, I knew you," which suggest we have always existed in his mind since he always knew us and knew where, when and who we would be. As for the nature of time I think there are some considerations worth looking at. Time may not exist at all. It may not be a medium. We don't know what it is. It may just be a logical consistency in events which is somehow inherent to reality. It may be the expansion of space. Like electricity, light, and the atom, we don't know what time is in essence or if it has an essence. Humbling for the occasional honest scientists in our midst willing to admit this. Philosophers have asked themselves: If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there, does it make any sound. This is an old conundrum later ripped off by Schrodinger for his silly zen like excuse for a cat theory (an offshoot of Quantum) wherewith Schrodinger concludes that a cat in a box who may be alive or dead is somehow both until someone opens the box and sees him. I am asking: In a time which no consciousness beholds, does time pass? Does time exist? Is there any meaning to the notion of time? Up until very recently scientists claimed that the universe was limitlessly old, ie that it had always existed. This is called the steady states theory. Some of them claimed the universe did have an age but was beyond billions of billions of years old. Now using coherent measuring of physical data, the scientists estimate that the age of the universe is between eight billion and 24 billion years old. They might be correct. But their original estimates were more in error than that of Mr Dawkins' supposed religionist saying the universe was just 6,000 years old.  So whose view should we respect more? The scientists who wasted billions of research dollars and ended up being wrong by an infinite amount, or the maundering old nut job who used an imaginitive reading of the Bible to be just a few years out? Nor can I help wondering does time always pass at a consistent rate. Perhaps the universe is billions of years old but the first billions passed in a flash. I was trying to refute Einstein once vis a vis his Relativity theory speculations evoking traversals of time as a medium. I said: "Time travel is not possible because the past no longer exists in the expansion," which I think you will agree, was telling him. The Prince song Time is quite good."