Journey into the Past

Next Tuesday, March 13, I will head for the mostly unpeopled, mostly parched desert of West Texas.  When I pedaled through there in 2014 on a bicycle from Atlantic to Pacific, I found its primitive heat and thorny cacti fascinating.  (Pictures in this post are from that passage.)  I will soon return to explore ancient rocks and distant stars.

Some people say that I am brave on these solo adventures.  I deny it because brave is something you do to help someone, with risk to yourself.  Then someone said “You us good by risking yourself on these adventures, and bringing insights to us.”  It changed my perspective...  Now I want to bring Creation to folks who don’t go there as much as I.

Some say we began in a garden just five days after the universe started.  They count generations from Adam to Solomon, and since we know the time of Solomon, creation began 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

I wonder if they appreciate metaphor among ancient Hebrews, who seem to love it.  Does a day mean twenty-four hours, or does it just as likely denote some vague period, as in “Day of the Lord” or “Day of salvation”?  Perhaps the Genesis story is not meant as science, but rather to show another truth, as Jesus’ stories usually did.

If you are uncomfortable considering theories espousing a much longer creation with differing sequence of events than recorded Genesis, then this blog is not for you.  My goal is not to disturb anyone or to argue, but to toy with the evidence, using a mind capable of pondering, accepting that any theory can be wrong.

Some of the light that I expect to see on this trip originated millions of years ago.  Some of us find Doppler Redshift and Cosmic Background Radiation as good reasons to think so, even as reasons change with evidence zooming past us in all the frilly frequencies of electromagnetic waves.

Some of the rocks I will see contain shapes of extinct animals.  In the cracks of those sedimentary layers, veins of once liquid magma show that they cooled millions of years ago.  Radiometric dating of their isotopes, once speculation, has grown to accepted practice through a multitude of cross testing, adding confidence in very old ages of some rocks.  And if the magma veins are old, then the fossils they cut through are older.  I don’t think God objects to such thinking, even as he may chuckle at our lack of knowledge, while holding final answers close to his vest.

Can I accept a formless

purposeless origin

an uncreated which creates

something more abstract

than a god?

These are some of the ideas I take to West Texas on this “Journey Into the Past.”  If your faith lies in different sedimentary layers, we can be friends, waiting together for future discovery.