Todd, I get your point and it is well taken. There is a presupposition in it, though, that goes to my point about "surpassing our simpleton abilities to know". It presupposes that our measurement of "a million years old" is the only measurement that matters.
As an aside: If we weren't talking about the character of God in asking whether He may have created a universe that may appear older than it actually is, it wouldn't matter about any other measurement than our own, right? I mean, we live on Earth, we measure with tools that we have, based on verifiable things that we can depend on as standards of measurement. (For example, a second of time is so many gazillion oscillations of a cesium atom, that atom acts dependably the same here, and the measurement is observable, verifiable, repeatable, and it so happens to be smack dab on what we already knew as a second. We can depend on that, and we rightfully do.) Since we measure with pretty good tools, it is okay that we use those measurements to say, "Here's how old a fossil is, here's how old a star is, etc." There's nothing wrong with us making those measurements and saying, "Well, here's what the ruler, scale, clock, etc. shows." It is responsible.
But, when we get into the question of **why** that measurement is right or not and **why** it matters when we inquire about the nature, character (or existence, if someone were an atheist) and being of God we have to bring another question into it --- do we have a grasp on what are the only measurements that matter? Or, as I said in the other post, is there another measurement to know other than what we believe we know? Because, we run the risk of having our limited tools in our little hands and saying, "Okay, if God's activity is not measurable in a way that makes sense by these rulers, scales, clocks, etc. that we understand, then He acts with some motive or intent that we might impugn." That is why I even make the point about "things that surpass our simpleton abilities to know".
So, I look around and say, "Do we know what we believe we know?" And, sure enough, there is a well studied but not well understood something-out-there that mainly theoretical physics is addressing. That is the time dilation stuff I mentioned yesterday. I don't know if it answers anything or not. But, it might very well be consistent with God making a universe that --- by our measurements made from our frame of reference --- is gazillions of years old but that --- from His perspective and what we know about the speed of light and what the Scriptures reveal about Who He Is --- the universe is not old at all. And, this is not even directly an issue about the eternity of God and His being outside of time; this is about two different frames of reference where time is actually different because time is not uniform and it can be drastically different in different frames of reference.
It may be perfectly consistent and certainly not antibiblical at all to say "the universe is 5 billion years old" and to say "the universe is so new and young that you could measure it in the thousands of years as opposed to billions". I know that sounds crazy --- and maybe it is --- but from what I read, that's my understanding of it. Things get really crazy to our perception when we talk about these time-related things and theories. It is easy to arrive at points of knowledge that seem to be contradictory but are not. I do think it is highly possible that this is one of those things, and that in no way is God's nature and character called into question when we say the Earth and the universe itself is "young", and that in no way makes anyone a liberal evolutionist anti-Christ when he says the universe itself is "old".
