Those were my sentiments about 10 years ago. Personally the grandeur of the universe seems on an intuitive level to accord with something ancient and almost eternal, like God. One physicist said the universe would reflect God’s immortality if the universe were immortal itself. That certainly resonated with me on some level. And so did evolutionary theory when I was an evolutionist. The idea of ever increasing good resonated with me – that was more of Theistic evolutionary viewpoint for sure. One many levels I wish it were so.
But as Huxley said (and I’m not a Huxley fan at all, but he got this one right):
The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
So Evolutionary theory, Old Cosmos, looked very beautiful to me, even evidence of God. But then I began to get acquainted with ugly facts. Rather than evolving upward for the better, the world looks designed but also CURSED. I see wasting and deterioration and suffering. Technology has given us relief for a season, but I don’t think humanity is improving genetically. I fear diseases will increase. As the Lord said, “wars and rumors of wars, famines, pestilence…”
So my views slowly got chipped away. Then was the fossil record. It looked young. I couldn’t run away from that. Richard Milton, who is an agnostic and no creationist, came to a similar conclusion. So have other non creationists, and my own survey of the literature forced me to the same conclusions.
Then I looked at Solar system evolution. I read this book:
And ironically, at that point I rejected an evolutionary origin of the solar system. Every chapter of the book ended, “this is a difficult unresolved problem.” The author was trying to attack creationism, but because of his scientific integrity in giving a balanced view, I became a Young Solar System Creationist – say around 2004.
By way of extension, I began entertaining Young Cosmos creationism. But, unlike my views of the fossil record, Young Cosmos is not very defensible, except to point out what a crisis the Big Bang theory is in.
So, all this to say, I’m not trying to be indifferent to trying understand the Genesis text. But for me, I began to form opinions on how to properly read it and how I should believe it as I surveyed the data.
The data we have available today hasn’t reassured my understanding of all the Genesis texts, but that’s not to say God might not give us more data another day. I’ve seen this in my own personal and professional research over the last 20 years. Data not available 20 years ago has clarified things for me, not to mention, I began to learn things that were in textbooks that I didn’t know 20 years ago.
I still think Galaxies and Stars were specially created. The issues is when. The “how” is by miracle. As my professor of 15 years ago gave “The Fiver Reasons Galaxies Can’t Exist.” Those problems are still problems today. Witness the search for likely non-existent Dark Matter.