>If He made granite instantaneously, I would not expect it to have
>xenoliths, different radiometric ages in agreement with its stratigraphic
>position, mineral formation as expected from gradual cooling, etc. The
>amount of apparently non-functional detail supporting an age of several
>billion years is too much for me. Thus, it seems evident to me that God
>tells us what and why He created, but not how or when in the Genesis
>account.
Well, this would indeed be strange granite then. Would it have large or
small crystals (i.e. did it appear to have cooled slowly or rapidly), or
did it have crystals at all, since we assume that crystal size is related
to cooling history. I think you cannot avoid the "problem" (since it is a
problem only for those naturalists who cannot tolerate a god who doesn't do
things the way they think they should be done) of having God do things that
give the appearance of process that did not occur. Otherwise, you have a
God who can do nothing, because anything He does, someone will not approve
of, because it appears that it occurred through process. I think if some
of us were teaching God how to do things, this would indeed be a very
different world (maybe still molten!). The issue has to do not with
whether we were fooled by something we understood, but whether God was
deliberately trying to decieve us. Since He did give us an account of what
He did, we cannot accuse Him of decieving us unless the account in Genesis
is not true. Then we could accuse Him of deceiving us.