The creation of the Hitler diaries would have entailed a creation process and therefore a history, but it wasn't the history the dairies purported to tell: They were forgeries. According to the logic of young earthism the creation is effectively a forgery
Somebody recently asked me the following question:
I have a friend who, for some reason, is friendly to the
idea that God might have created our universe already aged by a few million
years, so to speak - so that the universe looks 14 billion years old, but if at
the start of creation God kind of zapped it into existence at several billion
years old already then it just looks older but is actually much younger.
My reply is given below: It includes some clarifying changes and actually concatenates two emails.
***
This is less of an issue than it was in the late 60s and early 70s when young earthism had its revival. For example in the early 70s my wife was told by a young earthist that God placed the fossils in the rocks "as is". The 1961 book "The Genesis Flood" which I read in the mid 70s tells us that God might have created light from the stars in transit.
But young earthists have been trying move away from this
"appearance of age" creation (Sometimes euphemistically called "mature creation"); they will admit:
a) It is subversive of science and can block all attempts to do science.
b) Far worse, it questions God's creative integrity.
This "mature creation" can be likened to the person who wrote the fake Hitler Diaries - it's all a lie.
a) It is subversive of science and can block all attempts to do science.
b) Far worse, it questions God's creative integrity.
This "mature creation" can be likened to the person who wrote the fake Hitler Diaries - it's all a lie.
Hence, for modern young earthists much effort is put into
flood geology and star light theories in order to try to give scientific
account as to why things are the way they are. These theories have
come to grief but at least a protagonist can engage them polemically whereas the guy who
just claims that it was all created "as is" is difficult to argue
with. But even if God created a fake diary it would still have a history in so
far as it would require God to assemble it in his mind - hence you can't get
away from history as an assembly path.
See here
But one finds that in the final analysis even those young
earthists who try do science have to eventually fall back on creation "as
is" and are open to being accused of the "Hitler Diary"
syndrome. (See my links below)
Science is a data dot
joining exercise: We see a pattern of "data dots" and attempt to complete the pattern with a
theoretical narrative which joins the data samples into a coherent whole. We attempt
predictions of further dots and those predictions, if correct, point to the correctness of our dot joining theories. But all this is based on
the assumption that the data dots are not misleading us; no problem for a
non-fundamentalist Christian who believes in God's creative integrity. But it
is a problem to a fundie who is effectively positing huge arbitrary holes in
the anticipated background structure joining the data dots*. This is basically
what the "appearance of age/mature creation" wallahs are trying to
tells us; namely that the world is a forgery! I don't buy it!
Some of my writings on the subject can be seen in the links
below.
Footnote
* Notice that this back of the envelope sketch of science doesn't recognise the distinction "historical science vs observational science" - the latter is a misleading fundamentalist trope. Science is about timeless patterns and in the exercise of all science both history and observation are always implicit. This is no surprise because every object we observe and study can only be done at the receiving end of signals transmitted by the object. These signals inevitably have a history of travel. However, there is such a thing as epistemic distance and this distance varies; some objects are closer to our scrutiny than others, some objects have a greater density of data dots than others and some objects have a greater complexity of behaviour than others: These are all factors that impact epistemic distance, making an object more or less amenable to our epistemology.
The fundamentalist attempt to solve the star light problem by positing a coordinate system which entails the instantaneous arrival of star light at our earthly doorstep (See links above for more on this "solution") immediately creates an issue with the historical science vs observational science dichotomy: This follows because it raises a conundrum as to whether astronomy is to be classified as "historical" or "observational" science!
The fundamentalist attempt to solve the star light problem by positing a coordinate system which entails the instantaneous arrival of star light at our earthly doorstep (See links above for more on this "solution") immediately creates an issue with the historical science vs observational science dichotomy: This follows because it raises a conundrum as to whether astronomy is to be classified as "historical" or "observational" science!
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