David Slack wonders who Chris Luxon really is, in relation to the question of how old the planet earth is.

David Slack reminds us that evangelicals who believe literally in the bible stories of creation, etc., are not completely hidden away here in Aotearoa/NewZealand. It’s not just in the rabbit hole fringes of the USofA. (*)

I see where you are going with this, David. The old biblical stories were metaphorical stories which early civilized Jewish people found useful to try to understand the world, and perhaps so that Moses could guide them in a new direction. Other cultures have had different metaphorical stories for much the same purpose. There has been no guarantee that civilizations’, or perhaps other ‘uncivilized’ cultures’ history would have led to the ‘who we are’, or ‘who they are’, today; we could be a different ‘who we are’. Remember when PM Ardern said after the mosque attack, ‘this is not who we are’. But ‘who we are’ is not so simple to understand. One of the main impediments to progress on climate change is that the possibly existential nature of climate dangers imples we need a fundamental change of the way we organize society, in fact, ‘who we are’. Denial of that is of a similar type to the denial of the science of the age of the earth.

(*) Note how the evangelicals in the USofA are reacting to the growing violence in Israel / Palestine. Is this leading up to the ‘end times’, the biblical prophecy? Or not? Are world nations waiting with a nuclear holocaust? Note that nation states are no longer the structure defining the world, the ‘refugee diaspora’ is. Nation states are feeling very insecure.