an original thought

pre-script: i am not geologically, astronomically, nor even historically minded; i favor the arts, not the sciences. though i respect the accuracies of the other side, i write of them only by my understanding of the overflow--not that i studied them, but that i grasped them by their proponents. by human nature, i am a critic. but i do not claim ignorance of that which i speak, simply a different perspective toward it. for the artist is unconcerned about being taken as right or wrong; it is enough to be unique and yet still relatable.

the age of the universe is disputed by most anyone who has ever given it thought. while many atheists use the argument to deny the existence of a Creator, many Christians as well believe the assumption of modern science, and so the question of proof for or against God's existence between those two groups lays on different grounds. my point, however, does not arise from such a battle, for i belong to neither side.
Einstein introduced us to relative time. Darwin researched the effects of special (root, species) variation. science books operate on the assumption that the universe is billions of years old and that our Planet is millions of years old, theories which are based--as any science is limited--upon the present world as we know it. dating methods, for example, use half-lives and reduced atomic particles to assume the age of rocks, the time that has passed since their presumed perfect state which likely existed upon their formation. but it is not that such discoveries could disprove the purpose and therefore existence of a Creator, which is perhaps why many Christians have no qualms in agreeing with them. to stray from that stance once again, the issue is really that the open-mindedness of the scientist (i.e., the powers that present the scientific community as one common thought, though the beliefs of any individual mind may vary as much among other minds within a field as among those in others) is closed to the possibility of a Deity.
alongside that thought, many say that these discoveries of the need for billions of years to produce what we have come to see now simply contradicts what has been recorded in the Bible; for, if they cannot deny the existence of a nameless creator, they can at least battle the Christian understanding of One--who, by extension, is the most popularly acclaimed God in the world, spanning three faiths. because, after all, most of their opposition stems from such groups, and it is quite rewarding to fight fire with fire. but the fault of the scientist (again, not necessarily a single individual, since to be "a scientist" neither presumes your field nor your stance) is the assumption that, at some point, everything began.

"Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materialists believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos. Choose your miracle."

-Glen Scrivener

do not take this wrongly. this is not an argument about beginnings; it would not do St. Anselm justice. my point is simpler than stating the need for a Starter. to put it to terms, let us assume it takes one billion (1B) years for a star to become what we today know as The Sun. this assumption is based, naturally, on the idea that such a clock begins with the initial spark that could now define the entity as a "star." yet, if a Creator is a possibility, He may be explained to have sparked that star; or--and this is my point--He is perfectly capable to have formed that star in mid-state. that meaning, following the natural order of things, a star can spark and presumably take one billion years to become like The Sun as we know it, and so the unnatural/ supernatural/ dare-i-say-miraculous anomaly can produce an entity as though it had taken nearly one billion years to reach such a point in its life and yet in actuality only took an instant. such an occurrence would neither deny the scientific mind nor the artistic one.
and this is not so uncommon a notion. one's childhood may remind us of the age-old question: the chicken or the egg? for, the egg is alike to the star's spark, while the chicken is alike to the mid-state star. and the three faiths that believe in Adam as the first human will know that his life was not begun as a fetus nor even a cell; he was created as a fully functioning person, though natural order would succeed him and his wife.
so then, while it may be scientifically sound to say that the universe would take billions of years to become what it is from a presumed initial starting point, it is the denial of possibility--the unscientific (untestable) belief--which claims that everything began as things continue to be formed today. from that conclusion, the broad arguments for variations can begin to be called into question (for, if change is the only constant, how should the scientist come to know the state of the universe at its origins?), but such a topic awaits a separate occasion.