William Shakespeare didn't write all those plays. It was someone else with the same name.
– An old philosopher's joke
My youngest son's friend "Dale" (not his real name) has the strangest rationalization of the Biblical Genesis I've ever heard. Dale has the misfortune to be intelligent, inquisitive, and a fundamentalist Christian who believes the Bible is literally true. God, according to Dale, created the world six thousand years ago. But Dale is smart and also realizes that the evidence plainly shows that the Earth is over four billion years old, and that evolution is real.
These two beliefs are completely incompatible. So, according to Dale, for some inscrutable reason, God set everything up so that the universe looked exactly like it would if the "Big Bang" happened billions of years ago. Even though the stars are millions of light years away, God carefully placed photons headed for Earth so that it would look like the stars had been there all along. God carefully put fossils in the ground, and carved out rivers and mountains and valleys, all so that it would appear that Earth is billions of years old. God created all the plants, animals, fungus and other life forms exactly like they would have been if they'd evolved according to Darwin's principals of Evolution.
I was amazed to hear an otherwise rational, intelligent young man stretch so far to reconcile the facts about the world with his religious beliefs. The problem with his theory is that it's completely useless. I could just as well say that there are little green men living inside the sun, and assert (correctly) that you can't prove me wrong. The little-green-men hypothesis isn't right or wrong, it is useless. It's uninformative, unpredictive, and doesn't explain anything.
Dale's theory is not right or wrong, it is simply irrelevant. Dale claims God did this trick six thousand years ago, but I could just as well claim that God created the world yesterday, that we've only been on Earth for twenty-four hours, that God implanted all of our memories so that we'd think we'd been here all our lives. Dale couldn't prove me wrong. It's a modern-day analog of solipsism, which (very roughly speaking) asserts that we can't even prove that we even exist, so all other argument is useless.
I call it sloppyism, using unprovable, specious logic to divert intelligent people from real intellectual progress. Dale has discovered the same problem that bogged down some of the greatest philosophers of all time, including Emmanuel Kant. Kant was perplexed by the fact that a solipsist could assert, "The entire world is nothing more than my imagination, and you can't prove to me that you even exist other than in my mind." Kant famously called this, "the scandal of philosophy" that such a basic question as the existence of the world couldn't be answered. But the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it best:
The 'scandal of philosophy' is not that [a proof for the existence of the world] has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.
– Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger
Dale needs to learn from Heidegger: The real scandal is making unprovable assertions to divert attention from important problems. Dale is trying to hold two irreconcilable truths, and to make it work, he invented an irrefutable bit of "logic." Unfortunately for Dale, and perhaps for the rest of us who will lose this bright young man's mind to the prison of religious rationalization, his strange explanation does nothing useful other than to rid Dale of his anxiety. Instead of furthering his quest for knowledge, Dale is now stuck on an intellectual dead-end street.