I know I'm going to regret this but...

I get Kent Davis's point in his post of 03 Jan 11 - 11:06 PM that there is a distinction between the artifact and the idea but the trouble is, we are dealing with two different artifacts.

The first artifact is the bible. I'm not sure when this artifact was created, probably over quite a long time starting up to a thousand years BC through to 100 years AD. The "idea" starts (In the King James version) "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.". There is no back story. No events are referred to before that moment of creation. The date of this event was calculated by Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century to be 4004 BC purely from the chronology of the bible story without reference to anything in the real physical world that we inhabit. This is the origin of the idea that the world was created 6000 years ago. Whether the bible is the work of man or God I will leave to others.

The second artifact is the universe, within which the Earth, within which humankind. This is, if He exists, God's creation. Scientific observation suggests that it came into existence, by whatever means, about 13 billion years ago. There is no indication that anything of that magnitude happened in 4004 BC.

The implication of Kent's post is that the world was created 6000 years ago but made to look as if it had been created 13 billion years ago but that is not what the bible says. It says that it was created from nothing 6000 years ago.

Kent, would you care to explain a little further?