Dear God, My Grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy. How far back do you go? We laugh at this example of childish understanding and of course, recognize that some day he will mature in his knowledge.
Unfortunately, what is sad about the education system in this country and nearly every country in the world today is an orchestrated attempt to keep children in a state of ignorance because of religious bigotry. Instead of demonstrating the world around us is an obvious product of design, they offer the feeblest of explanations for literally every observation of natural phenomena that exists.
I was walking through a gravel parking lot one day and something caught my eye. I reached down and picked it up. It was a dirty quarter and I thought, at the time; what was it about that quarter that caught my eye? The answer to most people is pretty obvious. It was perfectly round and flat, unlike the random shapes and sizes of the limestone gravel in the parking lot. Nobody would have surmised that it was just a nice round piece of gravel. In other words, to assert that that quarter was a product of the random crushing and sizing of the gravel used to cover that parking lot would be ridiculous. Yet that sort of explanation is offered in our schools for far more complex things every day. I am speaking of evolution; not just organic evolution but the existence of every single thing in this world is explained by some form of evolution. All of the sciences have embraced this phony dichotomy to avoid pointing out true origins.
The answer to the little boy's funny question is that God is an eternal being. There can be no natural explanation for God. He is the creator of all that exists. There can be no other explanation. What's more, a supernatural explanation is logically demanded by what exists. When human reasoning attempts to find an explanation for the origin of what exists, he can only go back to some point in time when the first something existed. The existence of that something means it was eternal or it was created by an eternal being. To state that matter in any form is eternal goes outside of the realm of science. We would have to conclude that the original dead matter was not only eternal but it also gave birth to itself. We are left with describing something supernatural. That something would necessarily have all the same attributes of God that are described in the Bible.
The "Big Bang" theory is the best explanation of origins science offers. Unfortunately for science, it does not deal with origins. It starts with a so-called primordial soup. All the elements of the periodic table would have to be in that soup. No explanation is given for where they came from.
To suggest that they accidentally occurred as a result of an explosion is just not tenable. There is absolutely no evidence that certain elements can randomly combine in any scenario to complete the list we find in the periodic table, even with an unlimited number of physicists working in a perfectly supplied laboratory and super computers to do their calculating can a combination of elements be made to become different elements. It cannot be done. A good example, though it is ancient, is the attempts by alchemists to to make precious metals like gold. Though they worked for centuries on the idea, it remains to this day to be just another "pie in the sky" dream. The dream for anyone who expects to find cover for absurd theories, is in long periods of time. In other words, given enough time anything is possible, or so they say. How that makes any sense, I don't know. How does time change natural law? It is true that catastrophic events have changed uniformitarian predictions but not any of the laws we so rely on to predict outcomes. Space travel, for example, is possible because we have a good understanding of the predictable physics involved, none of which are random.
Dating methods are always based on certain assumptions, most of which involve a lot of circular reasoning. Few scientists have challenged these methods. Discrepancies in the dating models are never examined, nor are the ones that do not yield a long age included in the discussions of the age of the earth. They simply do not support accepted theory One who did challenge orthodoxy was Albert Einstein. Prior to our first moon landing, their was a lot of concern about the lunar landing in a dust blanket that could be up to a mile deep. That would be reasonable if the universe was the 4 &1/2 billion years old many were saying. Albert did not argue with them. He simply said no; there would only be a couple of inches on the moons surface.
We can also note that a very complex arrangement of atomic and sub-atomic material, along with mechanisms to account for their molecular characteristics would have to be in place for a primordial soup to exist. So, you have only two possible explanations for the existence of matter; an eternal creator or eternal matter creating and arranging itself.
Attempts to bridge the gaps inherent in the "Big Bang" (which does not offer any explanation for the primordial soup) have taken off in many directions, but one of the most critical problems is how to bridge the gap between energy and matter. I would comment that the problem is much more complex than that, but attempts to supply a workable model have recently involved the theoretical existence of subatomic particles called bosons. I understand that if you begin with energy, you have to have a source for original matter. Again, we have the same problem. What is the origin of the energy? But suppose that "in the beginning", there was a great deal of concentrated energy, that was responsible, in some way, for starting the cosmos. Scientists have been trying to provide a unifying theory of physics to explain God out of the equation and conjure up what has been dubbed "the God particle". They postulate the existence of a field of these particles (the Higgs Field) extant throughout the universe, which supply the matter when accelerated proton particles collide within this field. The largest particle accelerator in the world, located just out of Geneva, Switzerland, was constructed at a cost of 13.25 billion dollars, with the sole purpose of proving the existence of these particles. Quite a number of physicists like the idea, but some believe it to be "pie in the sky". If it exists, the Higgs particle is a part of the Higgs field, which fills the universe but is invisible to our eyes and, so far, to all scientific instruments.
Let's take organic evolution, for example. Biologists say we are all a product of original one celled organisms that evolved by random mutations and natural selection over a period of hundreds of millions of years. They have no real explanation for where these first one celled organisms came from, but we will skip that discrepancy for a moment. If one applies real science to the matter, a problem quickly arises. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that all that exists obeys the principle of entropy. That is that everything tends to become more and more random or less organized. Everything deteriorates, contrary to the mutation and natural selection scenario, which inanely concludes that simple one celled plants or animals somehow divide and mutate to develop sister plants and animals with survival characteristics superior to the parents. Then this survival mechanism over millions of years continues to multiply mutations so succeeding generations, continue to improve their survival chances as they mutate and gradually change into a new organism. Any scientific theory must be rational and subject to known laws of science. No one espousing the theory of evolution has bothered to offer anything reasonable that would bypass the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Secondly, all of the evolution models have a problem with the original material, which they say was just a conglomerate of certain basic chemicals that somehow arranged themselves in such a way as to give rise to LIFE. Of course, chemicals don't arrange themselves but even if they could, certainly such arrangements could be duplicated in a laboratory. Again, they have a big problem. Not one single living organism has ever been produced by any scientist.
Thirdly, they say, although they can't explain how, since life exists, it must have risen over millions of years through some, yet to be discovered, mechanism. The fact is, evolution has been proven to be mathematically impossible. There are many ways to show the logical fallacies in the theory of organic evolution but the Bible puts it very simply with one cogent statement..."every house is built by someone but the builder of all things is God". (Hebrews 3:4)
The world we live in is a testament of design. It is so complex, the heavens we look at every night appear to contain an innumerable number of stars, all of which are said to be in motion. All of the planets in our solar system are different in composition, though it is said they all have the same origin. The human body, with it's billions of cells, functions at a level beyond what is conceivable from any number of random events. The list of entities existing that showplace design is endless and attempts to explain them without a designer is ludicrous.
The Genesis record is plainly written, so there is little room for misunderstanding, but it seems to be written in summary form, leaving details for the reader to surmise. One could say such would be in the realm of opinion or conjecture, but certain of the details left out require an implication. For example, Cain took a wife, but up to the point of him doing so, there is no mention of any other offspring born to Adam and Eve. We are not told how long they were in the garden. So it is implied that other children were born to them that are not mentioned and Cain had to have married his sister or even a granddaughter or a niece. The long lifespans of that period makes possible a substantial population of people having originated from Adam and Eve that are not mentioned during the lives of Cain and Abel. How many years had it been that regular sacrifices were made to God by both sons until Cain decided his grain sacrifice was all that was needed? (God's requirement of a blood sacrifice is implied by His displeasure towards Cain's grain sacrifice.)
No one knows. Did Abel have a wife? We are not told. Did the Genesis record usually include women in the genealogies? No. Is it possible that God recorded the Cain and Abel incident primarily to teach about the first murder and the example of blood sacrifice...not to chronicle the first two children born to Adam and Eve? We are also not told how God showed His displeasure toward Cain's sacrifice. We can picture that it was done as is recorded in 2nd Chron. 7:1, how fire came down and consumed Abel's sacrifice and Cain was left on his knees waiting for his sacrifice to be consumed. Perhaps this happened more than once. Again, we are not told, but it is not hard to imagine the festering feelings that must have been developing in Cain to have brought about the invitation to go out to the field where he killed his brother.
While this may not have been the way these things transpired to the exact detail, it is useful to have a good idea of how it could have occurred. God could have made it happen in many different ways.
Mr. Nye in the Nye/Ham debate made light of the ark building account, speaking of how unlikely it would be for 8 unskilled people in Noah's family to have built a very large vessel capable of handling the extremes of a catastrophic flood. It never occurred to him that God could have instructed them and given them the necessary skills just as he instructed them concerning the pattern for it's building.
The point of all of this is that the genesis record is at most, a synopsis. It served God's purpose to present a brief account of our origins, not to provide a detailed record of how it was all accomplished. We should bear in mind that such a record would require many books. Most people are too lazy to read in depth the single volume we know as the Bible.
Another point we need to make about the origin of man is that God created us in His image. Gen. 1:26 "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." It seems to escape some people's notice that God made us perfect beings and He placed us in a perfect environment. Unless God made Adam anatomically different, we have the stuff of eternity in us. So what is different? How did God limit our lifespan? It is very possible that collapsing the vapor canopy that must have surrounded the earth before the flood, removed the protection from UV rays of the sun, which began a contamination of the gene pool, resulting in shorter lifespans. However, all He had to do was say "Let it be so".