If one posits a sufficiently omnipotent deity then that deity could have created the universe in a week and that week could have unfolded 6,000 years ago. It would have been quite the accomplishment as it would have included
- photons already heading our way with the correct red-shift from stars and galaxies over 6,000 light years away
- photons also already heading all sorts of other ways so that the light from stars which are within 6,000 light years illuminates nearby dust clouds and such in just the right way
- the cosmic rays and all sorts of other electromagnetic radiation coming our way that scientists have detected or will someday detect
- the rocks, planets, moons, asteroids, comets and whatever in our Solar system all carefully arranged and constructed to look just the right age both at a distance and upon close inspection for when we send unmanned spacecraft like Voyager I & II and New Horizons and when we someday send manned missions to explore them
- the stars that are within 6,000 light years in sufficient detail (size, makeup, velocity, gravitational effect on nearby objects, etc) to look the right age to our telescopes
- the various planets which we have already detected and which we have yet to detect orbiting other stars, each positioned and constructed to fit a coherent scientific explanation of how they came to be
- layers of fake evidence of the unfolding of the Earth's ecosystem all the way from when our Solar system was a dust cloud through to today with everything properly arranged and composed right down to the molecular level to show a process that appears to have taken billions of years
- include the evidence which scientists have collected to demonstrate the existence of "dark matter". Whatever it appears to be, it appears to be far further away than 6,000 light years so again we are dealing with evidence that has been faked by said deity in just such a way to allow scientists to conclude that "dark matter" exists. While still not well understood, scientists are clearly making progress and will learn more and more about this "dark matter" that the evidence that we are collecting about it needs to be just as robust as the evidence that said deity has created to fool us into believing that galaxies and such exist
- the evidence to support an astonishing range of other "discoveries" regarding how the universe operates on an apparent scale of many many millions of light years (billions of them actually) even though all of that evidence was faked 6,000 years ago in just such a way that it fools astronomers completely and consistently. Think of the Hubble photos of galaxies interacting gravitationally, colliding or just being there and doing the galaxy thing each in their own corner of the universe. Now contemplate the level of detail that said deity had to attend to in order to make even a single galactic collision or other event "look real" at the distance we see it from; once you have that pictured in your mind, multiply it by the millions and billions of galaxies out there where some of them are colliding while others are forming and others are just doing the galaxy thing, etc.
- throw in all of the other things that said deity had to attend to in order to get the Earth looking ancient in just the right way to fool evolutionary biologists, palaeontologists, nuclear physicists, chemists, geologists (whether dealing with layers of stuff that make up the Earth or the continental drift phenomenon that brought the continents to their current configuration), etc, etc, etc.
Is it possible? Actually, that's a silly question since if one posits a sufficiently omnipotent deity then anything is possible . . .
. . . and yet . . . somehow . . . such an explanation for the universe that we see around us is really quite unsatisfying to me.
I really have to ask why any deity would bother to go to all that trouble just to fool a bunch of mere humans. No - it makes far more sense to me to look at the still unfolding scientific process during the last few hundred years and to contemplate what it has discovered about the universe that we actually live in. To take one tiny little aspect of what science has found - that our galaxy really is over 100,000 light years across (i.e. that it takes light over 100,000 years to get from one side of the galaxy to the other) just makes sense. For that matter, Darwin's theory of evolution just makes sense. The amount of knowledge that scientists have uncovered since the dawning of the age of science not all that many centuries ago and the fact that this knowledge, for the most part, hangs together so well is all the evidence that I need to be not only comfortable but truly thrilled to be living in a universe that really is billions of years old, is billions of light years across, contains billions of galaxies, many of which contain billions if not trillions of stars, etc, etc, etc.
Lest anyone focus in on the places where bits and pieces of the scientific knowledge base do not happen to fit together all that well, I suggest that you contemplate the incredible scientific process that has been unfolding for the past few centuries and the extent to which said process has produced a body of knowledge that does, for the most part, fit together. I contemplate that and am forced to conclude that betting against science's ability to eventually "clear up the confusion" is a mug's game.
The notion that our universe was created by a sufficiently omnipotent deity at some point in the past, whether it be 6,000 years or whatever, just doesn't hold much that attracts me in comparison.
