Creation Unfolding

I enjoyed reading the book as it has got strong and sound logic in most parts. Dr Coulson, who is openly and unashamedly young earth creation geologist, according to his description of himself, tried to find a middle ground between creation and evolution sciences or worldviews. He admits that there are so many valid evidence for an old earth and universe which cause problems in the arena of creation research. To solve the problem, he revisited the concept of mature creation. Mature creation was first introduced by François-René de Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand (Part I Book IV Chapter V) 1802, in which it speculates that God created everything to look mature. This mature look would implement an apparent age. He drove some examples from the Bible, like the creation of Adam and Eve, animals and plants. For instance, Adam when created he would appear to be 20 0r 30 years old. This concept was not widely accepted by apologetics because it might portray God as a deceiver. Another concept to fill the gap between the world views, he inferred that God might have used the scientific processes that is known to us today but at an accelerated rate. Andrew Snelling called this concept “secondary processes” while Coulson called it “Supernatural Formative Process theory (SFP)”. He did not drop the supernatural powers of the Almighty God, but he thinks that God has used these miraculous powers through naturalistic processes to achieve His plans. To further his argument, Coulson introduced a novel idea that is “constancy of relative rate of process”. He explains this as everything God has created matured at constant relative rate to one another. God, in his opinion, has created not only mature animals, plant and humans, but also a mature earth, with a mature ecosystem and a mature universe as well.
The second major portion of the book talks about a conceptual universe. He presumes that God has all the processes of creating the universe in His mind eternal. That includes the Nig Bang for example. Such an idea, though not new, hard to infer from what is available. We were not there nor we know God’s mind.
Has Coulson succeeded in healing the division? I would say, it is a good try, but the division will continue as both camps each has their own worldview. What this book has achieved is firstly, broaden the way creationists should think, secondly created some controversy in the YEC, because we cannot through a blanket of SFP on everything in the creation week, for example, the creation of light, and a slight minority would accept the idea of “{conceptual universe”. Needed not to say, it was a good read.