Gabe/All: of course, from the moment they were created as adults, Adam and Eve had the appearance of age. And here are some ancient dinosaur depictions.
I believe that everything that was created by God, both the physical and the spiritual, was created during Creation Week. For both angelic and human people, I think our existence within the classroom of time affords us the opportunity to choose to freely receive the love of God, and to obey Him. After Judgment, the Lake of Fire is a continuation of opportunity for rebels to be healed and free to accept Jesus. Then, when death has been totally eradicated, there is no more need for linear time: we will all be fully conscious of our eternal place with our loving God. And then the real adventure begins:
There is a lot of evidence for a young earth—depending on your scientific paradigm. Here is a short article based on the work of John D. Morris, Ph.D. (His father Henry, also a young earth creationist, was department chair of civil engineering at Virginia Tech, my alma mater): “Arguments for a recent creation.”
Also, a fascinating book I studied in a course on the history of science was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by physicist and philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Kuhn’s book argues that “the evolution of scientific theory does NOT emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities. Such an approach is largely commensurate with the general historical school of non-linear history.” (Wikipedia.)
Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” to describe a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline, leading to a scientific revolution. This is in contrast to the activity of “normal” science, which he described as scientific work done within a prevailing framework (or paradigm).
Kuhn’s examples of paradigm shifts are primarily from the physical sciences: Aristotelian dynamics, Copernican astronomy, Newtonian optics, and Einstein’s theories of relativity. A paradigm shift is a crisis brought on by conflict between two or more paradigms, in which the best paradigm survives. Wrong presuppositions and prejudices must be recognized and abandoned, in deference to a new paradigm that explains the data better.
But, I would argue, there is a spiritual dimension to seeing the right paradigms, and letting go of false paradigms, even in the physical sciences.
Blessings.