Last Tuesday-ism

Last Tuesday-ism is occasionally used as an argument against Christianity (like here), especially Young Earth Creationism, especially the kind that I generally argue, where my answer to why geological structures appear to be really old is b/c God created them, like Adam, with a certain appearance of age to the natural eye. Adam was formed and created as a fully-grown man, not a zygote. Similarly, I figure it's a good explanation to say that God created the world to look old when studied from the standpoint of unbelieving naturalistic "science", using limited methodology, knowledge, breadth of vision (ie, we can't look back very far; indeed we've recorded even less), and instrumentation, and when attempting to, as it were, prove God wrong.
But since God actually did create it more recently than many billions of yrs ago, we'd expect to see inconsistencies in any worldview that expresses the billions of yrs belief. And indeed we do. Exhibit A - evolutionary naturalism.

Anyway, the skeptic asks how this position is distinguishable from last Tuesday-ism, and the answers are manifold. Remember, we take the question from the Christian worldview, and in that worldview, God doesn't lie, and He does communicate truth. That's the fundamental axiom; w/o that, we argue (and quite successfully) that there's no way to know anything about anything. So, as I said in the ERV thread above, if God is lying to us, then we have no way to discover truth. About anything.
Basically, this is an alternative worldview, much like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so it needs its own structure and framework to be constructed by the questioner. Who is God and how do you know? How do you know God created the world last Tuesday? How can you trust the passage of time? Are all of your remembered (but completely fabricated) relationships and experiences worth anything? If so, how do you assign value to them and how do you justify that assignment?
Can you really trust airplanes, boats, drinking water out of the tap, flu shots and vaccines, ibuprofen, food, sex, your parents, given that nothing you remember about them is real? I mean, you have a whole life of work ahead of you here.
By the way, if you want to go on the fascinating but flawed "prankster/evil god" argument from there, first demonstrate how you can reliably know anything about that god.


I'd like to turn the question back around to the skeptic now. How do YOU know last Tuesday-ism isn't true? Maybe the universe exploded (out of nothing, caused by nothing, of course) into existence last Tuesday and everything we observe now in the world, galaxy, and universe coalesced in that time, and by some improbably bizarre set of circumstances (sound familiar?), the Earth and life have come together since then. And yes, evolution has taken place in that short time. Natural pressures and natural selection have determined that human beings would exist, believing by and large that the world is many billions of yrs old, b/c if they didn't believe that, then they'd commit suicide out of despair (well, that's the scientific community's best guess, though we haven't -yet- figured out a way to study that part of our past, but we're working on it. And until then, it's a fact, not a theory). So up to this present time, the human population has been shaped by these pressures and selection to express the "Earth is billions of yrs old"-belief gene in most cases.
You may scoff and say, "That's improbable! Astronomically improbable!" Wait a second. Isn't that precisely what you say about the way you already think the Earth and all life on it came into existence - thru astronomically improbable events? Further, when challengers to Old Earth or at least to evolution challenge you and contend that the odds against life appearing on Earth are simply too vast to comprehend and to attribute to mere chance, don't you respond with "well, improbable it may be, but that's the way it is"?
So that's my answer to you - improbable it may be, but that's the way it is. After all, what's the difference in probability between astronomically improbable and astronomically improbable?
Now, prove me wrong.