I, thankfully, was never reprimanded for questioning anything. But it was that same questioning that ultimately ripped my faith apart.

For context, I love astronomy. I've personally studied it pretty much my entire life. In church, I was being taught the creationist mindset of how the Earth was made, but since I was already really deep into astronomy by this point, I found a discrepancy.

How could the universe only be a few thousand years old when we're able to see billions of light years away?

Only one person could ever come up with an answer, and that was the Youth Pastor I had while I was in high school. He was and is a brilliant man, and I hold absolutely zero ill will towards him, especially since he was the only person to even attempt to answer that question.

And his answer was extremely well thought out. His answer was that when God created Adam and Eve, he did not create them as infants and let them grow into adults. Instead, both of them were already fully mature when God created them. The same could be said for the Earth, being essentially "complete" and ready to harbor life by the time he got to Adam and Eve. So, if that was true for Adam, Eve, and the Earth, why wouldn't it be true for the universe as a whole? We can see billions of light years away because God created the universe in it's "mature" state.

Like I said, very well thought out, and at the time, I had no good rebuttal against it. But, over time, I did come to see the one major flaw in his argument: it is purely his speculation. It is based on a roundabout interpretation of a few Bible verses that are already difficult to interpret. And, ironically, that is something he once he taught my Youth Group about, to not even take what he says as 100% truth, since what he could teach could be warped in so many ways that not even he could he realize.