Since the orthodox dogma of the Christian faith (and Jewish and no doubt many others too) is that the act of creation took place 6000 years ago, that means that not just the earth, but the firmament itself is only 6000 years old. This not only necessitates explanations for fossils, fossil fuels, the residual radioactivity in ancient rocks, and a whole host of other anthropological and geological data to boot, but it also presents challenges for a number of universal phenomena.
For example, no matter or radiation can exceed the finite speed of light. This places limits on how big our universe can be. If it is only 6000 years old, then the universe can only be a maximum of 12000 light years in diameter. This is a huge problem cosmologically speaking, not least because it would mean that the entire universe is less than a sixth of the diameter of our own galaxy! So presumably either the disciplines of physics & cosmology are based on false premises, or the Devil somehow took God's creation and contrived to re-distribute matter and energy in such a way as to mischievously present us with this conundrum. Or perhaps God is supposed to have created it like that in the first place, though then I would ask why those same fundamentalists do not similarly claim that God created the fossil record. In any event, someone (God or Devil) is assumed to have set all these things up in just the right way to confound us.
And it gets worse. God or Devil must even have created radiation such that as it arrives at the earth now, six thousand years later, it appears to have originated from sources which are much more than six thousand light years distant (for example, quasar light is masively redshifted).
In short then, God/Devil must have created a mathematically and physically consistent framework which left alone for several billions of years would give exactly the universe we see today, but rather than doing that have decided for some nefarious reason to bring it into being at an already matured state.
This all becomes a contrivance of such magnificent proportions that one can only stand agog at the strength of faith of those who genuinely believe it.
2old