If God is love, then there must be a Hell. And it would have to be that bad.
(Though I'm not sure what you are imagining when I say "that bad." You could thinking of something from Dante or Milton, but I am thinking of the sheer horror of a lake of fire. It is simple and brutal.)
If God is love, then those who reject Him reject love and all the benefits that go with it. Some may be tempted to think that if someone wanted nothing to do with God then it would be fair for Him to send the person away to some descent place for eternity so that everybody would be happy. But what right do any of us have to any good from God in the first place? Hell is the only place where there is no good, there is no love, there is no hope because those there have rejected the source of all those things. Isn't it a terrifying thing to realize that God does respect our person-hood, the decisions we make? Hell is testimony to that.
So someone who calls God an "old duffer" has really committed the root of all sin: rejecting the God who is love.
on another note:
. . . the headmistress believes the earth is only 6000years old. . .
Deliberate ignorance of scientific theory is not only stupid but makes one look a bit foolish. But they are often nice people with good hearts with a disability of realising reality. . .
I think you assume too much and put your faith in the wrong places. You likely believe in on old earth (4 billion years old?) because you would need to if you also believe in the theory of evolution.
Here's the rub: it is called a theory and treated as fact. But really, it is only a bad hypothesis because it has not been, and can not be, observed. I am not talking about Natural Selection leading to variation, but the big story of evolution: of particles somehow becoming proteins, and proteins somehow becoming living cells with DNA that can reproduce, and those cells somehow generating brand new genetic information leading to ever more complex creatures until finally, somehow, we evolve.
Yet Natural Selection would hinder this process: it does not help generate new information, but only removes it. Cells don't know how to invent new combinations of DNA. This is all fantasy. If you know the scientific method, then you should know that evolution can't be called a theory: it doesn't even make it past the observation stage.
You likely base your belief in an old earth on radio isotope dating (I did too). But that rests on many faulty assumptions: do we know how much of each isotope was present to begin with? do we know if nothing contaminated the sample? do we know that decay rates were always the same and that there nothing that could alter them?
I do not think we can hold evolution equal with hard scientific knowledge. If we do, we feel obligated to constantly reconcile our religion with so-called facts that can and do change. If we go down the road of trying to believe in our religion as well as evolution in the name of "not ignoring the facts," then you will find (as I did) that you will have to continually ignore many other things, both scientific and scriptural, along the way as you form what becomes your very own religious science.
So with a straight face I can tell that the earth is young, 6 to 10 thousand years old perhaps.
