6 Days or 14 Billion Years?

According to a literal reading of the book of Genesis, only six days pass between the beginning of the universe and the arrival of man. Scientists, on the other hand, tell us it took 14 billion years. Is it time we divorce the Bible from science based on irreconcilable differences? Hmm....maybe not.

Most believers just accept the creation story as literal, while ignoring modern science altogether. And of course, there's nothing wrong with that. If, however, you find these issues unsettling, some good apologetics may be in order.

Before we take the scenic route, let's first look at what could be the simplest explanation: the Hebrew manuscript of Genesis, from which we get our 6-day creation story, is divided up into 6 "Yoms." Yom is the Hebrew word commonly rendered as "day." However, Yom has another literal definition:

"A long but finite span of time, age, epoch, season."

So as you can see, the author may have meant 6 unspecified epochs of time. In this case, it would just be a matter of semantics.

Another perspective through which to view this is astrophysical. It's a bit more complicated, but fascinating nonetheless. If we journey back in time, secular history begins to struggle for accuracy once we get beyond the birth of Christ. Travel back beyond the birth of Seth (around 4000 BC) and secular history becomes almost completely theoretical. Even the biblical perspective seems divinely allegorical in some parts of the creation story. I think it's like when we were children and our parents read us children's stories. Not the weird and creepy ones, but the ones that had a "moral to the story." Fictional, but with parabolic truths embedded within the narrative. These stories were clever ways to circumvent a child's naivety, and plant important moral principles. Well, considering the adolescent nature of humanity in the beginning, I personally believe in some sense, this is what God was doing in his story of creation. That's not to say it's fiction...but rather, a clever way of disclosing pertinent information to his children at this particular juncture in time.

Anyway, back to astrophysics. Even though prehistoric science can't guarantee an accurate description of things, it does nevertheless offer a significant array of circumstantial evidence for a universe much older than 6,000 years. So, is it 14 billion years or 6 literal days? Of course, I believe the biblical account is true. But for the natural side of this equation to ever make sense, we must take more seriously the scientific man's side of the equation. After all, it wasn't his brain that got broken in "the fall," it was his heart. Man is morally depraved, not intellectually retarded. The fact there was a sequence of events that led to terrestrial conditions suitable for man, is evidenced in both the Bible and the sciences. The only real discrepancy between the two is Time. However, there may be no discrepancy at all. The problem could just be our limited understanding of time.

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the passing of time differs throughout the universe. This differential in time is called "time dilation." I know it sounds totally sci-fi, but an actual experiment was conducted, using real people and real clocks, that proved "time dilation" was real. Recent experiments have proven that gravitational forces, and the velocity at which an object is traveling, has a direct effect on the passing of time. The following experiment demonstrates how speed slows time for the object in motion: Washington University and the US Naval Observatory put 4 cesium beam clocks aboard TWA and Pan Am flights, using Boeing 707 and Concord aircraft. The earth rotates from west to east, so this added speed to the eastward flight. And believe it or not, the clock on board lost time in comparison with the cesium beam clocks stationed at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC. On the westward flight, the speed of the airplane subtracted from the Earth's rotation, and the clocks gained time. even though this experiment only revealed a time differential of fractions of a second, it was nevertheless conclusive evidence that the faster something travels, the more time slows for the object in motion. It also proved that time is not the universal constant we had imagined. Interestingly enough, GPS satellite clocks have to be regularly corrected because time moves faster in space than it does on Earth. This is because the closer to Earth we are, the stronger gravity becomes; and strong gravitational forces also slow time.

Now, the question is, can we create greater time dilation than this? And the answer is yes. More recent experiments have been done using particle accelerators, proving that if something travels near the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), time slows significantly for the object in motion. The fact is, time dilation slows the aging process for objects in motion. For this reason, theoretical astrophysicists muse that if we had the technology necessary to move people at the same speed we move particles, we could potentially travel into the future. for instance, if you could leave the Earth traveling near the speed of light, you would begin to think, move, and age, at such a slow pace compared to people on Earth, until you could return just a week later and find yourself a hundred years into the future!

Well, considering our new revelation of time, could it be that the Bible's account of creation is just simply from a time frame different than the one we've tried to confine it to?

written by Frank Berretta

"A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day."

- 2 Peter 3:8