At this website by various means we seek to defend life, to encourage Christian faith, to promote Catholic tradition, to edify Marriage in its link to the Creator, to encourage families and individuals, and to support missionary disciples of Jesus. G.S.
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THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE
By: Dr. Gerald Schroeder
(This text found May 22, 2006 - current update October 2013)
http://geraldschroeder.com/wordpress/?page_id=53
In our discussion of God’s making and creating our magnificent universe, we’ve reached the stage at which we must elaborate on the time-line as described in Genesis chapter one. From comments submitted by readers of the pervious chapters in our Genesis Project, there seems to be the impression that we differ from the Biblical statement that six days passed between the creation of the universe and the creation of humankind. I make this definitive: I take the Bible as it stands.
Yet, one of the most obvious perceived contradictions between Torah and science is the age of the universe. Is it billions of years old, like scientific data, or is it thousands of years, like Biblical data? When we add up the generations of the Bible, we come to 5700-plus years. Whereas data from the Hubbell telescope or from the land based telescopes in Hawaii, indicate the age at 14 to 15 billion years.
Let me clarify right at the start. The world may be only some 6000 years old. God could have put the fossils in the ground and juggled the light arriving from distant galaxies to make the world appear to be billions of years old. There is absolutely no way to disprove this claim. God being infinite could have made the world that way. But there is another approach that also agrees with the ancient commentators’ description of God and nature. The world may be young and old simultaneously, and simultaneously with absolutely no bending of the wording of the Bible to match science. In the following I describe this latter option. Please bear with me as we go together through the text of Genesis, finding the “apples of gold” [the deeper meanings] within the “silver dish” of the Bible (see Proverbs 25:11).
In all that follows and in all of my research and writings, I refuse to use any modern Biblical commentary. All modern commentators know sufficient modern science to be influenced by the science. The trend becomes to bend the Bible to match the science. The classic example is to claim that since science has discovered that the world appears to be approximately 14 to 15 billion years old, then “let’s says that the six days of Genesis were not really days, but instead were indefinite, long periods of time.” Rest assured, you will not get that insulting, trivial and misleading message here. It is simply a modern attempt to bend the Bible to match the science. We’ll discover that there is no need to either bend the Bible or the science. As the 12th century theologian Maimonides taught in The Guide For The Perplexed. If you find a conflict between science and the Bible, there is usually one of two possibilities. Either you don’t understand the science or you don’t understand the Bible. Let’s try to understand both.
The only data I use as far as Biblical commentary goes is ancient commentary. That means the text of the Bible itself (3300 years ago), the translation of the Torah into Aramaic by Onkelos (100 CE), the Talmud (redacted about the year 500 CE), and the three major Torah commentators. There are many, many commentators, but at the top of the mountain there are three: Rashi (11th century France), who brings the straight understanding of the text, Maimonides (12th century Egypt), who handles the philosophical concepts, and then Nahmanides (13th century Spain), the earliest of the Kabbalists.
These ancient commentaries were finalized hundreds or thousands of years ago. There is no possibility modern scientific data influenced these concepts. That's an essential and absolute component in keeping the following discussion objective.
At the out-set, it is instructive to look historically at trends in the assumed age of the universe. Absolute proofs are not forthcoming. None-the-less, we can and should see how science has changed its picture of the world, relative to the unchanging Biblical picture of the Genesis of our world.
In 1959, a survey was taken of leading American scientists. Among the many questions asked was, "What is your concept of the age of the universe?" In 1959, astronomy was popular, but a deep understanding the universe was just developing. The response to that survey was recently republished in Scientific American - the most widely read science journal in the world. Two-thirds of the scientists, that is the overwhelming majority, gave the same answer: Beginning? There was no beginning. Aristotle and Plato taught us 2400 years ago that the universe is eternal. Oh, we know the Bible says 'In the beginning.' That's a nice story, it helps kids go to bed at night. But we sophisticates know better. There was no beginning.
That was 1959, less than 50 years ago. Then came the discoveries, in 1965, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. They revealed that the entire universe in all directions is bathed in a sea of very long wave of very ‘cold,’ radiation. They had discovered the echo of the big bang, the radiation left over from that intense vastly hot moment that marked the beginning. It was the one piece of information needed to nail down whether or not our universe had a beginning. For this they earned the Nobel Prize. Over night the world paradigm changed from a universe that was eternal to a universe that had a creation. Understand the impact. Science said that our universe had a beginning, that the first words of the Bible are correct. I can't over emphasize the importance of this scientific "discovery." Evolution, cave men, these are all trivial problems compared to the fact that science has come to agree with the Biblical statement that our universe had a creation.
Of course, the fact that there was a beginning does not prove that there was a Beginner, a God who “created the Heavens and the Earth." Physics allows for a beginning without a beginner. But having proven that there was a creation goes a long way toward opening the door for the likelihood of a Divine, Godly Creator. I'm not going to get into that today, but my book, "The Science of God," examines this in great detail.
Having established the validity of the Creation, the question we're left with is, how long ago did the "beginning" occur? Was it, as the Bible might imply, 5700-plus years, or was it the billions of years accepted by the scientific community?
The Biblical calendar is calculated by adding up the generations listed in the Bible. But the first aspect we have to understand is the zero point at which we start the calculation. This was established well over 1500 years ago and recorded in the Talmudic teachings, not as some new and surprising fact, but as common knowledge. The Biblical calendar is divided into two parts. We have a clock that begins with Adam. The six days of Genesis that lead up to Adam form a calendar unto themselves, separate from the time after Adam. The Bible has two clocks.
That might seem like a modern rationalization, if it were not for the established fact that Talmudic commentaries, 1500 years ago, bring this information. The calendar that leads to approximately 6,000 years begins with Genesis, chapter one, verse 27 in which God created the soul of the Adam. [Beware of erroneous translations.] The Six Days of Genesis are separate.
Now 1500 years ago, when this information was first recorded, it wasn't because the commentators were trying to match science. Remove yourself from the sophistication of 2006. You have to put yourself in the mind frame of 1500 years ago, when people traveled by donkeys and we didn't have electricity or even zippers. Most thought the world was flat and beasts or demons inhabited the other side. The Six Days were taken out of the calendar because time as described in the Bible is broken into two parts. Time is described in a unique manner in those Six Days of Genesis. "There was evening and morning," day by day.
Once we come to Adam, the flow of time is totally in human terms. Adam and Eve live 130 years and have a child named Seth. Seth lives 105 years and has a child named Enosh (Genesis chapter 5). From Adam forward, the flow of time is totally human in concept. Vastly differing from the previous "evening and morning" sequences.
Moses, himself, broke the calendar into two parts. In his closing speech to the people, Moses said if you want to see the fingerprint of God in the universe, "Remember the days of old, consider the years of the many generations" (Deut. 32:7). The Kabalist Nahmanides (ca. 1250) taught that ‘Remember the days of old’ relates is the Six Days of Genesis. ‘The years of the many generations' is all the time from Adam forward." ??
In trying to understand the flow of time, we have to remember that the entire Six Days is described in 31 sentences. The Six Days of Genesis, which have given people so many headaches in trying to understand science vis-à-vis the Bible are confined to 31 sentences! At MIT, in the Hayden library, we had about 50,000 books that deal with the development of the universe: cosmology, chemistry, thermodynamics, paleontology, archaeology, the high-energy physics of creation. Up the river at Harvard, at the Weidner library, they probably have 100,000 books on these same topics. The Bible gives us 31 sentences. Don't expect that by a simple reading of those sentences, you'll know every detail that is held within the text. It's obvious that we have to dig deeper to get the information out.
Now, again, put yourself into the mindset of 1500 years ago. Do you think that 1500 years ago they thought that God couldn't make the world in 6 days? We have a problem today with the claims of an old universe based on scientific data. But 1500 years ago, what's the problem with 6 days for an infinitely powerful God? No problem. If fact if we think about it, six days is not too short a time. It is too long! Why should an infinitely powerful creator need six days. Why not have it all in a snap of the Divine fingers.
So when the commentators excluded these six days from the calendar, it wasn't because they were trying to rationalize what they'd seen in some telescope or the local museum. There were no telescopes and no local museum. No one was out there digging up ancient fossils. They excluded the Six Days of Genesis from the calendar because those days do not fit.
Let's look at those evocative Six Days of Genesis as they are recoded in the Bible.
Each day of creation is numbered. Yet there is discontinuity in the way the days are numbered. At the end of the first day, we read: "There is evening and morning, day one." But the second day doesn't say "evening and morning, day two." Rather, we find "evening and morning, a second day." And the Torah continues with this pattern: "Evening and morning, a third day... a fourth day... a fifth day... the sixth day." Only on the first day does the text use a different form: not "first day," but "Day One" ("Yom Ehad"). Many English translations make the mistake of writing "a first day." That's because editors want things to be nice and consistent. But they throw out the cosmic message in the text! As Nahmanides wrote almost 800 years ago, there is a qualitative difference between "one" and "first." One is absolute; first is comparative. For the Bible to have written “a first day,” there would have had to have been a second day. First is relative to the second.
Nahmanides explained and scientific opinion centuries later confirmed that on Day One time was created. Hence at the creation, there was no second day with which to compare it. That by itself is a phenomenal insight. Time was created. You can't grab time. You don't even see it. You can move your hand through space, you can see matter, you can feel energy. I understand a creation there. But the creation of time? Eight hundred years ago, Nahmanides attained this insight from the Torah's use of the phrase, "Day One.”
We look at the universe, and wonder about its age? We look back through the history of the world’s genesis and discover the billions of years from the creation of Adam back to the creation of our universe. That's our view of time. But the Bible's view of that same flow of events is seen, not as history looking back in time, but instead from the beginning looking forward. That is the secret, the ‘golden apple,’ of the verse, “and there was evening and there was morning, one day.” A view from a moment before which there was a second day with which to compare it.
This might imply that perhaps those unique six days were not actually 24 hours each. But this is not the case. No such simple explanation is possible because every ancient commentary, with no exception, and that includes the Talmud (in the section called Holidays, ca. 500), and Rashi (ca. 1090), and Nahmanides (that is the kabala, ca. 1250) all tell us that the Six Days of Genesis were six 24-hour periods “not longer than the six days of our work week. [!]”
Nachmanides continues the statement: although the days are 24 hours each, they contain "kol yemot ha-olam" - all the ages and all the secrets of the world. Six 24 hour days contain all the ages of the universe. How?
Again, the Kabala as derived from the Bible: Before the universe, there was only God. Then suddenly the entire creation appeared as a minuscule speck, with a dimension not larger than the black pupil of an eye, perhaps akin to the size of a grain of mustard. That was the only physical creation. There was no other physical creation. All other creations were spiritual. The creations of the Nefesh (the soul of animal life, Genesis 1:21) and the Neshama (the soul of human life, Genesis 1:27) are spiritual creations. That first speck of space contained all the substance that would be used for making everything else. Nachmanides describes the substance as "dak me'od, ein bo mamash" - very thin, no graspable substance to it. As this speck expanded out, this substance - so thin that it has no material essence - turned into matter as we know it.
Nachmanides further writes: "Misheyesh, yitfos bo zman" - from the moment that matter formed from this substance-less substance, time grabs hold. Not "time begins," but “time grabs hold.” Time was created at the very beginning. But time "grabbed hold" when matter condensed, congealed, coalesced, out of this substance so thin it has no material essence. The Biblical clock of the six days starts then.
Science has shown that only one "substance-less substance" exists that can be compressed so densely that all the eventual matter of the universe, the makings for 100 billion galaxies each to contain 100 billion stars, can be pressed into a speck no larger that the black of an eye, and that can later then change into matter. And that is energy, the super-powerful light beams of the creation. Energy is ultimately compressible. Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, tells us the numerical relationship between matter and the energy from which is it constructed. At the speed of light, time does not exist. Once light beams change form and become matter, they enter the realm of time. Time literally grabs hold when matter forms from the light beams of the big bang creation. Keep in mind that this understanding of our cosmic genesis was written centuries prior to the scientific discoveries that have confirmed it.
Nachmanides has made a phenomenal statement. I wonder if he knew the Laws of Relativity. But we know them now. We know that energy - light beams, radio waves, gamma rays, x-rays - all travel at the speed of light, 300 million meters per second. At the speed of light, time does not pass. The universe was aging, but time only grabbed hold when matter formed from the energy. This moment of time before the Biblical clock begins lasted about 1/100,000 of a second. A miniscule time. But in that time, the universe expanded from a tiny speck. The Biblical clock, the Biblical perspective of time for the six days, begins here.
The laws of relativity and the discoveries of astronomy and cosmology tell us that three aspect of our wonderful universe affect the flow and perception of time. In locations of high velocity or high gravity time flows more slowly relative to (and hence the name, the laws of relativity) locations of lower velocity or gravity. The third aspect that affects the perspective of time is the stretching of space as the universe expands. It is this third aspect of time with which I work. Gravity and velocity do not enter the calculations.
We look back in time, and say the universe is approximately 14 to 15 billion years old. But every scientist knows, that when we say the universe is 15 billion years old, there's another half of the sentence that we never say. The full statement sentence is: The universe is 14 to 15 billion years old as measured from the time-space coordinates that we exist in on earth. But what would those billions of years be as perceived from near the beginning looking forward, from a moment in time when the universe was vastly smaller? Since then, the universe has expanded out. Space stretched. And that stretching of space totally changes the perception of time. The following discussion is based totally on Nahmanides and the Kabala’s millennia old insight of viewing time from near the beginning and the effect of the stretching of space on the perspective of time.
If we were to view with some superbly powerful telescope events happening in a galaxy billions of light years away, we’d see those events only after the light had traveled to us through the space between the distant galaxy and us. But as the light traveled, the space through which it sped was stretching, and so the events as we viewed them would be stretched out in time. What may have happened in a few seconds could appear to use as happening in periods of hours or years or millennia depending upon how much space had stretched. If the universe had stretched to be 100 times larger by the time the light reached us, then what actually took one hour would appear to us as taking 100 hours, if one second then to us it would appear a 100 seconds. To know the actual timing on that distant galaxy, we’d have to divide our observation by that ratio factor of stretching. In this case it would be dividing by100.
Today, we look back in time. We see some 15 billion years of history. But the Torah, looking forward from when the universe was vastly smaller - billions of times smaller – teaches six days. In truth, they are both correct. And correct with absolutely no bending of either the Bible or the science.
What's exciting about the last few years in cosmology is we now have quantified the data to know the relationship of the "view of time" from the beginning, relative to the "view of time" today. It's not science fiction any longer. Any one of a dozen physics or astronomy textbooks all bring the same number. The general expansion factor, the change between the scale or size of the universe from near the beginning at the moment of stable matter formation (nucleosynthesis is the term) to now is a million million, a trillion. That's a 1 with 12 zeros after it. It is a unitless ratio. The universe is now a trillion times larger than it was at nucleosynthesis. When a view from the beginning looking forward says "The following events happened in one day," we would see those very same events lasting a trillion days. That's the stretching effect of the expansion of the universe. In astronomy, the term is “red shift”.
The Torah tells us that from the perspective of Day One, six days passed between the creation of the universe and the creation of Adam. How would we see those six days? From our perspective in time, looking back into history those six 24 hour periods would stretch into six million million days.
Six million million days is a very interesting number. What would that be in years? Divide by 365 and it comes out to be 16 billion years. Not a bad ‘guess’ for 3300 years ago. When we correct for the fact that Adam received the Neshama, the soul of human life, during the sixth day and not at its very end and so less than six complete days passed, and for the recent observations that the universe is actually increasing in its rate of expansion, the calculated age of the universe decreases by approximately 10% to 14 billion years.
The way the scientific and the Biblical ‘ages’ match is extraordinary. I'm not speaking as a theologian; I'm making a scientific claim. I didn't pull these numbers out of hat. That's why I led up to the explanation very slowly, so the derivation based totally on ancient biblical commentary and modern science can be followed step-by-step.
Now we can go one step further. Let's look at the development of time, day-by-day. Every time the universe increases in scale by a given factor, the time as perceived at the beginning is divided by that same factor. When the universe was small, its rate of doubling was very rapid. But as the universe got larger, the time it took to double in scale took ever longer. This rate of expansion is quoted in "The Principles of Physical Cosmology," a textbook published by Princeton University Press, and used literally around the world. The decreasing in the factorial rate of growth tells us that the early 24 hour days of the Genesis week contained most of the historical time as we perceive it.
The calculations come out to be as follows:
The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective was 8 billion years.
The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 4 billion years.
The third 24 hour day also included half of the previous day, 2 billion years.
The fourth 24 hour day - one billion years.
The fifth 24 hour day - one-half billion years.
The sixth 24 hour day - one-quarter billion years.
When we add up the Six Days, we find that the time between the big bang creation and the creation of the Adam is 15 and 3/4 billion years. Again, correcting for the fact that Adam received the Neshama part way through the sixth day and that the universe is actually increasing in its rate of expansion, the age becomes approximately 14 billion years. The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance?
But there's more. The Bible is so certain that it brings the truth that it tells us what happened on each of those days. Now you can take cosmology, paleontology, archaeology, and look at the history of the world, and see whether or not they match the Biblical claims day-by-day. And I'll give you a hint. They match up close enough to send chills up the spine of even a confirmed atheist.
END
http://geraldschroeder.com/wordpress/?page_id=53
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Applying the above, with the adjustment suggested at the end, here are the numbers we come up with:
Day one - 6.9942856 billion years ago LIGHT
Second day - 3.495 billion years ago SKY (PLANET EARTH)
Third day - 1.7475 billion years ago DRY LAND & VEGETATION
Fourth day - 0.87375 billion years ago or 873,750,000 years ago SUN, MOON, STARS
Fifth day - 0.436875 billion years ago or 436,875,000 years ago BIRDS & FISH
Sixth day - 0.2184375 billion years ago or 218,437,500 years ago CATTLE, ANIMALS, INSECTS
(Human beings coming at the "end" of this period) MAN & WOMAN
Today - 13.765847 or 13,765,847,000 billion years later
FASCINATING!!!
At this website by various means we seek to defend life, to encourage Christian faith, to promote Catholic tradition, to edify Marriage in its link to the Creator, to encourage families and individuals, and to support missionary disciples of Jesus. G.S.
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