On the Paradox of the Six Days as Billions of Years
Douglas O. Walker
Professor of Economics
Robertson School of Government
Regent University
Virginia News Source—October 11, 2005
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There has been much debate in recent months in the media and elsewhere about the teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design in the public schools and the possible inconsistency between the Biblical account of the beginning of the world and the modern scientific understanding of the creation of the universe.
Without wishing to rekindle an already contentious debate, may I point out that there is no difference between the Biblical account and modern science. Each supports and complements the other, providing a fuller understanding of how and why the world was created. In this first note the apparent discrepancy between the 6 days of Biblical creation and the much older earth of modern science is reconciled by reference to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In another note, issues of Intelligent Design and evolution are discussed.
In Genesis 1 the Bible provides the merest sketch of Creation's beginning. What is remarkable is that from a scientific point of view the outline is entirely correct in the picture it paints, and, more importantly, there is no reason to believe that this picture should have been anywhere near as accurate in a scientific sense as it actually is. This picture was, after all, painted many millennia ago in a language and culture that did not know science and was not looking for a scientific explanation. A more appropriate question would be "Why should the Biblical account have gotten anything scientifically right at all?" Yet, Genesis does get it right in amazing detail, and how else except through divine inspiration?
The similarities between the Genesis and modern science are indeed striking. There is agreement that an act of creation occurred, which both Creationists and mainstream scientists refer to as “the Big Bang”, and there is agreement that in some sense the universe “evolved”, in that it changed from what the Bible calls a physical state “without form and void” to a physical state where, to summarize the Biblical portrayal, the waters gathered together and dry land surfaced, plant life developed on land, animal life emerged from the sea, many different creatures spread over the land, and man made his appearance.
Both the Bible and science reject the idea of a static and unchanging universe with no beginning and no end, and both see the creation of an increasingly complex and ordered world from the chaotic state that existed at a beginning of time. The process of change is essentially the same between the two accounts. It is only in the time span of creation where there is a difference, not how the world began or how the continual process of change to which it has been subjected has played out or that it is governed by regularities rather than unpredictable and unknowable forces.
The Bible also stands apart from mainstream science in that it views creation as the work of a Creator, and it is His account of the formation of the universe that is being given to man. The Bible speaks of what God did in a few short days and looks to what God accomplished for man.
Mainstream science has nothing to say about a Creator, and views creation as a continuing process spread out over eons of time. It sees the world as a fifteen billion year-old self-operating mechanism that started at an instant of Creation, proceeds over the course of billions of years, and looks to what is to come.
There is nothing necessarily contradictory in these two views except the glaring contrast that occurs when Genesis 1 sets forth the origin and development of the heavens and the earth over a period of six days and mainstream science insists that the formation of the universe follows an incomprehensibly enormous explosion from a “super-hot” point of nullity that took place some 15 billion or so years ago.
Because of the readily apparent inconsistency in the time span between these two otherwise largely identical accounts of Creation, it would seem impossible to reconcile these different perspectives into a single vision of the process of creation where each supports the other. However, this is not as difficult as it might at first appear.
In terms of perspective, the Bible looks forward from the past as seen from the origin of the Creation and modern science looks back on the past as seen from the earth. In normal conditions, no reconciliation between these two views would be necessary as science predicts (and common sense supports) the conclusion that the flow of time (or the length of space) is the same for all observers in the ordinary circumstances of life.
In the extraordinary conditions of the Big Bang of Creation, however, the distinction between looking forward and looking back from different places is crucial from a scientific point of view because, under conditions of the Big Bang, Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity must be invoked to measure time and space as seen by different observers moving at tremendously high speeds relative to one another.
In the Biblical account, the first act of God is to create light: “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). It is as if this first act defines the nature of the world that is being created, “And God saw the light, that it was good.” Light is the standard by which God judged creation, and a hint of its importance in the Creation story.
Similarly, in Relativity, the key role is also played by light. It assumes the only constant in the universe is the speed of light in a vacuum. When making this assumption, the speed of light is the same as seen by all observers, it is the same in all directions, and its speed does not depend on the velocity of the object emitting the light. Light is the universal constant of modern physics.
Consider the situation at the very instant of Creation and the implications of Relativity’s assumption about light. In order to keep the speed of light the same to both an observer at the center of the universe and an observer accelerating away from the center at nearly the speed of light, the shape of space and the flow of time must be bent, that is, must be different, between the two observers. Otherwise, the speed of light would be different to the two observers.
According to Einstein, the extent of the distortion depends on the relative motion of the observers, with the greater the relative motion, the greater the difference by which space is warped in length and time elapses between two ticks of the second hand of a clock.
Herein lies the explanation for and the reconciliation of the difference between the six days of God and the billions of years of man: It is in the warping of space and time associated with the incredible force of the Big Bang, when God looks forward from Creation to an earth receding at an incredible speed from the point of origin and science looks back to the origin from an ever expanding universe.
Einstein gave an exact mathematical statement relating the two perspectives in his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, and it can be used to equate the six days of Genesis to the billions of years of science. In this paper, he noted that the time elapsing between two strokes of a one-second clock as judged from a stationary observer when looking at the clock moving away with the velocity v is not 1 second but:
1
% (1 - v2/c2)
of a second, where c is the speed of light. Einstein’s equation states that as a consequence of its motion to an observer, a clock goes more slowly in motion than when it is at rest with respect to the observer.
Given that during the Big Bang matter (that is, what became the earth) was shooting away from the center of Creation at nearly the speed of light, this equation indicates that a day to God at the point of Creation would be millions if not billions of years to another observer, in this case, a man on earth. In terms of the equation, v2 would approach c2, and the necessary adjustment in time (and the corresponding adjustment in space) required to maintain a constant speed of light between the two observers would become truly tremendous.
The Genesis account of the six days of Creation is therefore in strict accordance with modern science and is in no way inconsistent with it. The world was created in 6 days from the point of view of man looking at what God accomplished and it took many billions of years from the point of view of life here on earth. The apparent paradox is explainable in terms of the adjustments necessary to the very structure of the world as God created it, that is, to the constancy of the speed of light in the universe.
Those critics of the Biblical account of Creation -- I have heard it called “absurd” -- should learn modern physics. It is what they say that is wrong, and because it is wrong the argument that the Bible is inconsistent with science cannot be used to exclude Creationism from the public schools. |
