The Universe:
6 days and 13 billion years old!
(The Jerusalem Post — September 7, 1991)
by Gerald Schroeder
Scientists tell us it all began with a Big Bang 10-15 billion years ago. Yet the opening chapter of Genesis tells us in no uncertain terms that the universe and all it contains was fashioned in six days. From the standpoint [of a literal interpretation of the Scriptures], those six days plus the following 5752 years is all the time there ever was. So how do we get billions of years?
Millennia before telescopes and spectrometers revealed an expanding, many-billion-year-old universe, [some believed] our understanding of the flow of nature during the six pre-Adam days would not be the same as our perception of nature after the advent of mankind. The calendar would start with Adam, leaving the preceding six days open for investigation. Perhaps our science has now advanced to the point where the apparent difference between six days and 15 billion years can be explained.
Genesis Days
It’s conceivable that "genesis days" are really measured in billions of years per day. After all, Psalms 90:4 says: "A thousand years in Your [God’s] sight are as a yesterday." But Nahmanides [a Jewish commentator on the Scriptures] says in his commentary on Genesis 1:3 that the "six days of genesis" were "true days composed of hours and seconds," their duration being the same as "the six days of our work week."
If those days are adequate to encompass the cosmic flow from the Big Bang to an Earth housing mankind, we clearly require an understanding of time that is not obvious to our unaided senses.
Einstein and the Theory of Relativity
In 1915 Albert Einstein published a description of the universe that revealed an extraordinary and quite illogical fact: the rate at which time passes is not the same under all circumstances. This is part of the Theory of Relativity. The theory tells us that as velocity or gravity in one place increases relative to a second place, the flow of time at the first location slows relative to the flow of time at the location where the velocity or gravity remained low. Such changes in the flow of time caused by differences in relative velocity or forces of gravity can be measured. The phenomenon is known as time dilation. As a space traveler approaches the speed of light, for example, one day for the traveler may equal forty days back on a "relatively" stationary Earth. Similarly, on a planet that has a huge mass relative to that of Earth, a visitor will experience the passage of, say, three minutes, while we here on Earth will experience the passage of two years.
Something fascinating happens when we apply Einstein’s equation for the gravitational slowing of time to the size and mass of the entire universe. The estimated mass of the known universe is 10-to-the-56th-power grams (the number 1 with 56 zeros after it, reading as 100 billion billion billion billion billion billion grams). Its estimated radius is 10 billion light years. (One light year is the distance light travels in 365 days — about 9.6 million million km.)
Using these estimates, we can calculate the gravitational potential at the hypothetical "edge" of the universe and the time dilation it causes. Clocks would be slowed by a factor of about one million million relative to a clock functioning on much less massive Earth. This means a clock at the "edge" of the universe would measure the passage of one minute while Earth-time experienced a million million minutes. In terms of days and years and millennia, this slowing down of time by a factor of a million million reduces 15 billion years to … six days!!!
Scriptures and Science
Thus Scriptures and science would both be correct, though we cannot think of the flow of time during those "six days of genesis" in our accustomed terms. Nonetheless, the days were six days made of 24 hours each.
The many-billion-year measurement of the age of the universe would be a figure produced by clocks working at Earth’s current gravitational potential, and it says six days passed before Man was created, it is speaking of a system that encompassed all the universe — the logical perspective of an Infinite Creator.
That is why the Bible’s terminology when describing the passage of time for the "six days of genesis" is so different from the terminology for the ages that follow Adam and Eve. Note that from the time humankind appears, the dates of events described in the Bible match dates derived from archeological finds; the Biblical calendar and mankind’s calendar are one and the same. And logically so. The post-Adam events are dated in the Bible by the ages and generations of humans living on Earth. They lived on the Earth. Their time was and is our time. Archeology confirms this.
I should make it clear that the foregoing is scientific speculation; it could be true, but as of today there is no way of proving it is true. As well, there are several ways to describe our universe, only one of which is that of an expanding sphere, and no one description is necessarily more correct than another.
The numbers I used in the calculation of the dilation of time are, as I stated, approximate. Neither the mass, nor the age, nor the size of the universe is known exactly. The values I chose are the approximate midpoints of the currently estimated values. Most estimates of the size and age of the universe do not vary by more than a factor of three.
Yet in this discussion, we must not forget that the idea of a many-billion-year-old universe is an anthropocentric projection. It is the imposition of measurements made by clocks working at a rate determined by the gravity and velocity of our Earth on objects existing and events occurring at very different gravities and velocities, and hence with very different local rates of time passage. And during the first few "days" of Creation — that is the first, say, five billion years — there was not even an Earth or solar system, and thus no gravitational field within which our earthly clock could track time as it does today.
Gerald Schroeder holds a BS, MS and Ph.D. from M.I.T. He is also the author of Genesis and the Big Bang: the discovery of harmony between modern science and the Bible published by Bantam Books.
This page was last edited on February 10, 2002