The Universe: 6 days and 13 billion years old!
(The Jerusalem Post — September 7, 1991)
by Gerald Schroeder
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.
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.
Science Resurrects God
(from the Wall Street Journal — December 24, 1997)
by Jim Holt
by Jim Holt
Scientists are hard to work with on a committee, and academic friend once told me, because they often change their minds when they see new evidence. I was reminded of this a few months ago when I saw a survey in the journal Nature. It revealed that 40% of American physicists, biologists, and mathematicians believe in God — and not just some metaphysical abstraction, but a deity who takes an active interest in our affairs and hears our prayers: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This percentage, it turns out, is exactly the same as it was in 1916, when an identical poll was taken. Strikingly, as the nation’s intelligentsia has turned toward atheism, many in the scientific community have stuck to theism. They apparently haven’t changed their minds about whether God exists.
Matter is Fundamental? But should they have? In the 19th century, religious orthodoxy endured blow after blow at the hands of science. Geologists fatally undermined the literal truth of Genesis, making a mockery of Bishop Ussher’s calculation (arrived at by totting up the "begats" in the Bible) that the creation took place in 4004 B.C. Chemists demystified life by synthesizing its organic molecules in the lab. Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution seemed to banish divine providence from the sphere of nature once and for all, replacing it with the groping of blind chance. "There is no God and the ape is our Adam," cried a vexed Cardinal Manning.
The quasi-scientific 19th-century school of thought known as materialism, which held that matter is the fundamental and final reality, excluded the possibility of an immortal soul. Man was a machine; the brain produced consciousness as the liver secreted bile. And if matter was eternal, as the laws of conservation suggested, it made no sense to suppose that a creator could have brought the material universe into existence ex nihilo at some point in the past.
Newton had thought that the deity’s role was to make occasional adjustments to the solar system lest it run down, and idea that Voltaire and the other philosophes of the Enlightenment found congenial. But Newton’s 19th-century successors demonstrated that a clockwork universe was actually self-sustaining; no divine help was required to keep it operating smoothly. When Napoleon asked Laplace where God fit into his equations of celestial mechanics, the great physicist coolly replied, "Sir, I had no need of that hypothesis."
It was this new spirit of scientific rationality that allowed Nietsche to declare that God was dead. By the turn of the century, skepticism about the claims of faith had become the norm among thinking types, including scientists. As far as the typical intellectual was concerned, religion was at best a socially necessary fiction. At worst, it was dangerous humbug — the opiate of the masses.
But if the scientific findings of the 19th century eroded belief in God, those of the 20th century have had just the opposite evidential force, although few intellectuals outside science have come to terms with this. Traditional arguments for the existence of God, which seemed outmoded a century ago, have had new life breathed into them.
The Cosmological Argument Take the "cosmological argument." Why does the universe exist at all? Philosophers of an Aristotelian kidney reasoned that it must have an external cause — a creator, namely God. By the 19th century, the cosmological argument had ceased to be taken seriously. If the universe has always been around, the revised thinking went, then maybe its existence was just a brute fact requiring no further explanation.
In this century, however, it has been discovered — much to the surprise of scientists like Einstein — that the universe hasn’t always been around. Rather, it suddenly exploded into being some 15 billion years ago in a flash of light and energy. The abrupt emergence of a world out of nothingness with the big bang bears an uncanny resemblance to the Genesis command: "Let there be light . . . ." Atheists now had some explaining to do.
The Argument from Design Then there is the "argument from design" — the claim that nature is so wondrously fashioned that it must have been the handiwork of a Divine Artificer. The wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the swiftness of the antelope: all these weren’t produced by a beneficent deity, submitted 19th-century Darwinists, but by random mutation and natural selection. Since then critics of a religious bent have sought to show that the theory of evolution is false or incomplete. The biochemist Michael J. Behe has argued that gradualist Darwinian processes could never have given rise to the intricate molecular machines of life. Meanwhile, inside the Darwinist camp itself, "radicals" like Richard Dawkins and "pluralists" like Stephen J. Gould go at it hammer and tongs over the basic logic of the theory. Will Darwinism ever be proved wrong? The current debate is one of the most confusing I have ever tried to follow: at times it seems that no one can agree on anything, and that everyone thinks everyone else is a fool, if not a knave.
Yet even if Darwin’s theory is fundamentally sound — as I am convinced it is — that doesn’t mean the design argument for God’s existence is defunct. For in recent decades, physicists have noticed an astonishing thing about the fundamental laws of nature: The twenty or so parameters they contain — numbers governing the strength of gravity, the ratio of the proton’s size to the neutron’s, and so on — appear to have been fine-tuned so that, against astronomically unfavorable odds, conscious organisms could emerge. Make gravity the slightest bit weaker, and no galaxies suitable for life would have formed; make it a bit stronger and the cosmos would have collapsed moments after the big bang.
The universe, as the cosmologist Fred Hoyle once remarked, looks like a "put-up job." Who but a Divine Designer could have twiddled with these twenty different "control knobs" until they were pointing at precisely the right values for the full array of life ultimately to appear? (Design by wholesale is more grand than design by retail," one 19th-century American clergyman presciently commented.) Another conundrum for atheists.
The Argument from Consciousness Finally, consider the "argument from consciousness." How could sentience, self-awareness, and free will arise in a purely material universe? They couldn’t, argued the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke: Consciousness must have existed from eternity, and the eternal mind must be God. In the 19th and much of the 20th century, this proposition came in for ridicule. When an organism’s neural pathways grow sufficiently complex, materialists insist, their firings are somehow accompanied by consciousness. But despite decades of effort by philosophers and neurophysiologists, no one has been able to come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how this happens — how the hunk of gray meat in our skull gives rise to private technicolor experience. One distinguished commentator on the mind-body problem, Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained, has been driven to declare that there is really no such thing as consciousness — we are all zombies, though we’re unaware of it.
Even as the "soul" has made a comeback, computer science has helped us imagine how it might be an immaterial and, indeed, immortal thing, separable from the body the way software is separable from the hardware that runs it. And quantum theory, which overthrew Newtonian physics in the first half of this century, has revealed that matter itself has a ghostly, almost magical character. The universe turns out to be more like a thought than like a machine. Which raises a question for atheists: Whose thought?
Far Cry From Kierkegaard "The more I study science the more I believe in God," Albert Einstein once remarked. Einstein’s Supreme Being, it should be noted, was a remote and disinterested one, more or less identifiable with the final laws of physics — a far cry from the God of Kierkegaard, the God incarnated under the reign of Augustus as a Galilean craftsman and crucified during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate in an act of redemption.
Contemporary science, no matter how unsettling it may be to the vulgar atheism of many of today’s intellectuals, could never by itself hint at such a deity. Still less could it resolve the perplexity of Evelyn Waugh, who said, "I believe it all. But what I cannot understand is why God made the world in the first place."
This percentage, it turns out, is exactly the same as it was in 1916, when an identical poll was taken. Strikingly, as the nation’s intelligentsia has turned toward atheism, many in the scientific community have stuck to theism. They apparently haven’t changed their minds about whether God exists.
Matter is Fundamental? But should they have? In the 19th century, religious orthodoxy endured blow after blow at the hands of science. Geologists fatally undermined the literal truth of Genesis, making a mockery of Bishop Ussher’s calculation (arrived at by totting up the "begats" in the Bible) that the creation took place in 4004 B.C. Chemists demystified life by synthesizing its organic molecules in the lab. Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution seemed to banish divine providence from the sphere of nature once and for all, replacing it with the groping of blind chance. "There is no God and the ape is our Adam," cried a vexed Cardinal Manning.
The quasi-scientific 19th-century school of thought known as materialism, which held that matter is the fundamental and final reality, excluded the possibility of an immortal soul. Man was a machine; the brain produced consciousness as the liver secreted bile. And if matter was eternal, as the laws of conservation suggested, it made no sense to suppose that a creator could have brought the material universe into existence ex nihilo at some point in the past.
Newton had thought that the deity’s role was to make occasional adjustments to the solar system lest it run down, and idea that Voltaire and the other philosophes of the Enlightenment found congenial. But Newton’s 19th-century successors demonstrated that a clockwork universe was actually self-sustaining; no divine help was required to keep it operating smoothly. When Napoleon asked Laplace where God fit into his equations of celestial mechanics, the great physicist coolly replied, "Sir, I had no need of that hypothesis."
It was this new spirit of scientific rationality that allowed Nietsche to declare that God was dead. By the turn of the century, skepticism about the claims of faith had become the norm among thinking types, including scientists. As far as the typical intellectual was concerned, religion was at best a socially necessary fiction. At worst, it was dangerous humbug — the opiate of the masses.
But if the scientific findings of the 19th century eroded belief in God, those of the 20th century have had just the opposite evidential force, although few intellectuals outside science have come to terms with this. Traditional arguments for the existence of God, which seemed outmoded a century ago, have had new life breathed into them.
The Cosmological Argument Take the "cosmological argument." Why does the universe exist at all? Philosophers of an Aristotelian kidney reasoned that it must have an external cause — a creator, namely God. By the 19th century, the cosmological argument had ceased to be taken seriously. If the universe has always been around, the revised thinking went, then maybe its existence was just a brute fact requiring no further explanation.
In this century, however, it has been discovered — much to the surprise of scientists like Einstein — that the universe hasn’t always been around. Rather, it suddenly exploded into being some 15 billion years ago in a flash of light and energy. The abrupt emergence of a world out of nothingness with the big bang bears an uncanny resemblance to the Genesis command: "Let there be light . . . ." Atheists now had some explaining to do.
The Argument from Design Then there is the "argument from design" — the claim that nature is so wondrously fashioned that it must have been the handiwork of a Divine Artificer. The wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the swiftness of the antelope: all these weren’t produced by a beneficent deity, submitted 19th-century Darwinists, but by random mutation and natural selection. Since then critics of a religious bent have sought to show that the theory of evolution is false or incomplete. The biochemist Michael J. Behe has argued that gradualist Darwinian processes could never have given rise to the intricate molecular machines of life. Meanwhile, inside the Darwinist camp itself, "radicals" like Richard Dawkins and "pluralists" like Stephen J. Gould go at it hammer and tongs over the basic logic of the theory. Will Darwinism ever be proved wrong? The current debate is one of the most confusing I have ever tried to follow: at times it seems that no one can agree on anything, and that everyone thinks everyone else is a fool, if not a knave.
Yet even if Darwin’s theory is fundamentally sound — as I am convinced it is — that doesn’t mean the design argument for God’s existence is defunct. For in recent decades, physicists have noticed an astonishing thing about the fundamental laws of nature: The twenty or so parameters they contain — numbers governing the strength of gravity, the ratio of the proton’s size to the neutron’s, and so on — appear to have been fine-tuned so that, against astronomically unfavorable odds, conscious organisms could emerge. Make gravity the slightest bit weaker, and no galaxies suitable for life would have formed; make it a bit stronger and the cosmos would have collapsed moments after the big bang.
The universe, as the cosmologist Fred Hoyle once remarked, looks like a "put-up job." Who but a Divine Designer could have twiddled with these twenty different "control knobs" until they were pointing at precisely the right values for the full array of life ultimately to appear? (Design by wholesale is more grand than design by retail," one 19th-century American clergyman presciently commented.) Another conundrum for atheists.
The Argument from Consciousness Finally, consider the "argument from consciousness." How could sentience, self-awareness, and free will arise in a purely material universe? They couldn’t, argued the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke: Consciousness must have existed from eternity, and the eternal mind must be God. In the 19th and much of the 20th century, this proposition came in for ridicule. When an organism’s neural pathways grow sufficiently complex, materialists insist, their firings are somehow accompanied by consciousness. But despite decades of effort by philosophers and neurophysiologists, no one has been able to come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how this happens — how the hunk of gray meat in our skull gives rise to private technicolor experience. One distinguished commentator on the mind-body problem, Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained, has been driven to declare that there is really no such thing as consciousness — we are all zombies, though we’re unaware of it.
Even as the "soul" has made a comeback, computer science has helped us imagine how it might be an immaterial and, indeed, immortal thing, separable from the body the way software is separable from the hardware that runs it. And quantum theory, which overthrew Newtonian physics in the first half of this century, has revealed that matter itself has a ghostly, almost magical character. The universe turns out to be more like a thought than like a machine. Which raises a question for atheists: Whose thought?
Far Cry From Kierkegaard "The more I study science the more I believe in God," Albert Einstein once remarked. Einstein’s Supreme Being, it should be noted, was a remote and disinterested one, more or less identifiable with the final laws of physics — a far cry from the God of Kierkegaard, the God incarnated under the reign of Augustus as a Galilean craftsman and crucified during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate in an act of redemption.
Contemporary science, no matter how unsettling it may be to the vulgar atheism of many of today’s intellectuals, could never by itself hint at such a deity. Still less could it resolve the perplexity of Evelyn Waugh, who said, "I believe it all. But what I cannot understand is why God made the world in the first place."
God and Science
God and Science is a website with a plethora of food for thought for anyone seeking God or answers to the ultimate questions of human existence and reality