One answer to the dilemma of a seven day Creation vs Scientific views of creation.

This will most likely be a tangent to the way you would normally conceptualize time. Do not be alarmed. Remain calmly seated in your comfy chairs and read on.

Most people are aware that Science shows us a universe about 13.798 ±0.037 billion years old since "The Big Bang". I won't go into the specifics as there are many sites on the Internet that can show how that number is arrived at. It will suffice to say that I believe it to be a fair estimation of the age of the universe since the Big Bang.

The Bible, however, has a Creation account that has the universe being created roughly 6,000 years ago.

"Ah ha!" many say, "that proves the Bible is wrong, because we can accurately measure events that are older than 6,000 years!"

Now, here's the rub: I believe both. "What", you say, "are you nuts?"

My answer, of course is "No." and, if you will allow me to monopolize some of your 'online' time, I shall explain why.

Ever since Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, physicists have held a slightly different concept of time than the general public. They conceptualize a construct called space-time where both time and space are not the same for all observers. To quote Doctor Who, it is "all wibbly, wobbly, timey, wimey".

One of the things that can affect time is gravity. A big lot of gravity can crunch time (and space) down. You get a lot of gravity from the presence of a lot of matter, which has mass.

One of the coolest quotes in this regard comes from John Archibald Wheeler. He said; "Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move." In this quote, the 'space' he was actually referring to, was, in fact, space-time. Think about that for a moment. Let it really sink in. Perhaps even meditate on it 'till you can see how it works.

Let's consider an example. It's the story of two observers, one watching the other fall into a black hole. (This is only a metaphorical tale, no one will be hurt in the performance of this thought experiment. Also, some physical limitations will be overlooked).

Dave is watching John plunge into the black hole, from geosynchronous orbit. John is actually falling towards the center of the black hole, a place called the singularity because no one has a better name for it. As John falls, he accelerates due to gravity getting faster and faster as he approaches the speed of light. Dave, however, sees something different. He sees John moving slower and slower until John appears to stop at the 'event horizon'.

The event horizon is the point where the gravity becomes so strong that light cannot move fast enough to get away.

Why does John appear to slow down from Dave's point of view? It is because of the dilation of time between a stationary viewpoint and another approaching the speed of light. Because the speed of light is constant, time and space are getting crunched up, from Dave's perspective. The gravitational gradient, which is stronger than light is equivalent to traveling at the speed of light from Dave's perspective. I know, it may be hard to visualize it but it's all in the equations, really.

Now John's view, looking back at Dave, is somewhat different. As his space-time is being crunched up to zero (at the singularity), he will see Dave get bored and zip off and then watch the entire history of the universe pass by before he hits the singularity.

Dave sees John stuck for all eternity, John sees all eternity happen. Their time frames are vastly shifted with respect to each other.

So, lets go back to the Creation. God, who makes everything happen, must be incredibly powerful. This is like saying that God must have a lot of energy at his disposal.

Now there is an equivalence between energy and mass. You know the famous E=mc^2 equation. So God would have enough energy to be a singularity in our universe.

The view from within a singularity would see time outside the gravitational field as passing incredibly quickly.

The only observer of the six days of creation was... of course, God, you got it!

So, there it is, a possible answer.

Now, an exercise for those who must just know things;

Assuming that the creation consumed God's energy enough to dilate 13.798 ±0.037 billion years into six 24 hour days of creation, calculate the energy God used to create the universe (this is assuming a curve with an asymptote coinciding with the 7th day when He rested). Cross check that with the calculated mass of the universe (approx 10^53 kg) to get creation efficiency.

Cheers! Hope this generates some lively discussion.

Does the Bible say 6 Earth Days?

Why not 6 Venus Days? Which would be 1458 Earth Days...

I always heard it was originally translated as 6 Ages anyways...




But I like your presentation of God's POV.

Well constructed.

My brain started to experience some cognitive dissonance reading that. I think you got some science wrong, but I will wait and see if anyone else see's what I see.

originally posted by: chr0naut
The Bible, however, has a Creation account that has the universe being created roughly 6,000 years ago.

Are you sure the Bible says that?

I thought the Bible said nothing on the subject, but James Ussher established a date based on his study of Biblical genealogies.

originally posted by: Elton

originally posted by: chr0naut
The Bible, however, has a Creation account that has the universe being created roughly 6,000 years ago.

Are you sure the Bible says that?

I thought the Bible said nothing on the subject, but James Ussher established a date based on his study of Biblical genealogies.

Of course, you are right. The Bible only suggests from its accounts of known historical events and lengths of lives in genealogies, the time of the Creation.

originally posted by: Grimpachi
My brain started to experience some cognitive dissonance reading that. I think you got some science wrong, but I will wait and see if anyone else see's what I see.

It was very 'back of the envelope' stuff & I could definitely have some science wrong.

Where specifically?

a reply to: chr0naut

The first words in the bible are "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". Doesn't give a timeline between that and the whole 7 days thing, could have been 13 billion years or 1 second. Who knows but God, if he/she/it is real.

a reply to: chr0naut

I am pretty sure time dilation will only be experienced by the one falling into the event horizon but I could be wrong so I am waiting to see if anyone else can corroborate.

originally posted by: CharlieSpeirs
Does the Bible say 6 Earth Days?

Why not 6 Venus Days? Which would be 1458 Earth Days...

I always heard it was originally translated as 6 Ages anyways...

But I like your presentation of God's POV.

Well constructed.

The translation 'day' is in question.

Especially in the light of the "for God, 1,000 years are as but a day" type of thing.

Also the 1,000 does not always mean exactly that number, it was also used colloquially to mean 'a really large number'. You can see it used that way where it describes God as owning "the cattle on 1,000 hills" (It obviously didn't limit God to that specific number).

a reply to: chr0naut

I'm sure there will be some anti-theists along to claim "special pleading", but this is precisely how I have viewed the situation for quite some time now. There have been some other threads on ATS proposing an identical idea. It also puts the "6 days of creation" as well as the "7th day of rest" into very interesting terms when we consider not only cosmological evolution, but biological evolution as well (as loaded as that term is).

Brilliant thread. I enjoyed reading it immensely. I hope as you do that this will generate discussion as opposed to snide remarks and one liners on the first page for stars. Understanding where our universe came from and how it came to be is a scientific, philosophical, and religious question. I personally believe that all 3 disciplines are better served with open dialog instead of open season on one another.

originally posted by: Grimpachi
a reply to: chr0naut

I am pretty sure time dilation will only be experienced by the one falling into the event horizon but I could be wrong so I am waiting to see if anyone else can corroborate.

I see where you are coming from but ask yourself this, which frame of reference is absolutely fixed and which is dilating?

I'd argue that they are both relative to each other, neither can be called absolute.

What one frame of reference saw as dilation, the other would see as contraction.

That is the relativism in Relativity.

a reply to: chr0naut

The translation 'day' is in question.

I think most people get the idea of "a day" from the fact that it says "And the morning and evening" was a day, all through Genesis 1.

But the Hindu see "God's day" by the progression of the equinox and the tilt of the earth. So an "age" is around 2500 years and 12 ages makes a Yuga, and so on and so on. So, we could be seeing "God's" days for infinity, really.

I think the more pertinent question is why six days and what is the significance of the number 6 and why the 7th day should be "suspended", so to speak?

When I think of the number 6, I think of a cube. When I am told that 6 is the "number of man", I think man's trapped in a box in which he needs to think outside of.

a reply to: chr0naut

Like a sort of metaphor for a really long time...

That makes sense.



@Grimpachi


I'm not too sure...
If one could be positioned directly outside the time dilation it's theoretically possible that they would also see a distortion, they just wouldn't be affected by it.

But in a way, God would be inside & outside the time dilation...

So I don't know really.



I still like the premise.

originally posted by: ZeussusZ
a reply to: chr0naut

The first words in the bible are "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". Doesn't give a timeline between that and the whole 7 days thing, could have been 13 billion years or 1 second. Who knows but God, if he/she/it is real.

Yes, that is the way I see it, an implicit gap in time between Genesis 1 and 2. In fact a truer translation of the text would be: "In the beginning God began creating (ayth barah)* the Heavens and the whole Earth and the whole Earth became (hayah)* a formless nothingness".

*(Probably really badly spelt transliteration and reversed in order from the original because I think in English).

originally posted by: windword
a reply to: chr0naut

The translation 'day' is in question.

I think most people get the idea of "a day" from the fact that it says "And the morning and evening" was a day, all through Genesis 1.

But the Hindu see "God's day" by the progression of the equinox and the tilt of the earth. So an "age" is around 2500 years and 12 ages makes a Yuga, and so on and so on. So, we could be seeing "God's" days for infinity, really.

I think the more pertinent question is why six days and what is the significance of the number 6 and why the 7th day should be "suspended", so to speak?

When I think of the number 6, I think of a cube. When I am told that 6 is the "number of man", I think man's trapped in a box in which he needs to think outside of.

Interesting take on it.

The "evening and morning" bit may also be a mistranslation.

Firstly, most human societies break the 24 hours up with morning being the start (because before that is sleep) and an entire day being morning to morning. The use of evening to morning is probably the first big indicator that we have it wrong in our translations.

The literal sense of "ereb boker" is 'indistinct vision, followed by clearer vision'.

It has been suggested that this is actually describing an inverse progression of entropy, which resonates with my view that quite advanced science is represented by the original language and it has been beyond us to interpret it correctly for millennia.

a reply to: chr0naut

Lets say it occurred just the way you described, and let's say we can even defend it with Scripture. There is still a glaring issue when it comes to god's alleged creation story. Genesis says the Sun and all the stars are made after Earth. Do you have a way to reconcile that with our understanding of cosmology? There are many reasons we can discount the Bible because of the claims of Genesis.

^I'm not trying to derail it's just you made that comment about us trying to disprove the Bible because of the time discrepancy as if that was our entire gripe with Genesis.

All that aside, I do enjoy reading threads like this and metaphysical discussions on 'god'. I'd rather it be religiously agnostic, but hey...I still enjoyed it.

originally posted by: Lucid Lunacy
a reply to: chr0naut

Lets say it occurred just the way you described, and let's say we can even defend it with Scripture. There is still a glaring issue when it comes to god's alleged creation story. Genesis says the Sun and all the stars are made after Earth. Do you have a way to reconcile that with our understanding of cosmology? There are many reasons we can discount the Bible because of the claims of Genesis.

^I'm not trying to derail it's just you made that comment about us trying to disprove the Bible because of the time discrepancy as if that was our entire gripe with Genesis.

All that aside, I do enjoy reading threads like this and metaphysical discussions on 'god'. I'd rather it be religiously agnostic, but hey...I still enjoyed it.

Thanks, you seem to have caught the spirit of comradely discussion that I'd hoped we could have. Everyone so far has been polite and has actually contributed positively. This is what ATS is about!

I have no definite answer to your issue but I do have a 'way out there' reason and it has to do with the possibility of a gap of time between Genesis 1 and 2.

It has been suggested that in Genesis 1, God created the universe complete and perfect. In Genesis 2, something had screwed up the universe, making it "formless and void" (which could also be read as 'a wasteland and empty'. There is no mention of time frame here at all.

It has been assumed that the event that scrambled the universe was the result of the fall of Satan. (there are verses suggesting that Lucifer the "covering angel that protects" and God's favorite, rebelled, taking 1/3rd of the angels with him. In response God "knocked down his towers" and made his cities "formless and void" (same wording again).

From a physics standpoint, I theorize that the initial centripetal force of the proto-universe was unrestrained, allowing superluminal inflation. This is because the Higgs Field required time and matter to establish, leading to a boundary condition on the proto-universe where despite it having mass that grew with velocity, that mass could rise towards infinity without the restraint of the Higgs.

Of course, once the Higgs field did establish, then superluminal velocity would no longer be possible, freezing matter in its location at the time. The energy of the halt of that expansion and of the halt of angular momentum of the proto-universe initially caused a rise in temperature of the universe then this dissipated into a spin-up of vacuum energy, leaving the ZPE at the high value it is today.

This change of state stirred the universe as quantum effects became prominent causing the destruction and reformation of everything in the universe. The blasts of energy in a nuclear sense, formed heavy elements without stellar generation and at this point the CMR was established, and then rapidly cooled by the dumping into the ZPE.

Just a theory, with lots of unsupported suppositions (sorry got carried away with myself).

Long & short of it is that there could be a 'residue' earth & biosphere before the stars re-lit.

One solution: The Bible was made up by an ancient group of people who just wanted to try to explain the 'who'/ and 'why'? of their existance.


Solved.

originally posted by: Kalixi
One solution: The Bible was made up by an ancient group of people who just wanted to try to explain the 'who'/ and 'why'? of their existance.

Solved.

Yes, that is a reasonable answer but is it the only reasonable answer?

a reply to: chr0naut

The Bible, however, has a Creation account that has the universe being created roughly 6,000 years ago.

No where does the Bible give that number as the age of the universe...while I am aware some Christians believe that, none of the ones I know do.