The 7 Day Paradox: My thoughts on how god could have created Earth in 7 days.

First, I would like to say that this is just a THEORY I came up with a little while back. It was right after Bill Nye and Ken Ham had their debate about creationism...

It's also worth stating that I don't really believe in God. I have my own personal belief system and I hold on to it, but that's where it ends. I feel a connection to this universe that I cannot describe and because of that, I am willing to entertain the idea of a Higher Consciousness that COULD be responsible for creating the Cosmos. Now I have another theory on how the Big Bang would have come about, but I will save that for another day.

In this post, I would like to talk about the 7 day Paradox.

I don't know if it's actually called that, I'm just giving it that name for the ease of explaining...

In order to comprehend how our Planet could have been created in 7 days, it would be wise to first look at what Ancient people did know and did not know. We know for a FACT that Humans in this time period did not have a clear understanding of what the Sun was. The majority of people back then did not realize that the Sun was a Star, just like the stars they see at night. To them, the Sun was "Day." The Daylight... That's day...

Now lets take a step forward to today and look at what we know about our star...

Science has concluded that our Sun is at LEAST a 3rd generation star. Which means, that in the relative local region of space that the Sun occupies has been occupied by at least 2 other stars prior to this one.

www.physlink.com...

Ok. So we know that this star is not the first star to be here and we know that Ancient Humans didn't know that the sun was a star. See where I'm going with this??

The Bible says God created the Earth in 7 days. The people who wrote the Bible understood "Day" to be "Daylight." So one could interpret the line in the Bible as, "God created Earth in 7 Daylights." We can take that to mean "6 stars formed and died before the 7th star came around and had the Earth form."

Is it really a HUGE leap to go from thinking this is a 3rd generation star to a 7th? Who's to say it isn't? We already know that supermassive stars can live and die within 100,000,000 years which means there was MORE than enough time in the universe for this to happen. So maybe, JUST MAYBE there is a tiny thread of truth in there....

As I said above, I first started to seriously consider this after the Nye/Ham debate. My big issue with this debate comes from some of Bill's statements and the statements of other skeptics... He and them all call for Proof from religious people, knowing full well that those people are not going to provide the proof. Why would they? If you believe in something, you don't need proof so they have Zero motivation to provide it. I'm a skeptic and I will accept Science over faith any day, but as a skeptic wanting proof, I have realized that it's up to me to find it. So why don't other skeptics/scientists try to do the same??

My logic is sound. Science AND Christian Theology together, for once!

I really do think that it's up to us Skeptics to pick the Bible apart and look at it Objectively, the way skeptics say they look at things. IF skeptics want the proof, they need to find it themselves. I think that this way of thinking could very well be a path towards finding that elusive proof...

So there you go. I think that the 7 day's line actually means 7 stars. There is nothing is in science that says this cannot possibly happen.

What do you think?

a reply to: PollyPeptide

It only took six days and he rested on the seventh.

a reply to: PollyPeptide

Hmmm... The only paradox I'm familiar with when it comes to creating the earth in 7 days is that the universe is 13.82 billion years old and the Earth is only 4.54 billion years old. The universe was created on day 1:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Days 2 - 6 are God creating and fine tuning the Earth (to long to repost here, but I'm sure everyone is familiar with what I'm saying). Then on day 7 he rested.

SO, that means that Day 1 was 9.28 billion years long, Days 2 - 6 was 4.54 billion years long, and Day 7 was of some indeterminate length. The paradox I see is, "How can a day be of variable length from one day to the next?"

Another paradox I see is, why did god spend 5 days creating and fine tuning the life on Earth and not the other planets in the universe? We know that other planets exist. When did He work on those planets?

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Reconstruction of the matrix

www.tomorrowsworld.org...

We read in the very first verse of the Bible, before the events of that week, that: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

As we will see, that initial “beginning” of the earth and the heavens—before Adam and Eve, and before the animals and plants with which we are familiar—may have occurred long, long ago!

But notice carefully the second verse of Genesis, which many read right over, missing its clear implications, because of its usual translation: “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2).

A simple statement—but it contains much more than meets the eye! The English words “without form, and void” are translated from the Hebrew words tohu and bohu.

These two words, used together in Scripture just three times, indicate an uninhabitable wasteland—a condition of desolation or destruction. Significantly, the other two passages where tohu and bohu are used together—Isaiah 34:11 and Jeremiah 4:23—indicate that such desolate states of ruin and devastation were brought about by sin.

www.ucg.org...

Yet this interpretation that the earth “became” waste and void has been discussed for close to 2,000 years, as pointed out by the late Arthur Custance in his book Without Form and Void: A Study of the Meaning of Genesis 1:2 .

The earliest known recorded controversy on this point can be attributed to Jewish sages at the beginning of the second century.

The Hebrew scholars who wrote the Targum of Onkelos, the earliest of the Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, rendered Genesis 1:2 with an Aramaic expression Dr. Custance translates as “and the earth was laid waste” (1988, p. 15).

The original language evidently led them to understand that something had occurred which had “laid waste” the earth, and they interpreted this as a destruction.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Simple. As the universe expands space/time is stretched. In the early time of the universe time moved much more slowly because space/time was more compressed. This, rather than perception as a percentage of time lived, also explains the feeling that time moves faster as we age. It's because time actually moves faster as the space/time we occupy stretches as the universe expands. This also explains why people in the past lived much longer life spans.

If Einstein's theories of relativity are correct, this is an absolutely plausible conclusion. After all, it is the compression of space/time that causes time dilation as predicted in special relativity.

Jaden

p.s. the simple fact is the universe is NOT necessarily 13.82 billion years old. Year is not a measure of time since time fluctuates. Year is the amount of time that the earth takes to revolve around the sun. The actual amount of time (as we currently understand time) that that takes is variable and that's not even taking into account the numerous flaws and changes to the estimate of the universe's age by the paradigms.

a reply to: PollyPeptide

I think a few things...

1. If the ancients didn't know that the sun was a common star, and that the sun was a ball of gas with a finite lifespan, then how could they even conceive that there had been, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 more before it?

2. In the six days (not seven) of creation, it says god created the heavens, earth, light and dark on day one. But wait...then it goes on to say that it wasn't until the fourth day that the sun (and all the stars and heavenly bodies) were created. So, let's take that literally for a moment--this means that the first three days could not be considered "daylights," as you put it, because the sun did not exist yet.

3. We also need to remember that, without the sun, there would be no atmosphere like what we have here on earth, at least scientifically speaking. The radiative heat from the sun is what creates our greenhouse effect, recycling liquid water into water vapor that then recondenses into clouds and provides rain for all of the plants to live and thrive (not to mention is responsible for photosynthesis itself...no sun, no plants). But, if that's the case, why would god create all plant life BEFORE he created the sun?

I know number three doesn't really pertain to your theory, but it's just another little hole in the need to try and meld the Genisis postulation as to how the universe (not just earth) was created in six days with the known or theoretical evidence that we have from science. In fact, I would argue that it's unscientific to try to do that, because you're bending and reshaping something (the Genesis story) that was not meant to be malleable.

I don't understand why people take the 'seven day' thing so literally. Even if God actually said he did it in seven days it is still unreasonable to assume time is the same for an omniscient, omnipresent God than for us little humans on planet earth.

While I don't subscribe to a Christian philosophy...I still see no reason that the world wasn't created by God and that 'he' uses evolution among other scientific principles to create.

originally posted by: Masterjaden
a reply to: Krazysh0t

Simple. As the universe expands space/time is stretched. In the early time of the universe time moved much more slowly because it was more compressed. This, rather than perception as a percentage of time lived, also explains the feeling that time moves faster as we age. It's because we do. This also explains why people in the past lived much longer life spans.

If Einstein's theories of relativity are correct, this is an absolutely plausible conclusion. After all, it is the compression of space/time that causes time dilation as predicted in special relativity.

Jaden

I didn't do it, but I could have also broken down Days 2 - 6 by commenting how long science has observed how long it took the various things that those days say happened.

Day 2:
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

It is now believed that water appeared on the planet around the same time it was formed. This means that day 2 was roughly a few thousand years at the most.

Day 3:
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

The first life appeared on earth 3.8 billion years ago, though this is talking about land based life soo... that was about 700 million years ago. So that makes Day 3 about 3.9 billion years long.

Day 4:
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

I don't even know what the hell God created here because it is already written that God created the Sun, stars, and light on day 1. So I don't know how long that day could have been.

Day 5:
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

Ok now we are out of sync. On day 3 there were land plant life and now God is creating water based animals which predate land based plants. So let's just pretend it meant land based animals, which was about 440 million years ago. This makes Day 4 260 million years long.

Day 6:
God creates man (the entry is rather long and this post is already long enough as it is).

Humans in their current form appeared on the planet about 200,000 years ago. This makes Day 6 339.8 million years long.

Now if you are following along at home we have:
Day 1: 9.28 billion years long
Day 2: few thousand years long(?)
Day 3: 3.9 billion years long
Day 4: ???
Day 5: 260 million years long
Day 6: 339.8 million years long
Day 7: ???

As you can see, it isn't a set shrinking length of time but increases or decreases from day to day.

Im always the strange one...here goes...the term day refers to one revolution of the earth around the sun. this is possible with an atmosphere as light is evident, without this atmosphere, it would look dark all of the time, no refraction. The earth was without form can mean many things, so my theory is the inhabitants of the earth before us really messed it up, they had advanced way beyond where we are now, but in a different way. More highly advanced without the need for computers and heavy machinery. since we have no real clue to the start of what we call time (everything is just theory), there could have been several cycles, each messing up as bad as the last. Uranium can be found on earth, and all the elements for destruction lie in waiting. Advanced beings or gods possibly re terraformed the earth, atmosphere, oceans, etc. Earlier, much earlier, asteroids made of ice the size of a continent (think solid) could have been snatched from space for this, they were probably many at this time. but the term day at the point of earths "construction" could have been any number of any measure.

Remind me again please.....what is time?

Isn't time the man made tool to enable a strategic routine and timetable in order to control an entire system?
God created day and night not hours and minutes.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Well, I'm afraid you might be confused about what I would consider a potential accounting for Genesis. I am not of a mind that God came down and wrote it. It was written by man and almost every account of God communicating with man (there are some exceptions) are via visions and man passes down that information in the best way he can.

I would think that the if the account of Genesis came from God, that it would be man's interpretation of God's vision to them and that the time frames would be an approximation by the person seeing and interpreting the vision. So the time frame given would be based on THAT person's time and his description of the visions could be distorted.

Truth comes easier from trying to find out HOW something can be true than trying to dismiss it based on your current beliefs and predispositions. If after attempting to see HOW something can be true you come to the conclusion that it isn't likely, then you are in a more informed position.

If you start out trying to discredit something because it doesn't fit your paradigm, you are doomed to live in ignorance.

Jaden

a reply to: Masterjaden

Genesis, Genes is, i mean Genes are what?
Passed through DNA perhaps?
Woven within you and your DNA?

next you will be telling me we are all of God or that God is in us all.....

Makes you wonder about bloodlines.......wey it does me

originally posted by: Metallicus
While I don't subscribe to a Christian philosophy...I still see no reason that the world wasn't created by God and that 'he' uses evolution among other scientific principles to create.

I see no reason that the world wasn't created by a band of space monkeys flinging galactic poo at each other...

except for the fact that there is no evidence for it at all...but besides that...

a reply to: Masterjaden

Hey the thread was about a paradox in the 7 day creation account. I just posted a more obvious one than the one the OP was talking. If you want to believe what you said, fine. But don't think that I never tried to make Genesis fit with science. There was a time when I was a Christian and spent much time trying to figure out a way to reconcile Genesis with evolution and the Big Bang. For a time I would just say that God could be the answer to why and science the answer to why, but now that I'm not Christian I can see the paradoxes and other discrepancies for what they are.

Pretty week theory.

The 7 Day Paradox: My thoughts on how god could have created Earth in 7 days.

The Bible was not written in English. The word translated as Day does not just mean day as in a 24 hour period. The Original language but particularly the Greek translation of it that Christ and the apostles used (we know this because they quoted it) uses a word that has many meanings. Among them are day period, era, aeon, epoch... you get the picture.

The bible teaches that there were three ages involved in the bible: the present age, the age to come and the age before Adamic man. A whole lot of history happened (and was lost to posterity) before Adam. Though the bible is mostly concerned with the present age and the salvation plan for mankind which is active in it.

For that purpose it is unimportant if mankind understands the exact period of time inherent in each "day" mentioned in Genesis.

However; there is no reason to be ignorant on our own even if the bible emphasizes this age over the the preceding age or the age to come. in the present age science has given us pretty much unimpeachable evidence that the creation is billions of years old. Prretending that the vast body of science is wrong is a discredit to God and Christianity because it makes it easy to ridicule the truth and to cause disbelief. Properly understood the Bible is the truth and so is science. If they appear to conflict one or the other is not being understood correctly.

The knowledge of science need not conflict with revealed knowledge in the bible. This is true even concerning such topics as the age of the universe, the earth, mankind, evolution, spiritual realm stuff. Even if one day scientists create from inert elements a living creature it does not negate biblical knowledge of creation. Nor does it negate the creation of mankind or Adam and eve. nor does the creation of adam and eve negate evolution.

BTW creation actually took 8 "days" not six or seven. Adam was created on the eighth day. otherwise the two creation narratives conflict with each other. the sixth day adam has an impersonal article and the eighth day adam uses a personal article in the original language. ADM has several meanings in the original language. it means man as in mankind if used in an impersonal sense and it means the man Adam if used with a personal article. It also has several other meanings but those are not germaine to the point that there were two creation dates for adam.

At any rate according to the proper translation of the original texts mankind was created two "days" or really periods of time before Adam the man. Thus there were other people on the earth before during and after Adam's existence. Using some of the other meaning for ADM Adam the man was capable of visibly blushing. Ruddy complected, to bring blood to the face are other meanings of ADM.

Well, if we really want a paradox, let us try this one.

God created the earth, and sent his only begotten son. God is omniscient and is outside time, he knows everything. God knew Jesus was going to get killed. God let humanity kill Jesus. Jesus was sorely vexed as is demonstrated in the NT. Jesus asked god why. And all the while, the world has gone from disaster to disaster socially. People say god is testing us. As far as tests go in relation to humanity, god has failed EVERY SINGLE ONE. Now that is a paradox.

originally posted by: Jonjonj
Well, if we really want a paradox, let us try this one.

God created the earth, and sent his only begotten son. God is omniscient and is outside time, he knows everything. God knew Jesus was going to get killed. God let humanity kill Jesus. Jesus was sorely vexed as is demonstrated in the NT. Jesus asked god why. And all the while, the world has gone from disaster to disaster socially. People say god is testing us. As far as tests go in relation to humanity, god has failed EVERY SINGLE ONE. Now that is a paradox.

Jesus was God on earth in the flesh. He was sent for a reason and he died for a reason. Jesus was never at any time unaware that he was going to die. He repeatedly told his disciples he was going to die. Remember this: God did not ask of us anything he was unwilling to do himself. He came into the flesh. He died in the flesh. He lived by the law perfectly while in the flesh. When God said the penalty for violating any of his laws was death he was willing to live by the same standard he set for us himself in the person of Jesus.

originally posted by: jazz10
Remind me again please.....what is time?

Isn't time the man made tool to enable a strategic routine and timetable in order to control an entire system?
God created day and night not hours and minutes.

Time is a measurement that merely measures man's mortality. Per certain models of the so-called Big Bang Theory all matter , energy , and time was contained within the original singularity. At the time of the Great Expansion all matter , energy and time was released and began expanding into the space (whatever that means) of this universe.I believe the model that all time happened (from beginning to end) at the Big Bang and what we see as time is merely the perception of our portion of the history of the universe we live in.
So , if there exists a Supreme Being, time would mean absolutely nothing and any measurements would be MAN's perception and not God's

originally posted by: stormbringer1701

The Bible was not written in English. The word translated as Day does not just mean day as in a 24 hour period. The Original language but particularly the Greek translation of it that Christ and the apostles used (we know this because they quoted it) uses a word that has many meanings. Among them are day period, era, aeon, epoch... you get the picture.

The Greek version also refers to Days with the literal meaning of the word Day.
The writer(s) wanted to give emphasis on the power the creator that's why they chose such a short time.

the world was not created in 6 days and many say; - to god a day is like 1000 years.
Well if god is omnipotent and he's writing a book for people to read and understand - don't you think that God knows how long a day is? Even if a day is 1000 years that takes the age of the universe up to what? 12,000 years? Where did the other 15 billion years go?

The bible also has creating in the wrong order. The stars came before the Earth(god has it backwards). And it's very easy to prove; We are seeing stars and galactic clusters out there that are 10 billion light years away. That means that what we are seeing came from the stars 10 billion years ago.

Lets see;

Creation of Day and Night "Day" 1
Creation of Heaven "Day" 2
Creation of the Earth, the Seas, and the Plants "Day" 3
Creation of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars "Day" 4
Creation of Fishes and Birds [Beginning of Sexual Reproduction] "Day" 5
Creation of Land Animals (Cattle, Insects, Reptiles, Man) "Day" 6
So we have day and night before the sun was created
plants are older than the sun, and so is the Earth and seas

Also why are those two referred as something separate aren't the seas part of the planet Earth? This shows that those who wrote genesis (or god himself, since it's god-breathed) didn't even knew the earth was a planet, for them the earth meant the ground and nothing more, which is normal for a flat Earth society, but not for the creator

and it took him five days to create earthy things, while it took him just one day to make the moon the sun and the ~1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars and their planets-worlds in the vast complex universe. Yet the creation doesn't even speak about a vast universe as we know it, it just calls it sky and ''Heavens'' as they imagined it above their flat Earth.

Wouldn't an omniscient and omnipotent perfect god who created everything, know any better than this? It's like me claiming to have build the empire state building, while I have no idea how it was build, presenting faulty plans of the building.

If that's not proof that the creation story is wrong and naive people (and not an omniscient god) wrote the story with their extremely limited understanding of cosmology, then what is?