A 6,000-year-old Universe?
A 6,000-year-old Universe?
From a scientific perspective, we know that Einstein’s relativistic equations, and specifically the notion that time slows down for a person travelling close to the speed of light, have been experimentally proven to be correct. And from a literary perspective, we understand that the writer of Genesis 1 is writing in the 3rd person and from God’s point of view. So if you’ll allow that God exists outside of the realm of nature and is moving at or beyond the speed of light, what does a day mean from his point of view? It could literally be billions of years from a human perspective.
Detailed Argument: You might ask the obvious question: how can anybody who writes from God’s point of view expect to have even a shred of credibility? They can’t if you are a materialist – that is, if you hold the view that nature is all there is. If nature is all there is, then there is no God and the bible is not credible. At all. But suppose you hold the view that there is something beyond nature, or you are open-minded enough to engage in a conversation with someone like myself who holds that view? Then by all means, read on.
At this point I will put on my Captain-Obvious hat and say that science can never prove there is nothing beyond nature nor that there is something beyond nature. And that should be obvious because science draws its inferences and conclusions from measurements of nature. In other words, to argue that there is nothing beyond nature because I can never reproduce a miracle by taking measurements from nature, is like arguing that there are no four-footed beasts because I don’t see any in my gold-fish bowl.
If you take measurements of a falling rock, and you get the result that a rock always falls with an acceleration of 32 ft/sec^2, you may correctly conclude (like Newton did) that gravity is a law of nature. But what happens when you read in the New Testament that Jesus walked on water? Is it philosophically rigorous to argue that your science experiments prove that Jesus could not have done that?
I would argue no, but how can I support that? Because, as C.S. Lewis argues in his book Miracles, nature can be viewed as a perfect hostess of the natural laws. From an open-minded perspective, if God created nature with its attendant laws (such as the laws of kinematics or the laws of relativity), then God exists outside of the realm of nature, and can set aside the laws of nature anytime he chooses to do so. And nature, being the perfect hostess of God’s laws, accepts that interruption, ingests it, and then goes back to enforcing the laws she was endowed with. Lewis uses the example of the virgin birth. God sets aside the laws of biology and Mary becomes pregnant by a miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit – likely in an instant of time. Nature receives that change, biological laws take over, and two or three nights later Mary wakes up craving pickles and ice-cream.
If you are open-minded enough to still be with me, then perhaps you will accept my argument that we can only lend credibility to the creation account in Genesis 1 if, as the New Testament tells us, the writer was inspired by the Holy Spirit as he or she wrote. Maybe that’s too spooky for 21st Century rational minds (think of Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter books), in which case you might want to stick with a strictly allegorical interpretation.
Personally, I’d prefer a more straightforward interpretation (not an argument, I get that) and like Lewis, I don’t wish to eliminate the possibility of the miraculous. Indeed, Lewis wrote that Christianity is the only religion which requires the supernatural (you cannot have Christianity without the virgin birth or the resurrection, for example). And so, having considered a few of the scientific and metaphysical issues, I would like to look at this from a literary perspective and in doing so, I’ll repeat that the creation account in Genesis 1 was written from God’s point of view (and not the human writer’s).
Ironically, the hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis 1 which leads to the young-earth creation argument cannot stand without the notion of inspiration. So I find myself having to agree with the young-earth creationists on that point. But if our view is that nature is all there is, and there can be no inspiration by the Holy Spirit, we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath-water, because, as Nietzsche pointed out so eloquently, we can quickly find ourselves in a nihilistic state of mind if we go down that path.
So, if you’ll allow the possibility that there is something beyond nature, I would argue that the Genesis 1 creation account is credible, is open to interpretation (literal or otherwise), was written in 3rd person from God’s point of view, and was inspired by the Holy Spirit working through the writer some 3000 years ago.
And from a philosophical perspective, if there is something beyond nature, then perhaps Genesis 1:3 is credible when it says, “Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” If God created time and space and light, then he exists outside of those limitations and the New Testament writer Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote that time might work differently from God’s perspective than it does for a human perspective.
For a more rigorous treatment of the science behind the big-bang event (it’s a theory, but a highly credible one) and how it relates to the creation account, I’d recommend Hugh Ross’s book, The Creator and the Cosmos, which can be found here.
And like I said, Peter mentions that one day is with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day in the New Testament. And we don’t know how fast God is moving relative to the speed of light – he could be moving faster than the speed of light since he created it (although I have inside information that even God can never go faster than warp 10 – no one, not even the Romulans can go that fast). So was Einstein influenced by Peter’s assertion in the New Testament about the relative nature of time from God’s perspective? We may never know.
One thing we do know is Peter wrote that the earth would be consumed by fire some 2000 years ago, and that is consistent with what we now know about stars. Our star (the sun) is going to become a red giant in a few billion years and consume Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth.[2]
So now we can understand that the creation account in Genesis 1 was written from the perspective of God (not a human) and that when it describes evening and morning in each of the seven days of creation activity, we are in danger of anthropomorphizing God when we require that each of those days be a strict 24-hour period.
On top of that the science behind the Doppler effect gives credibility to the notion that the big bang event happened some 13 billion years ago. Hence I would argue that there is nothing in Genesis 1 that contradicts our scientific understanding of the universe in the 21st Century, and that those who argue for a young-earth creation are either too lazy to do good hermeneutics and balance their interpretation with present-day knowledge, or are not really interested in the truth.
If it is the latter and they are not really interested in the truth, then what are they arguing about? I would suggest they might be motivated by a lust for power. A teacher in our society wields a lot of power. If one can set one’s self up as a teacher of things that no one else understands, one can wield a certain amount of power over one’s followers. It is sad to me that there are those who follow leaders like that, but I think it speaks to the human condition we find ourselves in. And against all odds, human beings have an incredible knack for adding two plus two and getting fifty, but maybe I’m no different (which is why, like the Philosopher, I don’t claim to know anything, but don’t mind questioning everything, including why people find it necessary to argue for a 6000-year-old universe or the notion that there is nothing beyond nature).
-paul
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism, downloaded 11/3/2018
[2] https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html, downloaded 11/3/2018