What every single person who insists on 5,770-odd years as the age of the universe misses is that the first 6 days, those before Adam’s creation, WERE DIFFERENT. They are NOT 6 literal days, as we know them now from our perspective.
I’m not going to explain the whole thing, but I’d strongly advise anyone genuinely interested in the subject to read some books by Gerald Schroeder, who is both an astrophysicist and an Orthodox Jew (the latter of which means that he believes in the word of G-d as presented in the 5 Books of Moses - on which is based ALL Christian views of the age of the universe). He has written “Genesis and the Big Bang,” “The Science of God” and “The Hidden Face of God: How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth.”
Essentially, he shows how the Bible and the Talmud are consistent with modern science in terms of both the age of the universe and the exact order of the unfolding of creation. Due to the time dilation effects of the Theory of Relativity, he states that the age of the universe is roughly 15 3/4 billion years according to the Bible - a figure that is remarkably consistent with the view of modern science.
For an article on this subject (long, but free and much shorter than 3 books), take a look at: http://www.geraldschroeder.com/age.html
A critical paragraph from that article lays out the problem of a literal interpretation of the Bible:
“In trying to understand the flow of time here, you have to remember that the entire Six Days is described in 31 sentences. The Six Days of Genesis, which have given people so many headaches in trying to understand science vis-?-vis the Bible are confined to 31 sentences! At MIT, in the Hayden library, we had about 50,000 books that deal with the development of the universe: cosmology, chemistry, thermodynamics, paleontology, archaeology, the high-energy physics of creation. Up the river at Harvard, at the Weiger library, they probably have 200,000 books on these same topics. The Bible gives us 31 sentences. Don’t expect that by a simple reading of those sentence, you’ll know every detail that is held within the text. It’s obvious that we have to dig deeper to get the information out.”
Read the rest of the article. This is a highly intelligent man of faith with his feet firmly planted in both the worlds of science and religion. He is, IMHO, virtually unique in his ability to understand both and tie them together in a way that is understandable by people from both sides.
Thanks for the link to the Schoeder article. It was excellent and confirmed many things that I had suspected for years. I find it difficult to understand how some people can throw out thousands of years of scripture studies of the original text and place their entire faith on a modern translation of a translation of a translation.
The Bible / Torah reads; on the first day....on the second day...etc.....it counts 6 days and then God rested on the seventh day.