[wmfights]

Thank you for the look at your slide.

In trying to understand this concept of time being relative to your position I'm stuck on how Schroeder determined the time and size of the universe at the end of the 1st day. I understand the idea that God pre-existing the begining was outside time all together and thus was outside time at the begining/big bang.

It's the break points for day 1, 2nd day, etc. that I have a hard time understanding. I'm assuming that his thought is that outside the universe in what we measure as 24 hours would be 8 billion years if we were measuring time from the center to the edge of the expansion and then the 2nd day would be half that and each succeeding day half the previous day.

[TXnMA]

Since God said nothing about "24 hours". I am secure in calling those spans "God's workdays".

It was Hipparchus of Nicaea ( c. 190 BC – c. 120 BC) who came up with the scheme of 24 equal hours in a day. (Millenia after Genesis...)

In fact, in Scripture, "24 hours" is mentioned nowhere. And the term, "hour" does not even appear in the Old Testament at all.

IMHO, trying to re-interpret God's day into our divisions of Earth's rotation is merely a human conceit -- trying to cram an incomprehensible God into a framework that humans can lay claim to. (Even Schroeder's Jewish sages lived well after BCE, so they were projecting their own latter-day ideas of time back onto clearly-stated Scripture.)

I find it simpler and precisely scriptural to state that Creation was accomplished in six of God's workdays -- exactly as He stated in Genesis. No more, no less...

And that works just fine using relativistic time, as well -- as shown in my diagram.

[Alamo-Girl]

In Physicist Gerald's Schroeder's original article on the Age of the Universe, he said:

The way these two figures match up is extraordinary. I'm not speaking as a theologian; I'm making a scientific claim. I didn't pull these numbers out of hat. That's why I led up to the explanation very slowly, so you can follow it step-by-step. Now we can go one step further. Let's look at the development of time, day-by-day, based on the expansion factor. Every time the universe doubles, the perception of time is cut in half. Now when the universe was small, it was doubling very rapidly. But as the universe gets bigger, the doubling time gets exponentially longer. This rate of expansion is quoted in "The Principles of Physical Cosmology," a textbook that is used literally around the world.

(In case you want to know, this exponential rate of expansion has a specific number averaged at 10 to the 12th power. That is in fact the temperature of quark confinement, when matter freezes out of the energy: 10.9 times 10 to the 12th power Kelvin degrees divided by (or the ratio to) the temperature of the universe today, 2.73 degrees. That's the initial ratio which changes exponentially as the universe expands.)

In his current article, he adds this remark:

Following a talk I gave at AZUSA Pacific University, February 2011, a participant noted that when calculating the expansion ratio of space [that is, by what fraction space had stretched] from the era of nucleosynthesis to our current time, I had neglected to correct for the effect that the increase in the rate of universal expansion has on the current cosmic microwave radiation background. This increase introduces a non-linear effect. [That is, the rate of expansion is not constant, rather the rate is increasing.] The correction is in the order of 10%. Had the expansion been linear [and not super-linear resulting from the increased rate], the CMRB would be, not the currently observed 2.76 K, but 3.03 K. Introducing this correction into the exponential equation that details the duration of the six 24 hour days of Genesis Chapter One results in an age of the universe from our perspective of 14 billion years [14, 000,000,000 years]. From the Bible’s perspective of time for those six evocative days of Genesis, the number of our years held compressed within each of those six 24 hour days of Genesis, starting with Day One, would be, in billions of years, respectively, 7.1; 3.6; 1.8; 0.89; 0.45; 0.23.

So when we put the two together, it comes out this way (using his words with the adjustment):

* The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective was 7.1 billion years.

* The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 3.6 billion years.

* The third day also lasted half of the previous day, 1.8 billion years.

* The fourth day - .89 billion years.

* The fifth day - .45 billion years.

* The sixth day - .23 billion years.

When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of the universe at 14.07 billion years. [Nearly} The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance?

But there's more. The Bible goes out on a limb and tells you what happened on each of those days. Now you can take cosmology, paleontology, archaeology, and look at the history of the world, and see whether or not they match up day-by-day. And I'll give you a hint. They match up close enough to send chills up your spine.