I did read the current article.
My "issue" with his argument is
* 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.
How did he arrive at this specific break point. The universe continues to expand and it's not like there was a momentary stop and restart.
when he writes:
lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective."
Is he taking what we measure as 24 hrs and looking from outside the expansion? I think I have a rudimentary understanding about how time is different from within the expansion because points are getting farther apart.
I appreciate anyone's thoughts. I would love to be able to explain this in basic terms to doubting friends. It seems plain as day to me that the creation of the universe is the greatest example we have of how nature reveals God to us.
Let's look a bit deeper. The classical Jewish sources say that before the beginning, we don't really know what there is. We can't tell what predates the universe. The Midrash asks the question: Why does the Bible begin with the letter Beit? Because Beit (which is written like a backwards C) is closed in all directions and only open in the forward direction. Hence we can't know what comes before ― only after. The first letter is a Beit ― closed in all directions and only open in the forward direction.
Nachmanides expands the statement. He says that although the days are 24 hours each, they contain "kol yemot ha-olam" ― all the ages and all the secrets of the world.
Nachmanides says that before the universe, there was nothing... but then suddenly the entire creation appeared as a minuscule speck. He gives a dimension for the speck: something very tiny like the size of a grain of mustard. And he says that is the only physical creation. There was no other physical creation; all other creations were spiritual. The Nefesh (the soul of animal life) and the Neshama (the soul of human life) are spiritual creations. There's only one physical creation, and that creation was a tiny speck. The speck is all there was. Anything else was God. In that speck was all the raw material that would be used for making everything else. Nachmanides describes the substance as "dak me'od, ein bo mamash" ― very thin, no substance to it. And as this speck expanded out, this substance ― so thin that it has no essence ― turned into matter as we know it.
Nachmanides further writes: "Misheyesh, yitfos bo zman" -- from the moment that matter formed from this substance-less substance, time grabs hold. Not "begins." Time is created at the beginning. But time "grabs hold." When matter condenses, congeals, coalesces, out of this substance so thin it has no essence ― that's when the Biblical clock of the six days starts.
Science has shown that there's only one "substance-less substance" that can change into matter. And that's energy. Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, tells us that energy can change into matter. And once it changes into matter, time grabs hold.
Nachmanides has made a phenomenal statement. I don't know if he knew the Laws of Relativity. But we know them now. We know that energy ― light beams, radio waves, gamma rays, x-rays ― all travel at the speed of light, 300 million meters per second. At the speed of light, time does not pass. The universe was aging, but time only grabs hold when matter is present. This moment of time before the clock begins for the Bible, lasted about 1/100,000 of a second. A miniscule time. But in that time, the universe expanded from a tiny speck, to about the size of the Solar System. From that moment on we have matter, and time flows forward. The Biblical clock begins here.
Now the fact that the Bible tells us there is "evening and morning Day One" (and not “a first day”) comes to teach us time from a Biblical perspective. Einstein proved that time varies from place to place in the universe, and that time varies from perspective to perspective in the universe. The Bible says there is "evening and morning Day One".
Now if the Torah were seeing time from the days of Moses and Mount Sinai ― long after Adam ― the text would not have written Day One. Because by Sinai, hundreds of thousands of days already passed. There was a lot of time with which to compare Day One. Torah would have said "A First Day." By the second day of Genesis, the Bible says "a second day," because there was already the First Day with which to compare it. You could say on the second day, "what happened on the first day." But as Nahmanides pointed out, you could not say on the first day, "what happened on the first day" because "first" implies comparison ― an existing series. And there was no existing series. Day One was all there was.
Even if the Torah was seeing time from Adam, the text would have said "a first day", because by its own statement there were six days. The Torah says "Day One" because the Torah is looking forward from the beginning. And it says, How old is the universe? Six Days. We'll just take time up until Adam. Six Days. We look back in time, and say the universe is approximately 15 billion years old. But every scientist knows, that when we say the universe is 15 billion years old, there's another half of the sentence that we never say. The other half of the sentence is: The universe is 15 billion years old as seen from the time-space coordinates that we exist in on earth. That's Einstein's view of relativity. But what would those billions of years be as perceived from near the beginning looking forward?
The key is that the Torah looks forward in time, from very different time-space coordinates, when the universe was small. But since then, the universe has expanded out. Space stretches, and that stretching of space totally changes the perception of time.
Imagine in your mind going back billions of years ago to the beginning of time. Now pretend way back at the beginning of time, when time grabs hold, there's an intelligent community. (It's totally fictitious.) Imagine that the intelligent community has a laser, and it's going to shoot out a blast of light, and every second it's going to pulse. Every second ― pulse. Pulse. Pulse. It shoots the light out, and then billions of years later, way far down the time line, we here on Earth have a big satellite dish, and we receive that pulse of light. And on that pulse of light is imprinted (printing information on light is called fiber optics ― sending information by light), "I'm sending you a pulse every second." And then a second goes by and the next pulse is sent.
Light travels 300 million meters per second. So the two light pulses are separated by 300 million meters at the beginning. Now they travel through space for billions of years, and they're going to reach the Earth billions of years later. But wait a minute. Is the universe static? No. The universe is expanding. That's the cosmology of the universe. And that does not mean it's expanding into an empty space outside the universe. There's only the universe. There is no space outside the universe. The universe expands by its own space stretching. So as these pulses go through billions of years of traveling, the universe and space are stretching. As space is stretching, what's happening to these pulses? The space between them is also stretching. So the pulses really get further and further apart.
Billions of years later, when the first pulse arrives, we say, "Wow ― a pulse!" And written on it is "I'm sending you a pulse every second." You call all your friends, and you wait for the next pulse to arrive. Does it arrive another second later? No! A year later? Maybe not. Maybe billions of years later. Because depending on how much time this pulse of light has traveled through space, will determine the amount of stretching of space between the pulses. That's standard astronomy.
15 Billion or Six Days?
Today, we look back in time. We see 15 billion years. Looking forward from when the universe is very small ― billions of times smaller ― the Torah says six days. They both may be correct.
What's exciting about the last few years in cosmology is we now have quantified the data to know the relationship of the "view of time" from the beginning, relative to the "view of time" today. It's not science fiction any longer. Any one of a dozen physics text books all bring the same number. The general relationship between time near the beginning when stable matter formed from the light (the energy, the electromagnetic radiation of the creation) and time today is a million million, that is a trillion fold extension. That's a 1 with 12 zeros after it. It is a unit-less ratio. So when a view from the beginning looking forward says "I'm sending you a pulse every second," would we see it every second? No. We'd see it every million million seconds. Because that's the stretching effect of the expansion of the universe. In astronomy, the term is “red shift.” Red shift in observed astronomical data is standard.
The Torah doesn't say every second, does it? It says Six Days. How would we see those six days? If the Torah says we're sending information for six days, would we receive that information as six days? No. We would receive that information as six million million days. Because the Torah's perspective is from the beginning looking forward.
Six million million days is a very interesting number. What would that be in years? Divide by 365 and it comes out to be 16 billion years. Essentially the estimate of the age of the universe. Not a bad guess for 3300 years ago.
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 a hat. That's why I led up to the explanation very slowly, so you can follow it step-by-step.
The tentative title is:"GENESIS -- A scientist looks at the first four verses", and it compares the sequence of statements in Genesis (favorably, it turns out) with their current counterparts in scientific knowledge and theory.
Everyone who has seen it has said that it reinforces their belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God...
I dispose of "the elapsed time question" quickly, because it is a "sidetrack" to the central message. I (a physical chemist AND a Bible scholar) am very comfortable with the issue as shown in the "frame". It is both scientifically and Scripturally correct.
Trying to cram "24 hours" (mentioned nowhere in the entire Bible) into the discussion merely muddies the fact that God claimed to have completed Creation in six of his "work days". (And He was the only Observer around for most of that time -- notably so for those first days when neither a rotating earth nor the sun [earth's day's "rotational reference"] existed at all...)
IOW, rather than get into an on-stage argument with a "YEC fanatic" or a "Science-only agnostic", I would prefer to skip the "E-T matter" entirely. But, I hope to "put it to rest" by presenting each "side" in a way that an advocate of that side cannot deny represents the recorded data-- and by stating that both views, as presented, are acceptable to me.
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FWIW, this discussion has caused me to re-think the order in which I present the frames dealing with elapsed time. Perhaps I will share that (revised) small section of the presentation with you, later...