The Age of the Universe: One Reality Viewed from Two Different Perspectives By Gerald Schroeder #Can the universe be young and old simultaneously? For centuries, science and theology have been locked in an ideological battle as to the ultimate source of truth. And basic to this standoff is the question of the age of our universe. Is it an old universe with a history containing fossils of dinosaurs and cavemen, or young with just a few days passing between the creation of the universe and the creation of Adam, the first human being? And if our universe is young, then the so-called ancient fossils were placed in the ground by God to test our faith in the truth of the Bible. The old age measure of our universe is based on research by astronomers and cosmologists. These scientists measure how much light waves from distant galaxies are stretched and lengthened due to the stretching of the space of the universe as those light waves travelled over eons of time to reach us here on earth. The data embedded in those stretched rays of light reveal that our magnificent universe was created at just under 14 billion years ago. The young age measure of our universe is based on data in the Bible. The opening chapter of Genesis states that six days passed between the creation of the universe and the creation of Adam. Then in Genesis, Chapter 4 we read that Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain murdered Abel and Cain was exiled by God. The achievements of Cain’s progeny are listed in chapter 4. Then in Chapter 5 we read that 130 years passed before Adam and Eve had their third child who is named Seth, and then 105 years passed before Seth fathered his first child. This pattern of stating the time spans between births is continued with no break until Joseph is sold as a slave into Egypt (Genesis 37:2, 28, 36). We add all those ages plus the years to their exodus from Egyptian slavery and their entering the Promised Land and then their exile from that Land. With the conclusion of the Hebrew Bible we add the ages of the kings, queens, presidents etc. that followed, Summing all those data we reach an age for the universe of a bit less than 6000 years. There is a crucial difference between the information given in the Bible about of the progeny of Cain and the progeny of Seth. This difference is that although the accomplishments of Cain’s progeny are listed, no ages are given for Cain’s progeny but detailed age data are given for Seth’s. This difference in the age data is the hint that the Bible wants us to develop a calendar. It is through Seth that we reach Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the lineage that becomes the Israelite nation. The family line of Cain ends in Chapter 4, so it is irrelevant to an on-going calendar. Age data for Cain’s line would be superfluous if we are to build a calendar and there are no superfluous data in the Bible. This is the clue that the Torah wants us to make a calendar: the Torah tells us all the age data that can contribute to the calculation of a biblical calendar and omits age data (i.e., Cain’s) that would be irrelevant to such a calendar. If no age data were given in the Bible for any of the persons, there would be no theological /scientific controversy today over the age of our magnificent universe. Since the data are given, there must be a reason and a resolution that is faithful to these two sources of wisdom – the ancient words of Torah and the modern discoveries of science, especially since the Author for the Torah is also the Creator of nature. Is it possible that the six days of Genesis are also the 14 billion years of cosmology, even as the six days of Genesis are 24 hours each and the 14 billion of years embrace all our cosmic history without bending either the words of the Torah or the discoveries in science? We must keep in mind that the major commentators on the words of the Torah, Rashi (ca. 1090) and Nahmonides (ca. 1250), stated explicitly that the six days of Genesis are 24 hours each (Rashi commentary on Talmud Hagigah 12A; Nahmonides commentary on Gen. 1:3). Therefore, an explanation of saying that the days of Genesis One were actually long periods of time could be construed as bending the Bible to match the science. They may have made these comments since the sun is not mentioned in the Bible until fourth day of Genesis. The key to the resolution of this seeming conflict is the change in perspective of viewing time. Recall that in Psalm 90:4, we read: “For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.” In this one verse we read about three perspectives of time: 1000 years, a day and a watch in the night. In our universe, perspective is everything when determining the apparent passage of time. Nahmonides insightful viewpoint on the days of Genesis is so direct that it is hard to belie ve that we have missed it so often. First, we must recall that the biblical New Year, Rosh Hashanah, marks the creation of Adam, not the creation of the universe. The six days of Genesis form a separate calendar and stand alone. Therefore, they are described in a unique way. The recurring phrase “and there was evening and there was morning” is unique to Genesis chapter one, the “creation” chapter. At the end of each Genesis day, the day is numbered: day one; second day; third day; fourth day…. Nahmonides asked almost 800 years ago, long before theologians were worried about ancient fossils of cavemen and dinosaurs, why does the form of the day number change from absolute, “one”, to comparative, second, third…? His answer is brilliant. The Torah writes “day one” on that first day because there was not yet a second day. And to write "first", it must be comparative to a second (commentary on Genesis 1:5). We see this in the naming of the world wars. The “great war” (world war one) only became the “first world war” when the 2nd started. The biblical perspective of time for the six days of Genesis is from day one, looking forward. If that perspective were from Sinai looking back, the Torah would have written a “first day” since by Sinai that had been over 890,000 “second” days! We look back in time and measure 14 billion years of cosmic history since the big bang creation of our universe. How would those years be measured from the Bible’s perspective of looking forward from the beginning? This is a totally non- human view of time. The amazing reality of time in our magnificent universe is that the perspective of the time for a series of events compresses as we project that perspective back in time, and it compresses, contracts, gets shorter, exactly as the “size” of the universe compresses as we go back in time. Professor Peebles in his book, Principles of Physical Cosmology, states this perfectly but in technical terms: “The standard interpretation of the redshift (the amount a light wave has been stretched as it travelled to us from a distant place in the universe) as an effect of the expansion of the universe predicts that the same redshift factor applies to observed rates of occurrence of distant events . even when the epoch is so early the redshift cannot be observed in detected radiation.” If we can calculate the magnitude of the expansion of the universe from the start of the biblical calendar’s six days to now, we can calculate how the 14 billion years (dinosaurs and all the rest) would appear from the perspective of the Bible. The key word here is perspective. We are calculating the age of the universe from two vastly different perspectives: the Bible’s perspective looking forward from the beginning when the universe was vastly smaller than now; our perspective looking back with the universe being vastly larger than in the era near the creation. They are two views of one reality. Again, it is Nahmonides who leads the way. He tells us that time was created at the creation (a brilliant insight mirrored by modern scientific concepts) but that time only “grabs hold” when matter forms (commentary Genesis 1:4,5), and that is scientifically true. Energy, light beams, are outside of time; they do not measure time. If an ethereal weightless you travelled on a light beam from the sun to the earth, your watch would record zero time. But if I could watch that light beam as it travelled, I would measure that about 8 minutes and a few seconds passed in that identical journey from sun to earth. Two true perspectives of one event. The first stable matter that formed from the energy of the big bang creation that “ages,” that experiences the passage of time, was protons, the subatomic particles that produce much of the mass of an atom and are theorized to be the product of the decay of neutrons into electrons and protons (free neutrons decay with a half-life of about 10 minutes but are stable when they are within the nucleus of an atom). The Bible views time looking forward into the expanding space of the universe from the moment of the formation of protons, a moment that was a tiny fraction of a second following the big bang creation of the universe, when the universe was vastly smaller than it is today.