I spent the last 21 years of my
working life as an academic, consequently,
I have acquired what some religious purists would call ‘the disease of
scholarship’ which is sure to ruin a good story. They call it a disease because
they believe that scholarship which demands rigorous research and hard logical
thinking is anathema to a sincere, innocent belief and faith in Jesus Christ. It is true that my faith and belief in Jesus
Christ is not innocent but neither is it sightless. I’m a hardened believer
tempered by the fires of doubt and scoured by sinful malfeasance but I am,
nevertheless, a true believer, more as a result of the disease of scholarship than
in spite of it.
I do not harbour blind faith nor do I wish it to be the cause célèbre of any
religious pursuit. To my mind there are only two kinds of faith; blind
faith and enlightened faith. Blind faith
is precarious baggage in which to trust that one’s soul will be safe. Too often such baggage is shipped to
destinations undiscoverable and unrecoverable.
The bookstores are awash with
works by unrepentant atheists anxious to tell their story of how they were once proud pursuers of
religion but now light their own way, albeit ever so dimly.
They demonstrate that blind
faith is often vulnerable and transient whereas enlightened faith which rests
on the cornerstone of research and logic is everlasting. If you don’t ask the question you will never
have the answer and if you never have the answer you are sightless. I have read a number of books by atheists
attempting to convince the reader that they have awakened from the trap of
religion and now know there is no actual meaning to life and its purpose is a
quest undertaken alone to a hollow end.
We must leave them to their earthly deserts for they have their reward.
I am aware that some of you do
not wish to indulge in research and hard thinking. Such thinking is painful; it hurts and while
you may have niggling suspicions that some parts of the bible are too fanciful
to be true you regulate them to that compartment in your brain labeled ‘things best left unspoken’. Like some of you I have niggling suspicions
about the Bible; God’s word, but I am not
content to let them sneak away to some dark corner of my brain. I want to know that what I am reading is
literally true. How can I believe that
it took only six days to create the heavens and earth and yet there is powerful
mounting empirical evidence that the earth is billions of years old? How do I accommodate the fact that from Adam
to this day only 5700 years (by generational count) have passed as well as the
six days of creation? Should I, as some hard-hearted creationists have done, merely
dismiss the brilliant minds of our Palaeontologist, Archaeologists, Astronomers,
Chemists, Physicists and Cosmologists as simply wrong? Not on your life. “Often, it is not realized that gaining an
accurate understanding of the Bible is an endeavor
that can be as demanding as the research of science.” (Schroeder, 2011)
Creationists have a tendency to
conjure up a number of straw houses to demolish when attempting to prove
scientists wrong. Their favored argument begins: “Evolutionists say…….”. These so-called evolutionists are nameless so
it is not hard to disprove what they are reputed to have said, especially if
they misrepresent a well-known axiom of science. No doubt some of the faithful believe
creationists have permanently resolved the issue while the less susceptible
recognize the fishy odour of a red
herring.
As the title of this post points
out my struggle is with the language of the Bible
and as it is claimed to be ‘inspired’ I remind myself to tread carefully but
determinedly. I think it is clear to
most Bible readers that their most
cherished book has suffered from a great deal of editorial tinkering from its
first scriptural presentation sometime in the 7th century BCE. Nevertheless,
it is how the Jewish peoples understood the bible that must be first counted
when attempting to come to terms with the first five books of the Old
Testament. If we take the bible literally then we are obliged to take the
ancient Hebrew Bible literally. I acknowledge right away that I cannot read
Hebrew so I must place my trust in those scholars who can. Surprisingly many scholars of different ages are quite often on the same
page when unpacking the meaning of significant passages from the Torah.
The level of literate to
non-literate peoples in ancient Jewish societies progressively improved as a result of the writing down of God’s word. Reading aloud from the Torah was an important
part of Jewish education. Nevertheless, a large part of the Jewish
population was comfortably content to let
priests, prophets, and elders of the
temple carry the weight of reading and writing.
Oral transmission was still the preferred method of instilling God’s
instruction into the minds of the populace and gossip was as prevalent among
the ancients as it is today. After all, word-of-mouth had been the primary
means of communication for over two thousand years before writing was
introduced, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
To the point,
we must continually remind ourselves that while the Bible was written for all of us to gain wisdom and solace to enrich our worship it was not
written to all of us. (Walton, 2010) It was written to
a special people who had ingrained in their psyche thousands of years of myths,
superstitions and firmly held primitive beliefs about the nature of their
world. Many of these myths and
superstitions they shared with neighbouring
societies who were sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile. Most believed that the earth was flat and the
sky was a solid dome. "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and
its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a
canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.” ( NIV, Isaiah 40:22)
They had no inkling about a
solar system or a universe and were quite prepared to accept that the sun, moon,
and stars were lights attached to the sky,
orchestrated by the creator. Jews were
the poor cousins of Mid-Eastern religious thinking peoples. They were urged to believe they only needed
one God whereas their disbelieving neighbours
could boast of a houseful of gods; one for every occasion.
Convincing the ancient Israel
people that the sky was a dome was not difficult. Everyone could see where the dome ended at
the horizon and after all God told them it was so: And God said
“Let there be a dome in the midst of the
waters and let it separate the waters from the waters”.(NRSV)
A moment’s reflection will give
us understanding why an ‘inspired’ author should convey such a dubious message. He couldn’t very well say ‘See here, your
eyes deceive you. The earth is actually
round like a ball and it is part of a solar system which is part of a galaxy,
of which there are many millions in the universe I have made.’ “Through the entire Bible, there is not a
single instance in which God revealed to Israel a science beyond their own
culture. No passage offers a scientific perspective that was not common to the Old
World science of antiquity” (Walton
2010)
The author had to give them something they could absorb and test with their own
eyes though they tended to elaborate his description a bit; they took it that
rain was the result of a body of water above the sky that periodically showered
the earth and who could blame them? “1: 6. And
God said, “Let there be a space within the water, and let it separate between
water and water.”(Ancient
Torah, Friedman 2012) The whole
exercise was designed to give the Israel peoples a means whereby they could grasp
the idea that their God was the one who orchestrated the movements of the sun,
moon, stars and the seasons.
From the first page of Genesis
it is an unspoken ‘given’ that God has made the universe which is why the Torah
reads: “1:
1 In
the beginning of God’s creating the skies and the earth 1: 2
when the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of
the deep, and God’s spirit was hovering on the face of the water.” (Friedman
2012)
Richard Friedman holds that this is his
literal translation and we can see that it is significantly different from the
usual English translations. Friedman points out: “This
point of grammar means that this verse does not mean “the earth was shapeless
and formless”— referring to the condition of the earth starting the instant
after it was created. This verse rather means that “the earth had been
shapeless and formless”— that is, it had already existed in this shapeless
condition prior to the creation. Creation of matter in the Torah is not out of
nothing (creatio ex nihilo), as many have
claimed. And the Torah is not claiming to be telling events from the beginning
of time.” (Friedman, 2012)
The author of Genesis is not
discussing the beginning of the universe.
For the ancient Jews, the term
‘creation’ was ripe with nuances that escape the understanding of 20th
century English readers. For example to instill order onto
chaos is to create. “Consequently, the
actual creative act is to assign something its functioning role in the ordered
system.” (Walton 2010) Friedman
makes a similar point. “In each case, creation is the act of separating a thing
from the rest of matter and then giving it a name.” (Friedman,
2012) This is what the ancients understood as
turning disorder into order. The earth,
sun, moon, and stars were in a mix of
chaos before God set it right in Genesis.
1: 1. In the beginning
of God’s creating the skies and the earth.
1: 2. When the earth had been shapeless and formless, and
darkness was on the face of the deep, and God’s spirit hovering on the face of
the water.
1: 3. God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
1: 4. And God saw the light that it was good, and God
separated between the light and the darkness.
1: 5. And God called
the light “day” and called the darkness “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning:
one day. (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
Day one and God straightens out
the mess preparing it for earthly habitation.
One day or Day one is a curious phrase.
If you will check your bible you will see 1:5 is described as ‘the first
day’ which several scholars agree is a misreading or mistranslation. One is a cardinal number which is absolute
whereas ‘first’ is ordinal implying a
list. For Gerald Schroeder this seeming
anomaly is important: “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.” (Schroeder, 2011) It is
also curious that it is described as a day at all for the sun which marks a day
was not set in place until 1:16 -17.
By turning to the ancient Hebrew
text we realize that we are at a different starting point from our English
language translations of the bible. We
are used to our bible starting with the making of the universe:
1:
1. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” (KJV) which
we were taught was the beginning of everything as
1: 1 “In the beginning, God created the universe” (ISV), but,
alas, this was not quite the case. The
Big Bang came several billion years earlier before congealing gases concocted
the earth which is some 4 to 6 billion years old. I know this will make some religious types a
bit anxious but there is a remedy for their distress. To find it I will have to try and unpack some
physics in layman’s terms remembering all the while I am not a physicist.
According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity when
an observer travels at speeds closer to the speed of light, the clocks
associated with the observer (even biological) slow down. If you could travel at the speed of light
your watch would stop and you would not grow old. Time for you would cease to exist. Actually,
Einstein’s idea is no longer a theory for it has been demonstrated in several
ways. It is a reality. Imagine yourself starting out from a planet
10 billion light-years away riding on a
light wave and heading for earth. Light travels
at 299,792.5 kilometers per second and it never changes. From your perspective,
you get here instantly and traveled zero distance in the process. From the perspective of something or someone on
earth 10 billion light years passed before you got here. As weird as it may sound this is how time
works in space. I have simplified this explanation
somewhat and I have assumed that everything in space is static which of course
it isn’t. I have left out a number of aspects that physicists
might hold to be
crucial if we were going to use this description as the basis for space travel
to the edge of the universe. In the
first place, we can never travel at the
speed of light. Only God has this prerogative.
Another important aspect I left out
from the above example is that space has undergone a continuous expansion as a
result of the Big Bang that occurred 15 billion years ago earth time[LT1] .
Space and time are two sides of the same coin. No space, no time and vice versa. As space expands time stretches. The distance between elements, and later
galaxies, widens. As God is eternal he
is outside space and time. Today most
scientist and most creationists accept that the Big Bang started everything. Unlike the authors of the Torah, young earth
enthusiasts presume that what the Bible
describes at the beginning of Genesis is the big bang but their calendar for the age of the earth does
not start until six days later. God did everything in six days so what’s the
problem? He created all the dinosaurs,
beasts of the land and sea and proto-humans
and then made Adam and Eve. It all
started with a Big Bang. Creationists
realize they have a problem with their time line
and they resolve it by arguing that dinosaurs, beasts of the land and sea and proto-humans all lived at the time of Adam and Eve
and all the bones that have been uncovered are at most only 5700 years old.
But God being God why did he take six days?
Could not God do everything in the blink of an eye? He could and he did but His blink of an eye
was our measurement of 15 billion years, no time at all from God’s perspective. “What was for me the most exciting discovery
in this search is that the duration and events of the billions of years that,
according to cosmologists, have followed the Big Bang and those events of the
first six days of Genesis are in fact one and the same. They are identical realities that have been described in vastly
different terms.” (Schroeder, 2011) While he was at it God also
created the laws physics. God knows we do not view things from His
perspective but He has given us time to know and understand Him. Time is a gift that ought not to be wasted.
But must we tweak the bible to
give us the understanding needed to accommodate Schroeder’s description of
events? He claims we need not and we should not. “The Bible gives God six days to form earth
and mankind from the material produced at the creation. Current cosmology
claims, it even proves, that nature took some 15 billion years to accomplish
the same thing. Which understanding is correct? Both are. Literally. With no allegorical
modifications of these two simultaneous, yet different, time periods.” (Schroeder, 2011)
The age of the universe can be
arrived at using several different methods, each producing different ages
measuring from the Big Bang to today.
There is a great deal of uncertainty for there are many variables to
account for and they are not all reliable.
The available data produces an age of the universe somewhere between 10
and 20 billion years. So that he can
stay somewhere in the ball park,
Schroeder splits the difference and uses the value of 15 billion years. (Schroeder G. , 2009)
The stretching of time I spoke
of earlier is called dilation. Einstein
showed us that when dealing with long distances time is relative between the observer and the observed. Two atomic clocks are set to the exact same
time and one flies around the world, the other stays in the lab. At the end of
the flight, the air borne clock has run slower than its mate, an earthly
demonstration of the imagined example I gave you previously. Time
between the observer and the observed is different for each. This should be no surprise for the Bible relates a similar example; “For a thousand years in thy [God’s] sight
are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”(Psa 90:
4 KJV)
For God, today becomes
yesterday with one tick of the clock but for us
it represents a thousand years. But how
many ticks make a day and how do we marry 15 billion years to six days? Also,
while the observed is existence in the form of space, time and matter the observer
has yet to arrive on the scene. At this stage, the human mind is merely a
hypothesis. It should read if we could observe what was taking place
this is what might be the case.
We must keep in mind that space is expanding and time is stretching
and this is necessary for God’s work. The
expansion began almost from the millisecond the explosion spewed out the
quantum elements and later the gases that were to form the matter of the
universe. We have to remember that this unimaginably, super hot quantum soup was not in space, it was space. Space did not
exist prior to its arrival. Space inflated a hundred times its initial size in
a fraction of a second as determined by physicists.
We might ask what existed before
space happened? We cannot, like some well-known
atheists, say ‘nothing’ for by definition nothingness does not exist. Existence
is always something. It is a
contradiction in terms to try to show ‘nothing’ even in physics. Schroeder points out: “There are aspects of
quantum physics (those are the physical laws that guide the minute subatomic
world) that allow the creation of something from nothing. Such a concept seems
to violate even a rudimentary understanding of how the world works. But it does
not. At the subatomic level, something can come from nothing.” (Schroeder G. , 2009) But of course, this is not correct. What they mean by ‘nothing’ is that they
don’t know where this ‘something’ comes from.
They have no means of describing it.
There is only one answer to the
question ‘what existed before space happened’?
If we believe in the Big Bang we
are obliged to believe in God[LT1] [LT2] for God being eternal He encompasses
space and time. If there were no one about other than God to contemplate this
miracle it had to end as soon as it had begun.
God tells us this. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” (Rev: 21: 6 KJV) God doesn’t waste time.
He tells us that it is all over and He is just waiting for us to catch
up.
“46:9Remember the
former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there
is none like me, 46:10 Declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times
the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do
all my pleasure: (Isa: KJV)
Everything for God is instant, we are the slowpokes. As far as God is concerned the End of Days
has already happened but our earth clocks need time to register the event. God doesn’t make prophecies He makes promises
because He knows what has already happened.
Eternal existence as God means
there is no future or past for there is no such a thing as time. Everything is now!
Anything that travels less than
the speed of light we can measure. Such
is the case with the expansion of the universe.
Individuals may make mistakes but the method works. From an Ancient Hebrew perspective it took 8
billion years (give or take a billion) for this photon/neutrino hot soup to
cool and congeal into matter where the Bible could say:
“1:1 In the
beginning of God’s creating the skies and the earth 1: 2 when the earth had
been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and
God’s spirit was hovering on the face of the water.” (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
Why did Hebrew authors choose a time 8
billion years after the beginning to begin Genesis? They could not have known what is now known
about the cosmos. Schroeder believes
they did and he bases his belief on the writings of Nachmanides. “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.” (Schroeder, 2011)
Pretty impressive for a 13th century Hebrew scholar who had
no training in physics. Time grabs hold
when there is something to hold onto and that is the emergence of matter; earth,
a place to stand by which to measure time.
While
8 billion years was zilch time for God, for the authors of the bible it was a
long wait. Nevertheless, a beginning was taking place and the Bible's authors inspired and guided by God’s
Spirit looked backward in time to report
the event. “1: 3. God said, “Let there be light.” And there
was light.” Cosmologists deduce that in this period
galaxies would be colliding and stars would be exploding and evolving anew which
would have imparted immeasurable quantities of light. The 12th Century Hebrew scholar Maimonides
describes God as being a destroyer of worlds as a prelude to the creation of
the earth. (Schroeder,
2011) But Adam and Eve
don’t show up for another six or seven billion years Hebrew time.
1: 4. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God
separated between the light and the darkness.
1: 5. And God called
the light “day” and called the darkness “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning:
one day.
(Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
Earlier I questioned the calling
of this event ‘one day’ as no sun had been put in place. Schroeder clears up this seeming anomaly by
referring back to the ancient Hebrew text and the comments of a 13th
century Hebrew scholar. “Nachmanides
says the text uses the words "Vayehi Erev" ― but it doesn't mean
"there was evening." He explains that the Hebrew letters Ayin, Resh,
Bet ― the root of "erev" ― is
chaos. Mixture, disorder. That's why evening is called "erev", because when the sun goes down, vision becomes blurry.
The literal meaning is "there was disorder."
The Torah's word for "morning" ― "boker" ― is the absolute opposite. When the sun rises, the
world becomes "bikoret",
orderly, able to be discerned. That's why the sun needn't be mentioned until
Day Four. Because from erev to boker is a flow from disorder to order, from
chaos to cosmos.” (Schroeder, 2011)
Calling it one
day is likening it to the days that follow when the sun is set in place. The Bible text I quoted was translated by Richard
Friedman and Schroeder is using his own translation and referring to Nachmanides
and Maimonides but it is not at all clear that they would disagree. We have to remember that for ancient Jewish
peoples there were no street lights and candles and oil lamps if used in their nomadic tents, were used sparingly. The sense of disorder and order seems apt for
the occasion.
As space
expanded time stretched out. The result
is that space-time runs slower. “Each
wave of light is a tick of the cosmic clock. The frequencies of light waves are
the timepieces of the universe. Waves of sunlight reaching Earth are stretched
longer by 2.12 parts in a million relative to similar light waves generated on
Earth. That stretching of the light waves means that the rate at which they
reach us is lowered by 2.12 parts per million. This lowering of the light wave
frequency is the measure of the slowing of time.” (Schroeder G. , 2009)
Schroeder tells us the
Hebrew calendar doesn’t start until Adam is given a life and a soul (Animals
live but have no soul.). Jewish religion celebrates this as the birth
of the world with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Each time space expands it doubles in size
and time is slowed by one half of the previous time. As we can estimate how old the universe was
when God began his work and we have a good idea how old the earth is today and
we can make an educated guess as to how things developed day by day. “Based on
the very old zircon rock from Australia we know that the Earth is at least
4.374 billion years old. But it could certainly be older. Scientists tend
to agree that our little planet is around 4.54 billion years old - give or take
a few hundred million.” (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-do-we-know-earth-46-billion-years-old-
180951483/#TR7FmtYToHIezoQz.99)
Schroeder
uses his knowledge of physics to work out the stages of development that are
described in the bible.
“The calculations
come out to be as follows:
• The first of the Biblical days
lasted 24 hours, viewed from the “beginning of time perspective.” But the
duration from our perspective was 8 billion years.”
1: 1. In the beginning of
God’s creating the skies and the earth.
1: 2. When the earth had been shapeless
and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God’s spirit
hovering on the face of the water.
1: 3. God said, “Let there be
light.” And there was light. 1: 4. And God saw the light, that it was
good, and God separated between the light and the darkness.
1: 5. And God called the light “day” and called the
darkness “night.” And there was evening,
and there was morning: one day. (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
“•
The second day, from the Bible’s perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective, it lasted half of the previous
day, 4 billion years.”
1: 6.And God said, “Let there be a space within
the water, and let it separate between water and water. 1: 7.
And God made the space, and it separated between the water that was
under the space and the water that was above the space. And it was so. 1: 8. And God called the space “skies.”
And there was evening, and there was morning: a second day. (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
“• The third 24 hour day also included half of the previous
day, 2 billion years.”
1: 9. And God said, “Let the waters be concentrated under the skies into one
place, and let the land appear.” And it was so.
1: 10. And God called the land “earth,” and
called the concentration of the waters “seas.” And God saw that it was good. 1: 11. And God said, “Let the earth
generate plants, vegetation that produces seed, fruit trees, each making fruit
of its own kind, which has its seed in it, on the earth. And it was so: 1: 12. The earth brought out plants,
vegetation that produces seeds of its own kind, and trees that make fruit that
each has seeds of its own kind in it. And God saw that it was good. 1:
13. And there was evening, and there was morning: a third day. (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
• The fourth 24 hour day ― one billion years.
1:
14. And God said, “Let there be lights in the space of the skies to
distinguish between the day and the night, and they will be for signs and for
appointed times and for days and years. 1: 15. And they will be for lights in the space of the skies to
shed light on the earth.” And it was so. 1:16.
And God made the two big lights— the bigger light for the regulation of
the day and the smaller light for the regulation of the night— and the
stars. 1:17. And God set them in the space of the skies to
shed light on the earth 1:
18. and to regulate the day and the night and to distinguish between the
light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 1: 19. And there was
evening, and there was morning: a fourth day. (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
“• The fifth 24 hour day ― one-half billion years.”
20 And God said, “Let the water swarm with a
swarm of living beings, and let birds fly over the earth on the face of the
space of the skies.” 21 And God created the big sea serpents and all
the living beings that creep, with which the water swarmed, by their kinds, and
every winged bird by its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful
and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply in the
earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning,
a fifth day. (Ancient
Torah, Friedman, 2012)
“• The sixth 24 hour day ― one-quarter billion years.”
24And God said, “Let the earth bring out living beings by their
kind, domestic animal and creeping thing and wild animals of the earth by their
kind.” And it was so.
25 And God made the wild
animals of the earth by their kind and the domestic animals by their kind and
every creeping thing of the ground by their kind. And God saw that it was good. 26
And God said, “Let us make a human, in our image, according to our
likeness, and let them dominate the fish of the sea and the birds of the skies
and the domestic animals and all the earth and all the creeping things that
creep on the earth.” 27 And God
created the human in His image. He created it in the image of God; He created
them male and female. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and dominate the fish of the sea and
the birds of the skies and every animal that creeps on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Here, I have placed all the vegetation that
produces seed that is on the face of all the earth for you and every tree,
which has in it the fruit of a tree producing seed. It will be food for you
30 And for all the wild
animals of the earth and for all the birds of the skies and for all the
creeping things on the earth, everything in which there is a living being:
every plant of vegetation, for food.” And it was so.
31 And God saw everything that He had made, and, here, it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Ancient Torah, Friedman, 2012)
“When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of
the universe at 15
and 3/4 billion years. The same as modern
cosmology. Is it by chance?” (Schroeder, 2011)
2:2 And in the seventh day God finished His
work that He had done and ceased in the seventh day from all His work that He
had done. (Ancient Torah,
Friedman, 2012)
Two hundred
and fifty million years would surely be long enough to cater for all the
archaeological bones and artifacts that
have been dug up in the last two centuries.
The oldest dinosaur bones are aged between 10 and fifteen million
years. It may have been that Adam was
created in the dying hours of the sixth day.
He is not mentioned until Genesis 2:7, and no specific chronology of
events are mentioned in the bible. Some
hold that Genesis 1 is merely a ‘skeleton outline of creation’
(no pun intended.) whereas Genesis 2
contains the detail, the meat to fill out the story. It is not at all clear that this is a correct
position to hold but for this writer that’s another paper. I think the onus is on those who disbelieve
Schroeder’s argument to contact him through his website. He is only too willing to show you his
calculations.
If anything this exercise has
demonstrated that referring to the oldest original text available gives us an
understanding of the bible that circumvents the errors of ancient copyists and
modern translators. Understanding that the
bible doesn’t begin with the beginning of the universe gives us a different
place on which to stand when weighing up the seeming historical discrepancies
in God’s word. It provides a text we can
believe is literally true.
###
References
Archer Jr., Gleason L.. New International
Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan's Understand the Bible Reference
Series). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
The
Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible (Old and New Testament) Fair Price Classics. Kindle Edition.
Friedman, Richard Elliott.
Commentary on the Torah, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition 2012.
THE NEW OXFORD ANNOTATED BIBLE
New Revised Standard Version
Coogan, Michael D.; Brettler, Marc Z.; Perkins, Pheme; Newsom, Carol A..
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Schroeder,
Gerald L.. The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom
. Free Press. Kindle Edition 2009.
Schroeder, Gerald. Genesis and
the Big Bang Theory: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science And The
Bible. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition 2011.
Schroeder, Gerald L.. God According to God: A Physicist
Proves We've Been Wrong About God All Along. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. The Authorized King James Version of the
Holy Bible (Old and New Testament) . Fair
Price Classics. Kindle Edition.
Walton, John H, Ancient and Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament.
Baker Academic, Kindle Edition. 2013
Walton, John H.. The Lost World
of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate . InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition 2010.
(http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-do-we-know-earth-46-billion-years-old-
180951483/#TR7FmtYToHIezoQz.99
Dr Gerald Schroeder
earned his BSc, MSc and double-Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics and Earth and Planetary
Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught physics
for seven years. While a consultant at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission he participated
in the formulation of nuclear non-proliferation treaties with the former Soviet
Union and witnessed the testing of six atomic bombs. He has served as a
consultant to various governments worldwide and has been published in Time,
Newsweek and Scientific American. He is the author of Genesis and the Big Bang, the discovery of harmony between modern science and
the Bible, now in seven languages. He is also the author of The Science of God and The Hidden Face of God. Dr. Schroeder is currently a lecturer at Aish
Jerusalem for the Discovery Seminar, Essentials program, Jerusalem Fellowships,
and Executive Learning Center ― focusing on the topics of evolution, cosmology,
and age of the universe.
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