The universe began as an infinitesimal speck smaller than the period at that the end of this sentence. This speck did not exist in a vacuum, because a vacuum is space. The speck by itself was physically all that existed. It harbored all the energy of the universe. There was a blast unlike anything we can comprehend. The universe expanded outward, and as it did so, the energy within it congealed, coalesced, and condensed into matter. (Einstein proved that energy can become matter.) Once the energy turned into matter, time grabbed ahold and the clock began.
When God tells Moses the story of creation, He is looking forward from the beginning. He is not looking backward from Sinai. God is looking forward from the beginning. From this vantage point, God tells Moses in six days the universe is created. So accordingly, Moses writes in the Torah that God created the universe in six days.
We have an issue now, because modern cosmologists are confident that the universe is billions of years old. They will tell you with certainty, “The universe is billions of years old.” However, there’s another half of the sentence that goes unsaid, because it goes without saying for everyone in their profession. The full statement is, “The universe is billions of years old as seen from the space-time coordinates we exist in.” And it’s this second-half that holds the key! It makes all the difference, because the Torah looks forward in time from very different space-time coordinates––from the beginning, when the universe was small. But since that time, the universe has expanded outward via a stretching of the fabric of space. The stretching of space radically changes the perception of time. This is Einstein’s understanding of relativity.
To illustrate this idea, let’s say we time-travel back billions and billions of years ago. We reach a place somewhere in the universe that is close to the beginning of time. We’ve taken with us a special laser that can send pulses of light forward in time. We hold up the laser and send a pulse of light once every second. These beams of light fly off like segmented lines, each one separated by a second in time. Now our friend––who remained in the present moment of 2016 AD––has a huge satellite dish that’s ready to detect our signal coming from the beginning of time. Suddenly, his dish picks up the first pulse of light. Our friend is ecstatic! Catching his breath, he waits for the next one. Does the next one come in one second? No! Not at all. In fact, our friend may have to wait millions of years before he receives the next pulse of light.
The reason for this is because of what separates us from our friend. While those pulses of light journey through space over time, the universe expands. Space itself stretches. The space between each beam stretches, so the beams get further and further and further apart. To us, what is a second’s worth of space between each beam is perceived by our friend in the distant future as a gap spanning millions of years.
You see, scientists look at time going backward, and they see billions and billions of years. God looks at time from the beginning going forward, so He tells Moses six days. Neither are incorrect. And here’s something amazing: according to Dr. Schroeder, we now have the data to know the relationship between the view of time at the beginning relative to the view of time today. It’s been quantified. The general relationship between the view of time then to the view the time now is X times a million million (1,000,000,000,000x). To be clear, let’s return to our illustration: if our view from the beginning looking forward observed a one second gap between each pulse of light, our friend in 2016 would observe a pulse of light once every million million seconds. This measurement accounts for the stretching of space. It’s the effect of the expansion of the universe.
So the Torah says the creation of the universe took place in 6 days. The question becomes, how would we today perceive those 6 days? Well, taking into account the stretching of space, we would observe them as 6 million million days. And you can do the math: 6,000,000,000,000 divided by 365 comes out to 16.4 billion years! Essentially the age of the universe estimated by today’s scientific community.
So is the earth thousands of years young? Or is the earth billions of years old? The answer is yes! It just depends on which direction you’re looking.
(Dr. Schroeder’s book, The Science of God, takes you by the hand and walks you through the math of these calculations. I recommend listening to his hour long lecture on this subject, via simpletoremember.com. The lecture is one of their top audio teachings. Also, someone posted the lecture to Youtube and broke it down into five parts with added video; for that, click here. In Part 5 (the end of his lecture), he provides additional information I have not included. I should mention that in the lecture, he builds the case slowly, whereas I have distilled the subject to its core essence. I urge you to hear the whole lesson.)
