A major point of contention between Bible literalist and scientists is the age of the Earth.Most scientist place the Earth's age at around Four and a half billion years old.Most Bible scholars place the age at around six thousands years.
Scientists base their time line on the radiometric dating of rocks.
Bibliophiles base their own time line on the six days that the book of Genesis says it took God to create Earth,and then adding the lifetime years from Adam until the present.
Hmmm...4.6 billion vs 6,000 years.That is quite a DIFFERENCE.How can we reconcile these two numbers.You can't.If you are a hard core scientist or hard core Bible literalists-neither the twain shall meet.
But,just for fun,lets take a liberal tweak at these numbers.Lets see just how close we can get them...
First,the scientist's number can be can be legitimately reduced to 3.6 billion years because,to this point,this is the date of the oldest rock ever found that has so far been tested.Just for the shits and giggles,lets subtract the date down to a more reasonable 3 billion years....say for,ah,testing error.
O-K,that seems like a number we can work with.
Now,comes the real fudging.The"Biblical~fudging." The reason I am going to fudge with the Bible numbers the most,is because I suspect the Bible numbers of having been used the most incorrectly.I am going to attempt to show that MY interpretation of these numbers is the more accurate reflection of the true age of our planet.
First off,nowhere in the book of Genesis,does either of the two creation theories say that God created on consecutive days.But,The idea of God resting on the Sabbath,strongly makes us assume that He did.This is probably the best argument for the consecutive days theory.But it could be wrong.It could also be argued that these moments were six big moments of creation and God has yet to create a seventh momentous event.Maybe,because this is where He meant to stop.
If this is the case,my job is already done.Science and religion are,or could be in perfect agreement.And this theory does hold some water.Could Night and day be created one day and all of the oceans and dry land the next?Yes,but could all life be formed the following day?With God all things are possible,but stages of life,and different lifeforms develop at different rates-have different gestation periods.Sure God could have made all of this life appear in one day...But I ask,why?What would have been his hurry?Why couldn't life have progressed at it's normal rate-like it does today...what was to be gained?
In fact,according to Genesis,Adam was created before most of all of the rest of world.If this all happened in six days-good for Adam.The question I have to ask,however,is what was time to Adam?Adam(and Eve) did not realize their mortality until they were booted out of Eden.How would an immortal being measure time?I think that the 930 age years of Adam did not-could not-have started until his exile(and though 930 years seems like a terribly long time to you and me,it would seem a terribly short period to one whom only knew of forever before hand).
How long were Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden,anyway?The good book doesn't really say.One million years?Two million years?A week?A month?Twice now we could get the figures to jive-if we wanted to.But let's be more exact.
Since we are having fun,let us assume that we are talking six consecutive days.But are we talking about God time or people time?Let's use God time.What is God time?The Bible gives us a few clues.There are various God time to people time ratios in the Bible.For our purposes,let's keep the math simple.I will guage our lifetimes at a medium age of,say,60 years.Let's also say that our lifetimes are not the traditional blink of the eye,but the easier to use hour.Remenber this is just for fun.
If our life is as an hour to God,a God hour would be 60 of our years.Multiply that by 24,the hours of a day,and you get 1440 mankind years for a God day.Now,let's multipy by 365.We get 525,600 of our years.Finally,if we use the traditional Biblical 6,000 years for the age of Earth,we end up with 3,153,600,000.That is just over three billion years!
WoW!
Amazingly,through either the Biblical or scientific methods we have come up with almost the exact same numbers!What are the odds?See what fun fudging numbers can be?But what does this mean?On one hand,absolutely nothing.But on the other hand,this could mean that maybe,just maybe,science and religion can find some common ground,and in this common ground stop arguing over pointless and meaningless facts and start making our world a better place to live together.That should be all of our goals.
As always,Thanks for listening.
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