The Age of the Universe

As Part II of our series on God and Science, we pick up where we left off last week. We explained the correlation between the Big Bang theory and the creation story from Genesis. But what happened after that? If Scientists today measure the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years old and the age of the world at 4.6 billion, while Torah measures it at 5,773 years old, how can we possibly bridge this tremendous gap? And how could the greatest of scientists and philosophers also believe in a Creator? To name a few: Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Kant, Pasteur. There are many ways suggested by scientists & intellectuals to resolve the apparent contradiction, but we will look at one.

We will not focus on the fact that the effort to extrapolate backward in time to measure the age of the universe is presumptuous and unsubstantiated, since we're assuming the conditions and rate of processes we observe today have been consistent in the past millions of years. At the first moments of existence, the conditions of extreme pressure and incredibly high temperatures incomparable to anything today make it very hard for us to assume the chemical, geological, physical and cosmological were the same. Add to that Einstein's general theory of relativity, that time is relative and depends on the speed of the system in which it is measured, it becomes even more difficult to extrapolate.

LET'S disregard all of that for now and work on the assumption that the world and universe are billions of years old. This does not have to contradict whatsoever with the biblical account. In the beginning of the book of Genesis, on day 6 of creation, Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden of Eden, asked to follow just one rule: Don't eat from that tree. But let's back up a second here. Adam is only a few hours old. How can he possibly be ready to understand this directive? He's like a baby! And how is there fruit on a tree in the first place? The trees and creation at large were created just days beforehand, no time for edible fruit to grow. We have no choice but to say that everything was created ready for use. If Adam sliced open the tree, he would find rings dating it way back.The Talmud teaches that even Adam himself was created "ready-made", with the body and intellectual and psychological abilities of a healthy 20 year old. Genesis describes 4 large rivers flowing in the garden. Taking into account the rate at which a river is carved out (a few centimeters a year), rivers are sometimes dated at millions of years old!

All of the phenomena observed today in the world and universe at large can be explained with this same principle, that they were created with an advanced physical age, even though its historical age is only the age implied in the Torah. Why God did it this way, can perhaps be answered by the fact that the world had to be ready for man's use immediately, to affect and uplift the physical, to live among oxygen providing trees and rivers to travel on.

Let us appreciate the world we live in, as Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz (1640-1716) said: "We live in the best of all possible worlds. It must be the best possible because it was created by a perfect God." And as Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) said: "The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator." There is no contradiction.

Shabbat Shalom!

-Rabbi Daniel