Genesis 1:1 declares, “God created.” We’re here to study the written words of God, so there is no need to spend time proving the existence of God. God is, or as He tells Moses later, He is the I AM. He always was, and Genesis says He created everything in six days. So our first question is, how long did that take?
Did creation happen billions of years ago or as soon as 6000 years ago? It doesn’t matter what your belief, all determinations are interpreted from the same thing, time. Or rather, our perception of time.
Our perception of time comes from three things, the sun, moon, and stars. Mainly, it’s the sun because we’ve divided a day into 24 hour periods based on one revolution of the earth. We use those days to determine weeks, months, and years. From that understanding of time comes the conclusion that the universe is either 6,000 years or billions of years old. The problem is that our conclusion is from the vantage point of being here on earth and not from a viewpoint somewhere else in the universe. Before I get to that, let me give an example of the perception of time.
When I turned five years old, it seemed like an eternity until my sixth birthday. Now that I’m in my fifties, it feels like my next birthday approaches rather quickly. At the age of five, I couldn’t even grasp how long a year was because I hadn’t been through too many, and I was too young to remember even the first few years. As I grow older and comprehend things better, the years seem to get shorter and shorter. My perception is exponentially greater than when I was five. Back then, I lived through the landing on the moon (4 months old), the Vietnam war, and only one presidential election. Now I’ve lived through two space shuttle disasters, 20 years of humans living in space on the ISS, the end of the cold war, American involvement in nine wars or more, thirteen presidential elections, and three Star Wars trilogies. (Why, Disney, why?)
The point is, my perception has changed. My birth seems so distant that I don’t even remember it, not that I did when I was five, but 50+ years seems so long ago. Yet in comparison to the events of history going back to Adam, it’s unfathomable. That’s why Ecclesiastes says that our lives are like a mist, here today and gone tomorrow. Our lives are a dot on the timeline of all things, so of course, looking at the days of creation in perspective is going to be something incomprehensible.
But perceptions of time still don’t answer the age of the universe. That’s because of individual bias. Perspectives can influence our perception of time. Here’s what I mean. The number one reason people believe the universe is billions of years old is that it takes billions of years for the light of distant stars to reach us. If the universe is only 6000 years old, then the light from those stars wouldn’t have reached us yet. The observable universe should only be as big as the stars less than 6000 light-years away. However, the secular world unknowingly has the answer to this riddle already, the Big Bang.
According to the evolutionary Big Bang model, the universe began at a single point and exploded outward. That means that the light from those stars expanded out from an origin, the same as our planet. The light from those stars would have been visible from the earth from the beginning. It wouldn’t have taken billions of years for the light to get here.
That’s a simplistic rendition of the Big Bang model because the stars and planets were “formed” from the Big Bang and didn’t just come out as planets and stars, but let’s compare that to what the Bible says.
Big Bang says an origin point exploded everything into being and spread it out to create the universe. Genesis 1 says that God created the heavens and the earth, but it was without form and void (1:1-2). (It says “unseen and unprepared” in the LXX). On day four, God created the stars (1:16). Isaiah 42:5 says that God created the heavens “and stretched them out.” Both positions are saying the same thing. Everything started as a void and came into being, and the heavens were stretched out from some point. If there’s agreement here, then the discrepancy in dating the universe comes from differing worldview perspectives. Young-earth creationists believe God’s word is trustworthy, and therefore creation was 6000 years ago. Old-earth creationists and atheists want to follow the “science” that says that observations of space suggest a longer “billions of years” period. However, science doesn’t say anything. Scientists do.
Remember that I said the problem is that our conclusion is from the vantage point of being here on earth and not from a viewpoint somewhere else in the universe. Our perception of time is from here on earth. Our perspective of the universe is from here on earth. Looking at our solar system, you can find that Mercury is the fastest moving planet and circles the sun in less than 88 days. Those are earth days. Why don’t we say that Mercury revolves around the sun in one year? Because it wouldn’t make sense to say that both Mercury and the earth take one year to go around the sun. Mercury moves faster around the sun than the earth. Thereby, our calculation of Mercury’s revolution is from our perception of time from our perspective on earth. And such is every calculation of time in the universe.
I just recently read an article about the disagreement about how to calculate the speed of light. I learned that the speed of light was a constant. But there’s been a disagreement for some time about how to calculate that speed. Others hold to the notion that the speed of light has changed from time to time. We also know that gravity can bend light and slow it down in the process. And heavier gravity can also slow time down. That’s a misnomer because if you were at a place with gravity that is heavier, time would move the same from your perception while appearing to slow down from the perspective of earth. What does all of this mean?
We believe the light from the distant stars is billions of light-years away. What if the gravity of the heavenly bodies has slowed time down from our perspective so that we perceive it to be billions of years? After all, yearly time is a construct that we have calculated from our planet revolving around our sun and not calculated by observing time from anywhere else in the universe. For instance, if we viewed time from Mercury with one revolution being one year, Earth would take 4.15 years to go around the sun. Divide that into one billion years for the age of the universe, and from the perspective of Mercury, the universe would only be 240,963,855 years old.
It’s all about our perspective and our perception of time here on Earth. God created everything in six days and stretched out the heavens so that it appears to be billions of years old.
I don’t think a young-earth view contradicts the “scientific” understanding of billions of years. I think it’s a misunderstanding of the perception of those billions of years. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions.