"The tragedy of common sense
it that it is not
very common."
(Albert Einstein)

"Politically correct Christianity
is tolerated but despised.
Full Gospel Christianity is
respected but persecuted."
(Unknown)

"If you marry the Zeitgeist
you will soon become widow."
(Goethe)

"To reach the source of a river
you must swim upstreams."
(Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)

"I note that all those,
who are positive to abortion
already are born."
(Ronald Reagan)

How old is the Universe?

A very common view among Christians, as well as non-Christians, is that the Bible clearly states that the universe is about 6,000 years old. Many opponents of Christianity believe that this constitutes a direct evidence that most of the Bible contains myths and fairy tales.

The first question one could ask oneself would be, from where does the figure 6,000 years originate? The answer is that the Bible contains seemingly rather complete genealogies, from the first man, i.e. Adam, right up to Jesus. In Genesis 11:10-12 we read, for example:

These is the account of Shem’s family line: Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father of Arphaxad: And after he became the father of Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters. When Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he became the father of Shelah: And after he became the father of Shelah, Arphaxad lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters.[1]

Based on these genealogies, which thus extend from Adam to Jesus, a simple calculation shows that Adam was created about 4,000 BC. Because Jesus probably was born a few years before the year 0, the universe must consequently be about 6,000 years old today. In the mid-1600s, the Archbishop James Ussher declared, that in this way he had come to the conclusion that the “exact” year of creation was 4004 BC. Based on Ussher’s calculations Lightfoot, a scientist in Cambridge, a hundred years later, concluded that Adam was created on 23 October 4004 BC at 9 am in the morning, Mesopotamian time. Because Adam was created on the sixth day, the universe should thus have been created five days earlier, i.e. on 18 October 4004 BC.

These and other similar calculations have attracted considerable ridicule from many different directions. To argue that the universe would be only 6,000 years old seems as absurd as claiming that the earth is flat, according to the backbiters. There is, however, one fundamental difference. We can through direct and repeatable observations prove that the earth is not flat. Regarding the age of the universe, it is not that simple. In the latter case it is a question of interpreting traces of the past (which often can be interpreted in many different ways, depending upon what model of the universe you base your analysis), which implies great uncertainties. We must not forget that in terms of historical sciences, as the theories regarding the origin of the Universe, the origin of life and the evolution of the different species, undoubtedly are, we study non-repeatable phenomena, where the certainties of the conclusions become smaller the more time that has passed since the phenomena in question occurred. We measure and observe the present, and based on this we speculate about the past.

Let me give you one example. Today we often read about so called dark matter. Observations indicate that there are much more gravitation in our universe than can be explained by the amount of matter we can observe. In some theories this is explained by postulating the existence of a new type of “matter”, so called dark matter. We do not know which particles constitute this dark matter (there are many candidates, one recently proposed is a new type of neutrino, so far unobserved). To account for the observed excess gravity one must in this model assume that more than 90 percent of the matter content of the universe is dark matter. However, there are also models of our universe, recently presented in different scientific journals, that do not postulate the existence of dark matter. They explain the observed excess gravity in other ways.

For a theory to be scientific, it must be free of contradictions (consistency) and correspond to observations and experiments (correspondence), i.e. fit the observed “facts”. Normally a certain phenomena can be explained by several different theories, which all fit observations and are free from contradictions. Science by itself can not guide us to which of these theories is the “true Jacob” (as Einstein once expressed it). Occam’s famous razor, according to which we shall always choose the simplest explanation, cannot help us here. Firstly, because it is not always easy, in an objective way, to decide which alternative is the simplest. Secondly, because philosophical principles (like Occam’s Razor) have nothing to do with absolute truth. There is not reason at all to believe that the simplest explanation (according to a certain person or the scientific community) always is the objective and ultimate true explanation. Reality does not bow to philosophical principles! “The tragedy of science is a beautiful hypothesis slain by ugly facts” someone once said. This could be reformulated into, “The tragedy of philosophy is a beautiful philosophical principle slain by ugly reality”.

Science is generally unable to offer any absolute proofs, and this is especially true when we study the past. Suppose, for example, that a person claims he created the universe 1 minute ago. You might object that this is impossible. — The existence of my and other persons’ childhood memories, photo albums etc definitely show that the universe must have existed far longer than one minute. Pyramids and other archeological findings, historical documents, as well as various scientific observations, indicate that the earth must be at least several thousand years old. — Well”, says the alleged creator, “but I made everything look old, with ruins of past civilizations etc, and every man was created with a complete set of memories from childhood etc engraved into his brain”. This creation scenario, absurd as it may seem, cannot be refuted either by logic or by scientific observation, as it is free from contradictions and in full accordance with facts and observations. That every sane person immediately dismisses the claim as nonsense, is not based on logic or scientific evidence, but simply on “common sense” and “gut feeling”. This example clearly demonstrates the limitations of logics and the scientific method when it comes to phenomena in the past. However improbable and incredible as it may seem, at least to our intellect, that the universe would be 6,000 years old, this option cannot be completely ruled out on logical or scientific grounds. That it cannot be excluded based on intellectual reasons, is on the other hand no evidence that the universe is actually 6,000 years old. But we must be aware of and admit the difficulties.

When Christians get mocked and ridiculed because of their opinions, there are basically two traps they can fall into:

1. For fear of being ridiculed you compromise with the Bible’s message, and deny large parts of it. Science and logic then overrules the faith.

2. Since Paul says that the Gospel is foolishness in the eyes of the world, it is considered normal, as Christian, to be spat on and ridiculed for everything you say. That is, just because people are laughing at the world being 6,000 years old, this must be true. Therefore, the sign that something is true, is when it’s ridiculed and scorned. In this alternative faith overrules science and logic.

The problem with the first variant is that sooner or later you lose your faith more or less completely. You will be forced to deny more and more in Scripture to be accepted by the non-believers. Moreover, you are being presented with an increasingly watered-down Christianity, that nobody is being helped by or wants. When it comes to the second trap, it’s one thing to defend your faith, even if you get mocked and criticized. A completely different thing, however, is defending your own imaginative concoctions. The risk is then that instead of being a “fool” for God, you make God a “fool” for you. Your own stupid fabrications make people laugh at the authors of the Scripture and even at God himself, when they really should be laughing at you (or me). There is also a temptation in this, which many Christians have fallen for throughout history — the idea that the more absurd things you believe in, the more spiritual you believe yourself to be. Such an attitude is in fact a form of arrogance and exclusivity, and totally unbiblical.

Already in his time, one of the Fathers of the early Church, Augustine, felt compelled to give the following comment about Christians, who confidently, without any deeper knowledge or understanding, spoke about “heaven and earth and the sizes, distances and movements of stellar objects etc, and the nature of animals and other things”:

For a Christian, it is both inappropriate and harmful to assert having Biblical authority to speak on these matters, and yet speak so foolishly, that the unbeliever has difficulty to keep himself from laughing when he hears how unreasonably wrong the Christian is. And the problem is not that the person will be laughed at for his own stupidity, but that the authors of the Bible will be suspected of having taught in this way. Hence they are assessed as ignorant and rejected by people outside of the Church. And these people, whose salvation we so deeply and sincerely wish for, will be lost.[2]

The above was already written about the year 400, but is just as relevant today. Here it is indeed important to carefully keep the balance. What Augustine is criticizing, is not that anybody is uncompromisingly defending the Christian message. Naturally, and at any price, we have to stick to what we believe is true. No, this is about defending an unbiblical tradition and presenting it as an indispensable part of the Christian message, yes even as a revelation from God. Historically, there have been many examples of this. We know from history, how the Catholic Church forced Galileo Galilei (together with Isaac Newton one of the most important founders of physics) to deny that the earth revolved around the sun, even though the earth actually does revolve around the sun! This so called geocentric worldview, according to which the earth is the center of the universe, and which at that point of time was part of the Catholic dogma, did not come from the Bible but from the ancient Greeks. In retrospect the Church tried to justify their position with disconnected Bible quotations, e.g. Psalm 93, which in verse 1 says, “the world is established, firm and secure”. The earth (world) is thus immobile (firm and secure), they reasoned. Psalm 93 is, however, not a scientific exposition but a hymn of praise to God, in which His power and majesty and immutability are elevated. To draw conclusions about the universe’s physical structure from a poetic love song to the Supreme is a blatant example of what Augustine a little further on in his book describes as “They do not even hesitate to quote it [the Bible] incorrectly according to what they consider will serve their purposes, and they talk a lot without knowing what they are talking about”. As a Christian, one must thus ask oneself what is biblical and what is originating from church tradition etc, before embracing a particular doctrine. It is certainly not only the materialists who have preconceptions.

To return to the problem of the age of the universe, we must examine whether the Bible really says unequivocally that the universe is 6,000 years old or if some Christian traditions and interpretations are claiming this, based on nothing more than doubtful interpretations of the Bible text. If the first alternative is true, then, as a Christian, you have to stick with it, otherwise you deny that the Bible is God’s revelation and should not call yourself a Christian.

Among today’s Bible-believing creationists there is a wide spectrum of opinions when it comes to the age of the Universe and other datings. Some believe that the universe is very old, many billions of years (I am one among those), while others say that its age is somewhere between 6,000 and 100,000 years old. Before we go any further into this, we can at least conclude that as an evolutionist you must believe in a very old universe and a very old earth. The lottery-related mechanisms of evolution require a long, long time to accomplish something (if they now really are able to accomplish what they are claiming to accomplish, i.e. to make single cell organisms evolve into human beings with ability to compose symphonies, create advanced mathematical theories and travel to the Moon). If one could prove that the Earth and the universe are maximum 100,000 years old, all evolutionary theories would immediately collapse (at least in their present formulations). As a creationist you have, however, the liberty to believe either in a young or an old universe. There is nothing to stop a supernatural Creator from having created everything in a very short time, not so long ago. But even long-term perspectives are fully consistent with the belief in the Creator of the Bible (or any other Creator).

Now, let us try to be as open-minded as possible. I therefore ask you, if you are a non-believer, to lay down any preconceptions according to which nothing supernatural can exist, and ask yourself what could be possible. You who are a Christian, I pray you to discontinue all traditional parish thoughts and ask yourself what is the Bible text saying? Which are the true words of Scripture? What does the Bible actually say? And especially, what does the original Hebrew manuscripts of the book of Genesis say?

We have just seen, that if you formally count the Old Testament genealogies, the conclusion will be that the age of the universe is about 6,000 years. Is there anything outside the Bible that can possibly support such a scenario? Yes, first of all there are no written historical records that goes further back than approximately 3,000 years BC. The written history thus begins about 5,000 years ago, which in any event does not contradict that the age of the universe is 6,000 years. Secondly, the earth’s population today of about seven billion people is compatible with humanity’s existence of 6,000 years. It does not take any unreasonable exponential growth for the number of people on earth to have grown from 2 persons to 6 billion over 6,000 years. If you have a basic knowledge of simple high school mathematics, you can easily convince yourself that so is the case. One can therefore not exclude, for historical or demographic statistical reasons, that the literal, biblical interpretation may be true.

The strongest argument against the universe, life and Man having existed just a few thousand years, are the various scientific datings, which taken altogether seem to suggest that the universe is about 10 - 20 billion years old (about 13,5 billion years according to the latest estimations), the earth about 5 billion years and humans approximately one-half to one million years old. That the gradualist approach as such says that all changes must have occurred slowly and continuously, can be totally disregarded. This is just a philosophical perspective, based on extrapolation from what we observe today. The overall, conclusive power of the different methods used for datings is, however, something that cannot easily be dismissed.[3] Certainly there are uncertainties, sometimes very large ones, but should the generally accepted scientific datings be so wrong that billions of years are in fact only 6,000 years, well then something must be seriously wrong with, e.g. large parts of modern physics. And it is not a question of one or two measurement methods giving high ages, but that many different methods (most of them), which are seemingly independent of one another and are based on entirely different physical and chemical mechanisms — different types of radioactive decay, sedimentation in the ocean, changes in the Earth’s magnetic field etc — give fairly consistent age determinations.[4] That all these datings should be almost entirely false (thousands of years instead of billions of years), is contradicted by physic’s amazing ability to very accurately predict and explain the vast majority of observable, physical phenomena, from what happens in the microscopic world of atoms to the events in the immense depths of Cosmos.

It is certainly true that behind all datings there are certain assumptions, e.g. that radioactive decay and sedimentation in the sea have always occurred at a constant rate, or that the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has always been about the same. A worldwide flood disaster, which according to the Bible took place in Noah’s days, might well have deposited thick sediment layers in a very short time. This is something that for example has been observed locally in association with earth quakes on the ocean floor. A supernova outburst in our own galaxy might have reset all the radiometric clocks. Etc. If the speed of light has decreased since our universe originated, this could theoretically have affected the half-life of radioactive elements, so that previous decays occurred much faster than today. The radiometric methods will then indicate far too high ages (in my comprehensive article on dating methods — not yet translated — I discuss in detail the radiometric and other dating methods and the different problems with these).

To be honest and objective we must also admit that there are observations that indicate a young earth and a young universe (we are not talking of 6,000 years but about 100,000 years instead of billions of years – for details see the link above). As always, our conclusions are based on interpretations, and those observations that point toward a young universe are generally contested, sometimes for scientific reasons, but many times just because they don’t fit with the generally accepted consensus. That evolutionists tend to ignore datings that suggest low ages is by itself quite natural, because all that argues against the prevailing pattern is as usual denied or reinterpreted, or added to the, for the moment, “we don’t understand this right now but in the future we will hopefully be able to explain this”-file. On the other hand, many Christians ignore, of course, for similar reasons, datings that indicate high ages. So here we have opinion against opinion.

However, the total amount of scientific observations speak, in my opinion, against a universe that is only 6,000 years old, even if we should bear in mind the limitations of science. But let us not forget that scientific interpretations do not constitute absolute truths. And we must also remember that we are talking about events that took place a long time ago, and which can not be studied by direct observations and experiments. Especially when talking about the origin of the universe and the origin of life, we are limited to study traces (which often are vague and need to be interpreted) of what took place billions of years ago. The study of origin includes, not only objective observations and logic, but also a fair amount of interpretation and even speculation. So in this context some humility is appropriate.

Let us now assume that the scientific datings are fairly accurate, i.e. the universe is about 10-20 billion years old and that humans have walked the earth for about a half to one million years. Can this somehow be harmonized with the Bible’s account of creation? Is there any prospect of extending the biblical time scale to millions and even billions of years?

Now we will briefly look at what the first six “days” in the Creation narrative might mean? The Bible, or rather the English translation of the Bible, says that God created everything in six “days”, during which Man was created on the sixth, and then God rested on the seventh day. The Hebrew word for day is “jom”. If we look up this word in a dictionary, it turns out to have several meanings other than “day”, including “millennium”, that is a thousand years, and “period”. It is therefore fully possible, without compromising with your Bible fidelity, to read the first chapters of Genesis as that God created in six “periods”.[5] These periods may well have been of any length (measured in present day atomic time). Scripture also says in several places, that “To the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day”. So no conflict needs to exist between modern science and the Bible’s creation scenario. What further speaks against the interpretation of the creation days as 24-hour periods, is that the sun was not created until[6] day four, “to determine the seasons, days and years (verse 14). The 24-hour day is related to the rotation of the earth relative to the sun, why it seems unlikely that at least the first three days of creation were 24 hours days.[7]

One can thus envisage that God intervened supernaturally in creation on six different occasions. Between each such act of creation there passed perhaps millions or even billions of years, before God continued His work. As far as I can understand from the Bible, God exists outside of time and space (this is the view of many great rabbis in the Jewish history). We must therefore be aware that God’s view of time is decidedly totally different from our own limited understanding of this difficult concept. Maybe is not only a thousand years as one day for the Lord, but one billion years is perhaps as one second for Someone who lives outside time!

Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that time can move at different rates for different observers. The greater the gravity, the slower time passes. So a clock would go slower on Jupiter than on Earth, because gravity on Jupiter is vastly stronger than on our planet. This effect is only observable (by our senses) in extreme conditions, but is experimentally verifiable by using highly accurate atomic clocks.[8] Without going further into this, it is worth mentioning that if certain conditions are fulfilled, Einstein’s theory shows that the Earth might well be only 10,000 years old despite the fact that the rest of the universe, at the same time, is 10 billion years. The universe we see through our instruments might thus be just as old as the astronomers believe, while the age of the earth at the same time may be consistent with a literal interpretation of the Bible. On the other hand, this doesn’t solve the problem that earthly datings also generally give us high ages. So the contradiction between Bishop Ussher’s 6,000 years and science’s billions of years seem to persist (for a further discussion of this, please read the very important and interesting commentary by professor Gerald Schroeder, linked to at the end of this article).

During the first five “days”, according to the Bible, the universe, the stars, the planets (and thus Earth), life and all species except humans, were created. If we assume that these “days” were in fact periods of varying length, which we have seen may well be compatible with the original Hebrew text, then most contradictions between the Bible and the scientific datings disappear.

The remaining problem is the age of Man. Here it is much more difficult to reconcile long periods of time with a Bible-believing perspective. Even taking into account the uncertainties in dating methods, it seems hard to adjust their 500,000 to 1 million years with the first humans being created about 6,000 years ago. Here we face a difficult obstacle and it seems that you either have to dissociate yourself from some parts of accepted science or deny that the Story of Creation is divinely inspired and therefore true (except in a symbolic way).[9]

The problem with Bishop Ussher’s and similar calculations is that not all Bible-believing theologians agree that the patriarchal names in the genealogies always follow the relationship father-son. Jews, at that time, had another and more extensive way of looking at kinships than we have today. That this is the case is apparent i.e. in Matthew 1:1 where it says “Genealogy for Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham”. Even though it says that Jesus was the son of David, there were in fact about 25 generations between them. Neither was David direct son to Abraham.

Considering that the first eleven chapters of Genesis span just as long time, or even longer, as the rest of the Bible, it seems reasonable to assume that this portion of the Bible is extremely compressed. Only the most important is included. Maybe there were many anonymous generations, during which nothing of particular interest occurred, which for this reason have been excluded? Kind of like the Swedish school’s history books, omitting to mention less important Swedish kings, such as King Alf? Who ever heard of him?! Does the reader know, for instance, that he was of the Ynglingaätten (House of Youngsters), and son of Alrek? As for myself, I cannot remember ever having heard of King Alf.

That some less important material actually have been omitted in the Bible is made clear for example in Genesis 4:16-17. There it is written how Cain went “away from the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden”. And he lay with his wife and she gave birth to Enoch. Previously, only Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel are mentioned. Apparently Adam and Eve had significantly more children[10], but these are not mentioned by name, probably because historically they were of no interest.[11]

Edwin Orr writes in his book Faith that makes sense, that it well may be that the only names that are included in biblical genealogies are “heads of families and founders of dynasties”.[12]

The so-called Eve- or Eden hypothesis was mentioned in connection with my discussions on biochemical evidence for evolution (in my section about creation/evolution). According to this theory, studies of the molecular clock of mitochondrial DNA, which is only inherited from mother to daughter, indicates that all women descend from a common ancestress who lived about 143,000 to 200,000 years ago. Other studies of the sex-determining Y chromosome, which is inherited only from father to son, seem in the same way to suggest that all men come from an ancestor who walked the earth about 270,000 years ago. If one takes into account the rather large uncertainties of the molecular clocks, it does not seem unreasonable that the first humans were created round about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

To return to the genealogies, we can assert that if their 6,000 years shall be extended to the generally accepted radiometric datings of Man’s age being between a half and one million years, obviously many generations must have been left out. Although this possibility cannot be directly ruled out, it does not seem particularly likely. But let us, as a compromise, and with the scientific support of the Eden hypothesis, consider that Man was created about 100,000 years ago. To be able to expand the Bible’s 6,000 years to 100,000 years, a rough estimate will show that the genealogies must contain approximately every 15th generation. Between every specified generation in the genealogies, have thus on average 14 anonymous generations existed.[13] That “heads of families and founders of dynasties” are born only once every 15th generation does not seem totally unreasonable. But that it is not unreasonable, does not prove it is true.

A very strong argument against the genealogies being complete is the time they indicate for the Flood of Noah. A direct application of Archbishop Ussher’s method reveals that this flood disaster occurred 2,348 BC.[14] It was at about this time that the great pyramids were built in Egypt (during the third to sixth dynasties, that is 2686 – 2181 BC). The datings of these should be pretty certain, as for instance there are historical documents to support them. The carbon-14-method also gives similar results (carbon-14-datings can be considered very reliable regarding ages up to at least 10,000 years, which is discussed in my article on dating methods). If the pyramids were built just before the Flood, they should show signs of having been flooded, which they definitely do not.[15] Moreover, there are very strong indications that the Egyptian culture continued to exist without interruption long after the pyramid constructions were completed. We know for example that due to fear of grave robbers, the idea of pyramids was abandoned and the Egyptians proceeded to bury the pharaohs in hidden burial chambers in the so-called Valley of the Kings, just outside the current Luxor (the alternative that the Flood should have taken place between the pyramid period and the burial of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, seems just too absurd). The pyramids could neither have been built immediately after the Flood, since the Bible says that only eight people survived this. It must reasonably have lasted quite a long time before such an advanced culture as the Egyptian could arise out of eight people. Neither is it easy to explain how these eight, within a few hundred years, were able to give rise to Egypt’s millions of inhabitants. The construction of the pyramids must have involved tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Egyptians plus for that time very advanced mathematics, science and technology. And pyramid building was not the only thing taking place in Egypt at this time. There must have been farmers producing food etc, etc.

(Gerald Schroeder, a former professor at MIT and member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and a devout Jew, has for many years studied the question of the age of the universe based on the Bible’s perspective. In his very interesting expose “The Age of the Universe” he examines what the ancient rabbis concluded, by a detailed study of the original Hebrew text. It turns out that these, already in the 1500s drew surprisingly sophisticated conclusions about the universe and its age. And then he applies Einstein’s general relativity in an attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction between the Bible and modern scientific datings).

Back to the the Christian Creation Scenario

You can read more about the creation scenario in: Yet another theory

 

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[1] It may, from a current perspective, seem odd that people could become so old at this time. Theoretically we should, however, live to a much older age than we do, given that the body’s cells are constantly renewed. An old person should therefore have the same smooth skin as a baby. No-one knows with certainty why we age, although we today have a growing understanding of this topic (there are several competing theories and the true explanation might be a combination of these). According to the Bible sickness and death entered the world at the Fall. It is most likely that something happened to the cell machinery at this time. Perhaps the aging process is simply caused by small copying faults constantly creeping into the cell divisions, leading to a diminishing function of the cells as age increases. The longer a person has lived, the more faults have accumulated. But regardless of by which mechanism (or mechanisms) the aging occurs, it cannot be ruled out that other mechanisms than today took place a long, long time ago. The credo of gradualism, that the present is the key to the past, is essentially not a scientific fact, but a philosophical assumption.
[2] From De Genesi ad Litteram, book 1, Ch. 19:39.
[3] Unfortunately, quite profound knowledge of physics is required to understand many of the various dating methods.
[4] The above argument is a simplification. The various dating methods are partially interdependent. Changes of the Earth’s magnetic field are for example usually dated with the potassium-argon method (a radiometric method). Datings using permutations of the Earth’s magnetism are thus based indirectly on radiometric measurements. But even if dating methods are not totally independent from one another, and contain different types of uncertainties (science always include a certain amount of uncertainty), it is not obvious that this leads to errors of the magnitude of billions of years.
[5] An objection often made against this interpretation is that the Bible text says “And the evening and the morning were the second day”. But periods have beginnings and ends, so we should be able to interpret “evening” and “morning” as the end and the beginning of a period. To be able to interpret the Bible properly, not only do you have to be an expert on the basic language (Hebrew in this case), but you must also understand how the Jews at that time thought and expressed themselves. There are many examples in the Bible of statements that today seem incorrect or contradictory to us, because we interpret them based on our culture’s way of thinking. However, if you read them correctly, the ambiguities often disappear. What the words, that are translated “morning” and “evening”, really mean in this particular context, is impossible to determine with absolute certainty. You don’t need to be an expert in Hebrew or Old Testament exegetics so realize that.
[6] In Genesis chapter 1 the days are numbered a little differently. The first day is day zero, which is why the day when the sun and the moon were created is called “the third day”. But it is in fact the same as the fourth day (day 0, 1, 2 and 3 = 4 days).
[7] A common objection to the Genesis’ days being long periods is that the sun was created the “day” after the creation of the plants. The plants need the sunlight and should not be able to live for thousands of years (if the day before the fourth day was a long period) without it. On the other hand, there is nothing to say that the six creation periods must be of equal length. Perhaps was the third “day” very short.
[8] Atomic clocks at sea level (high gravity) have during long periods of time been compared to atomic clocks that have been located several thousand meters above sea level (less gravity), and it was found that the atomic clocks at sea level slowed in relation to the other clocks according to Einstein’s formulas. The measurements are uncertain, as this is about time differences in picoseconds (trillions of a second) per year. There are, however, many other observations that give a very strong experimental support for the general relativity.
[9] A person who is not a devout Christian might have a hard time understanding why it is so important to interpret the Bible literally. The problem is that if a person, for various reasons; fear of being laughed at, worshipping your own intellect etc, begins to deny portions of the Bible, it usually ends up with a total denial of everything, including God himself.
[10] If Adam and Eve were living for about 900 years, and begat children during much of that time, and these in turn gave birth to children, it can easily be shown that there may have existed 10,000 or even 100,000 people when Cain went to the land of Nod. It’s not hard to appreciate why each of these did not have his/her own complete biography in the Bible.
[11] Cain thus had children with his own sister of half-sister or at least with a close relative. Inbreeding normally involves a high risk of birth defects. We can however assume that God created the first human beings with a very rich set of genes. In this case, inbreeding causes no greater risk of birth defects than would exist under normal conditions. Only when a limited and isolated population of few individuals, by exclusively mating among themselves, eventually deplete the gene pool, inbreeding becomes something dangerous, and ultimately devastating. Various European royal families have encountered this problem on several occasions during the past centuries.
[12] Evangelipress, Örebro, 1968, page 46.
[13] In some cases, it’s obviously about direct father-son relations, such as Jacob and his sons. When I talk about every 15th generation, I am talking about an average.
[14] If you refer to the Masoretic Text, upon which i.e. the Swedish Bible translation is based. If instead you refer to the genealogies in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament from 250 BC (on which King James version mainly is based), the Flood occurred in 3261 BC. This definitely indicates that the genealogies are not entirely unambiguous.
[[15] The sphinx, however, unlike the pyramids, shows signs of very strong erosion due to flowing water. That the sphinx is older than the pyramids, probably most scientists will agree upon. There are even those that believe that the sphinx is derived from an ancient culture that flourished about 10,500 BC, i.e. 8,000 years prior to the great pyramids were built. If this interpretation is correct, the Flood should have occurred sometime between 2,500 and 10,500 BC. And most reasonably closer to the older year. That explains why the culture that built the sphinx died out, and also provides sufficient time for the 8 people who survived the Flood to repopulate large areas of the earth before the pyramids were built.
According to the book Noah’s flood (1998), written by two American geologists, Walter Pitman and William Ryan, who have studied sediments from the Black Sea, there are indications of a great flooding in the Mediterranean area, taking place around 7,500 years ago, which fits into the scenario given above.