Six Days of Creation – A Modern Reconciliation with Science

This is the last in a thread of posts which began with a review of R’Meiselman’s book on Torah and Science, followed by a discussion of the dispute between R’Meiselman and Nosson Slifkin, and finally, a broad philosophical perspective on maybe why there are six days of creation.  Now, I will be discussing modern Jewish views on the six days of creation in view of science and attempt my own reconciliation of sorts.

Overview of Jewish Answers of What’s Happening in the 6 Days Of Creation

Here is the short, short version of how different thinkers have phrased it, from right to left on the viewpoint map.  The answers are, I believe, not very far off.  It should also be understood that I don’t think any of those I refer to actually claim theirs to be the answer.  R’Sapirman poses his ‘answer’ in question form only for purposes of showing we need not abandon Jewish beliefs in the face of science, R’Meiselman’s answer is along the lines of “we don’t know, but we do know Torah is true”, and as for Dr. Gerald Schroeder … I once had the opportunity to pick him from the airport.  I asked him  “Do you believe your theory is true?”  He thought for a moment and said, “After teaching it for so long, I’m starting to.”

Answer 1: Strict Literal Reading – Six Days & Creation of an Old World

(By “strict literal”, I am using the colloquial understanding that creation took six days from our time perspective and using the incorrect assumption that time is absolute.  In ‘reality’, even if it was from another time perspective, that’s still “strict literal”.)

Rabbi Sapirman has been instrumental in trying to introduce teaching emunah (why jews believe what we do) into Jewish schools.  He has produced books, school curriculums with short lessons (which were dinner time reading for my family), and an audio series.  The latter is available for free download on this blog, entitled, “Know What to Answer Yourself.”

In Rabbi Sapirman’s audio series, he posits the question – why can’t it be that a Creator created the world already in place?  He uses an example of stars with light already stretching for light years when it was created.  This could be literally done in six days.  Just as man was created fully formed, so too was the universe.  This would explain inconsistencies with what current science observers from our exceedingly limited vantage point and what actually was.

I’m not particularly fond of this explanation, but it is at possibility and one which really can’t be disproven.  Then again, it’s not really that different than the more palpable answers.  If a tree falls on a mime in the woods … does anyone care?  (Farside cartoon.)  If it all happens slow or fast, and you’re an infinite which is creating, what’s the difference?

Answer 2: Different Time Click – We Don’t Understand it, Move On

It’s said a bit more eloquently than that, but this is my understanding of R’Meiselman’s opinion in his book.  He devotes a chapter to the Rambam’s understanding of the shift in time clock on the fourth day (Bereshis [Genesis] 1:14 where it states, “to separate between the day and between the night”).  Before there’s a difference between “day” and “night” there’s a difference in the time being told.  Beyond that, the Rambam also states (as quoted in the last article) that it’s the second most hidden topic in all of Judaism … right after the description of the visit to the throne of the Creator.

R’Meiselman also makes clear that we have a truth from our fathers extending back to Sinai and this tradition is the living and continuing truth from the Creator.  There are a ridiculous number of places where we see the wisdom in the Torah attesting to it’s truth and greatness. (Rabbi Sapirman points this out as well, though more in the prophecy sense.)  It doesn’t change, but beliefs of the rest of the world have and continue to do so.  If something outside of Torah matches it, great.  If not, it can go take a hike (again, he says it more eloquently than that).

Answer 3: Torah Sources Match Modern Theoretical Physics; We’re Almost There

This opinion comes from Avaraham Goldberg, a Torah observant theoretical physicist (kabbalist?).   I reviewed his book over here, previously.  He basically goes through, on a very simple level, how our Torah sources describe the first moments of creation especially, and continues through from there.  Minute Physics, a great YouTube channel, actually discusses this as well:

It’s also seen in the “God 2.0 Video” from Imagining the 10th dimension which I discuss over there.  Great video.

In short, there’s a whole lot of convergence of Jewish beliefs and modern physics beliefs that, well, for more are further evidence of the truth of both.  No other beliefs coming from such disparate systems which claim truth are so aligned, to my knowledge.

Goldfinger does acknowledge at the end of his book one major problem: time.  For this the answer is relativity of time.  I discussed this in the previous article, but Gerald Schroder really takes this concept and fleshes it out as fully as I’ve ever come across.  It was actually a talk of his which I attended which first let me to realize not all creationists are … ignorant.

Answer 4: Torah is Telling Time from the Point of the Big Bang

This is the theory posited by Dr. Gerald Schroder, a Torah observant physicist by training.  He has a lot of very excellent books, trying to understand the Creator.  He strictly uses Torah sources and modern physics and organizes a whole lot of data.  I am going to try and explain the basics of his theory in a short space and do my own “making it fit” experiment, with apologies to R’Meiselman. In short, taking current physics it is believed that the speed of light is constant … we’ll use this, though there are theories that say the speed of light must have been quicker and I don’t see a reason why, when the universe itself was being created and more in flux, that the properties of physics and math would also be more in flux and changing than the seemingly static rules we observe today.

So what happens if something is moving away from you at something close to the speed of light?  The time it takes for the light to arrive back to you takes longer.  Add in another element – not only is the object moving away from you, but it’s moving faster and faster away from you, e.g. accelerating.  See, for example, how the rolling shutter effect distorts our view far away galaxies.  With a spinning galaxy, the closer part of it will reach us faster.  This is shown quite well on Wikipedia as well in the article, “Relativity of simultaneity” and the image to the right which I borrowed.  (Click it to see it bigger.)

As Einstein put it, imagine a train traveling at half the speed of light.  Shoot a laser up from the floor of the train to a mirror on the ceiling. When the beam comes back down, if you’re on the train it will be a straight line.  If you’re standing next to the train as it whizzes by you, the light moves at an angle upwards (remember, the train is moving quite fast) and then back down … but since the speed of light is constant, the time it takes to do so is much longer.

Limits to Human Knowledge and Assumptions Inherent in Cosmology, Geology, Torah

(You can skip this section and move on to the answer, if you prefer.)

Here comes the fun – do the math when viewing the universe from the point of creation of the universe and you got a very nicely overlapping picture between the two disciplines of knowledge.  (I used to be able to do the math, but now I have a Flowers for Allgernon feeling (not understanding my own previous work) when I try to do it.  For some simpler English explanations, see here and here.  I’ll leave the details of the math in this problem up to whomever wishes to comment, or view Gerald Schroeder’s works.)

What makes this complicated to do is that, in my humble opinion, is that well what actually happened is quite static, our understanding of it from a scientific point of view, is always changing, and from a text point of view, is open to all sorts of interpretations.  For example, the most current theories say that the rate of expansion has been decreasing, until recently when it again began increasing.  That is shown in the graph to the right from the link in the prior sentence.  This theory has only been widely posited for about 7 years.  For purposes of simplicity, I’m going to go with constant deceleration of an expanding universe.  It shouldn’t change the data too much, and further, there are many more approximations going on here which create far bigger problems including massive gaps in human knowledge.

Now when we get to geology, this is also based on very limited amounts of data.  Try and research a question like “when did the oceans form?” and you’ll find that the range of current range of scientific estimates have about a 13% difference between them, and suffer from the problem of piggybacking off of the same absurdly tiny data set being used to form the conclusion the first place.  No one was there four billion years ago to make direct observations and much may have effected the present time observations that we haven’t a clue about.  I have even less knowledge than a person who spends their life on this stuff (why one finds an interest in dedicating their life to a pursuit that gets us nowhere in human development except for maybe making arguments for/against G_d’s existence is beyond me).  So I wrote to both the Museum of Natural History in New York, NY and the American Geological Association requesting an accurate timeline of events and how they know it from geological digs.  Let’s just say the answers are quite disappointing.  In cosmology the experts publish all sorts of timelines and mathematical calculations.  In chemistry, Mendelev arranged the periodic table and predicted elements yet to be found.  Geologists and evolutionary biologists don’t seem to like math or neat organization of very disparate data from all over the place which makes me highly suspicious when the experts in the field stopped just shy of writing to me that I should take a leap of faith and just believe them.  They confirmed that there is no place you can bore a hole in the earth and see a complete picture of the 4 billion years of earth development, but even worse, there isn’t even a published place, according to the experts I asked, where the biostratography is put together to paint a complete picture.  The claimed there isn’t much interest in such a thing, but yet, it’s the claim in every textbook.  So I’m defaulting to the every-man source, Wikipedia and the article, History of the Earth … and making another assumption that Wikipedia has accurate information on the beliefs of geologists and evolutionary biologists.

As for the words of the Torah, all of creation is summed up even more concisely.  It’s 26 sentences.  The description of the mishkan in the desert is far longer than that, and that was a temporary physical structure.  Conclusion: The latter is more important to learn.  That teaches us how to live and is a metaphor for a body with arms, legs, and a heart.  Meanwhile, when the Torah says with regards to creation, statements like, “”Let the water that is beneath the heavens gather into one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so” does that mean that it occurred all at once, over more than one epoch of time, or was it a command which was only actually fulfilled later in another day?  (The Malbim discusses much of this.)

A Day by Day Attempt At Reconciliation Using Relativity

Relativity of Time from Big Bang (“G-d Time Clock”) vs. Earth – Click for Large Image

With those disclaimers in mind, a theoretical person viewing the earth from the point of creation would be like the person standing on the train platform watching the train pull away immediately at it’s fastest, and steadily slowing down.  It’s an exponential decay curve. and is, according to Schroeder’s hypothesis, how the Creator is narrating the opening verses of the Torah.

With apologies to my high school calculus teacher for not updating the answers on the review sheet after graduation like I said I would (I guess I should forgive myself at this point…), I’ll do my best to explain – constant decreasing acceleration (picture a line going down and to the right on a graph) results in an increase in distance over time, but the increase comes slower over time.  Now, the time it takes for light to reach back to the observer takes longer and longer but the space in time between the first epoch (between “day 0” and “day 1”) is much greater when acceleration was faster and the percentage of distance change is highest.  If the “train platform” is also moving away, you have a further shift in observed time of the earth (or what will be the earth) from such a vantage point.  According to Jewish sources, in fact, the Creator did “remove Himself” to allow a physical space to be created.  Combine that with the rate of acceleration of the universe might not have been constant, and there’s an infinite number of ways to match up the “G_d timeline” to the “human timeline”.  I’m going to stick with Schroder’s theory to make it easier – time in the Torah is told from the point of the Big Bang, and earth is moving away at a decreasing accelerating rate.  (For more on the math of integrals and derivatives, that part is explained here.)

The final step is matching up what the first 26 verses in the Torah say for each day within those time frames.  I am using the current accepted number of 13.75 billion years for the age of the universe (Schroeder uses the now outdated 15 billion in his books, as far as I know).  In a decelerating frame of reference (again, assuming constant deceleration) that gives us a nice decay curve like you see to the right.  Viewing a photon traveling back to you after traveling for 24 hours at a rate much, much greater than the speed of light (by a power of 10 to 12) and it’s actually been traveling 7 billion years from it’s frame of reference.  If you want to view a photon traveling for two days from your perspective, and it’s 3.5 billion years from it’s frame of reference.

Here’s how it fits:

This article was actually far more difficult to research and put together than I had imagined.  While I have gone over it a number of times and made many edits, I am still not satisfied with it.  I also recognize that I am an expert in none of the areas I am describing.  Thus is the nature of a Patent Attorney.  We’re good at quickly learning all sorts of topics about everything and then writing at length about it.  Then we send it back to the inventor, the expert in the field, to make sure it’s all correct.  Given that this article spans many very different disciplines, there are a lot of different experts that will have opinions! Therefore, I am not insulted if you argue against anything I have said vigorously in the comments.  I welcome it (when done respectfully) so that you and I can both better come to finding truth.