God's Time is not measured by Earth Time- A Way Out for YEC

Faith & Science Conversation
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It does seem that time gets the most attention. We also need to remember, though, that the situation has a symmetry as you are “moving” through the universe. Your mass seems perfectly normal to you as you do so and it is all the things moving past you at nearly the speed of light that seem (to you) to have extremely high mass (and slower clocks, and the whole bit) because there is no way to say which party is really doing the moving. So don’t crash into any planets (or even particles!) while so traveling. It would be bad for both parties. That’s the conundrum of the twin paradox. Why should one twin brother do all the aging while the other didn’t if it cannot be absolutely determined just who it is who is doing the traveling? The resolution lies at the point where the symmetry is broken: one of them changed reference frames midway by turning around and coming back. The other never changed reference frames.

I think one of the stranger aspects is the flattening of the universe by the traveling particle. The whole thing turns into a pancake, still with its awesomely big dimensions except along the axis traveled! And yet to a particle traveling at a right angle to that, the same universe is pancaked differently according to it. But to the universe, it is your rocket ship that looks pancaked. If you can wrap your mind around that, then you probably need to join a recovery program of some kind!

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Or just read more Sci-fi to make it all seem routine!

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The standard estimate of the age of the universe is from our human viewpoint.

What if you had “Miracle Eyes” that could sample the background radiation, assess the infra-red shift (the so-called doppler effect), and instantly determine how many years back the light was emitted?

There would be no disagreement about how far back creation was … but if such “miracle eyes” could instantly count up the shift in wave-count, you would produce the calculations that the PowerPoint presentation is making.

I can see now that she gets herself buried too deep by using the image of a Clock. She should stay away from the “clock” figure of speech… or spend more time explaining her figure of speech.

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We have telescopes for that. All of the photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background were emitted about 300,000 years after the initial singularity of the Big Bang.

No, that powerpoint draws the wrong conclusions and most of the calculations are wrong too. The frequency of the Cosmic Microwave Background increases as you travel back in time. Therefore, your wave-count increases more rapidly as you approach the beginning of the universe. In other words, a “day” (defined in terms of wave counts) passed by more quickly back then compared to measurements in our modern reference frame. Conversely, a day in our modern frame of reference lasts relatively long compared with the reference frame of the early universe.

That’s exactly the opposite pattern of the drawings and calculations of that presentation. There is no “magical” coordinate frame that could justify those drawings. I don’t know how to clarify this point even further.

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Love you guys! Many thanks to the moderator for allowing this discussion of science and the bible to carry on. I hope it reaches some YEC. Science can help point us to God instead of away and we do not need to deny either God or science. I can understand why so many want to separate science from the word of God. It is safe theological ground to say science is fact and the word of God is our spiritual guide and neither the two should meet. But the weakness there is that we reduce God to only a spiritual thought, we erode the bible’s base in reality and many therefore claim other spiritualities are just as good.I have been told it is all mythology. (I have been through that discussion many times.) God is not fairy dust, He is real and in loving scripture we look to validate and understand the word of God through archeology, history, language studies and science. Science can actually help point us to God instead of away. It did for me. At the same time I recognize the risk in the science becoming it’s own power. We are called to salvation one on one. Each of us finds our own way to accept Christ. God would not grant us the authority to create a ironclad proof that proves Him to the masses and create a new worship of science. He gives each of us just enough to see Him and know Him personally when we look for Him, not a justification or an exact proof. It is so amazing that so many are drawn to look for Him in all things. God breathes His word onto imperfect people, even in the bible. I expect there are great witnesses among this group and this is just speaking to the choir. Thank you for many helpful possibilities and I hope we can reach the many who have lost their faith in God, or never had it to begin with. I will keep sharing God’s word for those in great doubt. God bless you.

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@Casper_Hesp, yep. That would be correct.

But notice what you said: “Frequency of the Cosmic Microwave Background increases as you travel back in time.”
And she is saying the same thing you are saying. (Though I think we could all say “SpaceTime” instead of just “time”.

So, what she is trying to do is make an analogy of wave “crests” representing a kind of ticking clock. As SpaceTime stretches out, crests spread out. And fewer of them would fit into the “benchmark” distance set at Creation, or set at the first appearance of light (or any other benchmark that seems convenient and logical to use).

Casper, have you actually gone through the slides? You would see in an instant that she is sloppily using “crest count” as a proxy for a ticking clock… and that this triggers all sorts of confusion for those who think literally about a clock traveling with a photon or whatever other way there is to get confused.

Take a look at the powerpoint slides… and look for the slides that deal with her treatment of frequency shifts as a kind of “clock” . . .

it’s really a very elegant comparison… Ultimately, the problem here is not her thought experiment, but what she wants to use it for: she wants to say the writer of Genesis was actually familiar with the spacetime concepts… and that Genesis’s coincidentally fitting well in an expanding Universe means something.

But, of course, she had to cherry-pick the scale before she got all the numbers to match up to God’s Six Periods, and the real age of the Universe.

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I have read the whole presentation and that’s exactly what I was reacting to. Some of the things that the author of the presentation says are correct and some things are wrong. If you would use the “crest count” as a ticking clock (i.e., set a fixed number of wave crests for each “day”), you would get something that looks like this:

High frequency in the beginning => wave crest count increases quickly => “days” are short.
Low frequency in the end => wave crest count increases slowly => “days” are long.

As you may have noticed, this is exactly the mirror image of the timeline of the presentation.

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Thank you Chris. Such a good way to express the topic. I am so glad there are so many great, gracious, faithful and kindly humorous commenters and scientists sharing thoughts here.

I have a slightly different objective than a clear proof. A scientist will look at x, y and z in a statement and work to prove that x,y and z are true, therefore the statement is true and proven. And if it is not, the entire statement is false. What a tough situation for someone who is a Christian and a scientist!
I am looking at the statement and seeing x is true, y is false and z is just plain confusing. So what does that make x? One commenter qualified such a fact as a coincidence. Wonderful! I used the term coincidence as well over and over again initially on this walk. We could also use the word ‘spooky’ or ‘possibility’. I would also call it a ‘clue’ and an ‘invitation’ to keep reading the book where it came from.:slight_smile: I hope others feel that way. I would like to jump to another ‘clue’ in the bible, if you wouldn’t mind. Here is the scenario- how would you, as a bystander and having no knowledge of radiation, write a very short description of the immediate effect of radiation on a small village? Maybe you have already looked at this one, but it’s a wondrous ‘clue’.

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BTW George, I want to say I’m sorry for reacting so harshly yesterday when I responded to the claims in that presentation (link). I need to learn to be more patient when I listen to people.

On the one hand, it looks like a fun idea presented in an nice way. On the other hand, it misrepresents the actual science and creates confusion. That’s were part of my frustration comes from.

Another part comes from the fact that this presentation abuses both Scripture and modern cosmology to force them into correspondence.

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The only comment that I have for the previous comments is that the scripture writers were faithful and dutiful, but not necessarily cognizant of the what they were reporting. They reported what they heard, felt, saw and God put on their hearts.
They were many good reporters in the bible and we can look at their observations with the knowledge we now have. I think this deeper look makes God fearfully real and not just a vague spiritual figure. I see Biologos being able to show the possibilities for God like what lawyers and legalists have been able to do to give a case for Christ. However that may be beyond the current mission of addressing the false science of young earth, so I will just share one more fascinating possibility I see in the bible. Maybe you have already discussed this one.

Here are some dutiful and faithful observations in scripture that indicate a possibility of a source of radiant energy or power for the ark. Which for me seems amazingly realistic and shows us a sign of a very real God.

1Samuel 5:11 “So they called together all the rulers of the Philistines and said, " Send the ark of the God of Israel away; let it go back to its own place, or it will kill us and our people. For death had filled the city with panic; God’s hand was very heavy on it. Those who did not die were afflicted with tumors, and the outcry of the city went to heaven.”

1Samuel 6:19 " But God struck down some the inhabitants of Beth Shemesh, putting seventy of them to death because they looked into the ark of the Lord.’

2 Samuel 6:6 "When they came to the threshing floor of Nakon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the Ark of God because the oxen stumbled. The Lord’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act, therefore God struck him down, and he died there beside the ark of God.

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The title of this thread is both true and false. Let me explain.

In the Hebrew Bible the first creation story represents time as a spatial measure, not a temporal one. This is one of the ways in which the first creation story is unique in all of literary history written as it was, in part, as a polemic against the pagan’s conception of time. In pagan mythology for example, time was circular (think of the movie Groundhog Day and you have a pretty good idea of how the surrounding pagans viewed time). In most (all?) pagan creation stories of those times, the passage of time was cyclic and repetitive. As a consequence, actions today were of limited impact in the future. Bruce K. Waltke reminds us that these pagan myths…

… of the Ancient Near East did not conceive of time in terms of a horizontal, linear ordering of events reaching from a historical beginning to a final consummation of all things. Rather, they regarded time as cyclical, the annual reordering and revitalizing of the universe. Their creation myths were recited at annual New Year’s festivals as magical words to accompany a magical ritual in order to reactualize the original cosmology, the passage from chaos to cosmos. In mythopoeic thought time has no significance and history no meaning.

So, how did the ancient Hebrews understand time? To paraphrase Waltke, the trajectory of the first creation story is as a horizontal, non-repeating, linear ordering of seven events. It is only on the seventh that, upon the completion of the previous six, that time comes into view (specifically, God blesses time - an action not found in any of the pagan mythologies).

The scriptural basis of this interpretation is pretty compelling. To see this we can turn to Genesis 1:5: here is the relevant text from the underlying Hebrew:

“וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה”

which reads “And Elohim called the light - day; and the dark he called - night.” More specifically, God does not assign a temporal measure to ‘yom’ or ‘layla’, but a spatial one. In other words, the literal text portrays yom and layla as regions of space, not a measures of time. You can read a more detailed explanation of this idea, here.

I teach a course in Genesis creation here at a local university and in my classes, I get my students to imagine that God is a metaphorical film editor in which He carefully examines and edits the first six frames of His creation movie. Accordingly, He adjusts the contents of each frame as He sees fit. When He’s satisfied, He loads the film into a cannister (do they use such things these days?) and starts the projector.

So, the title of this thread is true (God’s time is NOT measured by earth time). But I do not see a way out for the YECs until and unless their understanding of Holy Scripture is better informed by the meaning of the biblical text.

Blessings,

Michael

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@Casper_Hesp

I didn’t interpret your words as particularly harsh. They were succinct in a way that one would not be surprised to find in the speedy typing fingers of a descendant of the Vikings. So no worries here.

But I’m still puzzling through these overlapping meanings and conflicting frames of reference.

  1. If we step away from the idea of a clock of any kind… but think more in terms of a “counter” of clicks …
  2. With Light Wave crests as the “clicks” of a counter…
  3. It seems clear to me that the more you stretch out the wavelengths of light … with time slowing down … the fewer clicks one has in the more recent part of the timeline, than the many, many more clicks one has in the early part of the timeline, where the frequency is much higher:

God’s Day 1 > Day 2 > Day 3 > Day 4 > Day 5 > Day 6 .
1120 clicks > 560 clicks > 225 clicks > 110 clicks > 50 clicks > 24 clicks.
Doesn’t something like this get us anywhere?

I’m pondering how to arrange a graphic that does justice to the idea, without driving the concrete thinking of physicists crazy. Perhaps there is no way to do it … but I haven’t quite given up on this thought experiment yet …

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