Counting the years since the creation of the world
Hello Rabbi Michi,
Thanks for the summary. Continuing our conversation today. How can we explain the counting of years from the beginning of the creation of the world? According to the Torah, the world is approximately 5000 years old, while research shows that the world was created billions of years ago.
I would appreciate your response.
Hello A.
As I told you today, there are several possibilities to explain this and I have no way of deciding between them. The question could be important if it had no answer (because then it would prove that the Torah is not divine) or if it had one answer because then the true answer could be known. But since there are several answers and there is no way of deciding between them, it follows that nothing can be proven from this regarding the divinity of the Torah, nor can it be concluded what it really was. Therefore, this question does not seem particularly important to me and does not concern me.
I will briefly explain the different options here:
1. The description in the Torah is mythical and not historical. Its purpose is educational and not academic-factual. The description could, for example, teach about the moral hierarchy between inanimate objects, living plants, and humans (according to the order of creation). Incidentally, the Ramban wrote this in the 13th century, long before it was necessary to find excuses for the difficulties of modern science.
2. The chronology of the creation account is metaphorical. The account is factual, but one day in creation describes a phase and not a 24-hour day. At least in the first days there was no sun yet, so it is clear that there were no days in the modern sense. Thus, each day in the biblical creation describes a phase in historical creation, which could take up to a billion years.
3. According to the general theory of relativity, the rate of flow of time varies according to the density of mass in the universe. In the first moments of creation (the big bang), the mass was very dense, so in contemporary time terms it is six thousand years, but in objective terms it is billions of years.
4. The world was not created in the explosion of a singular point, but in its current form (in the Midrash Rabbah it is written: The works of Genesis were created in their height). Think of a baby who is born. He is not born the size of a dot, but rather a fairly large size. He is already a complete and structured person. His embryonic stage was in the womb. So is the world. The Bible describes the six thousand years that have passed since creation. For example, when the world was created, if you checked the age of carbon 14 on trees, you would discover that they were thousands of years old, just like the trees of today. And so it is with rocks, etc.
5. The Bible describes the last six thousand years of the process, since the creation of man. The previous stages are not described (in Kabbalah terms, this is the “world of chaos”).
6. The rate of time has changed throughout history, and so it seems to us today that the world is billions of years old. Think of a baby who was born and is now starting to grow. Let’s say that every year he grows about ten centimeters. At the age of two, we ask ourselves how tall he will be in thirty years, and the answer will be about four meters. We assume that the processes continue at the same rate as before, but this is not always true. The same is true when looking back: think of an adult who is no longer tall. Now we ask how tall he was when he was born, and the answer will be 1.80 m. Again, we are projecting the present backward, not necessarily rightly. The same is true for the world. We see processes (of carbon decomposition, etc.) that occur at a given rate and assume that this has always been the case. But there is no evidence for this. It is possible that in the past the decompositions were much faster (like the growth of a baby), and therefore it is possible that the age of the world and the objects that exist in it is much smaller. By the way, there is a talk by Rupert Sheldrake that was removed from the TED website, in which a very interesting person talks about the variability of the constants of physics over the past hundred years (i.e. not even in a period of evolutionary and cosmological significance). See here: https://www.lifehacks.co.il/2-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%A6%D7%90%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%98%D7%93-ted-%D7%A9%D7%94%D7%95%D7%97%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%95/
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