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Friday, April 15, 2005

In 1988, the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists published a volume of articles entitled Challenge: Torah Views on Science and its Problems. Among the articles in that book is one written by one Rabbi Simon Schwab. Its title is "How Old Is the Universe?"

The rabbi writes:

Our question is: How old is the Universe? Answer: the Universe is 5735 years old, plus six Creation Days.(6) [The article was originally published in 1962, so we can add thirty more years to the age of the universe.]

Rabbi Schwab, like Henry Morris, is concerned with light. Unlike Morris however, he focuses on the problem posed by light being created on the first day of creation, even though the sun and stars were not zapped into existence until the fourth day. He also is concerned to explain the peculiar fact that Elohim is said to have divided the light from darkness -- a process Mark Twain likened to picking black-eyed peas out of tapioca, ridiculing the authors of Genesis for not knowing that darkness is merely the absence of light.

While the rabbi seems to have come up with an unfalsifiable method for reconciling the great age of the Universe required by astronomy with the absurdly young age required by Genesis there remains a problem. Apart from the fact that unfalsifiable statements -- statements for which you can't even imagine a way to devise a test -- are scientifically meaningless there is the awkward difficulty involving the sequences of events recorded by Genesis on the one hand, and geology on the other.

Thus, we have Genesis chapter one telling us that green plants are older than the sun, whereas the record in the rocks gives us something more than a sneaking suspicion that the sun is older than green plants! It quite boggles the mind to contemplate green plants waiting millions of years for the sun to begin to shine. Genesis tells us that birds are older than reptiles, whereas the paleontological evidence is crystal clear: birds are descended from reptiles, and did so many, many millions of years after the first reptiles appeared. In addition to the problems with the sequence of creation given in Genesis chapter one, there is the stupendous problem of Genesis chapter two. In that chapter we learn that Adam -- the first male of the human species -- was created before all other kinds of living things, even before plants -- and Eve was created as an afterthought when Adam couldn't quite get into bestiality. Perhaps the timewarp proposed by the good rabbi also worked as a sequencewarp.