So, as promised (and requested by a few of you), I’m back to elaborate on some of Dr. Gerald Schroeder’s ideas.
Before I address the primary question posed in this thread, I’ll need to give a little background information as Dr. Schroeder’s thesis encompasses all of cosmological history and doesn’t make much sense without taking it into consideration. I’ll return to the main topic in my next post.
Rather than rehash his thoughts in my own inadequate words, I’ll try to quote from Dr. Schroeder as much as possible. In my first post, I mentioned that a Jewish Bible scholar living over 8 centuries ago taught that homo sapiens already existed before Adam; that Adam was not physically created, but only spiritually so (“God breathed into his lungs…”). Well, this scholar, Nahmanides, also proposed an interpretation of the very first verses of Genesis that might look startingly familiar to the modern reader. Dr. Schroeder writes:
So we have just seen a Jewish scholar pretty much lay out the Big Bang Theory 800 years before it was scientifically proposed!
Now, the very first sentence of the preceding section contains a very important piece of information. “Nahmanides taught that
although the days are 24 hours each, they contain “kol yemot ha-olam” - all the ages and all the secrets of the world.”
So here we have Nahmanides teaching that the Genesis days were both 24 hour days and yet ages long. How is this seeming contradiction to be resolved? Dr. Schroeder, no slouch in the realm of physics, found a solution in Einstein’s theory of relativity. For those who aren’t too familiar, the theory of relativity has to do with the passage of time, which increases or decreases depending on relative velocity and gravity. In fact, at the speed of light, time ceases to exist. (It seems our long-standing conception of both God and eternity as “light” is more than just an aesthetic nicety.) Dr. Schroeder explains:
It would take much too long to provide the specifics here, which can be found in “The Science of God” (and, for a more focused and exhaustive account of the particulars of relativity, in “Genesis and the Big Bang”) but Dr. Schroeder dedicates a significant amount of time to taking the best scientific knowledge we have to date regarding the age of the universe, the development of our planet, the emergence of life, etc. and lining it up against the six days of creation in Genesis, and then applying the math to see if, indeed, those 14-16 billion years and 6 24 hour days of pre-human history are the same thing:
I’ll give you a second to pick your jaw up from the floor.
And I will interrupt here to suggest that you go to your local library or bookstore and find a copy of “The Science of God”, as the charted comparison of the days and details as found both in the Bible and modern science reveal an uncanny correlation. If you can read this and think that the authors of Genesis did not have access to some form of superhuman information, I don’t know what to say.