The Time Question
In spite of the Bible being right about a beginning to the universe, Dawkins and other skeptics still call the Bible a book of fairy tales, belittling its six-day creation account as mythical. But, to make his point, Dawkins oversimplifies the biblical view.
There are actually several different views of how to interpret the time period in Genesis. Some scholars believe the Hebrew word for “day” in Genesis (yom) means a 24-hour period; others, however, point out that yom can refer to an indefinite period of time, such as an age or era.(21)
Physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder argues that both the Bible and science are right. Schroeder believes that God perceives time differently than we do.
By God’s time frame, the sequence took six days. By our time frame, it took billions of years.(22)
Schroeder points out that Einstein’s theory of relativity proves there is no absolute passage of time; it varies as opposed to being fixed. This principle of “time dilation” is why Atomic clocks on Earth run slightly slower than those on GPS satellites, and why astronauts age at slightly slower rates while traveling in space.
Nearly 2,000 years before Einstein’s theory the Bible indicated that God views time differently than we do when the apostle Peter wrote,
To the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.(23)
Regardless of how long creation took, the more fundamental question is: how was the Bible able to get it right about our one-time beginning millennia before telescopes, when science didn’t have a clue as to our origins?
Origin of Life
The Bible speaks of life as a miraculous gift from God. But since the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, scientists have looked for a natural, rather than a supernatural, explanation.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution dealt with natural selection in living things, not with the origin of life itself. He imagined life began in a slimy pond somewhere when organic chemicals spontaneously came together.
However, a hundred years after Darwin, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered that life is based on an intricately complex coded molecule called DNA. Crick, an agnostic, was so overwhelmed with DNA, that he called it, “almost a miracle.”(24)
What stunned Crick is that DNA operates like a language with its own extremely complex software code. DNA’s intricate intelligence prompted Microsoft founder Bill Gates to say that the software of DNA is “far, far more complex than any software we have ever developed.”(25)
How did such intelligent coding originate? Dr. Stephen C. Meyer observes that coded languages are always derived from an intelligent programmer.
Our experience with information-intensive systems (especially codes and languages) indicates that such systems always come from an intelligent source.(26)
When Antony Flew, the world’s leading atheist for 50 years, realized the intelligence within DNA, he reversed his anti-God belief, shocking the world. Flew admitted,
What I think the DNA material has done is to show that intelligence must have been involved.… It now seems to me that the finding of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.(27)
Instead of the Bible being outdated by science, scientific evidence has actually confirmed its ancient account of our origins in the following areas:
- Everything, including time and space, had a one-time beginning.
- Our universe and planet are perfectly fine-tuned for life.
- DNA’s sophisticated coding requires supernatural intelligence.
Oxford professor of mathematics, Dr. John Lennox summarizes the impact of these findings.
The more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”(28)
Continue reading page 4 of 10 of “Is the Bible True?”.
