Immanuel Lutheran Church Study Forum

God created everything in six days. Most will agree with that, but debate whether they were 24-hour Earth days or “God days” which could be significantly longer. Does it really matter since we are here now and moving ahead? Yes, it does matter because as the first page in the Bible, if this statement is unreliable, the entire Scripture could be untrustworthy. That makes this question a primary point of attack for anti-theists. However, even the learned faithful strongly and emotionally contest this question. I don’t have an answer, but I can offer some observations.

There are no dates in Genesis and no human was there to record the details. Any timeline requires faith to believe. God gave Genesis to Moses. God had to (truthfully) describe things that modern science can't explain in a way an 80-year-old man who had been herding goats for 4 decades could understand well enough to record and instruct his followers in 1500 B.C. While there are many ideas, I will layout 3 to start the discussion.

Young Earth. Creation took 6 literal earth days. This most literal interpretation is supported by verifiable references placing Genesis in the Historical Narrative genre. Since concrete facts like the Euphrates River and Adam and Eve's genealogy (They can’t be myths if we know of their descendants) are mentioned, we should assume the rest is equally valid on its face. Based on the ages and genealogy in Genesis this theory puts the age of the Earth at about 6000 years.

Old Earth. This idea is supported by current scientific theories and places the Earth as old as 18 billion years. This is rectified with Scripture in at least 2 ways.
Poetry. Since there are things in the creation story that seem metaphorical, like the Trees of Life and of Knowledge of Good and Evil, some people place Genesis in the Poetry genre and suppose the 6-day timeline as also metaphorical.
Framework. This theory says the word ‘day’ is used to describe an era of creation as a conceptual framework for discussion. Something like we might say, “back in my granddad’s day” when referring to a generational era, but on a God scale. There are a lot of interesting variations of this idea.

The creation holds a particular fascination for me, and I have a many thoughts, but will stop now as I am interested in yours.

Why do creation days go from evening to morning? Where is the day? One explanation I read was that 'evening' in Hebrew carried the connotation of chaos and disorder, the uncertainty of the impending nightfall. Conversely, 'morning' has a connotation of restored order or new organization. This makes a creation day go from chaos until (God's) order. Entropy is the constant natural trend toward disorder. One of the things science cannot rectify about our beginning, especially with evolution, is the violation of entropy. This explanation of evening and morning shows God's supernatural input into the creation process.

An interesting question

In his book 'Genesis and the Big Bang," Schroeder, who is a conservative Jew and a PhD Astrophysicist has a unique theory. Using the time compression theories of Einstein's relativity, Schroeder estimated relative times between the center of the "Big Bang" when all the mass in the universe exploded at the speed of light and a particle that would become part of earth. His calculations equate a 24 hour day at the point of origin to billions of years on the particle. As the particle slows down and moves away from the origin, the time at each location become more similar. Each 24 hour day at the origin equates to a theorized era in the formation of the universe and life on earth in accordance with the 'old earth' timeline.

God created earth and formed man - it is a matter of faith! Man has struggled from the beginning to KNOW exactly how He did it or why. Man has resisted “faith” in His existence and WORD, I believe, because he believes in himself and his ability to know and understand his world and it’s functions.
The “Big Bang” theory is a way to explain our world and cosmos and our existence. Exploring the evidence such as the fact that our cosmos is still expanding, is a search for a rational that will allow “us” to evade our ignorance of how God ‘did it’. We are being allowed, by God, to view just some of his power and plan. It is doubtful that we will ever know all but our vanity will never rest,
God inspired Moses to write what man could understand at that time and place and requires us to trust in his creation and control of our existence without giving us all the ways in which he created our world.