(A continuing conversation from my Theory of Everything series of posts)
A fundamental problem many of us have is that we try to understand the universe from our perspective. We use scientific principles to hypothesize, observe and make conclusions about what's going on around us. This makes perfect sense, because we're the ones that want to know. It's not like we want to teach it to dogs, cats and monkeys! Those of us who are comfortable with our place in the universe have an easier time, I believe, in thinking of ourselves in a different way.
For example, we live for something greater than 26 Thousand Days on average, so we get to see the seasons of the earth as it travels around the sun. What if we used a thought experiment to imagine ourselves as a tiny bug (pick one), that lives for 26 days instead? Each of us would experience a slightly different season, yet we would still know the cycles of day and night. Then, if something odd like a meteor shower happened, then some of us would have vivid stories to tell future generations. Even worse, if a meteor wiped us (or the dinosaurs) out millions of life-cycles ago, we might be fearful that our time would be coming to an end. Well, this is exactly the case - only, we live a thousand times longer than 26 days and the killer asteroid hit earth millions of years ago. If we lived for millions of years, then that would've only been a couple "months" ago.
This particular thought experiment comes to me frequently when people try to debunk the idea that God created the universe and created Man on day 6. Why's that so hard to believe? Our dating mechanism's can suffer from a major flaw whereby a particular amount of atoms we use to calibrate our instruments behave a certain way now, but fail to extrapolate to millions of years ago. What if carbon dating is completely wrong when we try to date "billion-year" old rocks? How do we know how fast compounds formed or decayed under the conditions that existed "billions" of years ago? What if the Earth revolved around the sun very slowly or spun extremely fast back then? Wouldn't that skew everything we try to measure now? I really like this answer to the question of how long is a biblical day. It mirrors my own belief - especially when it talks about that manyana thing :)
To those that believe with all their heart in creationism or evolution to the detriment of the other, let me declare that both are true. It's just that our perception of the real number of days it took to create the animals is like millions of years. And then when God created us, he may have used evolution as the mechanism or perhaps created enough creatures just like us (baboons and Neanderthals for example), then decided to go all the way and create us with a real brain. Some might then ask why do we know so much compared to the Neanderthals... Simple - NeanderEve shared a forbidden apple with NeanderAdam! Come on people, do I have to spell everything out?
So, since God created everything we know in 6 days and rested for the seventh, then he might still be resting! And to us, this day is taking a really long time for him to come rescue us from the major tyranny around the world. Or maybe on day 8 we messed things up (we're human - and it doesn't take us long to mess up a good thing!) Day 9, he gave us Alexander and Isaiah, Day 10 - the Ten Commandments, Day 11 the floods when we didn't listen, Day 12 Jesus to show us the way (again). So now we're in Day 13, a few ticks past midnight. It might take us a few thousand days/years more, but that Day 14 will surely come - the Day of Judgment. And because there are so many souls to judge that might be a very long day indeed.
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