Introduction

Is the Creation account in Genesis to be taken as literal or metaphorical? The question is pertinent because it seems like this is an issue that has led some to abandon faith altogether, in view of current scientific findings which seem to make a literal reading of the Genesis creation account impossible. This article lays out the reasons for the scientific calculation of the Universe’s age. These calculations are not in themselves based upon any bias against religion, rather were we not true to these calculations, it would be impossible to do any science at all, since the calculations derive from all the known areas of scientific research be it nuclear physics, quantum, general relativity, spectroscopy, trigonometry, wave- theory and so on. It is not the job of a religious text to dictate scientific research, unless this were explicitly stated in it. Rather one would expect the text to co-exist with our sense data derived from the Universe around us, based upon the presumption that both it and that Universe were “written”, so to speak, by God. In reading the signs in the skies are we not every bit as much reading a direct message from our Creator- for if we assume it is true there is a God, Creation is the direct work of His Hands, just as Revelation is the breath of his Spirit. Both provide in a very real sense, a real and direct access into the Mind of God. God did not give us one Book he gave us two. We observe our Universe with the same eyes with which we read our Bibles. Did not the same God inspire “all scripture is spirit-breathed” that also inspired ” God created the Heavens and the Earth”? But the Bible being a literary form, and not something from which we derive direct observational data need not fulfill the same function as the Book of Creation, it has a literary function to fulfil. God does not need to overlap purposes, therefore it need not be that the two are at Cross-Purposes.

Conflict in the Creation Accounts?

The first creation account seems to contain the difficult problem of the light being created on the first day and then the Sun and Moon being placed in the sky on the fourth. How could there be “evening and morning” before the Sun and Moon were in the sky? The sequence is hard to avoid, because that is all the fourth day is for, the placing of the lights in the dome of the sky, nothing else is created on it. I would take one of two possible positions here in response. The first is that God is counting night and day in his time. Remember that there are no animals at this time and certainly no rational animals that can mark the passage of night and day, and so God is giving a general impression of time prior to the actual days and nights on Earth- obviously celestial time precedes the commencement of the night-day cycle on Earth, so this seems plausible and reasonable as an explanation. However the problem with it is that vegetation is brought forth on the third day. The second possible approach is to say that this is such a glaring discrepancy, that there was no attempt to present a realistic account anyway. It could not fail to the obvious to even the most ancient of shepherds that it is sun that literally “fires up” the daylight in obviously progressive stages from the time that it peaks it’s face above the hills in the very first gentle warmth and light of dawn. Again it should be obvious to ancients that vegetation does not thrive unless there’s light, for example they would have noticed that plants/crops do not grow well indoors. These are pastoral peoples who are in fact much more attuned to nature than we are, so the point could not have been missed upon them. I think that we might be forced to take this second option – that a particular sequence is presented merely for the moral teaching and poetic value. Indeed poetic significances have been derived, but I haven’t got them to hand right now.

The second problem is that in the second creation account there are is that the vegetation in this account seems to come forth after the creation of the first man and woman, so as to feed them. This could be taken as suitably poetic, except that it is different from the first account. I would simply see this as more evidence that there is not even the attempt at accuracy in sequence and the poetic purpose of the second account is just that- to show that the Lord provides for the first man and woman. It is even specifically mentioned “when no plant of the field was yet in the Earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up- for the Lord had not yet caused it to rain upon the Earth and there was no one to till the ground” (2:8). However one could argue here that this is only referring to crop cultivation and not wild vegetation. However it could also be that v.6 does refer to the possibility of vegetation having arisen prior to the creation of the first man and woman in v.7, since the specified cause of the dearth of vegetation (no rain yet) is addressed therein “BUT a stream would arise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground”.

Measuring the Age of the Earth and Universe

Doppler Shift- Acceleration of Galaxies

Edward Hubble looked through a telescope with his own eyes he saw that the stars and the galaxies were racing away from each other with accelerated speeds. This he ascertained through their Doppler shift. Is Doppler shift real? We use exactly the same principle to measure the rate at which the blood in veins and arteries is accelerating in Ultrasound Doppler scans. It is as real as the change in the pitch of the sound of the train horn when it is coming towards and going away from us. Now if this acceleration is calculated backwards, it then slows down (decelerates) to a stop. This stop is shown to be around 13.7 billion years ago (this was calculated after some adjustments had to be made using the inflationary theory). For them to have got where they got in a lesser time, they’d have to have travelled at many times the speed of light for the entire alleged age of the 5000 year old Universe.

“Standard Candles”- Distance of Stars

This Doppler shift method is combined with distance measurements that can be made through measuring the luminosity and period of what are called “standard candles”- Cephid variable stars in the sky. These are known to have a period, which is the rate at which they flash, which is proportional to the luminosity. So if we are able to calculate the luminosity at origin and compare it to the luminosity that reaches us, we can make a distance calculation. Combine the distances with the rate of acceleration from the Doppler shift gives us a time measurement. What we are measuring in this case is the time it took for the galaxies to get to the distance were they are from where they began at the beginning of the Universe at the Big Bang: “sitting directly on top of us”.

Parallax measurement- Distance of Stars

Space.com website states regarding parallax, in an article by By Jim Lucas , Tereza Pultarova published January 11, 2022, excerpts:

Parallax is the observed displacement of an object caused by the change of the observer’s point of view. In astronomy, it is an irreplaceable tool for calculating distances of far away stars…

…It works like this: hold out your hand, close your right eye, and place your extended thumb over a distant object. Now, switch eyes, so that your left is closed and your right is open. Your thumb will appear to shift slightly against the background. By measuring this small change and knowing the distance between your eyes, you can calculate the distance to your thumb. That’s trigonometry

…The first known astronomical measurement using parallax didn’t involve a star but the moon. The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus reportedly used observations of a solar eclipse from two different locations to calculate the distance of Earth’s celestial companion.

…In 1672, Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini his colleague Jean Richer made simultaneous observations of Mars, with Cassini in Paris and Richer in French Guiana. Cassini subsequently used those measurements to compute the parallax determining Mars’ distance from Earth. 

“By comparing the intrinsic brightness to the star’s apparent brightness, we can get a good measure of the star’s distance by applying the 1/r^2 rule. The 1/r^2 rule states that the apparent brightness of a light source is proportional to the square of its distance. For example, if you project a one-foot square image onto a screen, and then move the projector twice as far away, the new image will be 2 feet by 2 feet, or 4 square feet. The light is spread over an area four times larger, and it will be only one-fourth as bright as when the projector was half as far away. If you move the projector three times farther away, the light will cover 9 square feet and appear only one-ninth as bright. If a star measured in this manner happens to be part of a distant cluster, we can assume that all of those stars are the same distance, and we can add them to the library of standard candles.”

This process of calculating distances using various “standard candles” took several decades to perfect and culminated in the work of the astrophysicist Alan Sandage who finally arrived at the values that we have today of an age of the Universe of 13.8 billion years.

Spectral Analysis- Age of the Universe

Calculating the age of stars has been made possible through spectral analysis of sunlight and the knowledge of nuclear physics and fusion and fission reactions. When the gaseous particles of a star are aggregated, then they are drawn together by gravity, and as a certain critical mass is reached the sufficient gravitation forces are produced to generate nuclear fission. This fission takes a certain number of years to burn the mass of that star. Our entire knowledge of the elemental table would be reduced to naught were this not true.

Radio-Isotope Dating of Rocks

How is the age of the Earth Calculated? by Radioisotope dating its oldest rocks. The video by the excellent PBS Spacetime channel gives a great depiction of this, the technique used is not the familiar Carbon dating, because the half-life of radioactive Carbon isotopes is far too short for these timescales, rather it is Uranium-Lead isotope dating. Uranium isotopes have half-lives of billions of years, and the technique consists of measuring the relative ratios of Ur compounds to the Lead into which it degrades in rocks.

Cosmic Microwave Background Data Analysis

These are useful excerpts from the Wikipedia page for “Age of the Universe”: “The problem of determining the age of the universe is closely tied to the problem of determining the values of the cosmological parameters. Today this is largely carried out in the context of the ΛCDM model, where the universe is assumed to contain normal (baryonic) matter, cold dark matter, radiation (including both photons and neutrinos), and a cosmological constant. The fractional contribution of each to the current energy density of the universe is given by the density parameters Omega t. Omega m, Omega lamda (…) For the purpose of computing its age these three, along with the Hubble parameter H0, are the most important. If one has accurate measurements of these parameters, then the age of the universe can be determined by using the Friedmann equation. (The Friedman equations were first derived by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 from Einstein’s field equations of gravitation for the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric). This equation relates the rate of change in the scale factor (…) to the matter content of the universe. Turning this relation around, we can calculate the change in time per change in scale factor and thus calculate the total age of the universe by integrating this formula. The age(…) is then given by an expression of the form

Where H0 is the Hubble parameter and the function F depends only on the fractional contribution to the universe’s energy content that comes from various components. The first observation that one can make from this formula is that it is the Hubble parameter that controls that age of the universe, with a correction arising from the matter and energy content. So a rough estimate of the age of the universe comes from the Hubble time, the inverse of the Hubble parameter. With a value for 1/H0 of 14.5 billion years”

The most accurate values of these cosmological constants required for these calculations are derived from observations from the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, most recently and accurately from the WMAP and PLANCK satellite data.

Further in the 2021, the three year Dark Energy Survey of the Universe was published. This was a mammoth project, and lends an additional corroboration to the CMB data, with the added benefit that while the CMB is measuring the Universe is measuring the Universe in its early state, the Dark Energy Survey is measuring it at far more mature stages billions of years later, and so the corroboration of the two results provides powerful independent verification of the evidence.

Evolution and the Origin of Life

I present this excellent resource on the topic: https://www.thomisticevolution.org/. I’ve discussed these matters in more detail in the science section.

What does the Church teach

the famous Jewish teacher Philo of Alexandria recognized that the 6-day creation was symbolic as did the 5th century St. Augustine Bishop of Hippo. This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church states on the matter:

“God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine “work”, concluded by the “rest” of the seventh day. On the subject of creation, the sacred text teaches the truths revealed by God for our salvation, permitting us to “recognize the inner nature, the value and the ordering of the whole of creation to the praise of God.”” (337)

In Summary

In order for young earth to create the picture in the sky as we see it, and yet produce experimental results that we see, God would have to literally take a slice of the space-time cone at 5000 years from our time, and discard everything back to the Big Bang. Even if that were a thing, it would seem like an unnecessary thing for a God to undertake, as though he were concerned to match the Universe to a Biblical metaphor, akin to the painted sky-dome in the Trueman show movie with starring actor Jim Carrey.

There seems to be no way out of this, in order to believe in young Earth, one would literally have to throw out all of Science as we know it today. This would involve living in a contradiction, because a lot of what we are able to do with technology today would depend on a correct understanding of science. So essentially when one sees appliances, vehicles at work, one would require to hold that the Science behind those appliances or vehicles was no more than a random sequence of events rather than anything that were dictated by laws that we have discovered. This is because that Science is the same means by which we read the signs in the stars.

It seems far more likely that God can indeed inspire writings that have no credible scientific correspondence, for example for reason of speaking to a people at a particular time, so as to be able to be relevant to those people at that time. Imagine God speaking to a nomadic shepherd form out of the sky saying “In the beginning I created the heavens and the Earth from a singularity in which all the five forces were united in a mass of infinite density and temperature. Then through the complex interplay of supersymmetry occurring at the Plank scale where Quantum electrodynamics and general Relativity are united as well, there occurred the union of electrons with protons to form the first hydrogen nuclei. At this moment which was three minutes later, the Universe because transparent and I said “let there be light” as the photons were able to shine through…

Did God not give us our eyesight and senses? It is one thing to say that God cannot lie in the Holy Book, but can God lie to us in what we see with our own eyes? For if Scripture is infallible, so also certainly is Creation, if we are to believe it is from God and no other.

See here for an analysis of the The Flood Account – Literal or Metaphor? and Human Genealogy by Single Descent?