Creation…6 days?…..really?

SIX DAYS OF CREATION

Six days. That’s how long the Bible says it took to create everything in the Universe. Six days. Religion and Science have been battling this out since the world was flat.

Without fail, people who believe the strict interpretation of the Bible relate a ‘day’ to what we think of as a standard 24 hour day. So basically they say the Universe was created in 144 hours.

Also without fail, scientists and most rational thinking people think these people are nuts.

Believers say God can do anything he wants and science says even God can’t defy his own physical laws. And so the debate has raged for eons. It’s one of the main reasons many religious people don’t trust science because to trust science would be to discount their God, and there’s no way that’s going to happen. It’s also the reason many early scientists were tortured or burned at the stake or met some similarly hideous demise.

But, what if science and religion aren’t really that far apart? What if there was actually a way to reconcile the two sides? Impossible you say? Not so, and it’s simpler than you might think..

See, there’s this thing called the Day of Brahma. It’s an ancient Hindu unit of time that lasts approximately 4.32 billion years. That’s right, billion years. So six days of Brahma would be over 25 billion years. Even modern day scientists don’t think it took that long to create the Universe but at least it puts religion and science in the same ballpark. When you’re talking billions of years, what’s a billion here or there? Nobody really knows anyway, right? It does make a lot more sense than 144 hours.

You might ask what a Hindu unit of time has to do with the whole Genesis narrative. Well, the Genesis story, or more accurately, the Hebrew versions¹ of creation, borrow heavily from ancient Mesopotamian mythology.² In fact, the Hebrew patriarchs spent their formative years living and learning in Mesopotamia. And Mesopotamia just happens to be the birthplace of the Hindu religion.

So, it’s more than likely the Hebrews and Hindus have more of a common heritage than we might think.

It’s not a stretch to understand that what Western Bible translators have interpreted as 144 hours actually meant 25 billion years.