THE "SIX DAYS" OF THE CREATION

According to the Biblical narrative, Adam was only created on the sixth day and, from that moment, our world is measured in terms of human timeline. By Adam, the Bible refers to the first human who was created by God Himself, at His image. This means that, whatever human-like beings existed before Adam (such as the evolution of several kinds of prehistorical men), they were part of the Creation and its evolution, and would have a degree of intelligence or instincts as animals do, but they did not have a divine soul (His image). Intelligence is not Soul. Only Adam received a Soul (which Jews call Neshama) which makes mankind vary far apart from the animal kingdom.

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But what happened before Adam?

This is what the Bible refers to the "six days" of the Creation (in Genesis 1). Needless to say that, from an atheist's point of view, there is no creation and there is no creator. For the believers in a creator though, it is still puzzling to mention "six days" when Science is saying that the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old ! As for the Earth, it is supposed to have been formed some 4.5 billion years ago (as the rest of the Solar System), and is proven to have been populated by all sorts of animals such as dinosaurs, that disappeared for an unknown reason, and then by prehistorical "men" for about 200,000 years, and then by the "modern man" from the last 12,000 years or so. 

How can we reconcile both points of view, Bible and Science? Simply put, these pre-Adam "six days" are not "human days" in the sense that they are not days that a human had counted or measured. These 6 days are "godly" days, because the only reference point by which Time was measured before the arrival of Adam was God. And a "godly" day could well correspond to billions or millions of what we now know as  (our human) "days" or "years". Those who study Physics already know the relativity of time (and space) as a scientific fact: in short, Time is not a constant notion, because it depends on the reference point from which it is measured or observed. Time and Space are related and actually the same thing. Time cannot be dissociated from the space or reference point from which it is measured. This was demonstrated some 100 years ago by Einstein in his Theory of the Relativity. He also proved that Energy and Matter are the same thing. So, these six days of Creation were indeed days, but only God's days. And if Science tells us that these Six Days (of godly reference) are actually 4.5 Billion years (of human reference), so be it !

 

There is no contradiction here. This simple fact is hinted in the Biblical text itself, in two ways. The first chapter of Genesis is related to God's work of the Creation. From the second chapter start the perception of the Creation by a human made at God's image (Adam). This first chapter contains 31 verses which is 1+ 30. The number 1 represents the "Day One" of the Creation narrative, when all started ex-nihilo including Time (and Space, which are the same thing). Beside, it is not called "first" day in the Bible. This "start" would correspond to the Big Bang that everyone knows now that it had existed (and nothing before it can ever be known). The number 31 is written ל"א in Hebrew, with letter א (value 1) and letter ל (value 30). Together they form the word אל, pronounced El which refers to god in Semitic languages. But one may say: the first 31 verses also contains the story of the creation of Adam himself, so counting of human timeline would have started from this point, in this same chapter 1. That is a valid point but too complex to argue here. So, let's simply use the second way: the creation of man is narrated in verse 27, which means that, before Adam was created, there are 26 verses. The number 26 also corresponds to the numerical of God's name (the 4-letter word, a.k.a. the Tetragram). Therefore these 26 verses are godly numbering/timing. So either way, 31 or 26, these are two hints to teach us that the works of the Creation, before mankind, were not human "days" but have to be understood from a different "godly" clock. 

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After the Creation, Day One, evolution started. But evolution alone cannot explain everything, in the timescale it would take for thinks to evolve. God had to intervene to change course of His creation and introduce elements in it: continents, plants, animals, and humans. In a Science point of view, there was also one single Big Bang and, afterwards, came "random" evolution, modulation, formation, etc. However, some mathematicians actually calculated the probability of random evolution and could only conclude that the time it would take to all what we see on Earth to really evolve and happen far exceeds the time assumed for the Earth (4.5 billion years) and even the Universe (14 billion years) : these Billions years, although they seem big numbers, are actually quite small in terms of statistics and probabilities. Therefore, for our earthly world, as we know today, to have been formed by "random" evolution in the course of 4.5 Billion is "mathematically impossible". And worse, the extreme complexity of Nature around us would have required a near-infinite number of mathematically impossible events to have evolved in the way it is today. The 4.5 Billion years period is far too short, from the formation of Planet Earth to the world we know today. The Bible rather tells us that there was a "master plan" that started from the Big Bang, went on with the cooling period of energy and the formation of basic matter, then onto more cooling and more matter formation to heavier elements to form the universe and the galaxies, then more cooling into these galaxies to form the stars and their systems of planets (and the Earth in the Solar system), then our planet saw the formation of inert objects and structures, then the elements to sustain Life, then Life itself, then living creatures, then… mankind. Everyone knows the old saying that “the world could not have been created in one day”. Well,  it took God seven of "His days". And each of His day was His interference in the random evolution to direct His creation to introduce new elements, that would have taken an infinite amount of time to eventually exist otherwise.