On the Second Day, Part 2: The "Baby Story" of the Universe

Needless to say, I have two sons who are very different, as was clear from the very beginning. Sam, you were four days late, and your birth was as scary as any first-time experience is, slow to come on, slow to progress, and if I even start to talk about how difficult it was, your mother kicks me under the table to remind me that she was the one who had to go through the actual pain (and to transfer some of that pain retroactively to me). I was reduced to cheerleader for a twenty-hour struggle. Then you came and we enjoyed a first quiet hour together. I held you so you could take your first look and you stared up at me with a bit of a question, maybe a “sorry about that” kind of expression, but I also saw you memorizing my face. Then I remember the TV showed the end of a Mariners game in which Lou Pinella threw a major tantrum and kicked his hat. I’m not sure what that means, but somehow it seemed fitting after all your mother went through.

Aidan, on the other hand, you were ready to go two weeks early, and Laurie asked for an epidural right away. We were so rushed we didn't have time to worry. The epidural worked well – so well that I took a little nap and woke up when the nurse said, in effect, “Here he comes!” This is when I first saw your incredibly red hair (we always knew you were a redhead even though the nurse told us you were a blonde -- actually, you had hardly any hair at first so it was an open question). You were long and stretched-out, and laid back, from the beginning, and we loved you from before that beginning.

Each birth was joyful and painful, but in different ways and with different timing. The important parts of the births were the results – two wonderful little boys – not the exact amount of time it took you to get here. We’re just glad you’re here.

Still, time is integral to the story that we tell. With that in mind, as part of telling the "Baby Story" of the universe, let’s try to figure out the length of its birth-day. We can emulate the “Harvard computers” with their Cepheid stars, and try to find some kind of yardstick for how old things actually are. Let's ask the earth how old it is, and let’s ask several different ways.

In the nineteenth century, geology was the fancy, popular science, much like biotech is today. Lots of hobbyists ran around trying to figure out rocks and fossils, including more than a few scientist/reverends like Rev. William Buckland of Oxford. It's important to start out by noting that everyone agreed the earth was very old, whatever their background, and the only question was, how many years does "very" old actually mean (and, how do you understand Noah's flood)? The most authoritative voice was the scientist Lord Kelvin, who saw from melted-looking rocks that the earth was once very hot, then calculated how long it would take hot rock to cool down in space, ending with a guess that the earth was 24 million years old. Others used different deductions to answer the question with 2300, 153, or 89, all "million years old." (Methods?) The bottom line is, even in the 1800's, many methods gave results confirming that the earth is very old.

But how can we actually measure it? We need something in rocks that is more durable than rock and as common as dirt. The rocks themselves can be split and deformed, knocked around by glaciers or floods, but the atoms themselves last very long time. All we have to do is stay away from the cores of massive stars or supernovas where atoms are created, which, incidentally, is probably good advice regardless. We can measure how fast atoms fall apart in the lab, and moreover, we can tell what should result from an atom falling apart with the certainty of 2 + 2 = 4, or perhaps 4 - 2 = 2.

(Here's an example, actually used in dating rocks: a potassium atom has 19 protons and 21 neutrons in its nucleus. It "breaks down" when one proton falls apart into an electron and neutron, which turns it into an atom with 18 protons and 22 neutrons: this is now an argon atom, because the protons tell us what kind of atom it is. We know how fast this break-down occurs: it takes 1.251 billion years for half of a potassium sample to turn into argon. To put it all together, a young rock will have lots of potassium and a little bit of argon, while an old rock will have lots of argon and a little bit of potassium. Since 19 = potassium, 18 = argon, and 1 = the poor-fated proton, it's 19-1 = 18 when you get down to the heart of it.)

We had to wait for the twentieth century to understand exactly how atoms fall apart. Thanks to the periodic table and work in nuclear physics, we figured out that uranium falls apart into lead, and not just any lead, but a special, unnatural lead with a few extra neutrons. If we can find both of these things in the rock we can tell how old the rock was when it cooled and froze into solid rock.

Clair Patterson is a scientist in the 1950's who tested samples of pitchblende, which has both uranium and lead in it. In 1953, he calculated that the earth is 4.5 BILLION years old. In other words, Lord Kelvin didn't know the half of it. In recent years, scientists scoured rocks where potassium fell apart into argon and rubidium fell apart into strontium, and the oldest rocks we can find always turn out to be 4.5 billion years old. It looks like that's when the earth started to cool, and that would be its birthday (probably, planets call it a "coolday"). (By the way, looking at moon rocks, we get an age just about as old, but a little younger than the earth.)It takes some more calculations to extend these ideas to the universe, which looks about 13 billion years old right now. Once you've accepted the idea of a 4.5-billion-year-old earth, what's another 8.5 billion years? The catch is you have to get your mind around the idea that from day 1 to day 2 of creation, from "let there be light" to the separation of the worlds and formation of the earth, it looks like 8 billion years elapsed.

You may want more information on exactly how these rock-dating methods differ, and how they account for atoms getting dissolved out of the rock or reacting with other atoms, etc. That's why it's good we have at least four very different methods that give consistent dates. I suggest a set of three articles by Davis A. Young, a Christian geologist who taught at Calvin College till his 2004 retirement, published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith vol 58:4-59:1, the journal of the American Scientific Association (referenced in a previous blog article titled "The Scientists' Favorite Psalm"). Dr. Young compares the many different techniques and talks about the theological implications of a very, very old earth.

Also, let's not forget to ask the physicists and mathematicians if they can work out a model for how the universe expanded, coalesced, and cooled into today's configuration over that long of a time scale. They can, and in fact, they have mathematically consistent theories for how the Big Bang happened down to a fraction of the very first second of the universe. So the chemistry gives us an old age from the rocks, and that gives the physics and math enough time to sort everything out. Everything makes sense scientifically. But ... not everything is reducible to "scientifically" right now, is it?

I expect you're experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance. Doesn’t the Bible say everything was made by God's word in six days? How can it be the word of God if the age of the universe is six days plus or minus 13 billion years? Why do we just see physical processes and no fossilized fingerprints of God in the mud?

It will take this entire series for me to even begin to answer all of these questions. We have to start somewhere, so let's start with the question of time. My immediate response is: don’t ask me, ask the Bible. In particular, ask Moses, who is the traditional author of Genesis.

It actually doesn’t say for sure in the Bible whether he wrote the first five books or not. But did you know there is one chapter in the middle of the Bible with Moses' name on the byline? It’s Psalm 90, which was not written by the usual suspects like David or Asaph, but "A Prayer of Moses the man of God." The amazing thing about this Psalm is that it fits right in with any discussion of Genesis. It opens with praise for God’s consistency and faithfulness, just like we talked about earlier in Day 2:

Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations / Before the mountains were brought forth / Or ever You had formed the earth and the world / Even from everlasting to everlasting / You are God.

You can embellish that with "Before the Big Bang and gravity," and it remains the same basic idea. We haven't got to mountains yet, but they're coming in Day 3. Keep reading the next two verses of the Psalm:

You turn man to destruction / And say, “Return, O children of men.” / For a thousand years in Your sight / Are like yesterday when it is past / And like a watch in the night.

That's an interesting perspective on time. Often people quote 2 Peter on this subject, but it appears that 2 Peter is quoting Psalm 90 (which also makes sense if you read the whole Psalm, because its themes of righteousness and judgment go right along with 2 Peter). So, if we read Psalms alongside Genesis, then the author of Genesis must have had a surprisingly flexible perspective on time, and how God relates to it. This isn’t too different from the findings discussed in day 1, the insight Albert Einstein gave us, that time and space are tied up together and can be distorted, even bent out of shape. Light is the absolute of the universe, and time itself bends to its constancy. I'm not saying that Einstein and Moses were describing the same thing, but I am saying that the same mind can read and assemble the ideas of each without having to wall them off from each other (like in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" for example!).

There’s lots to chew on here. The idea that time itself is not really pinned down is very, very hard to get your mind around. It does free us from having to say that the creation described in Genesis 1 had to happen in precise 24 hour spans. I'm not sure if the phrase "24 hrs" even has meaning here. What's clear from the chemistry of rocks and the physics of the Big Bang is that the universe was around long before us.

In day 1, we saw we live in a very big universe: from that I get a sense of awe, not self-pity or nihilism. Just because I'm small doesn't mean I'm insignificant or unloved. In day 2, we see that the timescale of the universe is very long: from that I get the same idea, of awe, not insignificance. Your Veggie Tales Bob doll is still right, you're still special and God still loves you very much. The scale of the universe does not diminish you, it enhances and even glorifies God. He loves you so much he made you through a billion-year-long process, something incomprehensible to us, but if He made it, it's not incomprehensible to him, is it?

Another side note is that it took 8 billion of the universe's 13 billion years to make the earth. The seven-day creation in Genesis is not evenly spaced. If it was, it might be more accurate science but it wouldn't be even half-decent writing. So the birth of the universe was more like the birth of Sam than the birth of Aidan. It was unimaginably slow. And that tells us something about the God who created it.
Some people don't like the idea of a long creation, and they say it makes God seem weak somehow, that if he's all-powerful, he could've made the earth in seven days. Well, why stop there? He could've made the earth in seven seconds. He could've caused the earth to pop out of nowhere without any process at all. But he didn't; he took his time, and his word did not return to him empty. Who am I to say it's an insult to him if he took his time? He gave me a mind to do my chemistry and count my uranium in pitchblende, and in good conscience I apply that, and I find that the world is old. I could have found that nothing is old, and it would have forced me to conclude that God made the world in seven days. But he doesn't force that, instead, he allowed the gravity he made to quietly scuplt the galaxies, the stars, and the worlds.
Love is patient ... God is love ... and God is patient. The root of patience is "passio," the Latin meaning to suffer along with something. God's patience can be seen in the long wait for the universe to come together according to his fixed laws. It can also be seen in Jesus' suffering on the cross, just a day on the earth but who knows how long to him? The birth of the universe, like your own births, was joy and pain blurred together like a spinning wheel of colors. God could have done it other ways, sure. He also could've fixed the world once and for all on that first Easter morning when Jesus came out of the grave -- but he didn't. Better yet, he could've sent legions of angels to Gethsemane to establish his kingdom in the way everyone expected, using the language of violence everyone (including his closest disciples) spoke -- but he didn't. Think of the reasons why he didn't, and hear his still small voice in the quiet of 8 billion years between the creation of the universe and the formation of the earth. Isaiah, David, and Bono combine to ask "How long, Lord?" for the patience to wait hundreds or thousands of years; God answers with the quiet patience to wait billions. This is part of the way creation groans from Romans 8, waiting for God to set things right. We live in a time where much has been fulfilled, but much is still to come. So we wait, and suffer a little bit more, and the fulfillment comes that much closer.

The previous three posts are about origin, immensity, and nearness. In those topics God appears as Creator and Father. But God as Creator is also the God seen in Jesus, and this fourth area (patience) is the first time that becomes clear. Consider the lengths to which He would go to create a universe elegant enough to produce what we need to know ourselves and to know him, and love him. His provision extends to the centers of the stars where atoms are created. We see a suffering God reaching out to us and patient enough to wait billions of years. God was above time but he also participated in it -- that's part of what it means to say he created "by his Word" and to say that "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God."
As for Genesis 1, it's tantalizingly close to what science shows us in what I'd argue are the most important points. But it's not as if science will eventually prove a 24-hour-creation day right, nor does it need to. I don't think God proves his existence that way, it's just not his style, and I don't think a God provable from nature would be same as the God revealed in Jesus.
As for the structure of Genesis 1, I like the idea that the seven days were the seven visions in which it was given to Moses, perhaps visually accurate, at the very least accurate in establishing each and every one of their essential points. Maybe I'm right on that, maybe I'm wrong and it was a polemic about God defeating the idols of the ancient Middle East. Maybe both are true. What matters is that I can see his hand in the gravity, and his heart in the long silences of creation. That's what science tells me: not an independent confirmation, nor a dissonant conflict, but a coloring and shading of the Genesis story, stretching some parts of it that are not essential to the message, but maintaining that (1) God made it and (2) it was good. I'd say those two points are repeated enough in Genesis 1 to be highly important!
Looking at the Bible with 21st-century eyes, and a full understanding of the experiments done to probe our universe, can pose some brief moments of dissonance, but it can also give dimension to what was unknown before. Consider how the size of the universe underlines the power of God. And while we're talking about the heavens and the Psalms, consider these words from Psalm 103:
For as the heavens are high above the earth / So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him / As far as the east is from the west / So far has He removed our transgressions from us.
In ancient times those were both examples of very far things, but most people considered them to be finite and limited. The firmament was very far away but it was still some kind of metal shell, or so they thought. What's fascinating is that hidden in this poem is an even greater understanding of God, unlocked by recent discoveries. The heavens are not just high above the earth, they're infinitely high (or, if you want to consider the firmament as the limit of the universe, 13 billion light-years away). Because we're on a sphere with a north pole but not an east pole, east and west are not just far, they're infinitely far from each other. So God's mercy is not just big, it's infinitely big. That's how far away your sins are removed: infinitely.
So that's what Genesis 1 says about the waters above; now we can pan down and move our focus to the waters below, the great oceans and seas that still are less explored than the surface of the moon. In them, life appeared almost immediately, as if it could hardly wait for the earth to cool off. But there was still a lot of waiting before it really started to flower, for similar reasons of patience and preparation. But I get ahead of myself, because that story really belongs to the third day. Wait for another post for that part of the story.
So there was a separation of the waters. There was evening, and there was morning. The second day was done.