Were six days of creation 24 hours?

Parables to Ponder

Billy Powell | billypowellbooks.com

 

Genesis, chapters 1-2, states that God created the universe in six

days. God’s creative acts by day: Day 1 – Light, Day 2 – the Sky, Day 3 – Dry Land,

the Seas, and Vegetation, Day 4 – Sun, Moon, and Stars, Day 5 – Sea Life and

Birds, Day 6 – Land Animals and Mankind. On Day 7, God rested.

After each

day of creation, the scripture reads, “Evening passed and morning came” which

implies that each day constituted 24 hours. However, it is inconceivable there

could have been a morning and an evening on Days 1-3, since the sun was not

created until Day 4.

Based

on a literal interpretation of the scripture (using the 24-hour day), James Ussher,

an Anglican Archbishop in the 1650s, computed that creation began on 23 October

4004 B.C. Thus, we are now living in the seventh millennium.

How did

Bishop Ussher arrive at the 4004 B.C. date? He did so by calculating backwards

from Jesus’ birth to the creation of Adam.

For example,

Genesis 5 chronicles 10 generations from Adam to Noah. Based on biblical

genealogies, the span from Adam’s birth to the flood in Noah’s time comes to

1656 years. The flood lasted one year and 10 days.

The 10

generations after the flood – from Noah’s son, Shem, to the birth of Abraham —comprised 292 years. Thus, the time span from Adam’s

creation until Abraham’s birth is 1,949 years (1,656 plus one (for flood) plus

292). Similar calculations were used to compute the time from Abraham to Jesus’

birth.

Since Ussher’s

chronology begins with Adam (created on sixth and final day of creation), it

fails to capture the time span for the first five days of creation, which could

have taken billions of years. Supportive of this view is that scientists have estimated

the universe to be nearly 14 billion years old and the earth about 4.5 billion

years old. Consequently,the logical

conclusion is that a single day of creation could have taken millions of years

or an indefinite period of time.

Does

not the scripture say that “with the Lord, one day is as a thousand years?”

The

best scientific explanation of creation is the Big Bang Theory of Cosmology.

This theory is reconcilable with the Genesis account of creation. It postulates

that approximately 13.7 billion years

ago, the entirety of our universe was compressed into the confines of a

single atomic nucleus, which under the pressure of trillions of degrees of

temperature, exploded and propelled matter into outer space. As the matter

cooled, it formed planets, stars, and galaxies. Light spectrometry proves that

these heavenly bodies are still being propelled through the outer reaches of

space at enormous speeds.

Since

the Big Bang was a supernatural event that occurred at a point in history when

space and time did not exist, it is evident that a Master Architect was behind

it – the Architect being God himself. This event could well account for the

method by which “God, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth.”

(Genesis 1:1). Therefore, the six days of creation become not six 24-hour days,

but eons of time spread over six creative acts instigated by a Master

Architect.