PART I - THE NATURE OF TIME

Introduction
------------
The six (6) Creation Days found in Genesis Chapter 1 are of
special interest to both Christians and Jews because they raise
the following question:
 

"How could our world have been created in 6 Days when
the consensus of an international jury of scientists
is that its age is in the billions of years?

Some have attempted to answer this question by saying that the
Hebrew word "YOM" found in the Book of Genesis is not a literal
24 hour day, but rather denotes an extended period of time.
Others however object to this interpretation because for the most
part "YOM" clearly has the meaning of an ordinary day when found
in other contexts throughout the Bible. But there is a third
answer which has not as yet been applied to this question -
primarily because it involves a little known aspect of time that
scientists routinely measure in laboratories all over the world
viz., time is an elastic band. To illustrate this fundamental
truth about time, the first half of this essay (Parts 1-3) will
describe what time is, while the second half (Parts 4-6) will
discuss the experimental data which proves that the description
is true. Although the biblical meaning of YOM is fully discussed
in the paper: "What Are the Creation Days?" (available for down-
load on this website), this essay shows that taking YOM to mean a
24 hour day leads us to conclude that a Creation Day in Genesis 1
may nonetheless correspond to billions of years as measured by a
clock that ticks on earth today.
 
 

Time Is "Elastic"
----------------
Imagine that we cut an elastic band with a scissors, and then
place it on a hard surface so that it is unstretched but
straight. Next we paint small black marks on the rubber band that
are separated from one another by an inch. Thus we have a
straight but unstretched rubber band with marks along its length
that are separated by one inch. Let's further assume that the
band is very long - perhaps several hundred feet - so that we
have thousands of these black marks, each one inch apart from the
next. Of course what we really have in this example is a very
long elastic ruler - something that can be stretched at will.

But before we do any stretching - before we pull at its ends,
let's use it to measure the length of something, say, the front
of an 84 foot house. Were we to use our rubber band to measure
the length of the front of this house, we would find that there
are over 1000 (one inch) black marks between the 2 ends of the
house. But this is with the rubber band unstretched. If we now
pull at the ends of our elastic ruler, the marks begin to move
apart and the distance between any two of them increases, so that
the number of black marks between the ends of our house becomes
less and less.

In fact, if we pull on our elastic ruler hard enough - and
assuming that it does not break, then we can stretch it so much
that the distance between any 2 adjacent black marks becomes
equal the length of the house that we are measuring. Thus with
our elastic ruler unstretched, the front of our house measures
over 1000 black marks, whereas when we stretch our elastic band
far enough, the length of the front of our house changes to only
one black mark.
 

Physical Reality
----------------
Let's reconsider the length of the front of our house. Did it
change? Of course not! What changed was the distance between the
black marks that we used as our ruler to measure. The same is
true of time. The true age of something is like the front of our
house. It doesn't change. But the "ruler" that we use to measure
this "age" does change. We call such rulers "clocks", and the
distance between the black marks is the interval between the
"tick" and the "tock" of a clock. Under certain conditions this
interval increases so that thousands of "marks" (years) can
become one mark. Scientists call the way that time stretches
"time dilation", and what it means is that although we may
measure the age of the universe today as being billions of years
old, this same "house front" of time (age) could have actually
measured only one hour in literal physical time using the same
clock but "stretched" when the universe came into existence.

But how does time dilation work? In other words, into what
kind of environment must we put a clock in order for the interval
between the "tick" and the "tock" to stretch and enlarge? In
terms of "Creation", the kind of environment that can translate
billions of years into hours is one that scientists call "large
space-time curvature". Virtually every scientist in the world
today is convinced that the physical reality in which we live is,
as a practical matter, composed of a 4-dimensional "space-time"
fabric consisting of 3 dimensions of space, and 1 dimension of
time. And although this "fabric" is essentially flat today, it
was highly curved during the epoch of "Creation". As a result,
time was in a highly stretched condition, so that a clock
measuring time then might tick only hours, whereas the identical
clock ticking today would tick billions of years.
 

PART 2 - THE DAYS IN GENESIS

Time At Creation
----------------
Genesis is describing time using clocks that ticked then - not
now. The reason is that time has no other meaning except in terms
of clocks that tick during the epoch in which the events occur to
which the "time" applies. We can express this truth another way:
Time is the order or relationship of events to themselves whereas
"space" is the order or relationship of things to themselves.
Thus time and space are both an "order or relationship" and
combine themselves into one common "space-time" manifold that we
perceive as physical reality. This means that "time" has meaning
only in terms of the order or relationship of the events that it
describes, and can only be rationally used within the context of
the space-time frame of their occurrence. Thus when Genesis
speaks of "Creation Days", they can only be rationally understood
using clocks ticking "then" - and not now. We exist in an epoch
whose space-time curvature is quite flat compared to that which
attended Creation, so that if one chooses to see the Genesis text
in terms of Days that contain 24 hours of literal physical time,
then the Genesis text must be understood in the light of what
time is, and not in terms of what our intuition would force it to
be. These considerations have three (3) important consequences:

1) Clocks that tick on Earth today can measure billions of years
for the age of something that - if measured by the identical
clock in the "stretched" (dilated) environment of the frame in
which the events occurred - might measure one day, one hour - or
even under one second. There is therefore no rational basis for
criticism against the Genesis text as regards an alleged conflict
over the age of things.

2) The length of time of the Creation Days described in chapter 1
of Genesis cannot be understood in terms of the age of things
that we measure today because it is impossible in principle to
correlate clocks "now" with clocks "then". This means that if
"YOM" means 24 hours, then the "hour" it describes can be, as a
practical matter, a virtual infinity compared to an "hour" that
would be measured using clocks that tick on Earth today.

3) The empirical fact (discussed in later paragraphs) that time
is "elastic" means that if the curvature of space-time changed
from "highly curved" at Creation to "almost flat" now, then the
length of the time interval between the "tick" and "tock" of a
clock would have undergone contraction. Thus a clock measuring
time within the frame of a Creation Day would always measure one
day of literal physical time, but the length of the Creation Days
as measured by clocks ticking today would appear to today's
observer as having diminishing values. Therefore the first or
second Creation Day might appear to have an apparent age of, say,
billions of years as measured by today's clocks, whereas the
latter several Creation Days could merge into the "time" that we
experience today.
 

PART 3 - THE WAY CLOCKS TICK

Modern "Time"
------------
The modern discovery of time dilation means that the 12 to 15
billions years for the accepted age of our universe cannot be
said to conflict with the description in Genesis of the world's
Creation in six (6) "Days" because if the same clock is used to
measure time "then" and "now", the "billions of years" that it
measures "now" can readily fit into the "Day" it would measure
"then". The reason is again time dilation - the scientific fact
that clocks tick at different rates, depending upon the space-
time environment in which they are used to measure time.

For example, one kind of "clock" that has been tested in this
way is a radioactive substance called "Cesium 137". It's a
"clock" because a large number of its atoms lose known amounts of
energy at a constant rate from their centers over time periods
that can be measured. To illustrate how this works in simple
terms, lets suppose that it lost 3 units of energy each second,
and that the total amount lost was 15 units of energy. From this
information we would know that 5 seconds of time had elapsed.

Time dilation can be demonstrated in today's flat space-time
by taking a clock, and causing it to move at high speed.
Experiments have been done, for example, in which the Cesium
clock has been put on an airplane, and made to fly at great
speed. Upon returning to the ground, the clock is found to loose
time, and in precisely the amount predicted by the mathematical
equations of the Special Theory of Relativity.
 

The Physics of Time
-------------------
The discovery which revealed that time is "elastic" is known
in science as the "Special Theory of Relativity", and it was
published by Albert Einstein in 1905. People often confuse this
with the "General Theory of Relativity" which he published 11
years later in 1916. Although they are related, they are quite
different in what they reveal, and in the degree to which they
are known to be true. The "General Theory", for instance, is
still the subject of much debate, and the degree of its validity
has not been definitively established. On the other hand, the
"Special Theory" is the most experimentally verified theory in
all of science, and the truth of what it teaches has been
confirmed with greater precision than any other similar
pronouncement in the history of science.

The "Special Theory", for example, provides scientific laws
that show us how to make thermonuclear bombs with sufficient
energy to annihilate islands off the face of the Earth when they
explode. We observe that not only can we construct such bombs and
watch them explode - but that the energy they release is, in fact,
exactly as predicted by the Special Theory of Relativity.

The physics that shows that time is like an elastic band is
the same physics which predicts that the mass of any object will
increase if that object is set in motion. In other words, the
Special Theory of Relativity shows that an object actually gets
heavier if it is set in motion, and that its mass would become
infinite were its speed to reach the speed of light (186,282
miles per second). However the way that the mass increases is
exactly the same way that the interval between the "tick" and
"tock" of a clock increases when a clock is set in motion.

This means that if a moving clock reached the speed of light,
the time that we would measure using that clock would be
infinite. Since such motion is equivalent to a "curvature" in
space-time, it means that clocks on Earth today could measure
billions or even trillions of years for the age of something that
might measure under one second using the identical clocks during
the epoch of Creation. We thus realize that the apparent conflict
between modern time measurements and the six (6) Creation Day
account found in Genesis is nonexistent, and that the confusion
occurred because of our limited knowledge of time. In a very real
sense the truths contained in the Bible regarding Creation were
too advanced for the state of our knowledge regarding "time", and
it took us until the twentieth century to align our knowledge
with its disclosures.
 

PART 4 - EXPERIMENTAL CONFIRMATION

Particle Accelerators
---------------------
Time dilation has been routinely measured in laboratories
throughout the world for decades, and the identical physics which
describes it is used in the design of particle accelerators in
every country where they are found. The magnetic poles of the
TRIUMF Cyclotron at the University of British Columbia, for
example, have spiral iron sectors whose design must take
relativistic effects into account, or the accelerator simply will
not work. The same is true for the multistage "MP" (Emperor)
tandem facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and also for
the 25 million electron-volt "Pelletron" tandem accelerator at
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Numerous other examples can be
cited such as the (time-varying field) Synchrocyclotron and
Alternating-Gradient Synchrotron, the (electrostatic) Dynamitron,
and the (linear) heavy ion and electron accelerators and storage
rings.

It should be appreciated that these atomic machines require
years to build, and at a cost of many millions of dollars. Were
they not to work as advertised, the consequences would be
devastating. Yet they only will work if the equations of the
Special Theory of Relativity are used in their design. The reason
is that the particles they accelerate travel at speeds that
approach the speed of light, and these particles get heavier and
heavier as they move faster and faster. The increased mass slows
them down - and if not taken into account they arrive late at
"critical points" where forces exist to accelerate them further.

The 400 billion electron-volt atomic machine at the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory, for example, is a multimillion
dollar machine in which the particles travel along a path whose
diameter is over one mile in length. Yet the guide fields and
focusing magnets in its 4 mile underground tunnel do not work
unless the design takes into account the equations of Special
Relativity - equations whose correctness depends upon time
dilation, and without which the atomic machines do not function.
Furthermore, the measured increase in mass is precisely what
Einstein's equations predict that it will be.
 

Mass Increase With Speed
------------------------
Experiments done as far back as 1909 (4 years after Einstein's
publication) proved that nature obeyed relativistic equations.
The scientist who performed these experiments was Alfred Heinrich
Bucherer. Born 1863 in Cologne, Germany, he studied in Technische
Hochschule Hannover (1884) and thereafter at Johns Hopkins. He
was a professor of both physics and chemistry in Bonn, Germany
during the period 1899 - 1923 in which the experiments were
performed, and was well grounded in his theoretical understanding
of the Einstein relationships as attested by his 1908 paper:
"Experimentelle Bestatigung des Relativitatsprinzips".

In 1909, Bucherer measured the change in the mass of electrons
that he accelerated to very high speed. He found that their mass
increased as they moved faster, and that it did so in precisely
the way Einstein had predicted. His scientific results were
published in a paper entitled: "The Experimental Confirmation of
the Relativity Principle" (Ann. Phys. (1909) 28:513, Leipzig)

Periodic Waves
--------------
The first direct verification of time dilation occurred in
1938 when Herbert Eugene Ives (John Hopkins, Dartmouth and Yale)
discovered that the distance between the peaks of the waves of
electromagnetic radiation emitted from rapidly moving atoms
increased when the atoms moved faster. Each wave is like the
"tick" or "tock" of a clock because the distance between them
displays the periodic repetition of a clock mechanism. Ives found
that the time interval between adjacent wave crests changed
exactly as described by the equations of Special Relativity.

Cosmic Particle Lifetime
------------------------
Additional confirmation occurred 3 years later in 1941 when
Bruno Benedetto Rossi (University of Padua, Bologna, Florence and
Manchester) demonstrated the validity of relativistic time by
counting the rates of cosmic particles at various altitudes. He
proved that the time over which certain atomic particles survive
(mesons generated in outer space and impinging upon the Earth)
could only be explained if Einstein's equations were correct, and
that without time dilation, their measured survival time would be
impossible.
 

Additional Confirmation
-----------------------
Many scientists studied the consequences of Rossi's work by
conducting a large number of experiments during the 1950's using
the same atomic particles that he studied. In every case, and
without exception, the actual measured time of the surviving
"mesons" proved to be exactly as predicted by the time dilation
equations of Special Relativity thus reaffirming their validity.
 

Mossbauer Effect
----------------
The "Mossbauer Effect" is a complicated scientific phenomena
where a small number of atoms resonate with gamma rays, and then
distribute the energy they absorb without recoil to the other
atoms in the lattice. In 1960, Robert Vivian Pound (Buffalo and
Harvard Universities) used the "Mossbauer Effect" (together with
G.A. Rebka) to verify the way in which the peaks of light waves
move away from each other as their atoms get closer and closer to
a large gravitating body. This work not only verified time
dilation, but also established the validity of the equivalence
principle in which a large gravitational field (highly curved
"space-time") produces the same time effect as would occur from a
clock moving at high speed.
 

Clocks In Flight
----------------
A very significant experiment testing the validity of time
dilation occurred in 1971 when J.C. Hafele and R.E. Keating
directly measured the relativistic effects on clocks by flying
four (4) of them around the world. The experiment reaffirmed that
time dilation is true, and established that its actual cause lies
in the physical field properties of "empty" space.
 

Energy Conservation
-------------------
The Special Theory of Relativity is so essential to understand
our modern world that a detailed understanding of the binding
energies of the nucleons within the centers of atoms would be
impossible without it. For example, when experiments are done
that measure the energy of nuclear particles, there are two (2)
kinds of energy involved - one is called "potential" energy which
is produced by virtue of the positions in which the various
particles are located with respect to one another, and the other
kind of energy is called "kinetic", because it comes about from
the motion of the particles.

Thus "potential energy" can be thought of as an energy of
position, whereas "kinetic energy" is an energy of motion.
However the important thing is that our scientific laws demand
that the sum of these 2 energies must be conserved. This means
that in any experiment in which these energies are measured, the
addition of the potential and kinetic parts must be the same both
before and after any impact that may take place. But unless
Einstein's equations are taken into account, this does not occur.
What this therefore means is that the most fundamental of all our
laws - the "Law of Conservation of Energy" - remains true only if
the effects of Special Relativity are included in the analysis of
the experimental results.

These experiments definitively show that it is the
relativistic energy which is conserved, and that without the
Einstein's equations, energy conservation is violated in
experiments involving nuclear reactions. Moreover, the analysis
of the energy balance in a large number of reactions shows that
the measured values of the nuclear masses that are deduced from
these reactions and the measured value of the mass, as obtained
by mass spectrometry, agree only when the effects predicted by
the Special Theory of Relativity regarding the mass and energy
are taken into account.
 

Atom Bombs
----------
It's sometimes helpful in discussing the confirmation of
Special Relativity to understand that atomic bombs likewise
constitute experimental confirmation of Einstein's equations. The
Special Theory of Relativity asserts that mass and energy are
equivalent, and that the one can be changed into the other by the
relation:
E = M C2

This equation merely says that if we take one gram of mass,
and convert it entirely into energy, then the amount of energy
released will be in "ergs" the number "10" multiplied by itself
twenty one (21) times. This corresponds to about ten hundred
thousand million billion ergs. It comes as no surprise that the
magnitude of energy that is both released and measured in atomic
explosions is this number, and that thermonuclear weapons and
reactors work the way they do because Einstein was correct when
he mathematically demonstrated that a very small amount of mass
can be converted into a vast quantity of energy.
 

Atomic Nuclei
-------------
We find confirmation of Special Relativity in virtually every
area of science. Consider, for example, something as "simple" as
the mass of a helium nucleus. Ordinarily we expect its value to
be four (4) times that of the hydrogen nucleus. But when
measurements are taken, we learn that this is not the case, and
that there is a one percent discrepancy between the two.
Classical science is unable to account for why the 4 nucleons in
a helium atom have less mass than 4 times the one nucleon in a
hydrogen atom, but Special Relativity precisely explains it in
terms of a tiny mass loss in exchange for energy to bind the 4
helium nucleons together.
 

Stellar Energy
--------------
Another confirmation comes from the fact that the age of our
universe as measured by our clocks on Earth today has been
established to be about 12 to 15 billion years by three (3)
independent measurements (Doppler Red Shift, Globular Clusters and
Nucleochronometers). However in and of itself, and as discussed
earlier, this is fairly meaningless in terms of the Book of
Genesis because the time measurement is relative to clocks
"ticking" within the frame of occurrence of events in the
flattened space-time fabric in which we presently exist. Nonethe-
less the fact that all three (3) separate and independent measur-
ements give essentially the same number for the age of the
universe indicates that the measurements are trustworthy.

Of course these times speak only to the age of the universe
and do not show that our solar system or the planet Earth is this
old. However the billions of years that these measurements do
reveal in terms of clocks ticking today raises the following
question: "How is it possible for the stars to maintain their
temperature for so long a period of time?" Any "ordinary" fuel
would have been spent long ago. Until the advent of Special
Relativity, this question had no good answer - but Einstein's
equations now provide astrophysicists with the solution viz.,
tiny amounts of mass are being continuously converted into vast
amounts of energy. In other words, stars are atomic furnaces, and
the energy that they produce is enormous.
 

Charged Particles in Gravity
----------------------------
The validity of relativistic effects was recently affirmed
anew with the publication of work in the proceedings of the
International Symposium on the Foundation of Quantum Mechanics
held in l983 in Tokyo. The scientists reported on theoretical
and experimental work dealing with the effect on electromagnetic
systems in the presence of a background gravitational field. In
particular, they reported that when electromagnetic and
gravitational fields are simultaneously present in experiments on
interferometry involving charged particles, the experimentally
observed effects are purely relativistic and cannot be obtained
from Newtonian Gravity.
 

Muonium Bound States
--------------------
Other scientific work reported in this same conference showed
that the universally acknowledged, and experimentally confirmed
quantum electrodynamical description of nuclear particles has
established the necessity of relativistic bound states for
muonium. This work was primarily concerned with the accuracy with
which certain theoretical predictions are known, but yet included
experimental results validating not only Relativistic Physics,
but Quantum Physics as well. In addition, the precision with
which the latest experimental value has been established is
without precedent in the history of nuclear science.
 

Scientific Acceptance
---------------------
The transformations of Special Relativity enjoy universal
acceptance today by virtually every scientist in the world whose
work in some way relates to the physical phenomena that these
equations embrace. Moreover, these physical outworkings are quite
extensive. Einstein's equations show, for instance, that such
things as temperature, pressure and many other common physical
quantities are "relative", whereas entropy, coulombic charge and
the velocity of light in a vacuum are shown to be absolutely
independent within the observational reference of an intelligence
making the measurements. These empirical statements and
conclusions are regarded as established fact by the scientific
community, and have been so regarded for decades.
 

PART 5 - COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Relativism vs. Absolutism
-------------------------
There are quite literally hundreds of books written on the
Special Theory of Relativity which demonstrate that the Theory is
based on experimental measurements showing that the speed of
light is absolutely invariant, regardless of the "inertial frame"
in which it is measured. For this reason the theory could have
just as easily been called: "The Theory of Absolutism". The
picture this presents is that of an absolute physical unity in
which a disturbance in one location produces another disturbance
relative to it at another location due to the absolute oneness of
the whole. Thus the theory of "relativity" does not compromise
truths regarding absolutes because the theory is, in fact, based
upon an absolute viz., the speed of light.
 

Expanding Universe
------------------
Sometimes people wrongly believe that the Special Theory of
Relativity depends on the belief that our universe is
"expanding". However this is untrue. The belief in an
expanding universe depends upon the existence of a regular
increase in the recessional velocities of galaxies which is in
proportion to the distance of a particular galaxy. For example,
if one galaxy is twice as far from us than another, then the
first galaxy will appear to recede at twice the velocity of the
second. This is known as "Hubble's Law", and it wasn't published
until 1929, whereas the Special Theory of Relativity was
introduced 24 years earlier in 1905. However the reason that
people may wrongly think that Special Relativity depends upon an
expanding universe is that Einstein's General Theory of
Relativity (published 13 years later in 1916) can be made to be
consistent with the idea of an expanding universe.
 

The New Inflationary Theory
---------------------------
The New Inflationary Theory of the Universe has been wrongly
believed to teach that our world came into existence from a
preexisting tiny "something" e.g., a super-dense "primeval
electron". However the theory does not teach this. In fact,
recent serious work speculates that the universe originated as a
quantum fluctuation, starting from absolutely nothing. The
"primeval electron" idea is again an example of something we
discuss below viz., confusion between what the theory does not
say as regards the source of our universe, and how the theory
does say it unfolded after it came into being. In truth, the New
Inflationary Theory of the Universe is the closest literal
statement of Genesis 1:1 in the scientific literature of which I
am aware.
 

Theistic Neutrality
-------------------
The New Inflationary Theory of the Universe is independent of
the details of the initial conditions from which our universe
originated. Thus contrary to popular belief, it cannot be said to
require a "primeval electron" as a primer from which to start our
world. Moreover, since the theory says nothing whatsoever about
the source of the initializing organizational miracle that
enabled our universe to come into being, it does not deny the
existence of a "Miracle Maker" as the Source of our world. But of
course, neither does the theory affirm His existence. The reason
is that the theory - like all scientific theories - is
theistically neutral.
 

Cosmological Theories
---------------------
In considering the potential merit of cosmological theories,
it is important to realize that such theories do not stand in
isolation, but are part of a much deeper framework that embraces
particle physics, recent cosmological data, and several new
theories that are presently under development, and which act to
unify the four fundamental forces of nature. Obviously, the work
is not complete, but it is certainly well under way. More
importantly, its foundation is, as a practical matter, accepted
by virtually every scientist presently engaged in such work, and
on an international basis.
 

Grand Unification Theories
--------------------------
Scientists today are developing "Grand Unification Theories"
which interrelate each of the four (4) fundamental forces of the
universe (strong, electromagnetic, hyperweak and gravitational).
One direct result of combining the older "Big Bang model" with
the "Grand Unification Theories" was the successful prediction of
the asymmetry of matter and anti-matter in the universe. In
addition, it is the consensus of the international jury of
scientists engaged in such work that the successes of the New
Inflationary Theory of the Universe offer pursuasive evidence in
favor of the validity of the theoretical foundations upon which
the model is built.

This does not mean that the theory is perfect. But it does
mean that future modifications will retain the successes while
improving its accuracy in predicting the measured features of our
physical world. Moreover, these "foundations" represent the the
beginnings of the unification of the 4 basic forces of the
universe: The "strong" that binds nucleons at the center of
atoms, the "electromagnetic" familiar to us in the form of heat,
light and electricity, the "hyperweak" which controls radioactive
decay, and the "gravitational" that we identify with the presence
of mass.
 

How Science Operates
--------------------
Another point of confusion can sometimes be over how science
operates. For example, a theory can be proposed and later found
to have problems. At this point, some people are tempted to say
that the theory has "unsuperable difficulties". The "Big Bang"
theory of the universe is one such example. But this perception
is really not true. The reason is that if such difficulties had
proved "unsuperable" for the "Big Bang" theory, then no new
theory would have emerged. However, the New Inflationary Theory
of the Universe is the formal expression that the physics upon
which the Big Bang theory was based had difficulties which were
not insuperable. In fact, the New Inflationary Theory of the
Universe has overcome them and, in replacing the Big Bang theory,
solved virtually every defect of the older theory while, at the
same time, retaining all of its successes. The question: "Is Big
Bang Biblical?" is answered in a paper by that same name that can
be downloaded from this website.
 

Mechanistic Evolutionary Processes
----------------------------------
Well intended people sometimes believe that they should
disassociate themselves from the Big Bang theory, the
Inflationary Universe theory or any other theory with
evolutionary, mechanistic overtones. But were we to do this, then
we would be disassociating ourselves from physical reality
itself. The reason is that virtually every one of our laws are
naturalistic, mechanistic, and "evolutionary" when that word is
used in its proper sense of "change" with the passage of time.
For example, when we apply an impulse to a physical object, such
as a rocket, it's trajectory naturalistically and mechanistically
evolves through time to ultimately place it at some predetermined
destination (for example, the moon). Or, if we seed a salt
solution, then the shape of the crystal that begins to grow in
the bath naturalistically and mechanistically evolves over a
period of time into that which characterizes the particular
constituents of the bath. Many other examples could be cited to
illustrate that our physical world manifests both microscopic and
macroscopic motions that evolve in time, that are naturalistic
and mechanistic, and that do so as prescribed by physical law.
 

Rejection of Scientific Theories
--------------------------------
People sometimes reject scientific truths because they
disapprove of the lives and personal beliefs of those who
discovered them. But the scientific theories regarding the origin
of our world that are currently popular in and of themselves do
not deny that the universe was supernaturally created. In fact,
these as well as other scientific pronouncements are theistically
neutral. In this regard, it may be helpful consider the fact
that when any one of us enter a hospital in need of an operation,
we hardly inquire into the personal beliefs of all of the people
that invented the procedures that could save our life. Or when we
eat, do we reject food that has been grown using procedures
invented by those whose lives and beliefs we may find offensive?

The point is this: inventions - be they machines, surgical
procedures or cosmological theories, should be evaluated on their
own merit, and not on the basis of an emotional resentment
against the people that may produce them. The important thing is
that Science is theistically neutral.
 
 

The Question of "Who" versus "How"
---------------------------------
A number of people do not distinguish between how the universe
came into being, and Who they believe brought it about. For
example, Genesis l:l identifies the Source of our world as God -
it therefore answers the question "Who". The verse also tells us
what He did viz., He created the heavens and the earth. However,
the Scripture does not tell us how He did it. What the Bible
does reveal, however, is that "His thoughts are not our thoughts,
and His ways are not our ways" (Is. 55:8). Thus we can make a
colossal blunder when we presume to know how God did things.
This confusion between the who and the how often permeates
Christian writings. Not only is the confusion ill-advised, but it
does disservice to the credibility such writings ostensibly seek
to nurture.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

The apparent conflict between modern time measurements and the
six (6) Creation Day account in Genesis is nonexistent and arose
from our limited knowledge of "time". If a "Day" (YOM) is taken
to mean 24 hours, then the "tick - tock" interval of the clock
used to measure these "hours" will decrease as the Creation
unfolds. This physical phenomenon is called "time dilation" and
is described by the mathematical equations of the Special Theory
of Relativity published by Albert Einstein in l905. This theory
has withstood every conceivable experimental test to which it has
been put, and today stands not only as the most experimentally
verified theory in all of science - but one whose theoretical
predictions have been confirmed with a precision that is without
precedent in the history of scientific investigation. This is not
to say that the Creation Days in Genesis Chapter One are billions
of years, but instead to show that the concept of a "24 hour day"
as understood by clocks that tick on earth today is an utterly
meaningless concept. A good discussion of the biblical meaning of
YON is available by downloading the paper: "What Are the Creation
Days?" as well as other related papers viz "What is Earth's Age?"