Quote:
Originally posted by Chewbaccus
On the religious book issue, I personally am not one to take religious texts word-for-word. Pour example, G-d(who am I to break precedent) creating existance as we know it in 6 days.
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I read an absolutely incredible book a few months back: <u>Genesis and the Big Bang</u>, by Gerald L. Schroeder, PhD. To summaraze its main point quite brutally, the six days of creation really <b>were</b> six literal days... in G-d's frame of reference.
To give a quick explanation of what Dr. Schroeder means, in Einsteinian physics time is <b>not</b> constant; rather, it is relative to ones velocity. This is due to the speed of light (c) being the only true constant in the universe.
I can't explain this fully, but I will give an example. If you have a number of people in a spaceship which leaves Earth at a velocity of, say, .98c (it is impossible for anything which has mass to reach c, and it is impossible for anything to exceed c) and goes on a journey for, say, 5 years, when they return they will have aged 5 years in their frame of reference, but the people who remained on Earth- within Earth's frame of reference- will have aged considerably more than that.
So, in G-d's frame of reference, 6 literal days <b>did</b> pass. Meanwhile, on Earth the billions of years suggested by science took place. The two are one and the same.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who has been torn by both religious and scientific beliefs. While Dr. Schroeder's explanations of evolution fall short of convincing me (he's a much better physicist than biologist), his method of resolving the biblical story of creation with the scientic one is quite facinating.
In a word: wow,
Z