How can the world be billions of years old if the Bible talks about the beginning happening thousands of years BC?

Answer 1

The question is more properly "What rubber ruler of time do you use?" In terms of light years, it could well be that the earth is billions of years old. In terms of how a "god" would measure times, it could surely be only seven days.

The convenience of the "day" in speaking of the terms of creation might be a literary device present in this particular passage of The Bible. All terms of time are measures of a particular passage of duration, and the convention that we use today is not mathematically accurate to the nanosecond. We agree among ourselves what a particular measure of that time is.

All measurements are simple agreed upon units that have been standardized. Time being one of them, has been measured by shadows, length of daylight hours, length between days, according to seasons, and many other devices. To apply today's standards to a literary work that is literally about 3,000 years old is to do the literary work a disservice. It might be accurately describing an event according to an agreed upon measure of time that we have no access to in this day and age.

To sum it up in a nutshell, today's measurements might or might not be accurate. They are dependent on man's measurements and are also dependent on his instruments of calculation. In my opinion, after a certain point these "measurements" become meaningless in terms of accuracy.

On the other hand, given that the Bible was written in another place and time and is a translation of another language, it might be that the measure of time in that context is just as accurate as the "scientific measure" which we use today. People are sophisticated, no matter the technology of the time. What we might not understand in today's context, the writers surely understood and wrote accurately for their time.

So both might be correct! Once again, which rubber ruler do you use?