- The World's Age
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- Moshe Ben-Chaim
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- Reader: I was wondering if you believe in dinosaurs, like if
they ever really existed or the bones or something was a trick ,...or
if like they were put here as "Gods toys" before he put us
humans.
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- Mesora: I've heard this notion
before. Some people suggest foolishly that God placed dinosaur bones
in the Earth to test us. But I wonder, "What is the test?"
According to them, we should believe that they never existed even
though our eyes see their bones, and our carbon 14 dates them to be
ancient. I would ask them, "Let's say I see an elephant, should I
not believe my senses?" They would of course say that an elephant
is different because it is alive. I would then continue and ask them,
"I'll exhume an elephant's remains and see its bones,... I see
the dinosaur bones, and I'm using the same two eyes which saw the
elephant's bones, so why should I say that these dinosaur bones are
fabrications, while the elephant's bones are evidence of truth?"
These chassidim will have no answer as they will see their
contradiction. They may claim that since they didn't read about the
dinosaurs in the Torah, then they cannot be real, in which case I
would say that every comet in space shouldn't be real because it is
also not in the Torah. Their foolish arguments can be removed quite
readily.
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- The Torah does not contain every bit of information in the world.
Perhaps what forces one to make such a claim is an infantile feeling
about the Torah, that if it misses one point, it is not perfect, so
they claim that every point is in it. This is similar to one claiming
that a Rebbe never sins. If he did, they couldn't tolerate it, as they
desire "angelic man", when in reality the Torah teaches that
"there is no righteous man in the Earth who does good and never
sins".
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- I would add to this point that A Rabbi mentioned that dinosaurs are
in the Torah, where it says in Genesis "taninim gedolim",
"great sea monsters".
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- Again, these people might claim that since the world is only 5761
years old, this contradicts the supposition that the world is millions
of years old. At least this is a more rational question, yet,
scientists are measuring the world as old as 16,000,000,000 years. How
did the scientists come up with this number?
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- The Hubble Constant ( H0 ) describes how fast the Universe is
expanding (which is due to the Big Bang (1)
). Since we know how fast the Universe is expanding now, we can
estimate when the Universe was just a single point, just before the
Big Bang . To determine H0 you have to look at objects which are very
far away, so that their velocities are dominated by the expansion of
the Universe and not by any local flows. You then find how far away
these objects are and how fast they are moving away from us. Once you
know this you can determine a value of H0 by dividing the velocity by
the distance. In practice you do this for many objects and determine
H0 from a graph of distance vs velocity.
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- Once you have a value of H0 you can then calculate the age of the
Universe. At the moment different astronomers find different values of
H0 , though these values generally fall into two camps. One camp finds
low values of H0 (around 50), while the other finds high values
(around 80). The low value gives a large value for the age of the
Universe (around 16 thousand million years), while the the larger
value of H0 gives a lower value for the age (around 10 thousand
million years).
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- Einstein discovered that time is not a constant, and as matter
increases velocity, time slows down. Therefore, there are different
time measurements in different portions in our universe. Our
measurement of the universe's age will be drastically different than
time measured on a distant star that is still speeding at tremendous
velocities (2).
There is no contradiction to say that the world is both 5761 years
old, and 16 billion years old. Time is different when measured from
different portions of the universe, as proven by Einstein's law of
relativity.
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- This vast time frame allows plenty of room for dinosaurs, and
numerous other eras that we will never fathom.
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- It is against God's will that man being endowed with intellect, and
yet suggest foolishly that God tests man in such a way that these
fools say. God desired that man arrive at conclusions based on
rational arguments. Therefore, to say that God would try to cause man
to err by planting false evidence is complete "kfiras
haTorah", a complete denial of God's will that man should
use the mind he was given by God. If there is evidence, and certainly
conclusive proof such as dinosaur bones, God's will is that man arrive
at a rational conclusion based on such proof, accepting with 100%
conviction what the evidence indicates.
- Scientific knowledge and Torah knowledge both are emanations from
the same Creator. The same method of rational analysis should be
applied to Talmud as to science. If evidence is used in scientific
knowledge, it is to be used in theological and religious knowledge as
well. The Navi warned of this dichotomy in haftoras
Vayikra.
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- Please read our article "God Testing
Man".
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- Footnotes:
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- (1)
The "Big Bang" is the theory that all matter came into
existence in an exploding, split second. At that point, the force of
the bang was so enormous, that today, galaxies are still speeding away
from the central location point of that explosion on the force of that
bang. Scientists state that since stars and galaxies are racing away
from each other, if one looks back into time, these galaxies were
closer, and the further one goes back, the closer they were, until, we
arrive at a point in time where all matter was located at the same
exact location - the point of its creation from nothingness. At that
first moment, matter was very dense, and contained all the material
necessary for the entire universe as it is today. Being that all
matter was so dense it required a great force - a "big bang"
- to propel it out to the farthest reaches of the cosmos as we find
today. Scientists estimate the speed at which these galaxies are
hurtling through space based in light colors and shifts.
- (2)
"Genesis and the Big Bang", by Gerald
L. Schroeder, pp 45-55, Bantam Books, 1990 edition.
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