Six Days of Creation and a Multiverse

Louis Berkhoff writes in his book Systematic Theology on page 165 of “The Hexaemeron, or the Work of Separate Days” on the paradigm of the six days of creation. He interprets Genesis chapters one and two from a conservative perspective, rather well in fact, and his evaluations of the opinions of various scholars that have taken different approaches to finding alternative meanings for the days in Genesis with extended time periods is helpful.

Some scholars have taken the days of Genesis to represent geological epochs, and I have considered that myself, yet is not necessary to regard the first reasonable alternative meaning for the days of Genesis as the gospel truth even if they may be found to be not in conflict with scripture. Language has an intrinsic capability for permitting several possible meanings, unlike arithmetic expressions that have a single sum in regard to the numbers.

Much of the conservative approach centers on the meaning of the Hebrew word for day; yom. Berkhoff writes on page 166 that; “it must be admitted that the Hebrew word yom does not always denote a period of twenty-four hours in Scripture, and is not always used in the same sense even in the narrative of creation. It may mean daylight in distinction from darkness, Gen. 1:5,16,18; day-light and darkness together, Gen. 1:5,8,13 etc.; the six days taken together, Gen. 2:4; and an indefinite period marked in its entire length by some characteristic feature, as trouble, Ps. 20:1, wrath, Job 20:28, prosperity, Eccl. 7:14, or salvation II Cor. 6:2.”

It is difficult to find a particular value for the meaning of yom in Genesis that would be exhaustive and exclusive of other possible meanings in natural science today. God is eternal and time periods are temporal. The nature of what time really is isn't actually known.

Time is considered to be a relationship of matter, energy and change that is observed. Max Tegmark noted that in a Multiverse (my recapitulation of a point made in 'The Mathematical Universe' of a Level 4 Multiverse) it could be that consciousness passes though a static, pre-existing field where all things past, present and future always exist and consciousness experiences the passage as time. If God is unchanging and eternal, every possible Multiverse that could exist, in every form, may exist eternally too (my point).

Eternal God might have a different criterion for temporal space-time than can be presently understood of humanity. If one takes the six days of creation as a basic paradigm for God's creation or endowment of a Universe-for-others (human beings) explained to mankind, then the description of Genesis may be consistent with an evolving Universe as it is observed by humanity (with science) that is in-itself a nominal stage within the eternal and omnipotent being of God.

Contemporary cosmology has speculated that the size of the Universe adjusted for early hyper-inflation may be ten billion trillion light years rather than the much smaller approximate 100 billion light years of the observable Universe. Whatever the size of a Universe that may exist within the context of an infinite Multiverse is, the field itself-a Higgs field, that lets solid state forms of energy exist as mass, could be itself embedded in a field, within a field, within a field with infinite regress.

There are secularists that theorize creation out of nothingness can be achieved naturally from virtual particles emanating from the Higgs field for an instant before disappearing . As a source for the singularity and all of the energy and mass of the Universe virtual particles cascading into being in a vacuum would need to aggregate and then form a singularity before exploding and inflating. If the field from which virtual particles formed then hasn't changed, it is a paradox that the existing mass clumps in the Universe such as stars and planets don't attract additional cascades of virtual particles and a multitude of singularities and Big Bangs at least more often than every 13.7 billion years.

Virtual particles may be fluctuations of the Higgs field rather than that of an absolute vacuum that may not exist in any case (a logical irony). That vacuum energy may not be infinite however. Instead it may exist as a form of energy also within the Higgs field endowment. The entire Universe or Multiverse may exist within a greater field pre-existing the singularity. It seems to me a little churlish to get too insistent about how God actually worked the first light of the Universe on technical points or to what he was actually referring. It is a beautiful paradigm that is probably true at several levels. Uncertainty exists in the world of physics, in that of knowledge, and is a reciprocal of spacetime, being, nothingness and intervals with the certainty of probability. Theologians may benefit from the certainty of uncertainty too. Faith in God is the best certainty anyone can have, and the truth of scripture, minus the uncertainty of interpretive error.

The days of Genesis may refer to periods of light dark that can be paradigmatic recurrence yet not in form or type of event. Light being separated from the darkness-the first day, may have been within the first second of the Universe, however the darkness of space before the appearance of stars was a potential second recurrence of day, as could have been the formation of galaxies and of life as vegetation at various locations across the Universe. If earth is taken to mean dirt then the appearance of life on it, in a Universal sense could have been non-local.

Berkhof makes much out of the difference between particular seeds reproducing their own kind as distinguished from evolution. That seems a misunderstanding of evolution biology though, in that evolution did evolve species to do exactly that (cattle not giving birth to rabbits for example). Evolution does reach the stage the Bible speaks of, yet not instantly as if by magic. Genesis may have referred to the salient feature of Gods work rather than every little detail.

If historical conservatives of the future in a time when no one remembers much about car manufacture said that ancient documents (car scripture) said Ford made automobiles on a certain day, each after their own kind and disagreed with mechanical production evolutionists that say that Ford bought steel and synthetic metals, electronics, tires etc and evolved forms of cars that hat a common ancestor model T on the production line, to my way of thinking the point is that each are true points that describe the same event in different ways.