How Old is the World - 15 Billion Years or 6000 Years? 5 Points to Ponder

Panting

After physical activity involving effort, like running, we all pant – you can see it in our rapidly rising and falling chests.

But when I watched birds, I asked myself: how is it possible that birds don't change the shape of their chest cavity when they breathe?

Moreover, if you saw a bird just landing from migrating over thousands of kilometers, would you see its chest move as it breathes? Not at all! The birds appear relaxed and can stand completely still, regardless of the effort they put into flying. A great wonder!

How so? Thanks to a special respiratory system found in no other creature:

Inside a bird's body is a sort of sacs connected to its lungs and cavities in its long bones, through which air flows during flight. This arrangement supplies the bird's body tissues with oxygen quickly and keeps its weight light while flying.

(Photo: shutterstock)

The role of these air sacs is to make the breathing process efficient. Due to the bird's flying activities, its energy consumption is very high, and thus its oxygen consumption as well. The air sacs allow for efficient oxidation in the lungs both in inhalation and exhalation, whereas in humans or other animals, efficient oxidation occurs only in inhalation.

In both inhalation and exhalation, the airflow direction in a bird's lungs is the same, unlike in mammals' lungs – where inhalation and exhalation have opposite air flow. This means that both in inhalation and exhalation, oxygen-rich air flows through the lungs, making oxidation more efficient. Hence, the volume of air in a bird's lungs doesn't change between inhalation and exhalation but the volume of the air sacs does, unlike in other animals.

Thanks to this marvelous respiratory system, a bird can fly efficiently and migrate long distances without significant effort.

The Soul Dances

I was recently at the Western Wall. While reading Psalms, a young secular-looking man stood by me, with an earring and long hair, who also began to pray and read several Psalms – "A Song of Ascents, I lift my eyes to the mountains..."

Suddenly, I noticed the young man mouthing the words of his prayer and began to sway...

Wait, if we stop for a moment and think: what makes this secular young man sway? Have you ever seen someone reading a history book or a recipe moving their body back and forth unconsciously?

If you say that swaying helps one concentrate more in prayer, have you seen someone studying for a medical exam moving their body from side to side to remember and understand the exam material better? Maybe the opposite, it could cause distraction and confusion.

Let's try to understand what's happening here.

When do people move their bodies or essentially dance? When they listen to music. Why?

Beyond the physiological aspect, where listening to rhythms and music creates complex interactions between the auditory area and other areas of the cerebral cortex, these blend meticulously and are related to motion, listening to music improves mood.

Music is a spiritual creation. Human organs do not enjoy music, but the spiritual entity within the human body – the soul – is the one that enjoys it and thus drives the body. So is prayer, it's a text imbued with divine inspiration. Evidently, it is the only text in the world that, without a background melody, can make a person sway and feel better. Why? Because the soul enjoys it, therefore it "dances" in a person's body, much like with music.

The dance, swaying – these are movements of the soul, not the body. And so the Sages say: when a person studies Torah – the Torah is fire, and the soul is like a candle: "The candle of Hashem is the soul of man," and when the candle is lit, you always see the flame flickering and leaping...

Genetic Material Duplication

Pregnancy begins with fertilization, creating a single primary cell that contains the genetic material (DNA) of the mother and father, providing all the genetic information necessary to create a new organism. This single cell then duplicates itself by dividing into two cells, and so each cell duplicates itself to form another cell ("mitosis").

One of the crucial processes during cell division is the replication of hereditary material – DNA. It is a unique molecule found in every cell of the living body, instructing each cell on how to grow and what functions to perform. The DNA encodes all the characteristics of the living: body structure, height, eye color, hair shape and color, body structure, face shape, fingerprints, disease susceptibility, and so on.

(Photo: shutterstock)

Before cell division, there is a duplication of the DNA molecules in the cell. Miraculously, each DNA molecule yields two completely identical copies! Why is this necessary? So that each of the daughter cells, formed after mitosis, will receive one copy of each chromosome, thus containing in each of them all the chromosomes that were in the original cell from which they were formed.

DNA duplication is the process of creating a copy of DNA molecules within the cells of living organisms. This process must be carried out with great precision to prevent errors. Behold the following wonder:

DNA molecules are miraculously designed at any given moment to detect replication errors and correct them. There are enzymes that scan the DNA molecule, search for defects, and remarkably repair them through complex means. These are enzymes that perform quality control to prevent replication errors, just like an editor reviews a newspaper or book to find and correct mistakes.

No doubt! The code in the DNA molecule where all the living's traits are written, and the amazing system that duplicates the genetic material,certainly points to an incredibly intelligent designer!

"Dad, What Holds the Earth?"

True, this is an innocent childish question from a cute five-year-old, but without shame, do you know the answer? The Earth isn't resting on anything, there's nothing supporting it, yet it remains suspended in its exact aerial place. How is that? What's holding it?How does it not break into pieces?

There is nothing physical that holds the Earth, no glue, no ropes, and no screws, yet we do not fly off or fall from the Earth's surface. After all, there's an entirely empty space between Earth and the moon, yet the moon moves in coordination with the Earth without colliding with it or deviating from its path. Similarly, Earth revolves around the sun without being swallowed into it or drifting away from it. There are no metal tracks connecting the stars; they don't move like puppets on strings; no metal rods connect them, nor do they operate on Energizer batteries... yet they move in coordination, in harmony with each other!

So yes, gravity holds the Earth in place. Gravity is the force that causes us to remain on the ground. It's the same force that makes the Earth orbit the sun. This mysterious force interests many scientists, primarily because it provides stability to the Earth. But how does gravity work even in space, and where does it come from? Who set gravity in nature?

(Photo: shutterstock)

One cannot ignore something here that isn't physical, something unseen that holds all of creation at any given moment – something we might define as even "supernatural"? Who is this?

The answer is openly written in the Tanakh: ''If not my covenant day and night, if I have not established the laws of heaven and earth'' (Jeremiah 33:25). The Torah is called a 'covenant,' and thus the meaning of the verse is: if there would be no Torah in the world on any day or night, "the laws of heaven and earth will not be established" – the divine decree for the heavens and the earth to stand in their place will be canceled.

Did we hear well?

If one day or one night, or even part of the day or night, the world is left without Torah study – the world will be destroyed.

From this, we can understand why the Creator made the Earth round and not square so that on one side of the globe, it's daylight, and on the other – night. This circular state allows Torah study without interruption, 24/7 worldwide. When on one side they study, on the other they sleep, and vice versa. Hashem arranged for the night and day hours to change from place to place in the world so that at every moment, there will be those studying Torah and sustaining the world!

What an enormous power the Torah has, in studying it and those who learn it! Let's take a look at the world around us: the ground, the skies, the trees, the houses and cars, the people and animals – do you realize all this exists, only because of Torah study?

For those struggling to believe that spiritual words can sustain the physical world, let us recall that the world was essentially created by speech, by Hashem's command. For instance: "And God said, let there be light; and there was light" (Genesis 1:3).

15 Billion Years?

Many are confused about the age of the world. Apparently, scientific conclusions contradict the Torah's position: science commonly speaks of about 15 billion years, while according to the Torah, it's about 6000 years. The gap is vast! How can the gaps be bridged, if at all?

There are several ways to answer this question:

The length of the biblical day:

We define a "day" based on the cycle of the moon and the sun. Hence the term "day" mentioned in the six days of creation isn't similar to our days, as there wasn't yet such a day in the creation of the world; instead, it's a completely different period. For proof, on the first, second, and third day of creation it says "and it was evening and it was morning, the first / second / third day," and yet the sun was created only on the fourth day of creation!

The beginning of the count: Our counting does not start from the first day of creation but from the day the first human was created. How long passed before his creation? These could be much longer time periods. It is possible that a day in creation was a longer period, different from the regular day we know.

Methods for dating ancient periods:

Extrapolation - this is a technique for obtaining unknown data from known data. In other words: making an estimate of the unknown from the known by projecting, or predicting, new values found outside the data system.

In extrapolation, it is assumed that a set of conditions affecting development in the future is similar to that of the past or can be calculated based on it. This technique is currently used, among others, for predicting population growth, price trends, market indices, etc.

Science, calculating the age of the world based on fossils, relies on this technique because no scientist lived billions of years ago... but this technique for predicting the age of the world – is fundamentally flawed, undermining the entire measurement process. To what is this similar? To the developmental process of a kangaroo.

Imagine a student trying to conduct research on the lifespan of the red kangaroo (Macropus rufus). The kangaroo is born measuring 2-3 cm and weighs about a gram. By the end of its first year, it weighs about 5 kilograms, meaning its weight increases by 5,000 times.

After a year of observation, the student says to himself: why should I bother and continue to follow the kangaroo's growth? I am a smart person and can calculate: if its weight increases 5000 times in a year and reaches 5 kilograms, then at the end of the second year it weighs 5 * 5000. In the third year, its weight will again increase five thousand times, and so on. What will be its weight at the age of 22 years? In the conclusion of the research, he will write: "After observation and precise calculations, it was proven that a 22-year-old kangaroo weighs 2,384,185,791,015,625 tons"!...

In reality, of course, the growth rate drops significantly: at about two years old, it is already matured, standing about 2 meters high and weighing about 55 kilograms until its death at the age of 22 years.

The student's error lies, of course, in the lack of basic understanding that one should not mix calculations of the development period with calculations of the constant stabilization period. It is not possible to project from the growth period on what will happen throughout life. If we continued growing at the same rate we grew until age 3, what would be our height at our current age? And to what weight would we reach?...

Scientists today take an existing reality, measure measurements, and based on them extrapolate what happened when the universe was forming. And we have proven that such a calculation is a big mistake.

"All acts of creation, in their full form, were created" (Chullin 60a). When the first human was created, was he created as a baby or an adult? The sages say he was created as a 20-year-old. Trees were created as mature, animals as mature, and from there on they continue to live. If we looked at the first human a minute after his creation without knowing he was created a minute ago, we would assume he was created about 20 years ago. In truth, when he was created, he was already created in the stature of an adult, and so with all acts of creation. This answers additional questions like determining a tree's age by the number of rings in its trunk cut – according to these measurements, very early dates were set. But considering that all parts of creation were created as they are – mature and existent, the picture changes.

The conclusion is that we are truly unable to evaluate the age of the universe, hence there is no contradiction between science and the Torah in this matter. (Summary of Rabbi Zamir Cohen's words from his lecture "Torah and Science, Evolution and Dinosaurs").