Harold Gans - The Age of the Universe: 15 Billion or 5780?

Good evening and welcome to Project Inspire's Zoom series. My name is Harold Ganz. And I would like to talk with you about a problem that many people have and that is that there appears to be in many cases a difference if you will, a contradiction, a parent contradiction between what science says and what Torah says. My belief is that this is caused by people either not understanding the Torah completely, not understanding the science completely, or sometimes a little bit of both. One thing I will say that the place where you see this contradiction the most and which apparently most people are aware of is in the age of the universe. This it's very very simple. According to the Torah we can derive that the age of the universe is 5,780 years old, actually plus a few more months since Rosh Hashanah, but we'll just push that aside and not talk about that. And the scientific age of the universe which is 13.8 billion years plus or minus some fraction of a billion years. Now, of course the scientific estimate is that it's an estimate, but the accuracy is not the dis- accuracy is not going to make the difference of several billion years. So, that's not going to be an answer to the issue. The question is how do we understand this? How do we reconcile it? I'm going to give you one way of doing it. It's not necessarily the correct way. But what I'm going to try to show you is not what the Torah must mean in these cases and not necessarily what science with the truth is the science because science can change. But what I will show you is that there is consistency. And in fact the proof of consistency in terms of the age of the universe will be not a scientific proof, but a logical proof. So, even if the science changes, the logic will remain the same. At the same time, we will also build a little bit of a model of how creation may have taken place. And that model will be self-consistent, it will be consistent with Torah, it will also be consistent with science, which shows you that there cannot be any contradiction. So again, the purpose of our talk tonight is not to give you an exact accounting of how creation took place. I don't think anyone really knows that. No No scientist, maybe the Kabbalists know that, I don't know. But rather to show you how it might have happened in a way that is consistent. And there are several alternatives, and they all seem to work very well. Uh if you want to read about some of the other alternatives, there's a wonderful book by Gerald Schroeder called Genesis and the Big Bang. I highly recommend it. Uh there's another book by Dr. Andrew Goldfinger, uh called Thinking About Creation. There's still another book by Nathan Aviezer. I think it's called In the Beginning. Uh each one approaching it in a slightly different way, each one consistent. And this is simply another way of doing it. I think this would be the general approach anytime one sees uh a discord between science and Torah. First, make every attempt to understand the Torah. Second, make every attempt to understand the science. And many cases, the contradiction or the apparent contradiction will seem to vanish. We will find a more we understand convergence between Torah and science as opposed to divergence. So, let's start off with a scientific view of the universe. The first scientific view of the universe actually turned out not being scientific at all, but it turned into the science of the day. Uh this dates back probably to at least to ancient Egypt, maybe even to ancient Babylon. Uh it's called the steady state theory. That's the latest term for it. Um and what it simply says is the universe has always been here. It wasn't created. It's been here forever and ever and ever. It will always be here forever and ever and ever. No change. No creation. No question about where did the universe come from? It didn't It didn't come from anywhere. It's always been here. In 1948, George Gamow, an astronomer, proposed a totally new approach. He said, "You know what? I think the universe hasn't been here forever. I think that the universe was created in and what was called by it the detractors of this, the Big Bang." That that was to make fun of it because they said, "No, this can't be true. I mean, after all, everyone knows the universe has always been here forever." This was heresy, scientific heresy, that the universe came into existence. And he calculated something like the order of 10 to 20 billion years ago. Well, these two theories vied with each other, the steady-state theory, the Big Bang theory, until 1963. 1963, two scientists, Penzias and Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, detected the background radiation of the Big Bang. Now, this was something that the astronomer Fred Hoyle predicted. He was one of the people who held to the steady-state theory. And what his claim was is, "Look, had there been a Big Bang, there ought to be this cosmic background radiation. And no one has seen it. Therefore, there must be proof that there really wasn't a Big Bang." And then, lo and behold, predicted by the critics of the Big Bang theory, the scientists find, lo and behold, here it is. We just never discovered it until 1963. And so, from that point on, basically, everyone believed in the Big Bang. And the evidence has accumulated since then, over and over and over again. There seems to be no virtually no question in the scientific community there was a big bang. And you know, if you realize, this is the biggest concession. It's an infinite concession of science to Torah. Torah says the universe was created. Scientists always say it was never created. It's been here infinitely long. And now all of a sudden they say, "Guess what? It came into existence." Okay, a few billion years ago. We're going to discuss that. But they're conceding that the universe came into existence. So we have Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos, and I quote, "10 or 20 billion years ago something happened, the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know." Now, it's still a great mystery today. That this book was written a while ago. "That it happened is reasonably certain." And that's still true today as well. "All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density, a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures. Perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimension at all." Now, such a mathematical point would be called a singularity. And we're going to talk about that as we go on because it does look very much like the universe began as a singularity. Now, notice an interesting thing. There was a Big Bang and it began our universe and it started with a singularity. Okay? We're going to come back to this later. The next question that came up is, "What is the geometry of our universe? Is it closed or is it open?" Now, really there's a third alternative called flat, but for our purposes flat is the same thing as open. So instead of making it complicated, we'll just talk about closed and open. The question is, is it closed or open? What's the difference? The difference is that a closed universe, if this was a closed universe, then the expansion of the universe would go slower and slower, being all the galaxies and everything being pulled back by the force of gravity, and it's slower and slower until eventually the expansion of the universe would stop. And at that point in time, it would start coming back together again in what's known as the big crunch, and it's not a candy bar. On the other hand, if the universe is an open universe, it keeps on expanding forever and ever and ever. So, it is almost very similar to the idea of a rocket that's launched. If it's going fast enough and from the Earth 7 mi a second approximately, it will get away from the Earth and never come back. Just like the open universe keeps on going and going and going forever. On the other hand, if it's going too slow, if the expansion is not fast enough, the rocket is going at less than 7 mi a second, it'll then go slower, slower, slower, eventually reach its maximum altitude, and then begin to fall back again and come to a crash. Now, the difference between open and closed is really cosmic. It makes a tremendous big difference because here's why. If we come from a closed universe, if we are a closed universe, we came from a closed universe that was here before us. We might be part of an infinite sequence of universes that are exploding with a big bang, going out far, far, far, but slower and slower and eventually collapsing again into a big crunch, and then expanding again in another big bang. And there might have been an infinite number of expansions and crashes before us, and there'll be an infinite number after us. Now, there are ways of showing that that's not true. There are ways of showing that that's not true, but leaving those aside, that's one possibility. So, even though our universe is was created, is finite, but it came from a previous universe. On the other hand, if we live in an open universe, it did not come from a closed universe cuz a closed universe can only give birth to another closed universe. In the same way that a ball that's bouncing will never bounce higher than it did originally, each time it's going to bounce slower, lower, and lower. With the universe, this is very similar. Either it's going to be the same or it will be less, but it can't go more than it did before. So, if before it didn't have enough energy to keep on expanding forever, it won't in the future as either. So, therefore, if we are in a open universe, it couldn't have come from a closed universe cuz a closed universe cannot give birth to an open universe. On the other hand, we also could not have come from an open universe cuz an open universe never ends, which means that our universe, if it's open, it didn't come from an open universe, it didn't come from a closed universe. That means it didn't come from any universe cuz every universe is either got to be open or closed. There's no other possibility. That means we came from nothing. And all the evidence to date, starting from 1972, perhaps even earlier than then, every different test that scientists have done have indicated over and over again that the universe is open. Actually, it's flat, but as I say, that's part of being open. Scientists didn't like that because what it meant was the universe came into existence from nothing. There was nothing, and all of a sudden, there's a universe. And the big question is, why? How? Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientists of our time, in his book A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes, and I quote, "Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention." Now, there's a keyword in there that I you may not have noticed, and that is do not like the idea that time has a beginning. He didn't say that the universe has a beginning. Of course, that's true also, but the point that he's making is that time is part of our universe. When our universe was created, time was also created. Time and space are part of our universe. Okay, with that understanding, we now have two unanswerable questions from the scientific point of view. Unanswerable question number one is that the universe started as a singularity, a mathematical point, if you will. Where did it come from? How did that singularity get there? That's question number one. Question number two is, cuz you know, we said that it came from nothing. So, if it came from nothing, that means that at one, so to speak, moment, there was no singularity, and all of a sudden, there was a singularity. Well, what happened to make that singularity come into existence out of nothing? No one has to answer that question. Question number two is even more subtle. And that is, once the singularity was here, what caused it to expand? There was no time. If there was no time until the universe was created, how could the universe, first of all, how could the singularity come into existence? There's no time, which means nothing happens. And secondly, it can't start expanding. It's true, once it's expanding, there is time, cuz you now have a universe. But until the moment that it starts expanding, there is no time. What caused it to start? That's unanswerable question number two. Now, the Torah in the very beginning of the book of Genesis says, "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamaim ve'et ha'aretz." In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The word, the Hebrew word for create is bara. It's usually translated as create, but it has a slightly different connotation. It has more. Create means to form something. Like I can talk about, I've created this beautiful painting, or I've created this beautiful sculpture. Or I've created a beautiful poem. The word bara in Hebrew means not only to create something, but to create something out of absolutely nothing, which is totally new, which never existed before. So, number one, it's got to be something which never existed before. Number two, it's got to come from absolute nothingness. If it comes from something else, it's not bara. So, from the very first verse of the book of Genesis, we can derive that we live in an open universe. We didn't come from a previous universe, we came from nothing. How did the nothing turn into something? Well, for God, not a problem. For scientists, they're still thinking about it. And we go on in the book of Genesis, "For eretz hayetah tohu va bohu." "V'choshech al pnei tehom." The earth was tohu and bohu. No one really knows what those are. They're usually translated as chaos and void. The Ramban, Nachmanides of the 13th century, says bohu means not only void, but bohu, in it is substance. So, here you have a void, which a singularity they certainly would be considered a kind of void, but the entire universe is somehow in that void, even though you can never reach it. And in singularity containing the entire universe. But if bohu is the singularity that was the beginning of our universe, then what's the tohu that became before it, the chaos? Where did that come from? The Bahya, one of the biblical classical biblical commentators of the 13th century, says tohu is not physical. It's a detailed plan or blueprint, if you will, of creation. Not on paper, of course, but in thought, so to speak. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, a biblical commentator, a great rabbi of about 100 years ago, says he let his thoughts materialize. So, it starts out as thoughts in the mind of God, whatever that means, and it becomes a real universe. And again, Hirsch says tohu and bohu, subjective and objective chaos. Objective, something you can hear, you can you can feel, you can see. Subjective, something in the mind. Of course, at that point in time, there's no mind except the mind of God, so to speak. So, it's a thought. Now, interestingly enough, the great physicist Stephen Hawking, whom I referred to before, says that we can write equations of the universe, the size of the universe, the temperature of the universe, the the density of the universe, and so on. And versus time, as time goes on, the universe gets bigger and bigger. It gets cooler and cooler and cooler and so on, and less and less dense. Now, since we're dealing mathematically with mathematical equations, we can run the time parameter backwards, so to speak, and go back in time. And if you go back approximately 13.8 billion years, you arrive at the Big Bang. Now, you can't go back further physically because there is nothing to go back to. That's the beginning of everything. But mathematically, you can go through that you can go through that singularity, and so to speak, come out on the other side. And what you have then is what's what you may call an imaginary universe. Imaginary, not only in terms of imagination, but imaginary in a technical mathematical sense. It's a mathematical artifact. You can do arithmetic, imaginary arithmetic, but it doesn't correspond to anything in the physical real world. So, what you have is a mathematical model of a universe with imaginary time, imaginary space, imaginary distance, imaginary temperature, and so on. Everything is imaginary. They're numbers. You can manipulate them. The equations are still working, but there's nothing real that they correspond to. And if you go forward in imaginary time, you come to the Big Bang, and on the other side out comes a real physical universe, real numbers, not imaginary numbers. Very much like what Rabbi Nachman is is describing. Like thoughts, mathematics, suddenly becoming real. Now, interestingly enough, there's a chart in the Scientific American, December 1991, in an article called quantum cosmology and creation, which they give a diagram of the universe getting smaller and smaller, the Big Bang, and then the mathematical universe after it. And guess what? Mathematical time, imaginary time, does not go back infinitely, either. It, too, appears to have been created. Moving on, in the book of Genesis, "V'yomer Elohim, yehi or." God said, "Let there be light." And then a little bit further on it says, "V'yavdel Elohim ben or uven lachoshech." And God separated the light from the darkness. How do you separate light from darkness? And what's so important about light? Light is the first thing created. He separated the light from the darkness. All of a sudden, the first thing, light. What does he need light for? It's God. You know, he doesn't have to worry about stubbing his toe on the planet in the dark. But you see, light is coming, it's being separated from the singularity, being brought out of the singularity, separated from the darkness. And the moment you do that, you've created time. The creation of light is equivalent to the creation of time. Most important thing, you have to have time. Otherwise, things are not happening. So, first, the singularity, and then the next thing time. And of course at the same time space as well. The Sefer Yetzirah, the book of formation written according to tradition by the patriarch Abraham approximately 3,700 years ago says that there are 10 basic uh elements if you will to creation. They're called Sefirot. The first one is called Keter. This is the majesty of God and it comes into existence with the words Bereshit bara Elohim. The very first thing, the majesty of God, God has created the universe. The next Sefirah is Chokhmah, which is usually translated as wisdom. That comes into existence with Vayomer Elohim yehi or, God said, "Let there be light." The third Sefirah is Binah, usually translated as understanding and it comes into existence with Vayomer Elohim yehi rakia, that God said, "Let there be a firmament." Now, what is the difference between Chokhmah and Binah, between wisdom and understanding in the Hebrew sense, not in the English sense? Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan explains that Chokhmah is not bound by time. Binah is bound by time. In other words, Chokhmah is when you're planning something, when you're looking into the future or when you're deriving something ala Sherlock Holmes as looking at what's here and figuring out what happened before. You're going through time either to the past or to the future. Binah is understanding something as it is right now. The simplest example is the husband who comes home, says to his wife, "My dear, don't worry. No more worry. From now on I have a plan. We have I figured it out. We're going to have plenty of money in the future. I'm going to do this and that and we'll will have to worry about supper again. And she says, "My dear husband, but what are we going to eat tonight?" The difference between Chokhmah, planning into the future, or seeing into the future, seeing into the past, and Binah, what's here right now. So, why is it that Chokhmah is not bound by time, Binah is bound by time? Very simple explanation. Chokhmah comes into existence before time. Before time. Binah comes into existence after time. And what is it that brought it into existence? Well, take a look. Between the second Sefirah, which happens when when God says, "Let there be light." And the third Sefirah, when he says he's he's set that he uh let there be a firmament, you look in between, somewhere in between time has come into existence cuz at the time he says create creation of light, there's no time. And then, that means the light was created inside the singularity. There was something in the singularity created to eventually come out and be light. And between that and between the creation of the firmament. Well, if you look through all the verses, there's only one active verb in the middle. Only one. That one is Vayavdel Elohim ben or uven choshech. And God separated the light from the darkness. The separation of the light from the darkness is the creation of time. But what kind of a light is this? First of all, it was not created. It was formed. It was formed somehow from the darkness. We say it every morning in the morning blessing. Blessed are you, oh God, king of the universe, Yotzer or u'vore choshech. You formed the light, but you created the darkness. Or, that's the Hebrew word for light, but it's very strange word the way it's used because on the fourth day when God creates the sun and the stars all the sources of light, it's called they're called ma'or or in the plural ma'orot. Now, that mem before the word or means a source. It's coming from something. So, for example, kodesh is holy, a mikdash is a place from which holiness comes. It's a place that's holy. Or is light, ma'or is a source of light. The sun is a source of light. But over here, we're not dealing with the source of light, we're just dealing with light because there was no sun. Now, biblical critics have long said, "This doesn't make any sense. If the world we all know that all the light in the universe all comes from the sun or from the stars. The moon is simply a reflection of the sun. So, how could there possibly have been light before the sun was created on the fourth day?" But now science has said photons uncoupled from matter. Particles of light suddenly came about from wherever, from matter. There's light. But it's a sourceless light. And finally, erev. Vayehi erev vayehi boker yom echad. It was evening, it was morning, day one. This is a definition as we will see in a moment. But Rabbi Yehuda Halevi in the Kuzari, quoted by the Malbim, says something very interesting. Why was this erev? Why did we start with erev? After all, the erev is the end of the day. So, you how do you start with something which is the end of something that didn't exist? Why is it the evening comes first? Of course it does today because it's always comes after a day, but the very very first one, it started with an evening. It started with the end of a day before there was a day. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi the Kuzari says that that's because the first light lasted for only a moment and then it vanished. It went away. Faded away. And therefore, it was called era. Wasn't long enough to be called a day. Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition, volume 16, page 846, the first night lasted for 1 and 1/2 minutes approximately, and then faded away. The degrees. The Malbim, a commentator of about 100 years ago, says there were several different forms of war. The visible light was only the last one to be formed. And Shimshon Raphael Hirsch the light in the sun does not have the richness of that first light. Okay, so with this little bit of an understanding of what was happening in the very beginning of creation, let's now tackle the question of the age of the universe. How old is the universe according to the Torah? All right, so we said 5,780 years plus a few months since the last Rosh Hashanah. Um Okay, we're going to dis- disregard those few months since the last Rosh Hashanah. That That's nothing to talk about, really. We're talking about thousands or billions of years. When is the 5,780 years counted from? It's not counted from creation. It's not counted from the beginning when God created the universe. It's counted from the sixth day when God created Adam. Okay. We say it on Rosh Hashanah, by the way, in the prayers. The birthday of the world, right? When When Adam was created. So, the universe really turns out to be 5,780 years according to the Torah plus six days. Okay, six days. What is the definition, the scientific definition of the day? Now, some people say 24 hours, but that's wrong. I mean, a day is 24 hours, but the hour is defined as 1/24 of a day. The question is, what is the day? And scientifically, the day is the rotation of the Earth on its axis one time. When the Earth rotates all the way around 360° comes back to where it was before, that's the definition of a scientific day. Okay. Now, the word in Hebrew which is usually translated as day is yom. What is the definition of a yom? Well, that's in the Torah. And there was and he called the darkness night, he called the light day, and there was night there was night and day. Definition one, yom. So, a yom is has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth on its axis. The yom is a period of day and of night and day. Of darkness and light. Now, it comes to the same thing, right? Because as the Earth rotates on its axis and the light is coming from the sun, when it rotates 180°, right? It becomes dark cuz it's facing away from the sun. When it comes back, it's facing the sun, it becomes light again. So, the rotation of the Earth on its axis one time corresponds to one period of day or light, one period of night or darkness. So, they end up being the same thing. But, remember, the sun only came into existence on the fourth yom. Not the fourth day, the fourth yom. Right? Because before then, there was no day there was no sun. And therefore, it had nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth on its axis. What the light was, as we quoted before, there were different kinds of light. They weren't necessarily physical light as we know it today, although it may have corresponded to some kind of physical light. We do know in physics that there was a first light that lasted for about 1 and 1/2 minutes, then the universe became dark. It remained dark, which is called the dark age, for something like 700 to 800,000 years. Then all of a sudden, light came out again. So, there may have been a correspondence, but we don't know that. We don't know exactly what these spiritual lights were that we're talking about. Yom echad, as opposed to yom rishon, not the first day, but one day. That's the definition of a day. So, now we have disconnected the word yom from the word day. They can mean two different things, and certainly for the first four days, for for the for yom, they there was no sun, and therefore they we don't know that they were the same at all. They may have been the same, they may have been different, the yom may have been much longer, may have been shorter. We don't know yet. The Sforno, a biblical commentator of the 15th, 16th century, says the day and the night did not function then as it does today. So, here's the first hint, something different is happening way back then. The Midrash Rabbah, chapter 9, verse 14, says the primordial light determined the yom until the end of the sixth yom. So, here we find out that that primordial light, whatever it was, didn't only last until the sun was created, it lasted all the way up to the sixth yom. So, there was concurrent. There was this this light, and there was also light from the sun starting from the fourth yom. So, now we have a question about what was the length of the yom? Because after all, when did it go switching from primordial light time to solar time? We'll find out in a moment. Rabbeinu Bahya, 13th century biblical commentator, says those days were not as human days." That's Genesis chapter 1 verse 3. The question that we have to ask is why was the sun created? Now, most people would say it was created for its heat, for its light, but it's more than that. Because the Torah says so that man could keep time. So man could keep the seasons and and and be able to make a calendar and so on. So the sun is man's timepiece, which it actually has been until fairly recently with the invention of mechanical clocks and and electronic clocks. People kept time by the sun. In fact, they had sundials, right? By the sun, the turn of the shadow would tell you what time of the day it was. But the question is, that's the main reason for the sun? I mean, after all, there was a timepiece before then. There was the primordial light that was keeping the yom. Why did you need a new timepiece? The answer could be that the yom was such a long period of time no man would have lived to see the end of it. That was God time. And when did it have to switch over to man time? When man was created on the sixth yom, which is why the Midrash Rabbah says that the primordial light lasted all the way through the sixth yom. It was not needed simply for light. It was needed for time, but once man was on the stage, we needed a new time clock, namely the sun, something that he could see go up and come down and keep time with, not the yom that lasted for who knows billions of years perhaps. Now, the Ramban, Nachmanides of the 13th century, says in the profoundest sense, well, first he says, "You should know that the yom back then was an ordinary 24-hour day it is way we know it today." But then he goes on to say, "In the profoundest sense, the emanation issuing from the Most High are called yam." What Ramban is saying is that if you want to think of the yam as an ordinary 24-hour day, that's fine. You'll live your life, you won't be late for your appointments, everything's going to work just perfectly for you. But, if you want to be profound, understand that it corresponds to something quite different, emanations from God, whatever that should mean. The Akeidas Yitzchak of the 15th century, and I quote, "The description of the dimension of time in human terms is not possible without referring to celestial movements, but that does not prevent the Torah from describing events in human language." So, let's see what evidence we have for the length of the yam. Because now we know that the age of the universe is 5,780 years plus six yam. So, this might make quite a difference in terms of how old the universe really is from a scientific perspective. The fifth chapter of Genesis, first sentence, "These are the generations of Adam in the day God created Adam." Now, what does that mean? And then it goes on to list his children. So, Rashi, the 10th 11th century commentator, says, "Adam had children on the day he was created." That's what it's saying. These children all came about on the day he was created. The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin 38b says, "Not one day, one hour. That is 1/24 of a day No, not a day, a yam." Now, I've heard of very first fast childbirth, but this would be crazy unless the yam is a very, very long time. You could easily fit seven or nine months into that time. Chapter 2 verse 20. And Adam named all the land creatures and the birds. Now, there are 4,500 species of animals of mammal. Approximately 9,400 species of birds. Again, the Talmud instances Misafte Sanhedrin, 1 hour. That comes to naming them one name every 1/4 of a second. So, you just try to say something between Well, you got 5 milliseconds. You couldn't move your lips fast enough to say it. A new name, a meaningful name, by the way, in Hebrew, every 1/4 of a second. Unless unless that hour is a 24th not of the day, but of a Yom, which would make sense. The Midrash tells us that there were several worlds created and destroyed before this one. Worlds not meaning the whole world, the whole Earth. It means the flora and the fauna on top of the Earth. And we know scientifically the last one took place something like 60 million years ago with the demise of the dinosaurs. Something that you don't expect to happen every day, but maybe every Yom could happen. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan in his translation and commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation that we mentioned before, page 185, quotes several different 13th century, important, not today, 13th century Kabbalistic works, from which you can calculate like the age of the universe, approximately. And he does so. And as it turns out, the minimal age of the universe, according to the 13th century Kabbalah, is 12.78 billion years. According and the largest it could possibly be, the longest, is 15.3 billion years. And 13.8 billion years is right in between the 12.78 and the 15.3. It fits perfectly. Now, once again, I want to remind you, I'm not saying this is what it's got to be. Gerald Schroeder, for example, has a different approach, which is perfectly reasonable and perfectly makes sense. And it's consistent, but it's different. But there are several different ways of looking at it that show you that there is no country There's no intrinsic contradiction. You can come up with several different models of what was going on and what the interpretation of everything is and see that everything fits together, both 13 billion years and 5,000 years at the same time, depending on how you understand things. Now, one thing that this does not explain is the age of man. Because after all, if if the 5,780 years start with the creation of Adam, the Yom became before then, we're talking about 5,780 real ordinary years like we understand them today. Yet, we find fossils of Homo sapiens that date back somewhere between 100 and 200,000 years. How do we understand that? See, the explanation we had before doesn't explain the fossils that are more than 5,780 years old. Genesis chapter 1, verse 26. God created man in his image. The Ramban, the Maimonides, explains, as you probably understand, this doesn't mean it is physical image. God doesn't have a nose and a mouth and ears and so on. It means it is spiritual image. So, man is in the spiritual image of God in the sense that man has a soul, which is in the image of God. Adam was the first Homo sapien that was created in the image of God. Says, God created man in his image. But listen carefully to the words. Man was the first Homo Sapien to have a soul. Man was the first Homo Sapien to have a soul, but was Adam the first Homo Sapien? There's a difference between Adam and man. Adam, of course, is used as a as a name for Adam, but Adam in the Hebrew means man, but there's also the word Ish, which also means man. Adam usually is a higher level of man. And Ish is referring to a male Homo Sapien. Adam is referred to something which is much greater. We call that an Adam Gadol, great Adam, not a great Ish, great man. There's something in there, the soul, that makes him Adam. The question is, Adam, the souled man, was created 5,780 years ago, but could there have been Homo Sapiens that did not have a human soul? They just had an animal soul, so to speak. But there were Homo Sapiens that lived before them, which would clearly account for all the fossils that date back hundreds of thousands of years. Adam looked through all of the animals looking for a helpmate. That's what the Torah tells us. Does that mean he was looking at elephants, crocodiles for a helpmate? You just try making a helpmate out of a crocodile. It's not going to work. But if there were Homo Sapiens besides Adam, but they didn't have a soul, but they were perfectly human in terms of the looks, maybe he was looking at animals that happened to be Homo Sapiens. They're called animals so they didn't have a soul. They were no better than animals. They may have been intelligent animals. Animals can have intelligence, too. Chimpanzees, dolphins are very intelligent. But they don't have a connection to God. Try by to a chimpanzee what God is. Have a connection to pray to God. It's not going to work. He doesn't have the soul that that gives him the connection to God. Maybe Adam was looking among all the beautiful female homo sapiens. He couldn't find a helpmate because none of them had a soul. Can't be married to someone, have a relationship with someone who doesn't have a connection to God. And so, God has to create a new female out of Adam and share the soul so that now is a female homo sapien with a soul, the same like Adam has a soul. The Ram the Ramban Nachmanides says, he could not find another soul. That was his problem. Not that he couldn't find a nice and nice wife. He couldn't find another soul. Vayomer Elohim, "Na'aseh Adam betsalmenu." And God said, "Let us make a man in our image." All the commentators ask the question, "Wait a minute, who is God talking to? Who's us? And what do you mean our image? And what do you mean make instead of create?" And then afterwards, just two pasukim later, two sentences later, it says, "Vayivra Elohim et Adam betsalmo." And God, not us, created, not made, Adam in his image, not in our image. What's going on here? There are two parts. There are two parts to the creation of Adam. The first part is the body, the homo sapien part, the physical being. The next part is the soul that goes into him. The Ramban, the Malbim, the Akeidat Yitzchak will say this. The first part is making the physical being, and then comes the spiritual being. The Yerushalmi Talmud, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud, uh tractate Yevamot, says there were two terms of creation. One took One part took 9 months, the other part took 7 months. Two parts, the body, the soul. The Sforno, chapter 1, verse 26, God took a previously created animal and put a soul into him into it to form Adam, the field to form not just Adam by name, but to form an Adam, the Homo Sapien with a soul. Rabbi Shimon Schwab was one of the greatest rabbis of the last generation. And uh he has a book published called Selected Writings. Um and in there there's a It was published in 1988. In there he has an essay. It's a book It's a group of essays, and one essay is entitled How old is the universe? And he deals with the same problems that we've been dealing with now, very similar ways. You're welcome to read it. It's very good. But what's particularly interesting is is this. He says, "What is the difference between the hayyot ha'aretz and the hayyot hassadeh?" It describes the serpent who beguiled Eve into eating from the tree of knowledge. It describes him as the cleverest of the of the hayyot hassadeh, the beasts of the cultivated field, as opposed to all the animals before that were that were called the I'm sorry. Called the hayyot ha'aretz. They're called the beasts of the land, beasts of the of the of the ground. What is the beast of the cultivated field? So, in the Mishnah Kil'ayim, Rabbi Shimon Schwab writes, it talks about the adonei hassadeh, who are the lords of the cultivated field. And he says that these are animals that but they resemble man. They're animals but they resemble man. Not just like a gorilla, but they really they look like man. Homo sapien. And they have intelligence. They can cultivate a field. But they're not Adam. What do we know about the Nachash? What do we know about the serpent? We know first of all that he stood erect. Number one. Number two, he was able to talk. He was talking to Eve trying to convince her to eat from the tree of knowledge. He was clever. He was able to reason. He convinced her. She wasn't stupid. He was very smart. It says Rashi says that the snake or the serpent desired Eve. Imagine the snake trying to to desire a Homo sapien. It doesn't make any sense. The Malbim says that he was a servant of Adam. Try making a ser- servant out of a snake. Out of a chimpanzee perhaps, but out of a snake? No way. Except that it's standing erect. It's speaking. What does it sound like? It sounds like a Homo sapien. It's able to reason. The Tame Yerushalmi says in Maseches Kiddushin that the snake wanted to rule the world. Can a snake rule the world? But a clever Homo sapien certainly might be able to. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan in quotes the Bahir and the Zohar, a Kabbalistic work of the 13th century that says there were 974 generations before Adam. Now, there are many places or at least a few places where these 974 generations are mentioned. They're mentioned in the Talmud, they're mentioned in the Midrash Rabbah. But in every place that I've seen where they're mentioned, it always is mentioned in such a way that we're not quite sure whether they really existed or not. Maybe they were just thoughts. God thought of making 974 generations and then he didn't and so forth and so on. But in the Bahir and the Zohar, it says specifically there were 974 generations before Adam. Now, how long is a generation? We usually think of a generation 20 30 years, right? But that's today. Remember that the Torah back then says that people lived a very long time. They were quite old when they had children. The length of a generation was much longer than it is today. So, I went ahead and took all the generations starting with Adam all the way up until Noah, until the flood. And I took the average. What's the average length of time of a generation before someone had a child? And it turns out the average is 158.4 years. Now, if you multiply 158.4 * 974 generations, you get 154,320 years. Which is just about how long we find the fossils of Homo Sapien around. Between 100 and 200,000 years. It fits. Does that mean it's right? No, but it does fit. It's consistent. It works. The Drushur Achaim from the written by the Pharisees realm that 1840s says that cavemen were pre-Adam man from these 974 generations. They were able to make art on caves. The current world of thinking humans, he says, is only the second one to be created. There was another creation before us. 974 generations, there was a generation before us, before Adam, that was able to think, was able to draw, was able to speak, was able to hope to rule the world. Now, once again, I want to uh impress upon you the fact that I'm not offering this as a definitive explanation of what happened. I'm giving it to you as a possibility. But the possibility does demonstrate that there is no conflict between science and the Torah in terms of the age of the universe, in terms of the age of man. Now the Rambam, the Rambam, Maimonides in the Moreh Nevukhim, chapter 1 part 1, defines that selem as meaning the betelem, which we translate as the image of God. The image we were created in the image of God, we first to the soul of man. Okay, so the selem, the image is the soul. Not a shape or a physical form. In chapter 7, he goes on to talk about Adam. What happened after Adam ate from the tree of knowledge? Turns out that Eve gave him to eat. And of course he blames her. He says, "Uh she's the one who gave did it for me." So naturally, since he blamed her, of course he doesn't take any blame on himself. But he blames her. Okay, but now since he blames her and she was at fault, and therefore he lost his immortality. He's now got to be angry at her. So he's angry at her. But you know what? He's got a long anger. It lasts for 130 years. 130 years. Now in Bereshit, in Genesis chapter 5 verse 3, it says that Adam lived 130 years and begot in his likeness and his image, and he named him Seth. So here he is, he has a son by the name of Seth. In his likeness means he looked like him. Not not unusual for children to often look like their parents. But in the image. The image, the selem is the soul. This son by the name of Seth after 130 years has a soul. You know what? Why it's telling you that? Because for 130 years he separated from Eve. He had nothing to do with her. Finally after 130 years he got back together with her. We now have a son. And of course the son, having two parents that have souls, now has a soul as well. In between in the 130 years, Adam is perhaps going and consorting with females, female homo sapiens who have no soul. Because he's not going to have anything to do with Eve. And when he has children that are homo sapiens, they have no soul. So now it's telling you something new that after 130 years, Adam gets together with Eve, they have a reunion, they now have a son, and guess what? Both parents have a soul, he's now in the image of his parents. Image again, remember, sell them, meaning the soul. Professor John Wheeler, one of the greatest physicists of our generation, and I quote, "To my mind, there must be at the bottom of it all, not an entirely simple equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be self-compelling, and so inevitable, and so beautiful, we will say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?" And to that Hawking says, "If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we would know the mind of God." I would contend that we do not have to have a theory of everything, a scientific description of everything in the universe, in order to know the mind of God. In fact, I would go further and say that even if we did, we still wouldn't know what's on the mind of God just from that alone. And furthermore, there's a very good reason to believe that we never will have a theory of everything that will explain everything in the universe. It's been proven mathematically to be impossible. But it is easy to at least know what's some of what's on the mind of God. And the reason is, he told us. Here it is in the five books of Moses, in the Chumash. You pick it up, you read the Chumash, and it's going to tell you what's on the mind of God. How did he create the universe? What does he want from us? Why are we here? What's our purpose in life? It's all in there. But you have to learn it from someone who understands the words, not just the translation, even in an Artscroll, which is pretty good, but doesn't catch the meaning of all the words, as I demonstrated earlier. Someone who really understands, understand the science, understand the Torah, and then you will find that your questions about the coincidence of science and Torah, instead of diverging, as you know more and more about both of them, they converge and fill in the pictures, each one filling in the picture in a different way. Thank you so very much.