Kaka D Iralu
All human beings are prisoners of time. From the moment we are born to the time of our deaths, all our human activities are dictated by time. All our lives follow a pattern of a time when we have to get up in the morning do our works, sow our seeds, reap our harvests go back to sleep- over and over again until we die. And the time spans of our own individual lives are just a speck in the larger framework of time where others too have lived long before us and still others will go on living after we are all gone. But taking all of human history into consideration, in what year-in terms of seconds, minutes and hours or day-did time as we know it, actually begin? Modern scientists like Einstein with his theory of “The Law of Relativity” and Stephen Hawkins with his theory of “Black Holes”oles”Holes have also grappled with this question and have died without giving us any concrete scientific conclusions. Then we also have the many other scientists who will date their data’s as going back into millions and billions of years in the past with no specific date or year as the beginning of their dates. We also have the Gregorian calendar of dating history in terms of AD and BC. AD (anno domini) in Latin, means “In the year of our Lord.” This time frame is based on the date of the birth of Jesus Christ as A.D.1. From this A.D. 1, we go backwards to B.C.1 (Before Christ) and go on and on backward denoting years that had taken place before the birth of Jesus. Modern scholars now have created another two terms called CE and BCE to denote “Current events CE” and “Before current events BCE. But in spite of this BC and AD and BCA and CE eras of time, we still do not know when time began. This is because neither the BC or BCE eras end in any specific time or year from which we can say “time” in terms of seconds, hours, weeks, months or years has had its beginning from that particular date. Then there is also this fact of different nations having their own different calendars so that the Gregorian calendar (Roman Catholic calendar) is different from the Julian calendar (Julius Caesar’s Roman Empire calendar) or the Chinese calendar.
Coming back to the modern scientist who dates artifacts and evolutionary species as having evolved at such and such many million years ago, what precisely is their “time framework” based on? For example when scientists say that Dinosaurs had inhabited the planet earth for more than 280 million years and that 65 million years ago, they completely disappeared from the face of the earth due to a meteorite strikes or a volcanic eruptions; are we all supposed to accept these explanations as scientific facts?” Is their time framework of dating the periods of the Dinosaurs rule and extinction based on the Gregorian calendar of taking AD 1 as the year of reference or are they taking some rock samples and dating their dates of millions or billions of years based on their own calculation of the age of the rock samples? Can modern educated man take this rock sample dating devices as absolute scientific facts?
As for me, I am not a scientist, but I definitely am not going to be taken for a ride by all these modern scientists who are presenting us with dates of so many millions and billions of years as scientific facts. In their view (not supported by scientific data, or some forms of data with many gaps), the universe was conceived 13.8 billion years ago and our planet earth was born 4.54 billion years ago! But the question is: “On what time frame is this age of the universe or the planet earth based on?” The simple answer to this question is: “Nobody in human history-whether Scientists or even Christians know when time actually began.”
But though the scientists can romp on with their speculations; Christians have an alternative answer which the scientists do not have. This alternative answer is through revelation as revealed in the Bible through the successive prophets of God and finally the physical incarnation of Jesus into human history. In this context, though I am not a scientist, I am neither a non believer of scientific facts. In actual reality, these scientific facts confirm the veracity (truths) of what the Bible is stating in simple ordinary language. For a simple example, the Bible records that man (Adam), in his physical component, was made from the soil of the earth. On the other hand, science confirms that all the chemical components that are found in the human body like iodine, potassium, nitrogen etc are also found in the soil. The Bible and Science therefore are not contradicting one another. The Bible further says that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was separated from the seas. It then went on to state that the seas were next covered with algae and sea creatures. The Bible next records how the birds of the air and the animals of the earth were created until man was finally created from the soil in God’s own image to rule over God’s creation. All these sequences of creation were done so that air breathing, water drinking and vegetable and meat eating man could finally inhabit planet earth. Science also shows that all these sequences happened in space and time. If the sequence of- first water and then algae and plants that produces oxygen- were to be in the reverse, then man would not have lasted even for five minutes after his creation without water, oxygen and food.
Finally, the Bible begins with the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...” That is all that the word of God says about how time began. As for the date of that beginning, there is no date with B.C. or A.D. attached to it. The eternal God who is not time bound like us, began the beginning of time there (Genesis 1:1). As for God, he was there before “the beginning” started. As for us-time bound-human beings, that is where we and time began. However, if we believe in the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross and accept him as our personal savior, we shall again be merged into the eternal being of God (Jn. 3:16; Rev.3:20).
