This biblical eternity is not simply unlimited time, but a higher dimension in which time has begun and will ultimately end. The concept of a God who dwells outside of what Einstein called ‘space-time’ also provides a scientific basis for an understanding of the substance of biblical prophecy. As Kitty Ferguson puts it, ‘our chronological framework forbids knowledge of the future. That’s a prescription one wouldn’t have in a timeless situation. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to find God knowing the future.108’ Incredibly, this was also pointed out by the Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo; circa fifth century AD. The Genesis account commences at the beginning of terrestrial time; and the first problem for the modern reader is an apparent conflict between geological time, measured in thousands of millions of years, and biblical time, which is measured in creation days. There are a number of suggestions attempting to explain this anomaly which are worthy of our consideration.

The first proposes that, because a literal day could not have occurred until both the Sun and the Earth were created, that is, until the fourth day of creation109, creation days might actually have been six periods of time, or ages, of indeterminate length. Support for this interpretation comes from the observation that the Hebrew word yom, which has been translated as day, is elsewhere translated ‘no less than sixty five times in the authorised version110’ as time. It is also interesting to note that when David Attenborough is faced with a similar problem to the writer of Genesis - describing how life came to be established upon the Earth - he uses a strikingly similar analogy to compress time: ‘such vast periods of time baffle the imagination … as a rough guide, it will serve to let one day represent ten million years111’.

Another proposal is that the creation days were indeed literal days; the six literal days on which God issued his divine, creative commands. In between these days, there is the possibility that vast periods of unspecified terrestrial time may have passed. A particularly interesting proposition recognises that should the creator God exist, he must necessarily dwell outside our dimension of time112; he would therefore be able to move forwards and backwards through time instantaneously. On this basis, there is no scientific problem with a literal, six consecutive day creation being compatible with an ancient age for the Earth. Both of these proposals, whilst respecting the geological evidence for an ancient Earth, permit a more literal interpretation of the Genesis text; which we will now consider in some detail.

The first creative utterance recorded in Genesis is ‘Let there be Light113’ .In the 1993 Royal Christmas lecture entitled The Cosmic Onion, Professor Frank Close also stated that the very first thing to be formed, nanoseconds after the Big Bang was ‘light' .This is a stunning statement to have made since, as many observers have noted over the years, no light source had at that time been formed. But science is here completely in line with the biblical sequence of events which records the creation of light first and the formation of the stars later.