Genesis and Science

Here is a series of lessons I gave for my Kindergarten Sunday School class on how science and Genesis are complementary.

God is Great

Starting in December, we will be talking about the coming of Jesus and His life in the kindergarten Sunday School class. We were going to do a series on Joshua that would highlight the prophecies of the coming of Jesus. However, that curriculum is geared towards older kids and would be hard to bring down to the kindergartener’s level.

So I was praying about what to teach, and a thought came to me to do a series that would highlight how big and vast and old and smart God is, to provide a background so that the kids can really appreciate how significant it is that such a great God that created the universe would send his Son to save us.

God is Vast

• Earth 16 inches (size of basketball) moon is 4 inches (softball). How far away is moon from earth? 40 feet.
• Mars is ? far away
• Nearest star is ?
• Nearest galaxy is?

Craft: Draw the solar system

God is Big

• Size of sun compared to earth
• Hubble dark sky picture
  • Nothing visible
  • Picture the size the grain of sand
  • About 10,000 galaxies
  • Each galaxie has millions? of stars

Craft: Cover a picture of the sky with colored grains of rice

God is Old

• Timeline for how long a 5 year old has lived
• Timeline for the Bible
• Bible story of creation
  • Sun made in the 4th day
  • Can’t see the stars because of cloud cover
• Universe is ? billion years old

Craft: Timeline of your life

God is Everywhere

• Demo: Picture through a moving slit
• Demo: Turn rubber band inside out on a piece of paper
• Universe had 10 dimensions at the beginning
• Jesus walked through a wall
• God can hear everyone at all times

Craft: Draw a 3 dimensional picture

God is Smart

• How hard is it to create life?
• Scientist have tried for 50 years to create life in the laboratory, haven’t succeeded
• God invented DNA
• Life sprang up about the same time
• Lots of different animals and plants
• No new species since then

Craft: Create a new animal

God is Love

• How would aliens contact us?
  • TV message
  • Spaceship
  • Oblisk (Movie 2001)
• God talked to us
• God sent his Son

Craft: Draw a picture that you would send as an important message to someone who lived far away.

Day 1 – God Made the Heavens and Earth

Who believes in science and who believes in the Bible? Do we have to pick one or the other, or are they both compatible? Some people who believe in science think that science explains everything, but it doesn’t. However, it is amazing how often science and the Bible support each other!

In the lesson today, we will be looking at day one in Genesis 1 and how it corresponds amazingly well with modern astrophysics.

Background

For those teachers not up-to-date on the latest astrophysics :-) you might want to review this:

• Beginning of the Universe

Bible Verse

• “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” Genesis 1:31 NIV

Lesson

• What is science? (Hold up science book.) Science is stuff like 1+1 (write on board) and how we make things like computers work. (Show Treo.) Who has a computer?
• Does science explain everything? Science explains a lot of things, and some people think it explains everything.
• Do we need the Bible then? Are computers mentioned in the Bible? No, but the Bible explains a lot of amazing things that science can’t even begin to explain.
• Science can explain the beginning of the universe with the Big Bang theory.
  • According to scicne, about 15 billion years everything was smaller than a pea. (Show pea) Everything, including all the atoms in you and me, your computer, this earth, the sun, the planets, stars, everything. Then there was a big explosion and it all sprang out and started expanding. (Release foam).
  • But there was a problem. The universe was just a sea of particles and no light could escape. (Shine light through dark solution.) Everything was dark. This was called the Dark Ages.
  • Then after a couple of hundred million years, the universe cooled down a little and atoms formed so that light could shine out across open space. (Add chemical to solution to make it transparent and shine light into it.)
• Pretty cool stuff huh? This is what science says about the begining of the universe, lets see what the Bible says.
• (Read Genesis 1:1 – 1:5)
• Isn’t it incredible that Bible was right about how the universe was made, even though the Bible was written down thousands of years before this science book?
• The Bible was the first book the showed that the universe did have a beginning. This is pretty amazing because most people didn’t believe this.
  • For instance, when Einstein discovered the theory of relativity it showed that the universe had a beginning. But he didn’t like this, so he add some calculations that he later realized were the biggest mistake of his life.
  • Many religions think that the universe has always been present, or that it comes and goes.
• In the coming weeks, we are going to find out more about how the Bible has a lot of really accurate science in it, and can explain things that even modern science can’t explain.
• (Pray)

Props

• Treo
• Science book
• Bible
• Pea
• Foam balls, or foam snakes, or something that can be compressed a lot and will spring out
• Flashlight
• Solution of something dark that can be turned light by adding something

Genesis 1:1 – 1:5 from The Message

First this: God created the Heavens and Earth – all you see, all you don’t see.

Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.

God spoke: “Light!” And light appeared.

God saw that light was good and separated light from dark.

God named the light Day, he named the dark Night. It was evening, it was morning – Day One.

Craft Ideas

Pasta Sun

• Give each student a piece of construction paper and a the verse printed on a piece of paper.
• Have the students cut out the verse and glue it on the construction paper
• Glue pasta noodles around the circle as sun rays.

Note: Unless we get thick, quick drying glue, the glue might not have time to set.

Solar System

• Print out a sheet with circles of various sizes (representing the planets) with the name of the planet in each circle.
• Print another with the Bible verse colored paper
• Let the students cut out the planets and glue them on the colored paper and then decorate with stickers and pens.

Decorate Planets

• Print out sheets with one planet per sheet
• Let the students cut out and decorate with stickers and pens
• Put these up around the classroom

Day 2 - God Made the Sky

On the second day, God separated the waters from the sky and named it the Heavens. Today, we will try to show how big and wide and numerous the Heavens are.

Lesson

Intro

• Last week we learned how God created the entire universe, starting from a seed smaller than the size of a pea.
• This week, we are going to learn how big and wide it is, and how numerous are the stars and planets.

Verse

God spoke: “Sky! In the middle of the waters: separate water from water!”

God made sky. He separated the water under the sky from the water above sky. And there it was: he named sky the Heavens:

It was evening, it was morning – Day Two.

Genesis 6-8, The Message

Explanation: Maybe the “waters” were the gaseous clouds that existed after the big bang and separating the waters from the sky was forming the gas into planets.

Big

• Who has gone on a long plane flight? 10 hours? 20 hours? Remember how long it was. That is because the earth is really big. But the earth is small compared to the other planets. (Show the planet proportion)

Numerous

• Sand
• Pass out a tiny bit of sand and ask the kids to count the grains
• Hold up a baggie of sand and ask how many are in there
• Show pictures of beaches, ask how many in all the beaches in the worlds.
• There are probably 7.5 billion billion grains of sand

• Stars
• Solar system
• Galaxy: Ours has 100 millions stars, most have 400 million stars
• Universe: 100 billion galaxies
• But there are probably 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on earth (Show science book)

Bible Verse

“I’ll bless you – oh, how I’ll bless you! And I’ll make sure that your children flourish – like stars in the sky! like sand on the beaches!”

Genesis 22:17 The Message

Far

• Earth 10 inches (size of basketball) moon is 4 inches (tennis ball). How far away is moon from earth? 25 feet. (Wrap a string around the basketball 9.5 times to measure the distance.)
• Show how far the planets are on the pre-measured distances

Summary

• God must be really powerful to create all this

Supplies

• Basketball
• Tennis ball
• 1” sticker for the sun, and tiny stickers for the planets
• Measure out on the wall and then outside the locations of the planets in feet: 3, 6, 8, 13, 46, 85, 171, 269
• Sand
• Pictures of beaches

Craft Ideas

• Cover a picture of the sky with colored grains of rice
• Draw a scale model of the solar system
  • Use three pieces of butcher paper, one for each table.
  • On one, draw an arc with a 10 foot diameter (as much as can fit on the paper) that represents the Sun.
  • On another, there could be outlines for Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars
  • On the third, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. (Pluto was voted out as a planet last month by the International Astronomical Union.)
• Have the kids work on it together and color the planets, draw in stars and comets, and decorate with stickers.

Scales

Size – Earth is 1 inch

Body	Size (in)	Orbit radius (ft)
Sun	120
Mercury	0.42	776
Venus	1.0	1074
Earth	1.1	1636
Mars	0.58	5590
Jupiter	12	10252
Saturn	10	20621
Uranus	4.0	32329
Neptune	3.9	42481

Distance – Sun is 1 inch

Body	Size (mm)	Orbit radius (ft)
Sun	25.4 (1 inch)
Mercury	0.005	3
Venus	0.2	6
Earth	0.2	8
Mars	0.1	13
Jupiter	2.5	46
Saturn	2.1	85
Uranus	0.8	171
Neptune	0.8	269

 

Day 3 - God Made the Land and Plants

On the third day, God separated the waters from land and called the land Earth. Today we are going to see how amazing the Earth is.

Lesson

Intro

• Last week we learned about how many stars there are and how far away they are
• This week, we are going to learn about how amazing the Earth is.
• Let’s read what the Bible has to say about this

(Show picture of the Earth)

Verse

God spoke: “Separate! Water-beneath-Heaven, gather into one place: Land, appear!” And there it was.

God named the land Earth. He named the pooled water Ocean. God saw that it was good.

God spoke: “Earth, green up! Grow all varieties of seed-bearing plants. Every sort of fruit-bearing tree.” And there it was.

Earth produced green seed-bearing plans, all varieties. And fruit-bearing trees of all sorts. God saw that it was good.

It was evening, it was morning – Day Three.

Genesis 9-13, The Message

• Now let’s read what science says about the formation of the Earth

(Read science book)

Probabilities

• Does anyone know what “probability” is?
• It is just like this spinner, explaining how long it would take to spin a 6
• Who wants to try?

(Let several kids spin once and try to get a 6)

• Okay, now we are going to try to get 6 sixes.

(Tape the spinner on the wall and let the child keep spinning to see if they can get 6 sixes. Have an adult mark down each one. Have them continue speaking while you go on. Once they get 6 sixes, say:)

• Oh wait, I meant to get 6 sixes in a row. Try again.

Earth Probability

• Remember on the first day when the Bible said that “God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.” I think that He was preparing the Earth even way back to the beginning.
• Let’s look at some of the things that make the Earth special

(Get out the globe. Ask a teacher to be at the board writing down a mark for each of the critical factors)

• What are some of the things that make the Earth special, and make it possible for us to live here?

1. Temperature
2. Spinning speed (too slow and temperatures difference between night and day is too great, to fast and you get too many hurricanse)

(Get out the sun and let someone hold it)

• Why is the sun important?

1. Too hot, or too close, and all water would evaporate
2. Too cold, or too far away, and all water would freeze
3. Needs to be stable. Many starts give off erratic radiation

(Get out the moon and let someone hold it)

• Why is the moon important?

1. Stablizes the tilt of the Earth so we don’ wobble
2. Creates tides to cleanse seawater and move around nutrients
3. If too big or too small, wouldn’t do this.

• Some scientist think that there are probably more than 40 of these important parameters that are important for making the Earth special and supporting life.

(Have the teacher add more marks to make it 40)

• Each of these parameters is more than 1-to-6, many are more like 1-to-100!

(Draw a spinner on the board with many lines)

• So we would have to spin the spinner 40 times and land on the same number each time!

(Reference: Hugh Ross, “The Creater and the Cosmos”)

Summary

• The Earth is really a special place and everything had to happen just right in order to make it a good home for us.
• So even though there are billions and billions of stars, God made this special planet just for us.

Supplies

• Picture of the earth
• Science book
• Spinner
• Globe
• Tennis ball
• Lamp

Craft Ideas

• Print outlines of Earth with continents and let kids color it
• Paper Plate Earth (from curriculum)

 

Day 4 - God Made Lights in the Sky

On the fourth day, God made the lights in the sky? How can that be when God created the Heavens on day two? Also, why does the Bible say that the Universe was created in 6 days when science says it took billions of years?

Lesson

Intro

• Last week we learned how amazing the Earth is
• This week, we are going to learn about how the lights came into the sky, how long it took to create the universe, and how many dimensions God exists in.

Verse

God spoke: “Lights! Come out! Shine in Heaven’s sky! Separate Day from Night. Mark seasons and days and years. Lights in Heaven’s sky to give light to Earth.”

And there it was.

God made two big lights, the larger to take charge of Day. The smaller to be in charge of Night: and he made the stars. God placed them in heavenly sky to light up Earth and oversee Day and Night, to separate light and dark.

God saw that it was good.

It was evening, it was morning – Day Four.

Lights Appear

• Hey, wait a second, how can the sun, moon and stars appear on the fourth day when they were made earlier?
• Remember from first verse that God’s spirit was on the Earth. So the story of creation is from the view of the earth.
• But when the Earth was first formed, it likely was very cloudy and the stars couldn’t be seen from the Earth.
• Let’s see what it was like

(Put a sheet over the kids. Have some helpers hold some stars and moon and sun. Have someone turn on and off the lights.)

• Can you tell when the lights are on and off?
• Can you see any stars?

(Take off the sheet)

• Now can you see the stars?
• That is what it was like that the stars were already created, but they couldn’t be seen from the Earth because it was too cloudy.

Creation 6 Days or 6 Yohms?

• The Bible says the Universe was created in 6 days
• But science tells us that the Universe is about 14 billions years old
• Which is right?
• Wait a second, I need to go get something while you think about the answer.

(Stand up, and walk over to the counter, pick up something and walk back)

• Now, when I said “wait a second” did I really mean exactly one second?
• No, I was using this to just mean wait a little bit
• The word in Genesis for day is the Hebrew word “Yowm”. Can you say “yohm”?
• Now yohm can mean a 24 hour day, but it can also mean a general period of time.

Joke

• A man was talking to God and asked: “God, what is a million years to you? God replied: “But a second”.
• The man then asked: “God, what is a million dollars to you?” God replied: “But a penny”.
• Then the man got smart and asked: “God, can I have a penny?”
• God replied: “In a second”

Bible

• The Bible also has passages that suggest a day is not always a day:
• “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by” Psalm 90:4
• “God’s days are not our days” Isaiah 55:9

Summary

• So science and the Bible are both right, since “yohm” can mean an extended period of time.

Dimensionality

• How many dimensions do we live in?
• The answer is three.
• What would it be like to live in a one dimensional world?

(Put some blue tape on the floor in a line. Put the jar on one end)

• Okay, who wants to move this jar to the other end?

(Let someone move it to the other end, then another person move it back)

• If we lived in a 1 dimensional world, we could only move back and forth along a line
• What if it was a two dimensional world?

(Put a piece of blue tape perpendicular to the first. Let kids move it all over the floor, they don’t need to stay on the tape)

• Okay, what about 3 dimensions?

(Move a chair over to the cross of the tape and put a piece of tape from the floor up to the chair. Let some kids move the jar up to the chair)

• That was great. Now lets see what it would be like to live in a 4 dimensional world.

(Shake the jar really hard so the egg breaks)

• Okay, who wants to move this jar back in time before the egg broke? Come on, it can’t be that hard, we moved it forward and back, sideways, and up and down. We should be able to move it back in time too, right?
• We can’t, because we live in just 3 dimensions and don’t have control over 4 dimensions.

• However, scientist have discovered that when the Universe was first created, there were 10 dimensions. Not just 3 but 10! But shortly after the big bang, the other dimensions curled in and hid so that we live in a world of only 3 dimensions
• But this means that God lives in many more dimensions than we do. To Him, time is nothing. He can move forward and back in time, or make it slow or fast.
• Even Jesus after he died and rose up, lived in more than 3 dimensions.
• Let’s read a story about this:

The disciples were together with the doors lock and Jesus appeared. They thought they were seeing a ghost and were scared half to death. Jesus said “Why are you troubled? Look at my hands and my feet – it’s really me. Touch me. A ghost doesn’t have muscle and bone like this.”

• So even though Jesus was real and not a ghost, he was able to get through a locked door. This is because He exists in more than 3 dimensions.
• Let’s see how this woud work.

(Put up a barrier on the blue tape. Jump the jar over the barrier)

• God exists in many dimensions
• The great thing about this is that he can be with all of us, all the time.

Supplies

• White sheet
• Something that represents the stars, sun and moon that can be easily held by the teachers
• Blue painters tape
• Glass jar with lid
• Egg

Craft Ideas

• Print some general timelines. Have the kids do a timeline for their life marking important events. Then have them do another for the creation of the Universe.

Day 5 and 6 - God Made Animals and Man

Intro

• Last week we learned how the lights came into the sky, how long it took to create the universe, and how many dimensions God exists in.
• This week, we are going to learn about how what science knows about how life was created fits in with what the Bible says

Lesson – Evolution

Verse

God spoke: “Swarm, Ocean, with fish and all sea life! Birds, fly through the sky over Earth!”

God created the huge whales, all the swarm of life in the waters. And every kind and species of flying birds.

God saw that it was good.

God blessed them: “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Ocean! Birds, reproduce on Earth!”

It was evening, it was morning – Day Five.

God spoke: “Earth, generate life! Every sort and kind: cattle and reptiles and wild animals – all kinds.”

And there it was: wild animals of every kind, cattle of all kinds, every sort of reptile and bug.

God saw that it was good.

God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.”

God created human beings: he created them godlike, reflecting God’s nature. He created them male and female.

God blessed them: “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living things that moves on the face of Earth.”

Then God said, “I’ve given you every sort of seed-bearing plant on Earth and every kind of fruit-bearing tree, given them to you for food. To all animals and all birds, everything that moves and breathes, I give whatever grows out of the ground for food.”

And there it was.

God looked over everything he had made: It was so good, so very good!

It was evening, it was morning – Day Six.

DNA

• Science has learned a lot about life.
• It has shown that the “instruction book” for life is is written in DNA
• DNA uses 4 amino acids.
• The human genome (instruction book) consists of 23 chromosomes, 25,000 genes and about 3 billion DNA base pairs
• Even a simple bacteria has about 1 million base pairs

(Show picture of DNA)

Lego Entropy

• Let’s pretend that DNA base pairs are like Legos
• Has anyone put together a Lego car?

(Hold up Lego car)

• Do you put it together carefully?
• What happens if you throw it down?

(Throw it up, and let it fall an break into pieces)

• Hmm, it breaks into pieces.
• Well what if we threw down a lot of pieces and see what they built.
• Who wants to try?

(Let kids throw Legos into a bucket, each time hold it up and show that nothing was built)

• Hmm, this doesn’t seem to be working too well.
• Maybe we just need to try longer.

(Let them try a few more times)

• Why doesn’t this work?
• Science says this is called “Entropy” which means that things always get messier rather than neater.
• Doesn’t that make sense?

Lego Instructions

• So how do we make something out of Legos?
• We use an instruction manual

(Show lego instruction manual)

• This one is pretty hard, it has 24 instructions.
• Has anyone ever built a Lego car this hard?
• Well what if instead of 24 instructions, it had 1 million instructions, like a bacteria has – would that be hard?
• One million instructions would mean this book would be about 30 feet tall!
• Well what if it has 3 billion instructions, like a human does? Would that be totally impossible?

Science Limitations

• Well if you use only science to explain life, then life had to come about because all the DNA pairs just happened to get assembled in exactly the right order
• But even science has a hard time explaining this. Even over billions of years with exactly the right conditions, there wouldn’t be enough time

(Show picture of spark in glass ball)

• Scientists have been trying to create life for a long time using things similar to this.
• This ball contains just the right gases scientists think are necessary to create life, and then the put a spark in it to try to get them to combine
• But no protocells have been made.

(Read Wired excerpt)

Cambrian Explosions

• Another thing science can’t explain is that during a period about 540 million years ago, there was an explosion of animal life.
• This was called the “Cambrian” period
• Not “explosion” like a firecracker, but explosion like a lot of new animals were first seen.

(Read from book about Cambrian puzzle)

• Before that, there were mainly just plants on the Earth.
• Science has a hard time explaining this, but the Bible doesn’t.
• Remember in Day 3, God created plants?
• And then in Day 5 God created animals?

Summary

• We have seen how the Bible doesn’t include all of the details about the creation of the Universe and how life came about on the Earth.
• We have also learned that science knows a lot of stuff, but doesn’t have all the answers either
• But when you combine what is in the Bible with what science knows, it explains a lot.

Lesson – Messenger

• What if you had a friend really far away, how would you contact them?
• Maybe write a letter, or send an email or a picture
• What if you thought there was someone living on another planet? How would you contact them?
• What if there were other people outside our own solar system – how would they contact us?
• Let’s see one idea about this

(Show clip from “2001” starting at 12 minutes)

• This writer thought that maybe someone would contact us by sending this large, black slab that made noise.
• What did God send to us?

(Hold up picture of Jesus)

• God sent his only Son.
• Does that show that He loves us?

Summary

• We have seen how big, and old, and powerful God is and how we created this huge, gigantic Universe.
• So isn’t it easy to wonder sometimes if he really cares about small, little us in this tiny part of His Universe?
• But we know He cares because He sent his only Son to us.
• Let’s pray

 

Beginning of the Universe

Dark Ages

Known as the Dark Ages of the universe, it’s the 200 million-year period (more or less) after the last flash of light from the Big Bang faded and the first blush of sun-like stars began to appear. What happened during the Dark Ages set the stage for the cosmos we see today, with its billions of magnificent galaxies and everything that they contain – the shimmering gas clouds, the fiery stars, the tiny planets, the mammoth black holes.

When the Dark Ages began, the cosmos was a formless sea of particles; by the time it ended, just a couple hundred million years later, the universe was alight with young stars gathered into nascent galaxies. It was during the Dark Ages that the chemical elements we know so well – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and most of the rest – were first forged out of primordial hydrogen and helium. And it was during this time that the great structures of the modern universe – superclusters of thousands of galaxies stretching across millions of light-years – began to assemble.

From: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1376229-2,00.html

Flash of Light

The first of those hints comes from the universe-wide flash of light that followed nearly half a million years after the Big Bang. Before that flash occurred, according to the widely accepted “standard model” of cosmology, our entire cosmos had swelled from a space smaller than an atom to something 100 billion miles across. It was then a seething maelstrom of matter so hot that subatomic particles trying to form into atoms would have been blasted apart instantly and so dense that light couldn’t have traveled more than a short distance before being absorbed. If you could somehow live long enough to look around in such conditions, you would see nothing but brilliant light in all directions.

But as the universe expanded, it finally cooled down enough to allow atoms to form and light to shine out across open space. The accidental discovery of that light back in the 1960s convinced astronomers that the Big Bang was a real event, not just a theoretical construct.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1376229-2,00.html

Stephen Hawking On How the Universe Began

How did the universe really begin? Most astronomers would say that the debate is now over: The universe started with a giant explosion, called the Big Bang. The big-bang theory got its start with the observations by Edwin Hubble that showed the universe to be expanding. If you imagine the history of the universe as a long-running movie, what happens when you show the movie in reverse? All the galaxies would move closer and closer together, until eventually they all get crushed together into one massive yet tiny sphere. It was just this sort of thinking that led to the concept of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang marks the instant at which the universe began, when space and time came into existence and all the matter in the cosmos started to expand. Amazingly, theorists have deduced the history of the universe dating back to just 10-43 second (10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second) after the Big Bang. Before this time all four fundamental forces�gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces�were unified, but physicists have yet to develop a workable theory that can describe these conditions.

During the first second or so of the universe, protons, neutrons, and electrons�the building blocks of atoms�formed when photons collided and converted their energy into mass, and the four forces split into their separate identities. The temperature of the universe also cooled during this time, from about 1032 (100 million trillion trillion) degrees to 10 billion degrees. Approximately three minutes after the Big Bang, when the temperature fell to a cool one billion degrees, protons and neutrons combined to form the nuclei of a few heavier elements, most notably helium.

The next major step didn�t take place until roughly 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had cooled to a not-quite comfortable 3000 degrees. At this temperature, electrons could combine with atomic nuclei to form neutral atoms. With no free electrons left to scatter photons of light, the universe became transparent to radiation. (It is this light that we see today as the cosmic background radiation.) Stars and galaxies began to form about one billion years following the Big Bang, and since then the universe has simply continued to grow larger and cooler, creating conditions conducive to life.

Three excellent reasons exist for believing in the big-bang theory. First, and most obvious, the universe is expanding. Second, the theory predicts that 25 percent of the total mass of the universe should be the helium that formed during the first few minutes, an amount that agrees with observations. Finally, and most convincing, is the presence of the cosmic background radiation. The big-bang theory predicted this remnant radiation, which now glows at a temperature just 3 degrees above absolute zero, well before radio astronomers chanced upon it.

From http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/html/home.html

 

Hebrew Word for “Day”

• Transliterated Word: Yowm
• Original Word: ewy
• Phonetic Spelling: yome

1. day, time, year

1. day (as opposed to night)
2. day (24 hour period)
      1. as defined by evening and morning in Genesis 1
      2. as a division of time 1b 
3. a working day, a day's journey
4. days, lifetime (pl.)
5. time, period (general)
6. year
7. temporal references
      1. today
      2. yesterday
      3. tomorrow

From: http://www.studylight.org/lex/heb/view.cgi?number=03117

Hugh Ross instead believes these days (translated from the Hebrew word yom) to be historic, distinct, and sequential, but not literally 24 hours in length nor equal in length.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Ross_%28creationist%29