THE DAYS OF CREATION ARE PERIODS

I. The Astrotheology and the Universal Cosmological Model

One of the aims of Astrotheology is to convey the message that seals the unity between science and religion and to recreate faith in those who are troubled by scientific observations that seem contrary to the Word.

The main question is: what is causing this separation between science and religion?

Indeed, the field of religion is so vast that there are subjects that cannot be included in these debates. This is the case, for example, of faith and the mysteries that accompany it, as Jesus said: "If you have faith, you can move mountains ». (Mt 21:21). Moreover, St. Paul himself said: "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the demonstration of things not seen" (Heb 11:1). It is understandable why the subject of faith or belief cannot be brought into the debates of unity between religion and science. In order to account for this, we notice that in these debates, everything revolves around the questions that are related to creation.

By following these debates in different forums, we have seen that many of the differences are due to misunderstandings. Indeed, how can we put on the same table a story that dates back to 1500 BC against new scientific terms created 2000 years after JC? To defend or demonstrate to scientists that we often speak the same language and have the same understanding, we ourselves must first understand the biblical pattern of creation beyond what we read and bring it to the table.

In the experience of faith, sometimes the words that come out of the mouth do not reflect what is going on in the heart.
In one biblical account, we are told about Pharaoh's dream (Gen. 41). If the secrets of this dream were not revealed by Joseph, today everyone will read it as such. People will begin to interpret about the cows, whereas Joseph's first sentence was that these cows represented years of abundance. And, in the following, we saw that he was indeed right.

Thus, to better engage in the debates between science and religion, we ourselves will have to ask whether we understand what we are arguing for beyond what is written. If not, we might as well ask questions to understand the subject we want to discuss. But what is wrong with religion is that people do not ask questions, but want to impose what they think even when you try to bring them to their senses.

My contribution to these days in this forum is to bring clarity to the creation days. If we could understand the meaning of six days of creation, we would no longer be confused about fossil dating or even evolution.

As I said, in the unity debates between science and religion, the first point that is rejected by scientists in the biblical creation scheme is the six days of creation. Indeed, science has discovered that the universe is currently 13.8 billion years old, whereas according to the literal analysis of the Bible, the universe is still six thousand years old. Furthermore, according to science, each process in creation took millions, even billions of years, whereas according to the biblical scheme of creation, it took only one day. For example, from the Big Bang to the creation of the Sun took 9 billion years, whereas in the biblical scheme of creation it took only 4 days from the origin to the creation of the Sun.

All these considerations make the religious engage with their heads down in these debates where they cannot brandish this scheme, which moreover is already qualified from the accounts resulting from oral traditions whose true source has been lost. This last consideration is unanimously accepted by both atheist and Christian intellectuals. I am writing this article in order to restore confidence in the foundation of the biblical scheme of creation. Therefore, at the end of this article, I will only answer questions that are related only to what I have just published.

In relation to all that is said about the biblical scheme of creation and even what is taught in theology around this scheme, there is one verse that I always like to remind everyone of without exception namely:

Ex 33:11 "The Lord spoke with Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.

So, if we know that the 10 commandments are from God, we should also know that the biblical scheme of creation that is attributed to Moses is also from God. And in God there is only perfect knowledge. If today this scheme is relegated to cosmogony, it is because no one has ever understood it, and no one has ever rendered it well. Hence, scientists and atheists qualify it with all the attributes they want without the religious having any palpable proof. St. Thomas Aquinas said: "If there is a biblical verse that does not answer the observations, the problem is not the verse, but rather our interpretation of it. This is indeed what I discovered after spending many years probing the biblical scheme of creation.

One cannot understand the cosmological pattern of biblical creation without knowing the notion of time and work in the Bible. These preliminary notions are a basis for understanding the biblical scheme of creation. Since Moses, the writer of Genesis, later referred to the day after the six days as a weekly Sabbath, many believers and non-believers alike think that each day of creation was necessarily 24 hours long. If you try to prove otherwise, you will be called a concordist or a validator of a lie.

If the explanations of what follows come from me, but what I will have to explain comes from the Bible as a great man of God said; the Founder of "The Way Internationale", Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille: "the Bible interprets itself". This is to say that to the question of knowing if the creation took place in six days, the Bible itself answers through the following verses that we will have to develop and that it has nothing to do with concordism:

2 Pet. 3: "But one thing, beloved, you must not be ignorant of, that in the sight of the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.


The biblical language used by Moses was said in such a way as to make the message clear to his contemporaries. The vocabulary was not as rich as it is today.

We should be aware that the spiritual language contained in the so-called sacred books such as the Bible, the Qur'an, the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, the Mayan writings or other esoteric books dealing with spirituality, are very different from the literary or common language. The same word can have different meanings.

For example, when the Bible speaks of death, it refers to man's separation from God through sin, not physical death. Thus, in the phrase "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), we see saints dying young and seasoned sinners dying at around 99 years of age. And when the Bible talks about eating, it is the context of the sentence that determines whether it is something taken with the mouth or sexual intercourse.

This is to say that the biblical sentences, although pronounced with common language, have another meaning, in relation to the true reality. It is a spiritual language called a parable, and it is often pictorial.

Section 2
The concept of time

2.1 The existence of the concept of time In the Bible

The Genesis story shows us a God who creates things in an instantaneous way, like a magician; this is false according to our literal analysis, and even according to the analysis of Pope Francis. Indeed, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014, Pope Francis said: "When we read the account of Creation in Genesis," he noted, "we risk taking God to be a magician, waving his magic wand to do everything. But it is not like that. (cfr : https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/video/2014/10/28/selon-le-pape-le-big-bang-et-l-evolution-ne-contredisent-pas-dieu ).

Thus, there is indeed a notion of time in the creation story and this notion is well defined in the same Bible. Many religious people think that introducing the notion of time into the biblical creation scheme is a way of diminishing the omnipotence of God, which is not true. In everything God has done, there has always been a notion of time. God's omnipotence is revealed through the perfection of the things he made, regardless of the length of time it took, within a day, within the space between evening and morning: "there was evening and there was morning" (Gen 1:5-27).

2.2. Meaning of the word "day" according to the Bible

The lack of knowledge of the explanation of the days of creation in the Bible meant that no religious person could stand before the scholars with convincing arguments.

In the entire biblical creation story, there is one phrase that keeps coming up, namely "there was evening and there was morning" to mark both the beginning and the end of a biblical creation or day. And it corresponds to the beginning and end of an era, according to science.
Indeed, the Bible interpreting itself as Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille said, and considering the books contained in the Bible as a Whole by Christians, whose Hero in the shadow is God, the biblical day as quoted in the first chapter of Genesis is well defined in the same Bible in 2 verses and this is not a matter of concordism on our part as we can read:

Ps 90:4 "For a thousand years are in thy sight as the day of yesterday, when it is no more, and as the watch of the night."

2 Pet 3:8 "But one thing, beloved, you must not be ignorant of, that in the sight of the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.

Despite these Bible verses, no Christian has been able to relate them to the days in the biblical creation scheme. Were it not for the clarifications made in the Principle of Creation, a branch of the Divine Principle by Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, one would still believe that everything appeared simultaneously on the basis of the word.

There are two very important words in these verses, namely "ignore" and "as". Firstly, we should not ignore the notion of time. Secondly, there is the comparative term 'as': 'one day to God is like a thousand years'. Here the word "equal" is not used, but rather "like". This simply means that a biblical day can represent as many days, as many years as a cycle or an era can take. So to say that creation was made in six biblical days has nothing to do with our twenty-four hour days. Rather, it represents six major stages which, as science has discovered, took thousands, millions, even billions of years.

Furthermore, the sequence of events as recounted in the first chapter of Genesis is the same as what science has discovered so far: man being the last of the creatures to appear on the earth. We have already begun to demonstrate this step by step. . FLAVIEN PHANZU MWAKA - Rechercher (forumactif.com)
A striking example that shows that these were not ordinary days, but periods, is that during the first two days of creation in Genesis chapter 1, there was not yet the creation (appearance) of the luminaries to mark the notion of time. This occurred in Genesis 1:14, during the fourth period of creation.

Ge 1:14 "God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of heaven to separate the day from the night; let them be signs to mark the times, the days and the years...'" 19. 19 "And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

So the first two days were fixed according to what, since the notion of time began on the fourth day? It was fixed in terms of the outcome of the evolutions that were taking place in the Universe.

Let's just take the six events of the first day "... the spirit of God moved over the waters... and God separated the light from the darkness. So there was evening and there was morning: that was the first day. When did these waters begin to exist, until we reach the last phenomena? We can see without even doing an analysis or concordism that it is an unquantifiable time but that the author has contained it between an evening and a morning and has qualified it as a day.

In order to speak of the notion of time, two ingredients must be present, namely, a star revolving around another. The rotation of the star on itself and its translation or revolution around another, thus create the quantifiable notion of time. That of our planet Earth around the Sun has been divided into 24 hours and now serves as a reference for all notions of time. Now, as I said, during the first two days of creation, there was no creation of the stars to serve as the basis for the calculation of time. So the days spoken of in the Bible in Genesis chapters one and two are periods, not our ordinary twenty-four hour days.
This development of thought goes hand in hand with the thought of scientists that we can read:

"Cosmologists would like to specify the dates of these phenomena and obviously study them. But how to obtain information on what happened during the dark ages when there were no stars to shine..."?
(Cfr: futurasciences.com. First stars in the universe: signals finally detected, Laurent SACCO. 02/03/2018).

All this is to confirm that there was indeed a notion of time in the biblical creation story, and the days spoken of have nothing to do with our twenty-four hour days; fixed on the basis of the movement of the Earth around the Sun. Rather, they are periods of time that the Bible does not quantify, but which the author divided up according to the fulfilment of one ideal and moved on to another. Once an ideal is fulfilled, no matter how long it took, the author of the biblical creation scheme contained it in one day. And, as I said, we will have to refer to the explanation I made for 2 Pet. 3:8 "But one thing, beloved, you must not be ignorant of, that before the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years are as one day."

Thus, with the notion of biblical time explained, we discover that there are no discrepancies between science and the Bible. Science only shows us how many millions; even billions of years were contained in each period of a biblical day. It is thus understood that the six biblical days are large ensembles whose details are revealed to us by science. The same is true when the Bible tells us that man is made from the dust of the earth. Today science has confirmed this by revealing to us the earth elements that were part of this dust, the largest parts of which are oxygen and carbon.

Let's see an excerpt from a speech demonstrating that the notion of scientific time is also taken into account by the religious in relation to the six biblical days which are only periods and that this confirms the Principle of creation of Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon. This is the speech given to the Pontifical Academy (1951) and then to the astronomers (1952) by Pope Pius XII to encourage the Abbé Georges Lemaitre for having put forward the idea of the "primitive atom" which would become the foundation of the Big Bang theory:

"On the other hand, the mind eager for truth rightly insists on asking how matter could never have arrived at such a state, so inconceivable to our experience today, and on searching for what preceded it... With the same limpid and critical eye with which he examines and judges the facts, he glimpses and recognises the work of the creative Almighty whose virtue, aroused by the powerful Fiat pronounced billions of years ago by the Creator Spirit, has unfolded in the universe, calling into existence, in a gesture of generous love, the matter overflowing with energy. It seems, in truth, that today's science, going back millions of centuries, has succeeded in witnessing this initial Fiat lux, this instant when an ocean of light and radiation arose from nothingness with matter, while the particles of the chemical elements separated and assembled into millions of galaxies ».

I need not remind you that the Belgian Abbot Georges Lemaitre asked the Pope not to interfere with science, while reminding him that his discovery was purely scientific and had nothing to do with religion. But, to this day, we congratulate Pope Pius XII for having seen divine inspiration in this discovery, because the notion of the 'primitive atom' of Belgian Abbot Georges Lemaitre is indeed biblical. NOTRE GRAND UNIVERS A COMMENCE COMME UNE GRAINE (forumactif.com)

This is the explanation I give to scientists and all religious people who were wondering about the time of creation. I believe that I have made a positive contribution to this debate of unity between science and religion and that I have met the objective of all the organisations that are active in these debates. The inference that the biblical days are periods is part of the Universal Cosmological Model.

By Flavien PHANZU MWAKA
- Inventor of Astrotheology and the Universal Cosmological Model
- Author of the books of the collection "verses of the scholars" and "Astrotheology".
01/08/2022

How to quote from this article:

- Flavien PHANZU MWAKA, Cosmology According to Biblical and Ancient Models, éd. Librinova, Paris
2022. https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B093RRQD1P/

- Flavien PHANZU MWAKA, big-bang-to-humankind, ed. Librinova, Paris, 2022.
https://www.librinova.com/librairie/flavien-phanzu-mwaka-1/big-bang-to-humankind