If You Changed From YEC to an 'Old Earth' View, Would You Post Your Story Here...

[rogue06]

It seems to have been this one:

"Another, Nechunya ben HaKanah, a 1st century Kabbalist, asserted that if you knew how to use the 42 letter name for God you could decipher a lengthy time between the creation of the universe and of man. He estimated the age of the Universe at 15.3 billion years, some 2000 years ago, the very age modern astrophysics have just arrived at."

(Via http://www.fixedearth.com/kabbala%20I.htm, an extremely anti-science website.)

The exact method that ben HaKanah applied to the "42 letter name for God" is unknown. In any case, the precision of his estimate - at a time when no one would speak of millions of years, let alone billions of years - is quite astounding.

Disclaimer: I do not endorse any form of Kabbalah and reject many if not most doctrines generally accepted by Kabbalists. In fact it is questionable if any Jewish scholar of antiquity or the early middle ages can be labeled a "Kabbalist", as the actual Kabbalah emerged much later.

A modern Orthodox Jew who has harmonized Genesis with the currently accepted age of the universe is Gerald Schroeder. He claims that given the theory of relativity and the speed of time, six days from God's point of view would correspond to about 16 billion years from a human point of view.

Never heard of ben HaKanah but there was a medieval Jewish scholar Isaac ben Samuel of Acre, a disciple of the great 13th century rabbi and scholar Nahmanides, who calculated that the universe is 15,340,500,000 years old based on the concept that in the eyes of God a day equals a thousand years (based on Ps. 90:4 with a "divine year" representing 365,250 normal or solar years).

[shunyadragon]

Morton

It is a great pity that you are not an honest man

[Mark F]

Never heard of ben HaKanah but there was a medieval Jewish scholar Isaac ben Samuel of Acre, a disciple of the great 13th century rabbi and scholar Nahmanides, who calculated that the universe is 15,340,500,000 years old based on the concept that in the eyes of God a day equals a thousand years (based on Ps. 90:4 with a "divine year" representing 365,250 normal or solar years).

So now we seem to have at least three Bible-believing Jewish scholars who have proposed an age of 15+ billion years for the universe (based on two or three different interpretative methods of Genesis). Two of them lived long before scientists realized that the universe must be much older than a few thousand years.

What are the odds of randomly picking the number 15 billion from all (rounded) numbers between 6,000 - infinity?