Big Bang vs Genesis: The Timeline NASA Can’t Explain

Key Threads to Hold Onto Before We Enter the Genesis Theory

Mainstream cosmology, backed by NASA and major universities, dates the universe at about 13.8 billion years old, beginning in a hot, dense state that expanded rapidly (the Big Bang). Genesis opens with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” a line many see as theological and poetic rather than a modern physics description. The Gap Theory and relativity-based readings of the Genesis “days” are serious attempts within faith communities to reconcile ancient scripture with deep time and cosmic evolution. Even official models admit major unknowns—like what triggered the initial expansion—leaving real space for mystery and for new integrative theories such as the proposed Genesis Theory.

Before the Beginning: A Blinding Flash and an Ancient Page

Picture this: the universe erupts in a blaze hotter than anything we can fathom. According to NASA and related sources, in the first second after the Big Bang, the universe’s temperature was on the order of 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit (about 5.5 billion Celsius). Matter and light tear into existence, setting the stage for everything that follows. Roughly 380,000 years after this beginning, the universe cooled enough for electrons and nuclei to combine—an epoch of “recombination” that allowed light to travel freely, leaving behind the cosmic microwave background radiation we still detect today.

Now shift scenes. An ancient scribe in the Near East scratches words onto papyrus or clay, against a backdrop of flickering oil lamps and stories from Babylonian cosmology. The book of Genesis was composed in a world already steeped in ancient cosmologies, including Babylonian narratives like the Enuma Elish that speak of primordial chaos, divine speech, and light preceding the formation of the sun, moon, and stars. The Enuma Elish is dated to around 1800 B.C., centuries before many scholars place the final shaping of Genesis, suggesting a shared ancient conversation about origins rather than a lone, isolated text. Holding these two images side by side—the cosmic fireball and the sacred script—it’s hard not to feel the pull of something deeper connecting them.

How Readers, Scholars, and Seekers Say the Story Really Unfolds

We’ve all heard the debates, but let’s get real about what’s on the table. This isn’t just “science versus faith”—it’s a web of perspectives where people are grappling with the same questions. Many in faith communities report that the standard six-day, young-earth reading of Genesis (with a universe only thousands of years old) clashes sharply with what they see through telescopes, geological records, and evolutionary biology. Others push back, holding firm to that view because they see it as core to scriptural authority.

Old-earth creationists and Gap Theory proponents point to a possible temporal break between Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning…”) and 1:2 (“Now the earth was formless and void…”), a view popularized in the early 19th century by Scottish theologian Thomas Chalmers. Physicist-theologian Dr. Gerald Schroeder and others suggest the “days” of Genesis could be real intervals, but measured from a relativistic, cosmic frame—where time dilation could stretch what appears as six days in one frame into billions of years in another.

Some theologians, such as Henri Blocher, argue that the biblical concept of “death” primarily refers to spiritual separation from God rather than all biological death, potentially allowing for animal death and extinction long before humans arrive. In many testimonies, believers describe spiritual insights or experiences that, for them, align Genesis with an old universe and even evolutionary processes—while others insist that any departure from a literal six 24-hour days undermines scriptural authority. These positions aren’t caricatures; they’re driven by a real search for coherence.

Timelines, Temperatures, and Texts We Can Actually Date

Let’s anchor this in what we can pin down. NASA and mainstream cosmology estimate the age of the universe at approximately 13.8 billion years, based on measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation and galaxy redshifts (Hubble’s Law). The cosmic microwave background, dating back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, is widely viewed as a fossil imprint of the universe’s early state and a pillar of evidence for the Big Bang model. Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was dominated by extremely high temperatures—on the order of 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit in the first second—allowing only the simplest particles to exist before cooling enabled atoms, stars, and galaxies to form.

The Gap Theory, or Ruin-Reconstruction Theory, arose in the early 19th century, with Thomas Chalmers as a key figure, as a way to fit geological ages and fossil evidence into a biblical framework by placing eons between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, dating to around 1800 B.C., presents a creation account involving primordial waters, divine conflict, and the ordering of chaos—containing motifs strikingly similar to Genesis, such as light and order emerging before the luminaries.

NASA’s Expanding Universe and the Theologians’ Elastic Days

NASA and major universities endorse the Big Bang as the best current model: a universe expanding from a hot, dense origin 13.8 billion years ago, supported by galaxy redshifts and the cosmic microwave background. Official scientific materials generally avoid direct engagement with scriptural texts; they present cosmology as a physical framework and explicitly leave philosophical or theological interpretations to other domains. Mainstream science freely admits unresolved pieces, such as what initiated cosmic inflation, what (if anything) existed “before” the Big Bang, and the exact nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Young-earth readings of Genesis directly conflict with Big Bang timelines, typically compressing the entire history of the universe into roughly 6–10,000 years and treating the six days as standard 24-hour periods. Gap Theory advocates propose an ancient creation and possibly a prior world or catastrophe between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, allowing billions of years of cosmic and geological history before the six “days” of re-creation. Relativity-based approaches argue that if the “days” are measured from a cosmic vantage point near the universe’s origin, time dilation could account for six scriptural days corresponding to billions of years in the human frame, roughly matching Big Bang chronology. Some theologians and believers interpret Genesis as a liturgical or theological narrative set in the thought-world of ancient Near Eastern cosmology—similar to, but distinct from, myths like Enuma Elish—rather than a literal scientific sequence, allowing them to affirm both Big Bang cosmology and the spiritual message of the text. Tensions persist, but so do unexpected alignments.

Caught Between a Cosmic Fireball and a Sacred Text

The Big Bang framework, with its 13.8-billion-year timeline and well-measured stages like recombination, is strongly supported yet still leaves fundamental questions about origins unanswered. Genesis and other ancient creation texts share overlapping imagery—light before luminaries, ordering of chaotic waters, divine speech—that suggests a deep human pattern of trying to narrate the universe’s birth. Attempts to reconcile Genesis with modern cosmology—Gap Theory, old-earth models, relativity-based days, redefinitions of “death”—show a persistent drive to avoid choosing between a vast, ancient cosmos and a meaningful sacred story.

Key open questions remain: What, if anything, lies behind the moment of the Big Bang? Are the parallels between Genesis and other myths signs of borrowing, shared archetypal experience, or something more? And can a new integrative proposal—the Genesis Theory—offer a model that does justice to both the data of cosmology and the structure of the biblical text? We’ve laid the groundwork here, mapping the data and the debates. Part Two will build on this foundation, referencing these concepts and data points as it lays out the Genesis Theory’s specific claims about how the universe began and what that implies about our place in it. Sit with these tensions for now—they’re worth the reflection.