If our sun is second or third generation, does this not conflict with Genesis ?

Dude you're a genius. I am a believer once again! So which is it? God flies about at very nearly the speed of light, he resides in a very great gravity well, or he is constantly accelerating at a very great rate - while creating?
Thanks for this insight. Are you a preacher as I'd like to join your congregation. You don't serve Kool-Aid do you? Just so we understand each other, I refuse to drink the Kool-Aid.

ETA
There's one tiny problem. The muon will demonstrate it for me. It has a mean lifetime of 2.2 usec. When it is bombarding the earth at relativistic speed it's measured lifetime is longer due to the fact that its clock has slowed in our frame. It lasts 189 times longer.

So god moving at high speed will cause the age of the earth to appear even greater in God's frame then the already long 4.5 billion years.

Edited by shalamabobbi, : No reason given.

No, you are wrong. I'm surprised that nobody has pointed out your exact error.

The question or joke is not whether any light existed before the sun or whether the sun is the source of all light throughout creation. It would be easy to postulate a source of light other than the sun.

Instead, the question was and is what was the source of Day and Night on earth before the Sun and Moon were created on day four. Yeah, there was electomagnetic radiation in the visible portion of the spectrum present in the universe before the sun or stars existed, but not such that the light could create day and night or morning and evening on a non existence earth. For that, both the sun and a rotating earth with an atmosphere are necessary.

And guess what. You have yet to answer that question in a way compatible with science. The scientific answer is that the Earth did not even exist until the sun was billions of years old.

Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Edited by NoNukes, : Grrr apostrophe errors

Bs'd

If we start talking like that, I know another one: The whole universe is an illusion.

Welcome to the matrix!

Bs'd

There you go, problem solved.

Was that the question? I hear that for the first time in my life.

Well, some source of light, and a rotating earth is enough.

Bs'd

Since that days of Aristoteles, about 2300 years ago, the scientific viewpoint was that the universe was eternal, without beginning or end.
Einstein claimed to have proven that the universe was eternal.
All that time the Torah was very unscientific, by  claiming that there had been a beginning. 
For thousands of years Genesis went right against the scientific viewpoint, and didn't budge an inch.
Thank God.
Because somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century, the evidence for the big bang became so abundant, that it couldn't be ignored anymore, and the fact that the universe had a beginning was accepted by science.
Science made an about-face, and changed its viewpoint concerning the universe, and aligned itself with Genesis.
There was a beginning.
The rabbi's wondered:  "In the beginning of what?"
Their conclusion was: In the beginning of time.
It is written in the Torah:  "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was unformed and void."
The words for "unformed" and "void" are "tohu" and "vohu".  "Unformed" or "chaotic" is a fair translation of "tohu", but "vohu" is translated by both the Talmud, finished in around the year 500, and the Torah scholar Nachmanides, as "filled with the building blocks of matter".

So then the earth was not yet formed, had not yet been created.
The Jewish calendar, for already thousands of years, starts to count from the creation of Adam and Eve, at the end of the sixth day.   And not at the first day of creation.
The first six days are excluded from the Jewish calendar, who works with earth time.  The ancient Jewish commentators said that those days were days of 24 hours, the six days as the days of our working week. 
But, so they said, those six days contain all the secrets and ages of the universe.
The question arises:  When those days only lasted 24 hours, then how could they contain all the secrets and ages of the universe?

And if those first six days lasted only 24 hours, why then are they not counted in the calendar?
This is where Albert Einstein comes to the rescue.  He was the first one to realize that time is relative.
Science, and the Jewish calendar from the end of the sixth day, count with earth time.   But in the beginning of creation there was no earth, so also no earth time:  "The earth was unformed and void."

So then what?  Every spot in the universe has its own time.  On the surface of the sun less time has passed by since creation than on earth, because the bigger mass of the sun slows down time.
On the moon more time has elapsed, because of the lesser gravity.
And if we are talking about black holes, with and ENORMOUS gravitational force, then less than six days have passed there since creation. 
So there are plenty of places to be found in the universe where less then six days have passed by since creation.
But what time is it that Genesis uses?
Well, there is such a thing as an absolute time standard for the universe.   A clock which ticks everywhere even as fast.
An earthly clock, when brought to the sun, will slow down, and then every earth year he will tick away one year minus 67 seconds, because time there is slowed down by the bigger gravity of the sun. 
Greater masses will slow down time even more, so that won't work.
But, there is the cosmic background radiation, the echo of the big bang, which fills the entire universe.  That radiation arrives at every point in the universe with the same frequency. If we take every wave of that radiation as a tick of the cosmic clock, we have a clock that ticks everywhere in the universe with the same speed.
Of course it will LOOK like there are big differences.  In a black hole it will look as if the cosmic clock ticks with an enormously high frequency, and in empty space it will appear to be ticking much slower, but in absolute sense that clocks ticks everywhere even as fast.
That is cosmic standard time.  The time standard with which Genesis measures time from creation until Adam.

As we know, time is relative, and is affected by for instance mass, speed, and space.
The universe began as a singularity, an enormously small point, in which the whole universe was contained. 
As we all know, the universe is VERY big, and if you squeeze that into a very small point, than that is gonna be very crowded.
Because of that overpopulation, the pressure and temperature was enormously high.

The temperature there was so high that no matter could form, only pure energy existed in the form of electromagnetic radiation; light.
And then it started to expand.
Because of the expansion, temperature and pressure went down, and after a while we reached the point of quark confinement, that is the point where energy, in the form of light, was being transferred to matter.  The opposite as what happens in a nuclear explosion. 
As we all know, energy and matter is the same, like water and ice are the same; matter is congealed energy.
The temperature of quark confinement we know, it can be measured in advanced laboratories, and it is 1,000,000,000 degrees Kelvin.  That temperature was reached about 0.00001 seconds after the big bang, and then matter started to form.
With the formation of matter time started.  Without matter no time.  Time needs something to "work" on.  Energy is not subjected to time, and is in an everlasting "now".

And the universe kept on expanding, and pressure and temperature kept on falling.   And when space got bigger, the wave length of the electromagnetic radiation, the cosmic rays, were stretched out.  The wave length became longer, the frequency went down, the cosmic clock started to tick slower.
With the expansion of space, time slowed down.  The bigger the space, the slower the time.  Time is inversely proportional to space. 
Space is also inversely proportional to temperature.  When space got bigger, the amount of available energy had to be smeared out over a bigger area, and the temperature dropped.

When space is inversely proportional to time, and space is also inversely proportional to temperature, that means that time is proportional to temperature. 
We know at what temperature time began; at 1,000,000,000 degrees Kelvin.
We know what is the temperature of the background radiation now, about 2.73 Kelvin, about minus 270 degrees Centigrade.
So the temperature went down with roughly a factor of one trillion.  That means that time has been slowed down with the same factor.
Science estimates the age of the universe at about 15 billion years.

The Bible counts with six days of cosmic standard time, and almost 6000 years earth time.
But the cosmic standard time is diluted by a factor trillion, so if you want to look at those six days of cosmic standard time from an earthly perspective, then you have to multiply it with a factor one billion, and then the six days become 16.4 billion years.
So if anybody asks: "How much time has passed since creation, six days or 15 billion years?", then the right answer is: "Yes".

And I think we can work something out concerning the Kool-Aid

Not surprising. Do you really think that scientists were asking how could there be photons in the universe before the sun was created? Really?

What you have done is set up a doofus question that noone would ask and claim to have solved some profound issue. Well you missed the boat.

Duh! So what was the source? You did claim to have the answer to the question of the ages.

No, that's not true. Einstein believed in a steady state universe and he attempted to model such a universe using general relativity, but he made no proof. The truth about the universe was demonstrated during Einstein's life time.

It would be best if when you were making stuff up, you avoided doing that with physics or the history of physics because you will be too easily caught out.

Wrong. There are no such places and your faux relativity spouting does not suggest that there are.

But let's pretend that such a placed did exist way off in some distant galaxy-sized black hole 13.7 billion light years from earth. Is it your position that such a place is what the writer of Genesis was contemplating? Surely not.

But science is talking like that. You claimed that science is becoming more in line with the Bible, but science can't really say whether the universe is eternal. We know there was a beginning for the current expansion of the universe, but whether that was the ultimate beginning is unknown. And as I said before, time is not part of the math describing our universe, and science believes it possible that time is just an illusion, though, as Eiinstein said, a very persistent one.

And even Hubble's original discovery of the expanding universe didn't align with the Bible's "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...", because while it could be argued that universe *was* created at the beginning, it wasn't until millions of years later that there were any stars (the heavens), and not until billions of years later that the earth was formed.

If within your own mind you'd like to believe that science is coming more and more into line with the Bible then that's your business, but here in the real world science is becoming better and better aligned with the evidence from reality.

--Percy

Bs'd

Sure. And science also says that the universe doesn't exist.

Of course not, there was a beginning.

The whole material world is a very persistant illusion.

Only the spriritual world exists.

Time is relative.

God didn't use earth time when there was no earth.

What you experience as "reality", the physical world, that just doesn't exist.

It is all mental.

Bs'd

What was it that was created by the big bang? Matter? Or light?

What was created? That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure I can answer it. The question might well by metaphysical rather than physical. What does seem clear though is that matter and energy were likely repeatedly converted from one to the other in the very early universe, and at least some of the energy was in the form of electromagnetic energy.

Of course during the period of time when the e&M energy of the big bang was in the visible light spectrum, neither the sun nor the earth even existed. Currently the residual radiation is in the microwave region of the spectrum. Surely you are not suggesting that the earth was illuminated by visible big bang radiation?

I don't see how any of that helps explain morning light on a non-existent planet, but please feel free to make up more Star Trek physics. It's good for a laugh, but it's destroying your credibility.

I'm describing actual views within science while you're just making things up as you go along. You seem self-satisfied with your "explanations", but to anyone familiar with science they're transparently superficial and wrong.

And you continue to ignore rebuttals. For example, it was explained in detail why "time is relative" is not an answer, and yet here you are many posts later just declaring "time is relative" as if that explained anything. There is no manner in which "time is relative" is a meaningful answer. We can look back to almost the beginning of the universe right now (cosmic background radiation), so by your argument today and the period near the Big Bang are occurring at the same time. But we know the light from back then took billions of years to get here and that the period near the Big Bang is not occurring right now. And so do you, you just choose to play dumb.

The facts are that the Big Bang was 13.7 billion years ago, the first stars (the heavens) formed around 13.5 billion years ago, and the earth formed around 4.56 billion years ago. Genesis declares they were all created simultaneously: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..." Not much of an agreement there.

Hubble's discovery of an expanding universe is more in line with the Bible only in that it says this universe had a beginning. That's about it.

--Percy

Bs'd

Ah, when you say something it is science, and when I say something it is not science.

And you think that is a serious argument in a discussion??

You take yourself way to seriously, and especially your attempts to rebut something.

It is of course totally ridiculous to think that if somebody has a certain viewpoint, that after you tried to rebut that viewpoint, the other is no longer allowed to hold that viewpoint.

That is, as in time counted on earth right now.

Time on earth was not always the same, the expanding universe slows down time, and in other places in the universe time flows with totally different speeds.

So you cannot bluntly say: "the big bang was 13.7 years ago".

And there is of course still the fact that there are no facts in science. NOW science says the big bang was 13.7 billion present earth years ago.

Tomorrow they might discover something new that completely uproots that assumption.

So don't try to sell present presumptions as unshakable facts.

And that is already an enormous stap toward the Bible.

Bs'd

I explained in message 151 what time is used for the first six days of the creation story.

No, that is incorrect. You seem to be having big problems understanding plain English.

I said that I described actual views within science and that you're just making things up. This is true because the things I described are views that scientists actually have and that appear in actual scientific journals, while the things you described appear nowhere but in your own mind. Is that clear enough this time, or should I translate it into the Dutch for you?

You are again having problems with simple English. The problem is that you're ignoring the rebuttals. You're free to hold whatever opinions you like, but it's not a discussion if you ignore the rebuttals and just continue asserting your beliefs.

Says the person operating under the mistaken belief that he understands both English and relativity.

And this is what makes it evident that you don't understand relativity. Time flows at the same rate in all inertial reference frames. We may observe time flowing more slowly in other inertial reference frames that are in motion or are accelerating with respect to our own, but within those other reference frames time flows at the same rate as within our own.

You *really* don't understand relativity. Even if you were 50 billion light years from here, your observations would still measure the Big Bang at 13.7 billion years ago.

You're welcome to believe that. As I explained before, science does not believe the heavens and earth were both created in the beginning, and there is no certainty within science that the beginning of this universe was the beginning of existence. There is even speculation that there may be many universes - certainly the laws of physics permit it, and it falls naturally out of some forms of string theory.

--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Clarify sentence about time flow in other inertial reference frames.