One of the most obvious perceived contradictions between Torah and science is the age of the universe. Is it billions of years old, like scientific data, or is it thousands of years, like Biblical data? When we add up the generations of the Bible, we come to 5700-plus years. Whereas, data from the Hubbell telescope or from the land based telescopes in Hawaii, indicate the age at about 15 billion years.
Let me clarify right at the start. The world may be only some 6000 years old. God could have put the fossils in the ground and juggled the light arriving from distant galaxies to make the world appear to be billions of years old. There is absolutely no way to disprove this claim. God being infinite could have made the world that way. There is another possible approach that also agrees with the ancient commentators' description of God and nature. The world may be young and old simultaneously. In the following I consider this latter option.
In trying to resolve this apparent conflict, it's interesting to look historically at trends in knowledge, because absolute proofs are not forthcoming. But what is available is to look at how science has changed its picture of the world, relative to the unchanging picture of the Torah. (I refuse to use modern Biblical commentary because it already knows modern science, and is always influenced by that knowledge. The trend becomes to bend the Bible to match the science.)
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