Wayne in Maine wrote: You are probably thinking of the time dilation effect. Time is relative to your velocity, it passes more slowly for you as you travel faster relative to something else. If you could travel near the speed of light you could travel for a year of your life but when you return to earth a thousand years would have passed there. It is one of the consequences of the speed of light being fixed throughout the universe. This effect has actually been measured.
I would like to think that it explains the discrepancy between the apparent age of the universe and the age implied in the book of Genesis, but I don't see how. I think we just have to accept that the universe is old in the same way we accept that the world is not a flat disk covered by a dome with moving lights on it and gates that allow it to rain.
I've often felt the same thing Wayne - the Genesis 1 account is a beautifully poetic and unambiguous declaration of God's hand in forming and filling all of creation. I believe this declaration with all my heart!
However, the obvious use of figurative language, the differing details in Gen 2, the limited scientific understanding of the account's original audience, the relative nature of time, the vastness of the universe, the witness of the stars and rocks and ice, the overwhelming and multi-disciplined scientific evidence of great age, all affirm to me what the Genesis account
is (a foundational declaration of God's centrality as Creator and Sustainer of the universe) ...and what it
isn't (a scientific treatise on the particulars of the formation of time, matter, and life).
Faith and science are not nearly as conflicted as some would make them out to be.
Frankly, the whole young-earth industry seems to be exploiting a manufactured controversy...robbing the church of tremendous energy and resources, dividing communities of faith, cutting young people off from the wonder of scientific inquiry, imposing faulty litmus tests of orthodoxy, and benefiting no one - with the exception of a few textbook vendors, some seminar speakers, and one or two "museum" owners.