According to the numbers given in the Torah, human beings have walked the Earth for about 5000 years, and the Earth predates us by about one week. Modern science, on the other hand, has accumulated a wealth of evidence showing that human beings have been around for millions of years, and the Earth predates us by a few billion years.
How can these different positions be reconciled? One possible solution would be to speculate that the scientific evidence favoring millions and billion of years, for humans and the Earth respectively, was planted by Hashem to test our faith. However, most people who take the question seriously don’t take the “testing our faith” answer seriously, for a simple reason. Hashem is infinitely good, therefore it’s impossible that He would deliberately mislead us.
A priori, this makes a certain amount of sense. But before projecting our own categories on Hashem, maybe we should take a minute to see what the Torah has to say. Particularly relevant is the passage of the False Prophet, from Dvarim 13:1 to 13:5:
If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes to pass; and he says to you, “Let us go after other gods, who you do not know, and let us serve them”; do not listen to the words of the prophet, or that dreamer of dreams. For Hashem your God is testing you, to know whether you love Hashem your God with all your heart and all your soul.
The Torah tells us that sometimes, Hashem allows false prophets to provide convincing evidence of their false religions, in order to test our faith. If Hashem doesn’t see anything wrong with sending false prophets to test our faith, why would He have any qualms about planting a few dinosaur bones in the ground?
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