Define "Year"

If the earth was formed in 4,570,000,000 BC, but the universe was formed 13,700,000,000 BC, how was a year measured during the time the earth and sun didn't exist?

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Is this a serious question?

Yes, sir.

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The penny drops!

You're funny! You had me going with the whole "I don't like Hebrew or Greek" thing.

Heh, so if it wasnt directly measured then its in doubt?


No, that is not how it works I'm afraid.

A year is the standard amount of time that it takes the Earth to complete one full orbital revolution around the sun.

We can measure time by any commonly understood interval. Years tend to work well from a human perspective, but any regular interval would suffice.

Time still existed before the human concept of a year was invented. As an analogy, we can use feet to measure distance; but that doesn't mean that the physical world was compressed to a singularity at any point before the first human foot was used to compare distances, due to lack of a scale.

Surely you had time during your ban to consider abandoning the foolish semantics. Why have you made the choice to continue with them?

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a laundry list of problems doesn't make you interesting/and never getting help doesn't make you brave
Not listening to reason doesn't mean that you have faith/you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face.
So tie the noose, and raise the cross
The martyr's arrived.
A desperate plee for sympathy
Is all you need.
And you want it all.

Fair enough -- what's the answer to my OP then?

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It wasn't measured, at least not by any scale we're presently aware of. God would obviously have His own way of keeping track.

I feel like you have something in your back pocket, and are waiting for a certain answer or combination of words so you can argue it ... maybe it's just me tho.

He may be fishing for a specific answer to debate against, or he may be seriously asking a question.

The value of the question rests largely in the wording of Genesis since time there is not considered "scientifically", so God could create light and grass on earth before he created the sun etc.

But in answer to AV's question about how one would keep track of time before sun or earth existed (a reasonable question) then maybe he'd like to know the "Conversion factors" and the basic units involved:

1 Second is: "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom" (SOURCE)

Note how it is independent of the sun or earth or anything like that. (This wasn't always been the definition, but this standardizes it.

Now for the easier part:

60seconds = 1 minute
60 minutes = 1 hour
24 hours = 1 day
365.25 days = 1 year

So there we have it.

Now thankfully we don't have to rely on "eye witnesses" for the first several billion years of the universe and earth (unlike Bible-ologists who need someone to write it down), we can use physical tracers to show us how much time has actually elapsed (within potential measurement errors).

This is all messed up if some "supernatural trickster" (eg Loki in Norse mythology) were to, say, make time pass without actual passage of time, but that is only likely if one needs the trickster to explain something the person themselves cannot accept of the universe.