My understanding is that for a team and project that's been going for a while, scrum points can be roughly turned into time estimates by looking at the history of stories that were rated for that many points and averaging.

But that obviously won't work from the start, and it won't be accurate... Just better than nothing and (hopefully) better than what a programmer will estimate in their head.

And IME, it's a lot less stressful on the programmer to estimate points rather than time.