What really matters in the science-Christianity debate?
Planet Earth may have had its 6000th birthday in the last few years. In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher calculated its age by adding up the ages of people and reigns of kings in the Old Testament. He concluded (conveniently) that Creation had happened 4000 years before Jesus’s birth. This gave a date of 4004 BC – a scholar named Joseph Scaliger had already noticed that Herod had died by 1 AD,1 so Jesus must have actually been born in 4 BC at the latest. Ussher even somehow narrowed it down to 9 am on 23 October, although, he said, the action must have started around 6 pm on the previous evening.
On 20 October 1996, The Observer carried an article ridiculing Ussher’s calculation, by Mark Ridley, an Oxford zoologist. And rightly so. Ussher counted in such a way as to get 4000 years between the creation and incarnation because of a Jewish tradition that the earth would last 6000 years made up of three 2000-year phases. The Messiah’s coming must usher in the third and final 2000 year period, so the world would end on 23 October 1996 – or perhaps at 6pm the evening before.
Few people who hold to a literal ‘creation-in-six-days’ position would take this seriously (perhaps none since 24 October 1996!) because they recognise the difficulties involved. They would suggest the earth is perhaps 10-15000 years old (hence they’re sometimes called ‘young earth special creationists’). But science seems to suggest that it is 4.6 billion years old and that life started between 2 and 3.5 billion years ago. That’s a massive difference.
Competing conclusions
A lot depends on how one reads the early chapters of Genesis – especially chapter 1. Evangelical Christians – who all have a strong belief in the inspiration of Scripture – have come to several different conclusions about the age of earth and how long the creation process took. Mainstream science fits in with these to various degrees.
Whatever conclusion we arrive at, if the biggest question we approach Genesis with is, ‘How long did it take to create the world?’, we have utterly missed the point. We are coming to some of the most crucial chapters in the Bible with the wrong agenda. Why is it wrong? Simply because we are asking scientific questions – ‘How long did it take? What happened?’ – and not theological questions.
I’m not saying that the Bible doesn’t address these kinds of question; what I am saying is that the Bible’s main purpose is to reveal God to us and show us how to respond to him, not to satisfy our scientific curiosity. It wasn’t written as a science text book and we shouldn’t treat it as one. The questions we can and should ask are about bigger issues: ‘What is the nature of the world around us?’ ‘What does it mean to be a human being; what are my responsibilities?’ ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ ‘What’s the remedy?’ etc.
Worldview issues
The answers to these questions form part of our worldview – our set of fundamental beliefs about life, the universe and everything. Many people are not aware of their worldview – it’s like the foundations of a house which are buried beneath the ground but give the basic plan to the house. Or you could liken it to contact lenses you may not be aware of, but which affect how you view the world. A Christian worldview is fundamentally shaped by the first three chapters of the Bible.
An atheist will give a very different set of answers to a Christian – a world without God in which we briefly exist as nothing more than highly evolved animals or collections of atoms and molecules; with no real purpose other than the continuation of the DNA in our genes.
Most human beings are not content to simply survive and pass on their genetic code – people need a sense of purpose. Science which excludes God cannot come up with any other answers for them. The first three chapters of Genesis – if we go to them with the right questions – provide at least the beginnings of the most transforming set of answers the world has ever heard. These are the chapters that first tell us about God, about our world, about us, about humanity’s basic problem and give us the first hint of a remedy.
People want answers to these big questions of life. They need to hear these answers but they won’t while all we can see in these chapters is fuel for the fire of controversy over the mechanics of creation.
1. The first year of Christ – there wasn’t a year 0 which is why the next millennium really starts on 1 January 2001 not 1 January 2000!
Part Four: Approaching Genesis
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- Approaching Genesis How do we understand Genesis 1? So far in this series we have seen two reasons for the apparent conflict between science and faith. First, science and the Bible have...
- Ten Things You Need to Know About the Creation-Evolution Debate 2 Part two of a two-part article first published in Christianity magazine in 2005. [...]...
- Ten Things You Need to Know About the Creation-Evolution Debate – further reading Further reading on the Creation-Evolution debate [...]...
- Handling Genesis What is the purpose of Genesis 1? I said in the previous article that we are mistaken to go to Genesis 1 with a scientific agenda - to ask scientific...
- Ten Things You Need to Know About the Creation-Evolution Debate 1 Writing anything on creation and evolution within these pages feels akin to sticking a sign on my back reading, ‘Kick me!' I'm exposing myself to attack from one side or...
