This is the event at which I’m speaking on Friday evening:

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Books

Denis Alexander and Robert White, Beyond Belief (Lion, 2004)

Denis Alexander, Rebuilding the Matrix (Lion, 2001)

David Atkinson, The Message of Genesis 1–11 (Bible Speaks Today) (IVP, 1990)

RJ Berry, God and the biologist – faith at the frontiers of science (Apollos, 1996)

Henri Blocher, In the Beginning (IVP, 1984)

William Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design, (IVP (USA) 2004)

William Dembski, Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (ISI Books, 2004)

Michael Denton, Evolution: a theory in crisis (Woodbine House, 1996)

Philip Duce, Reading the mind of God – interpretation in science and theology (Apollos, 1998)

Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (IVP, 1993)

Derek Kidner, Genesis (TOTC) (IVP, 1967)

Kevin Logan, Responding to the Challenge of Evolution (Kingsway, 2002)

Ernest Lucas, Can We Believe Genesis Today? (IVP, 2001)

Paul Marston and Roger Forster, Reason, Science and Faith (Wipf & Stock, 1998)

Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: genes, memes and the meaning of life (Blackwell, 2004)

Andy McIntosh, Genesis for Today: Creation and Evolution (Day One, 2001)

Del Ratzsch, Science and its Limits (IVP, 2000)

David Swift, Evolution under the Microscope, (Leighton Academic Press, 2002)

David Tyler , The Guide: Creation – chance or design?

Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution

Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary Genesis 1–15 (Word, 1987)

David Wilkinson, The Message of Creation (Bible Speaks Today) (IVP,2002)

David Wilkinson, God, Time and Stephen Hawking (Monarch, 2001)

David Wilkinson and Rob Frost, Thinking clearly about God and science (Monarch, 2000)

Websites

American Scientific Affiliation – www.asa3.org

Answers in Genesis – www.answersingenesis.org

Answers in Science – chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience

Biblical Creation Society – www.biblicalcreation.org.uk

Christians in Science – www.cis.org.uk

Creation and Evolution – www.creationandevolution.co.uk

Creation Science Movement – www.csm.org.uk

Evolution (secular site with lots of information) – www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution

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This is part two of a two-part article first published in Christianity magazine in 2005. Part one is here.

6. Science and the Bible have different agendas, and humans aren’t perfect

One of the reasons for the apparent conflict between science and faith is that we have forgotten that science and theology have different approaches. Science is limited to describing the physical space-time world of matter and energy. It can do no more than understand how things work. Ultimately it can make no comment about why. The Bible can and does comment on the why. It is not concerned primarily about mechanisms but about meanings. These are complementary, not conflicting, levels of talking about reality. As creator and sustainer of the universe, God stands behind all that we see around us – the laws of physics are his laws.

Science has its ideas about how life came into existence. But it cannot answer some of the most fundamental questions of life: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? These are the kind of questions the Bible is interested in and Genesis introduces the answers. We will miss the point of these wonderful early chapters of Genesis if we come to them with a scientific agenda rather than a theological one. Ernest Lucas sees it can only lead to trouble: ‘I think that attempts to read scientific information out of it are misconceived and lead to all sorts of problems with distorting it.’

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?’ and ‘What has gone wrong with our world?’

7. There are good reasons for believing in Special Creation

Special Creationists take the Bible as their fundamental point of reference. Paul Garner says, ‘I always start with the Scriptures. The Bible is the foundational truth on which I base all of my thinking in science, and I think that’s where we need to begin. First and foremost, it’s what the Bible reveals about the history of the earth and the universe.’ Ken Ham agrees saying, ‘No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.’

But Special Creationists do also point to scientific evidence to support their case. For Paul Garner evidence for Intelligent Design is key: ‘I think when you look at, for example, DNA, it is a highly ordered code and we can recognise the hallmarks of intelligence. There’s information encoded in DNA. And information, from all of our scientific observations, is always a product of mind and intelligence.’ Another key aspect of Intelligent Design is ‘irreducible complexity’ of biological systems. David Tyler adds that ‘there are limits to [biological] variation. This runs right across the evolutionary position which is that there are no limits. But it seems to me that the data of science points to limits, and that’s where we would identify natural boundaries between groups of animals.’

There are some notable scientists who are special creationists, including Andy McIntosh, professor of thermodynamics at Leeds University; Edgar Andrews, professor of materials science at the University of London; David Back, Professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at Liverpool; and Professor Terry Hamblin, consultant haematologist at Southampton. Paul Garner, a Fellow of the Geological Society, says that, ‘Worldwide there are thousands of scientists at PhD level who would identify with this position, and they cover all field of science – biology and geology, even astronomy and cosmology. I think it’s a growing movement.’

David Tyler also gives three reasons for believing in Young Earth Special Creation from the non-living world: ‘I would point first of all to the uniqueness of the earth . . . it is something that points to design and a creator. Secondly, the design of the elements themselves to support life, the way that the building blocks of matter fit together to support life. And the third area is the fine tuning of fundamental constants. They are too finely tuned to be chance. They are designed for life.’

However, these latter reasons are actually are shared by Christians right across the spectrum – they support belief in a Creator, not necessarily a particular view of creation.

8. There are good reasons for believing in Process Creation

Denis Alexander says there is an important issue of integrity: ‘The task of scientists who are Christians is to describe what God has done in creation, and, as part of their worship, to tell the truth about God’s creation. Since Darwinian evolution is the best explanation we have at the moment for the origins of biological diversity, as scientists we should say that. We should tell the truth to the best of our ability, always knowing that science is incomplete and there’s always lots more to find out.’

For Ernest Lucas, studying the early chapters of Genesis within their historical context is crucial: ‘The opening chapters of Genesis are concerned primarily with teaching us theological truth about God, the nature of God, the nature of the world, our role in the world and so on. … I came to that reading of Genesis not from the scientific side but from the years I spent studying ancient near eastern culture and religion.’ Similarly Derek Kidner in his Tyndale Commentary, David Atkinson in the Bible Speaks Today commentary on Genesis 1–11, Gordon Wenham in his Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis 1–15, and French theologian Henri Blocher (among others) reject a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 on the basis of the texts themselves, not on the basis of science.

They still recognise essential historical truths, though. Denis Alexander is clear that God endowed Adam and Eve with his Spirit, and that the Fall was a historical event: ‘It seems to me a Fall implies ethical and moral obligations which is difficult to see could have happened without a command from God. That’s what God gave in the garden of Eden, he gave specific commands not to do certain things and they disobeyed his commands.’

Most process creationists agree with special creationists that there can be no explanation for the origin of life or of the human spirit without God. Iain Prance, one of the world’s most eminent botanists, says, ‘I’m a believer in evolution because obviously as a scientist who’s observing life, I see that it’s developed gradually. But there are two things that I think one cannot explain in science. One is the actual beginning of life. No-one’s been able to recreate life as such. They’ve taken bits of what already is life and made other organisms, but they haven’t really started it off from the beginning. And the other thing that is certainly true is that at some stage God used a particular organism to give a soul to and created man in his image.’

9. Everyone has to live with some tough – maybe unanswerable – questions

for a long time I’ve suspected that the positions finally adopt in this debate has as much to do with the questions we’re prepared to live with as with the things we’re certain of. This is because many of the issues in creation and evolution are so difficult to completely pin down, and the subject as a whole is too vast for any of us to master every aspect.

For Denis Alexander, ‘ the biggest challenge is the question of theodicy and how a loving God who loves us and his creation would choose to bring about biological diversity, including humankind, by what seems to us a long and difficult process which involves the extinction of more than 99% of all the species and an awful lot of death and suffering along the way.’ That’s not a question which only faces the evolutionary creationist though. The special creationist has to contend with the fact that God has still allowed 99% of all species to die, though in their schema it was due to the flood.

John Bryant, on the other hand, doesn’t see species extinction as necessarily a problem: ‘Is there anything cruel for an individual creature if its species becomes extinct? I can’t see that there is. . . . I don’t see extinction as a problem that makes God cruel; it’s just part of the changing and evolving structure of the universe. There’s something very sentimental about people’s worrying about it. I would, though, put a very different light on extinctions which have been caused by human activity.’

Death is a tricky question for both ends of the spectrum. What does it mean when God tells Adam that, ‘in the day that you eat of [the fruit] you shall surely die’ (Genesis 2:17, ESV) when he clearly doesn’t? The evolutionary creationist says that God’s words refer only to spiritual death – a world without death before the Fall would have been unsustainable as bacteria would rapidly have taken over. The special creationist will agree that Adam does immediately die spiritually, but insists that physical death entered also the world at that point.

Some aspects of this debate will just go on and on until we reach the new heavens and new earth and we just have to live with it.

10. Controversy means we often miss the main points of Genesis 1–3

The tragedy is that this debate divides Christians and alienates non-Christians. But the issue of human origins raises questions of profound significance and the world desperately needs to hear a Christian perspective.

The real conflict is between Christians who believe in a Creator, and atheists who go beyond evolution as a biological mechanism and turn it into a worldview – evolution-ism . According to evolutionism, humans are here by chance and have only one purpose – to pass on their DNA. Richard Dawkins says, ‘It is every living object’s sole reason for living.’

Most people feel that there must be more to life than this. But science cannot come up with any other answers – it’s about mechanisms not significance. The beginning of Genesis, however, introduces the most transforming set of answers the world has ever heard. These are the chapters that first tell us about God, our world, human nature and our fundamental problem. People need to hear these particular answers – but they won’t while all Christians do is squabble over the mechanics and timescales of creation.

We need to understand clearly what the early chapters of Genesis are primarily about. As we’ve seen already, it is a mistake to approach them looking for scientific answers – it couldn’t possibly be what the writer and first readers understood them to be teaching. Those who have extensively studied the creation accounts in their historical and literary contexts insist that their primary function theological: to give God’s people a right view of God, the world and humanity, in contrast to the false views of surrounding pagan nations in the Ancient Near East.

Genesis 1–3 teach us six key things everyone needs to understand:

1. God is the creator of everything . There is a God, and absolutely everything (the heavens and the earth) owes its existence solely to God’s will. The universe didn’t create itself and it didn’t appear by chance.

2. There is only one God. We’re unlikely to be tempted into sun or moon worship, but we may look to more contemporary idols like wealth, science, sport, relationships, etc. Nothing within creation is fit to usurp the rightful place of the Creator to whom we owe our life moment by moment.

3. The world reflects its creator. The world is orderly (and therefore understandable by rational human beings) and beautiful as well as functional (Genesis 2:9). Paul tells that creation shows us enough about God that there’s no excuse for anyone not to believe in him (Romans 1:20).

4. God is the law-giver. The universe obeys God. He gave us the responsibility of being stewards of the earth. All created things have a divinely appointed role, and they will only fulfil that role if they obey God’s instructions.

5. Human beings are God’s image bearers. Genesis shows who we really are. The question of what it means to be human is one of the most fundamental there is. But humanity in our postmodern, secularised world is suffering an identity crisis – people are uncertain about what being human means. Atheist scientists deny that we have any purpose beyond passing on our DNA. We are an accident of history. When we die, we rot. There is nothing more. No life has any real value. And we wonder why so many people have a low self-image? Genesis challenges these assumptions and claims we are God’s image bearers – the crowning glory of creation. We are like God – even after the Fall, despite all the corruption and wickedness that pervades us. Being made in God’s image includes our self-consciousness, our creativity and aesthetic awareness, our moral responsibility and our relational dimension. But over all these is our awareness of the transcendent – our spirituality – because we were made for a relationship with God.

6. Human beings are rebels against God. Genesis 3 tells the tragic story of how everything changed. All these aspects of the image of God are still true of us, but our rebellion has demeaned and warped every one of them. So we live in a world of alienation – from God, each other, our environment and even ourselves. We live in a world of fear and shame and lies. We hide from God and from each other. We are under God’s judgment. Incredibly, God still cares for his image bearers, and we see the first sign of God’s grace as he seeks out the newly fallen couple – ‘Where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9) – and the first hint that God will sort this mess out – one will come to crush the Tempter’s head (Genesis 3:15). The rest of the Bible is the unfolding story of God’s judgment and grace until, finally, we see a stunning picture of redeemed people back in relationship with God in new heavens and a new earth.

The big issues in Genesis 1 are not scientific. How much does it really matter if creation was a quick miracle or a slow one? The questions which Genesis 1–3 addresses are much more profound and important. We see there a God of power and creativity and grace. We see what sort of a world we live in. We see what it really means to be human and we see our need for a saviour. That’s what the world needs to hear.

Further reading

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Part Five: Handling Genesis

What does Genesis 1 say to us today?

The writer of Genesis would have been very aware of various creation stories believed by the surrounding pagan nations in the Ancient Near East. Those of the superpowers – Babylon, Assyria and Egypt – would have been very influential on the whole region. It was vital that Israel had a right understanding of God and his creation. Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 knocks many of these pagan myths on the head.

Pagan creation myths

There were five main areas of attack:

• All the surrounding nations believed that there were many gods. Genesis constantly refers to God, singular. There is only one God and he is the creator of everything.
• The Babylonians believed that before the gods could create anything they had to defeat the sea monsters (symbolising chaos). Compare that with Genesis 1:21 where we are told that God creates them (‘great creatures of the sea’ in the NIV) – they are God’s creatures not his rivals.
• Having defeated the sea monsters, the Babylonian gods had to struggle to separate the lower and upper waters (sea and sky). In Genesis 1:6-10, God separates them by simply speaking. All his creating is done by speaking things into existence – not by magic as the Egyptians believed.
• Worshipping the sun and moon as gods was very common. But in Day 4 we are told that God made them and they are just lights, nothing more. Genesis doesn’t even name them. Their role in the universe is to serve humanity, not to be worshipped.
• Human beings were an afterthought in the Babylonians beliefs. The gods made humans so that we could do their work and to provide food for them. In Genesis 1:26 we see what the whole chapter has been leading up to the creation of human beings as the pinnacle of creation. Why the pinnacle? Because we alone are made in the image of God. In chapter two we’re even told that God provides us with food.

Critics of Christianity often like to point out the similarities between Genesis and some of the other creation accounts. These similarities are very superficial; the theology of Genesis corrects the theology of the other accounts again and again. Genesis was not based on the surrounding creation myths but deliberately rejects them.

What is the relevance of Genesis 1:1-2:3 today?

We’re not likely to hold such beliefs today so does Genesis 1 have anything to say to us? In fact, these same five key bits of theology are just as vital today.

• God is the creator of everything (1:1). We’re far more likely to encounter the lie that there is no God at all rather than that there are lots, but the answer of Genesis is just the same. There is a God and absolutely everything (the heavens and the earth) owes its existence to God’s will. The universe didn’t create itself and it didn’t appear by chance.
• God has no competitors. Again, we’re unlikely to think that worshipping the sun or moon will enable our needs to be met. But we may look to more contemporary idols like wealth, power, science, new age therapies, sport, relationships, etc. Do we allow other things to take God’s rightful place? Do we actually spend most of our days with ourselves on the throne in our lives rather than God who made everything and to whom we owe our life moment by moment?
• God is more than just the creator – he is the law-giver. The universe obeys God. He called things into existence and they obeyed; he appointed the sun, moon and stars to mark out the times and seasons; he told the animal creation to be fruitful and mulitply; and he told humans to be stewards of the earth. All created things have a divinely appointed role and they will only fulfil that role if they stick to God’s instructions.
• The world reflects its creator. The constantly repeated phrase, ‘God saw that it was good’ tells us that the cosmos was a perfect creation. It was orderly and was conformed to his will. Now, after the Fall, creation is in bondage to decay and subject to frustration (Romans 8). But we can still see something of God’s greatness reflected in the world around us: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (Psalm 19:1). Paul tells us in Romans 1 that you can see enough about God’s greatness in creation that there’s no excuse for anyone not to believe in him.
• Human beings are God’s image bearers

Who we really are

It is so sad when the relevance of the Christian message is obscured by the side issues. The question of what it means to be human is one of the most fundamental there is. But the postmodern world is suffering an identity crisis – people know longer know what it is to be human.

We have been told by atheistic scientists that we are just animals who are lucky enough to have big brains which have developed language:

‘Just an enormously intelligent and intellectually agile animal’ (Henry Miller).

Or we’re just biological machines:

‘Human beings are survival machines; robots blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules which we call genes.’ (Richard Dawkins)

That’s all we are. We are told that have no purpose other than to be DNA replicators. We are just large, complex collections of atoms and molecules that have arisen entirely by a long process of chance events. We are an accident of history. When we die, we rot and there is nothing more. We count for nothing; no life has any real value. And we wonder why so many people have a low self-image?

The first chapters of Genesis show a very different picture. We are actually the crowning glory of creation. We are creatures that don’t just reflect a bit of God’s glory, but have the incredible privilege of bearing his image. We are like God – even after the Fall, despite all the corruption and wickedness that pervades us.

Aspects of the image:

What does it mean to be made in the image of God? It means having:

• Self-consciousness: It is only humans that have the ability to ask, ‘Am I just an animal?’; Only humans can accept moral responsibility for our actions.
• Imagination and aesthetic appreciation: Only humans are artists, composers and architects because only we bear the image of the Creator.
• Dignity: We are dust (Genesis 2:7) but we are not just dust; we are mammals but we are not just mammals. We are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
• Dominion: Human beings are workers and scientists. Because we are made in God’s image we are his representatives so we should rule over the earth in appropriate ways – caring and husbanding rather than exploiting (Genesis 2:15,19).
• Freedom: We have genuine free will to make real moral choices (Genesis 2:16).
• Responsibility: We are free to do as we ought not as we want. God has given us instructions as to how to live and we have a responsibility to obey (Genesis 2:17).
• Relationships: We were made for relationships with each other because God is relational. Supremely we were made for a relationship with him (Genesis 2:24).
• Spirituality: Human beings have a spiritual dimension as well a physical one.

Broken image

Genesis 3 tells us the tragic story of how everything changed. All these aspects of the image of God are still true of us but our rebellion against God has demeaned and warped every one of them. So we live in a world of alienation from God, each other, our environment and even ourselves. We live in a world of fear and shame and lies. We hide from God and from each other. Most importantly, we are under God’s judgment.

But God still cares for his image bearers and the first hint that God will sort this mess out comes in Genesis 3:15 – ‘one will come to crush the Tempter’s head’. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament we get more and more clues as to who this ‘snake crusher’ will be. In the New Testament we finally see him and all that he did for us. The Bible ends with a stunning picture of redeemed people back in relationship with God in the new heavens and the new earth. Then we shall really be like him for we shall see him as he is.

The big issues in Genesis 1 are not scientific. It doesn’t really matter if creation was a quick miracle or a slow one. The questions this first chapter of the Bible addresses are much more profound and important. We see there a God of power and creativity and grace. We see what sort of a world we live in. We see what it really means to be human.

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Part 4: Approaching 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 questions about the age of the earth and so on – because that’s not what Genesis 1 is for. It’s purpose is theological not scientific. It is interested in meanings and relationships not mechanisms. So we should be expecting to see Genesis addressing questions that would have been asked by people in the Ancient Near East back when it was written. The same questions are, in fact, still being asked by people today – although in very different terms.

But before we can get to those big answers to big questions, we must get to grips with Genesis 1 and find out more about it. This is a basic principle of all good Bible study. When we come to any passage of Scripture, the question burning in our minds is, ‘How is this relevant to me in my world?’ But before we can answer that question we must ask a more fundamental one – ‘What was God’s original intention in this passage?’ Or, if you like, ‘How was this relevant to the people who first heard or read this in their world?’ The first thing we must do is to see Genesis 1 in context – both its context within Genesis (and the whole Bible) and its historical context. This is called the literary-cultural approach to biblical interpretation.

So, how can we answer that fundamental question, ‘What was God’s original intention in this passage?’

The genre question

One of the first things to find out is the genre of a passage: what sort of writing is it? We’re all very familiar with genres. ‘Dear John …’ or ‘Once upon a time …’ instantly tell us what sort of writing we have in our hands and how to understand it properly. We don’t need to think too hard about it because we’ve grown up with these genres. We instinctively read things in the appropriate way. You don’t read a chemistry text-book in the same way that you read a love-letter – unless you have either a bizarre view of chemistry or a very sad relationship!

It’s not always so instinctive when we come to the Bible. It’s full of different genres. Some of them are easily recognisable: historical narratives, letters, and poems may have different rules from our modern equivalents but we still recognise them for what they are and read them in an appropriate way. Some genres, however, are completely alien to us: apocalyptic literature (Revelation, part of Daniel etc.), for example.

It’s vital that we do read things in the right way – we shouldn’t read a psalm in the same way as Paul’s letter to the Romans, for instance. The first is poetry – full of emotion and imagery – while the other is doctrinal argument and practical instruction. They are very different kettles of fish!

The nature of Genesis 1

So, what genre is Genesis 1? Is it a vision? A theological tract? Prophecy? Apocalyptic? Parable? It’s harder to be sure about this passage than just about any other passage in the Bible. It’s not even clear whether it’s prose or poetry. It’s in a class of it’s own; there’s nothing else quite like it in Scripture. It’s a kind of half-way house between prose and poetry – very grand, very formal and highly structured.

It’s a kind of narrative but a very stylized one: for example, every phrase in Day 1 (verses 3 – 5) becomes a formula which is reused in subsequent days. We can say that it is not straightforward historical narrative for the simple reason that there were no human eyewitnesses until verse 26. At the very least, God had to reveal this to someone at some later time.

As we will see in the next article, Genesis 1 (which really finishes at the end of verse 3 of chapter 2) is an introduction to the whole of Genesis and to the whole Bible. It is written in a different style, and stands outside the structure of the rest of the book. Clearly most of Genesis is intended to be read as straightforward historical narrative. But chapter 1 has to fit into some other category – whether or not you end up saying that the days are periods of twenty four hours.

The purpose of Genesis 1

If we can’t categorically pin down the genre of Genesis 1, what can we say about why it was written in the first place? It certainly was intended to teach the ancient Israelites some crucial theological truths about God, about the nature of the world they lived in, and about what it means to be a human being. But there are plenty of clues to strongly suggest that it is also knocking on the head some of the false beliefs of the pagan nations around Israel. In particular, it deals with pagan false beliefs about God, the nature of the world and what it means to be a human being.

In other words, Genesis 1 appears to be primarily a theological tract dealing with some of the most basic issues, and introducing the book which told the Israelites who they were and where they’d come from.

But if it’s hard to be sure about the genre of Genesis 1, it reminds us again that we need to exercise humility in the way that we approach it and form our conclusions about it. We can – and must – be clear about the theology that this marvellous chapter teaches. But we shouldn’t be too surprised to discover a variety of opinions from Bible-believing, evangelical Christians about some of the other issues it touches on.

Part 6: The Message

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Part Three: Big Questions

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 different agendas (‘how?’ versus ‘why?’). Second, the issues are not as clear-cut as people on both sides like to think. As a result, the debate tends to be viewed in very polarised terms. Either God created everything in six twenty-four hour days, or the universe and life came into existence by chance and have steadily evolved.

Polarisation is a mistake

There are at least three reasons why this polarisation is a mistake.

First, the issue is not as simple as this. There is a vast range of answers from both Christians and scientists. We shall look at some of the Christian answers shortly.

Second, many Christians believe that there is only one allowable answer. If we’re told that there are only two options and one of them is opposed to God, the other one must be right. Those holding to a different opinion end up branded as heretics!

We are bogged down in controversy instead of focusing on the central issues. We fight battles that don’t need fighting and miss superb opportunities for meaningful dialogue with those who aren’t Christians. Sadly, we fight these battles thinking we are doing evangelism when in fact we are merely making a hoop for people to jump through. A former colleague heard one well-known exponent of the Six Day Creationist position saying that if you do not believe this particular view of Genesis 1, you cannot be a Christian! That is adding to the gospel and is untrue!

How to understand the Bible

When we study any passage of the Bible we need to take into account the type of literature we are dealing with, its structure, words etc. We also need to take into account the historical context (including the culture) in which it was first written. A basic principle of biblical interpretion is that we must correctly understand God’s word in its original context before we can correctly understand it for today. Until we can answer, ‘What was God’s original intention in this passage?’ we cannot safely answer, ‘How is this relevant to me in my world?’ The answer to the first question for Genesis 1 is not as straightforward as we might imagine.

Five possibilities

We’ll come back to these issues in the next article. For now it’s enough to say that the complexity of some of the issues concerning Genesis 1, has led to Bible-believing Christians holding a range of convictions about what this crucial passage is saying. There are at least five approaches to understanding this chapter among Christians who believe the Bible to be God’s authoritative word.

1. Six Day Theory: The Genesis 1 account is exactly what happened – God created the world in six literal days and rested on the seventh. If you do some sums based on various biblical genealogies, you arrive at an age for the earth of a few thousand years. In the 1600s, Archbishop Ussher gave a date for creation of 4004 BC but most people would now suggest an age of 10,000 years or so.
2. Gap Theory: Some people accept the scientific view that the earth itself is extremely old but believe that the rest of creation took place in six days. They note that there could easily be a gap of indeterminate time between verses 2 and 3 (though some put gaps in various other places).
3. Days = Ages Theory: Psalm 90:4 indicates that God’s view of the passage of time is not like ours. Hence, some argue that, if each day represents an age of time, there is no difficulty in accepting much of the scientific evidence concerning the age of the earth, fossils etc. The order in Genesis 1 is, in fact, very similar to that in the fossil record. Most people adopting this position would think in terms of six acts or phases of creation rather than evolution.
4. Days of Revelation Approach: There were no human eye-witnesses to the Creation so, presumably, God later revealed it to someone (the traditional view is that it was Moses). Those who adopt this position suggest that God revealed his Creation over six days, and on the seventh established the Sabbath principle.
5. Literary structure approach: Those who hold this position don’t think that Genesis 1 is addressing the question of timescales at all. It’s agenda is solely theological and the days are used as a literary device to establish the Sabbath principle among other reasons.

With evangelical Christians holding to each of these positions, we should, at the very least, show humility to each other and not insist that everyone sees it in a certain way – even if our own mind’s are made up.

We have often missed the point of these wonderful early chapters of Genesis. Since science and the Bible have different agendas, we are mistaken to make Genesis answer scientific (‘How?’) questions. Its purpose was not scientific but theological. It does answer ‘Why?’ questions – theological questions of metaphysics (that beyond the physical world) and significance.

Imagine receiving a letter written in a foreign language which you don’t recognise. You could get scientists to analyse the paper, ink, handwriting etc. but you need someone who can read the language to tell you what it means. The scientific approach to the letter misses the point – it never discovers what the author is communicating.

It’s similar with the early chapters of Genesis: science has its ideas about how the universe and life – including us – came into existence. But that fails to answer some of the most fundamental questions of life: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? These are the kind of questions the Bible is interested in and, as we shall see in a future article, Genesis introduces the answers.

Part Five: Handling Genesis

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Part Two: Uncertain Answers

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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Part One: Two worlds at war?

Can we be so sure of what we think we know?

In the previous article we looked at one reason for the apparent conflict between science and faith: they have different approaches. Science is concerned to understand the space-time world of matter and energy. It wants to know how things work. Christian faith is concerned to understand more than that. The Bible shows us that there is far more to this world than simply what’s physical: there is a supernatural, spiritual dimension to life. There is a Creator who brought the universe into being and who wants a relationship with the creatures he’s made. There are real angels and a real devil. There really is spiritual warfare (Ephesians 6).

Different levels of explanation

But these things are in principle inaccessible to science. Science cannot study anything that is not part of our physical universe. It can do no more than understand how things work. Ultimately it can make no comment about why. The Bible can and does comment on the why. It is far more concerned with meaning and significance than mechanisms. We may understand that the force of gravity between two objects is F=GMm/(r*r). But if we fail to understand that God is responsible for the very existence of those objects and for the laws of physics that govern them, we don’t understand much of any real value. The two explanations of gravity are not contradictory but complementary. As creator and sustainer of the universe, God stands behind all that we see around us – the laws of physics are his laws. Somehow they are an expression of God. As John Polkinghorne said, “God is the guarantor of the Schroedinger equation.”

Richard Dawkins fails to see that you can explain things at different levels. For him a scientific explanation is all you can have. Asking ‘the why question’ is pointless because there may not be an answer.

Over-confidence in what we ‘know’

But there is a second reason for the apparent conflict and that is human arrogance. People on both sides are guilty of this – Christians (who should know better) as well as atheistic scientists. The problem is that we get very confident in what we ‘know’. We start to assume that what we know is right, and what others think is wrong. We start to say things like:

‘We know what science says about how the universe came to be and it disproves the Bible. Christians are wrong.’

Or

‘We know what the Bible says about creation. Scientists are wrong.’

But how certain can we be about what we know? We musn’t forget that our thinking isn’t perfect. Again, the issue is focused on the origins question.

Imperfect science

Firstly, scientific theories are never complete, final and perfect. The very nature of science means that they are always open to disproof or modification. For instance, Newton’s Laws of Motion stood uncontested for over 200 years. They worked in all the experiments and were generally considered to be the final word on the subject. But then along came a bright spark called Einstein who said, ‘Yes, they’re all very well but …’ and promptly introduced his relativity theory. Newton’s Laws are approximations that work fine in normal circumstances but are no good when you go too fast.

The scientific method involves observation, hypothesis and more observation. David Hulme, the philosopher, pointed out that you never totally prove anything that way. We have a theory that all polar bears are white. But until we have observed every polar bear in the universe we cannot be 100% certain. The ‘all polar bears are white’ theory could be disproved – it’s a theory, not a fact. The fact is that all the polar bears we’ve actually seen have been white. So we don’t worry about it being just a theory – we’ve seen enough to expect them all to be white. We have confidence that all polar bears are white but we don’t have 100% certainty. In practice, we’re happy to say that ‘all polar bears are white’ is a true statement except in nit-picking articles about the nature of science!

It also happens that a certain bias or preconceived idea leads to observations being interpreted in a particular way. There has been increasing interest over recent years in the subjective side of scientific progress – it’s not as dispassionate and objective as we like to believe. In the area of origins, scientists have often been too optimistic about their objectivity – it’s clearly in the interests of anti-Christian scientists like Dawkins to find a complete and indestructible theory which explains the origin and development of life without reference to God.

While few scientists doubt the basic principle of evolution, cladistics (a way of representing relationships and common ancestry) has called into question some aspects of traditional evolutionary theory. Fierce debate is going on between various schools of thought as to how it all works. On one side are the neo-darwinians like Dawkins who emphasise evolution taking place as a result of natural selection of successful genes. On the other are those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who call themselves ‘naturalists’ and who emphasise the whole animal rather than the genes alone. The origins question is far from clear-cut and 100% certain at a scientific level.

Imperfect interpretation

Secondly, our understanding of the Bible is never complete, final and perfect either (not this side of heaven anyway!). The Bible as God’s Word is true and trustworthy but our understanding of it is not. We are finite, fallible and fallen. As a result, our understanding is limited, changeable and flawed. As in science, our understanding has increased over the years – we have a much better idea of what the original texts actually said than we did. And our knowledge of the history and culture of Bible times is growing. This helps us in our interpretation but we are not in a position where we can claim that our understanding of the Bible is infallible.

When we come to the key chapter which talks about God’s creation, Genesis 1, we find that there are at least five different interpretations which are trying to do justice to what is actually written. We’ll come back to this question in the next article. For now it is enough to say that, with so much difference between Bible-believing Christians, we need to exercise a bit of humility with each other and not insist that everyone should see this issue in my way.

So science and faith share a common interest in the origin of the world but although both sides make some grand claims, neither is really in a position to be too categorical.

Part Three: Big Questions

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