Genesis 1

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use...The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go." - Galileo, in a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

I'd hoped to get in the swing of things a bit before expressing too many of my baldfaced opinions, but today I realized that would be impossible. Genesis 1 is certainly one of those parts of the Bible that I've read before, certainly a controversial one, and certainly one I've developed opinions on before today. So this first post will pretty much just be an editorial.

The first thing that comes to mind regarding Genesis 1 in modern discourse is the creationism vs. evolution debate. The second thing that comes to mind is the new earth vs. old earth debate. I've had opinions on these issues long before today's reading, and I'll articulate them here. These opinions also have huge implications for how I will be reading and interpreting the Bible, so I guess it's good to get this out in the open now.

It is not possible to prove any opinion on these matters without making assumptions that the opposing party would object to. Scientifically, proving the age of the earth requires the assumption that the laws of nature as they apply now, also applied in the same manner billions of years ago. There are also some discrepancies in some of the tests, such that the same piece of matter will be deemed far older by one scientific test than another. On the opposite side of the coin, proving anything using the Bible requires the assumption that the Bible is anything more than the fairy-tale myths of ignorant shepherds who lived thousands of years ago. And there are dozens of discrepancies and contradictions in the Bible as well. Some of these contradictions I will address in future posts, but even Genesis itself has a serious contradiction in it's first two chapters, which I'll address later. So proving either opinion is not yet possible.

(I'd contend that it is impossible to truly know that anything is true, but that we can believe things without knowing them. We can only have different degrees of belief, because pretty much all knowledge requires some basic assumptions. However, if our degree of certainty on a belief is sufficiently high, we may refer to this belief as something we "know" in common, everyday language. Determining where that bar of "sufficient certainty" lies can be a very subjective, dicey matter. But I digress...)

On issues where a proof is not possible, we ought to believe whatever possibility has the most evidence in its favor. To me, it seems that an overwhelming amount of evidence points towards evolution being a perfectly valid, reasonable, substantiated, and likely possibility. And it also seems to me than an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that the earth is far, far older than 6,000 years. Fossils, radioactive dating, astronomy, biology, geology, and tons of other scientific methods provide several independent lines of evidence that the earth is millions if not billions of years old. This evidence is the same sort of evidence scientists use to make hundreds of important, uncontested conclusions in fields like healthcare, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, or energy policy, conclusions which advance our knowledge and better our lives. I see no logical secular reason why anybody would object to this evidence. But thousands of people do anyway. Why is that?

The reason is what we refer to in the formal logic world as "a priori axiom." That is, people have decided what is true before they are confronted with the evidence, such that they will only accept information which is compatible with that presumed truth. Christians worldwide have adopted the worldview that every verse of the translated English Bible should be understood according to it's literal modern interpretation, a priori axiom, even though it written thousands of years ago, in a different language, in an entirely different context. It is a worldview that I believe to be errant, self-contradictory, and illogical. And because it is illogical, I believe it is a worldview that must be abandoned if the church is to survive and God's real word is to be spread.

Those who point to gaps in the fossil record or the inexact nature of radiometric dating as evidence that centuries of scientific study and mountains of research are entirely false are doing themselves a disservice. The pretend that just because no living human ever observed the Big Bang, or observed macro-evolution in action, and it is impossible to prove those things objectively, that one should not believe those things. But in doing so they discredit their own faith, because no living human has ever observed the birth of Jesus Christ or Noah's Ark, either, and nor can those things be proven. They hold the scientific world to a higher standard of knowledge than they apply to themselves, and in so doing encourage others to discredit Christianity as hypocritical.

500 years ago, a similar debate was happening between the Church in Rome and men like Copernicus and Galileo. For over a millenium, the church had adopted the geocentric astronomic model of Ptolemy, which said that the sun, moon, stars and planets all revolved around the Earth. They accepted this model because it seemed compatible with a literal interpretation of the Bible: Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 all read "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." But when men like Copernicus and Galileo math, a telescope, and years of careful study to show that this probably wasn't the case, they were ostracized, censored, and arrested. Others were even killed for saying so. It took the Catholic Church until 1757 to suspend its ban on heliocentric writings (including those of the great Isaac Newton), and they only relented because it had been essentially proven. Today Christians all over the world know for a fact that the earth does, in fact move, both by rotating on its axis and by revolving around the sun. The verses which said it could not be moved are now understood figuratively, such that the world is eternal, or that it cannot be moved by a mere human, or that what God has done cannot be changed, etc.

Furthermore, a literal interpretation of Genesis would be wrought with contradictions. In Genesis 1, it says that three days, evenings, and mornings passed before the sun, moon, and stars were formed, but the sun, as our only source of light, is a necessary prerequisite to the existence of morning, day and light! Genesis 1 also says that the plants and animals were created before man and woman, and that man and woman were created on the same day. But in Genesis 2, according to the Yahwist tradition, it says that Adam was created before the plants and the animals, and that woman was created after that. Of all the parts of the Bible for fundamentalist Christians to take a stand on a literal interpretation of the text, you'd think they'd pick text that isn't contradicted by itself (under a literal interpretation) within two pages.

So what's wrong with a figurative interpretation of Genesis 1? Why can't God saying "let there be light" be equivalent to God setting off a Big Bang that created the sun and gave us light? Why can't God "separating the light from the darkness" be understood to mean "God created gravity, such that the earth would revolve around the sun and rotate on its axis so that half the time we'd be in light, and half the time we'd be in darkness?" And why can't the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh "day" be viewed as a means of explaining to man, even early Christians who could not have understood complex evolutionary science or mind-boggling numbers of years, the order in which things were created, rather than the duration of time it took to do so? What is so heretical about the idea that just because God created the earth, animals, birds, fish, trees, and humans doesn't mean he created those things in their present form? Genesis 1:22 says "God told the creatures "be fruitful and increase in number, and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase in the earth", and that he did this before he created man. So why can't his creation of mankind on the sixth day mean that on the sixth day, he set in motion the process by which man, in its present form, would eventually arise? That he created the laws of nature and the universe which he knew would go on to form humans through him?

Something you'll hear me say constantly on this blog is that "science provides the how; religion provides the why." The book of Genesis was written to tell us why the earth was created - because God decided that it be so. I do not believe it was written to tell us how, by what means, God formed that earth. It is neither a specific timeline of how long it took for everything we see today to take it's current shape, nor a detailed play-by-play of the tools God employed during that time. Rather, it is a simplified and concise account of what God has done, and a reminder that all things which happen on Earth ultimately stem from Him.