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It is very common these days for many people to say that Science has proved the Bible wrong. This opinion is largely based on certain widely publicized interpretations of the book of Genesis by some Christians who claim that the Bible clearly says the Earth is only 6,000 years old (some might say 12,000 old). These people are called young Earth creationists. Their interpretations do not agree with the scientific evidence. It is not well-known that that there are other interpretations of the events in Genesis that fit very nicely with current scientific results. Plus, it is not all of Genesis that poses problems, beginning with Abraham in chapter 12 archaeologists have managed to confirm the existence of cities that Abraham visited and the kings that he dealt with. The only real problems with Genesis have to do with events before Abraham and these are the ones I'm going to consider here. As for the rest of the Bible, many other Biblical details have been confirmed by scholars and archaeologists so a reasonable person looking at the evidence would say that there are no credibility problems.

The young Earth creationist interpretation is as follows. The world and the whole universe are on the order of 6000 years old. The six days of creation are taken to be six 24-hour days from our perspective except some young Earth creationists are open to the idea that each of the 24-hour days was a thousand years long footnote. Using the details about the birth of people descended from Adam you get that 6000 years have passed since the creation of the world. One analysis Genesis Genealogy where Abraham is born about 2165 BC has the creation of Adam in 4111 BC. In addition Jews have a traditional chronology where the year that started in September 1999 began the year 5760 since the creation of Adam. In the beginning the entire world was fairy-tale perfect with no death or disease among people or other animal life. It is only with the sin of Adam and Eve that death entered the human and animal world and things began to fall apart. The flood of Noah is taken to be a flood that covers the entire world. I LOVE this interpretation of Genesis. I LOVE the fairy-tale perfection of the Garden of Eden and how wonderful things were for a little while and how wonderful they might have been forever. And of course the fairy-tale beginning goes so well with the fairy-tale perfection of the final state of the world.

Unfortunately the interpretation that I and so many people love is at odds with the scientific evidence. Some important results claimed by science are:

• The universe is on the order of 15 billion years old.
• The Earth is on the order of 4.5 billion years old.
• Humans are older than the Bible says.
• There was no worldwide flood.

There is plenty of good scientific evidence for an old universe and an old Earth and there is no good evidence for a young Earth. Young Earth creationists who tell you there is evidence for a young Earth are either lying or they don't understand the evidence or they're simply repeating what they've been told. The young Earth interpretation of the Bible really does not stand up to scrutinty. It is clear that the Bible does NOT tell us how old the Earth and the Universe are. People with this viewpoint are old Earth creationists. Old Earth creationists don't see any adverse theological implications for their interpretation while young Earth creationists say there are problems. For old Earth creationists the old universe shows God to be a REALLY big guy with a lot of time on his hands. For another thing a universe that is 15 billion years old has given people who would like to have a world without God a tiny opening they can use to embrace evolution and Atheism so actually there really is a very good reason for God to have an old Earth and an old universe.

The scientific evidence that humans have been in the world for much longer than 6000 or so years is not a problem either with other interpretations. Finally there is no evidence for the Biblical flood that covers all the mountains of all the Earth but then the original text can also be interpreted as a large local flood in the Middle East. So there are Biblical interpretations that are consistent with the scientific evidence.

Reinterpreting the Bible in the light of new evidence has had to be done before. God likes to be poetic so it can be difficult to know when what He says should be taken literally and when it should be taken poetically. The poetic approach is very effective at making His writing beautiful and inspiring but it really plays havoc with the people of today who are used to reading dull, dry scientific textbooks. In Revelation 7 the Bible speaks of the Earth as having four corners. There was a time when some people interpreted this to mean that the Earth was flat and square. Then in Psalm 19 it says the sun moves across the heavens and people used that to justify the idea that the Earth was at the center of the universe and the sun moved around it. In both cases God was being poetic, He was not giving a science lesson and people now realize this. So it should not be surprising if other statements in the Bible will need to be reinterpreted as we learn more about the world. Young Earth creationists hate the scientific evidence for an old Earth because it does not agree with their interpretation but for them let me remind them what it says in Romans 1:19-20:

God punishes them, because what men can know about God is plain to them. Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature have been clearly seen. Men can perceive them in the things God has made. So they have no excuse at all.

The first item to consider is the text of Genesis chapter 1. What does it really say? The typical young Earth creationist will point you to an English translation where creation takes place over six "days". You will see that the English text really uses the word "day". So the young Earth creationist will tell you that "the Bible clearly teaches" the universe was created in six 24-hour days. Plus there are some other additional arguments as well that young Earth creationists use. But is the typical English translation right and do the additional arguments hold up? To really know what is going on you need to know the exact meaning of the original Hebrew words. What is the right translation? Unfortunately, it's debatable. Search the net and you will find more pages than you can possibly read and they can all sound pretty reasonable even though they contradict each other. I suspect even if we could travel back in time and ask native Hebrew speakers how the text should be interpreted we still might not get a unamimous opinion from them.

To me the right way to interpret Genesis 1 comes from what we now know about the age of the universe and the age of the Earth and that is that creation took a very long time. You might say that is cheating but consider some examples. The computer field of natural language processing is interested in producing machines that understand natural language and so they have worked over many examples in many programs in order to find the best ways of understanding natural language. One little example was "John shot some bucks." But "shot" and "bucks" each have two possible interpretations. One interpretation of "John shot some bucks" is that John was out hunting in the forest and killed some male deer. The second interpretation is that John lost some money while gambling. Which interpretation is right? You need to know more about John and what his interests are and where he has been lately. When you have the facts you know how to interpret the words. Even the Bible provides examples of this, consider Genesis 41:57 where in the RSV translation it says:

Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth.

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under Heaven.

Even if you discard the principle of interpreting the text based on known science there are still interpretations of the text that argue very strongly against young Earth creationism. Young Earth creationists like to insist that they are interpreting the Bible literally but old Earth creationists maintain that the young Earth creationists are NOT interpreting the Bible literally!

Genesis 1, verses 1 and 2

For starters let's look at a translation of the first two verses of Genesis Chapter 1 that comes from the book Reading Genesis One by Rodney Whitefield, a PhD in Physics. His web site is: http://www.creationingenesis.com. His analysis demonstrates what others around 1900 had already figured out: the young Earth creationist interpretation is not supported by the text if the translation is done correctly. I can't go into the details of Whitefield's reasons for his version, it is all very long and detailed and it includes comparisons of how Hebrew words are used in Genesis 1 and in other portions of the Bible.

The first two verses of Genesis in the Whitefield translation are as follows where the word for created comes from the Hebrew word "bara" (farther on we'll see that what Hebrew word is used is an issue):

In the beginning God had created (bara) the heavens and the Earth. And the Earth had existed unsuitable for human life and empty of human life, and the darkness was on the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God moving over the surface of the water(s).

He is the one who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and makes a tent from them.

but our God formed the earth by his power and wisdom, and by his intelligence he hung the stars in space and stretched out the heavens.

General relativity also tells us something else that is interesting about the creation of the universe, it can be made from nothing. Quoting from astrophysicist John Gribben (at Inflation for Beginners) we have:

George Gamow told in his book My World Line (Viking, New York, reprinted 1970) how he was having a conversation with Albert Einstein while walking through Princeton in the 1940s. Gamow casually mentioned that one of his colleagues had pointed out to him that according to Einstein's equations a star could be created out of nothing at all, because its negative gravitational energy precisely cancels out its positive mass energy. "Einstein stopped in his tracks," says Gamow, "and, since we were crossing a street, several cars had to stop to avoid running us down".

By faith - by believing God - we know that the world and the stars - in fact all things - were made at God's command; and that they were all made from things that can't be seen.

The second item to note is that the Earth was dark. This might mean that the Earth was formed before the sun turned on. Once I ran into a theory that the Earth formed elsewhere and then took up an orbit around the sun, in this case the Earth would be dark because it was far away from the sun. However from Job 38:8-9, the New Living Translation, God describes the condition of the early Earth:

8 Who kept the sea inside its boundaries as it burst from the womb, 9 and as I clothed it with clouds and wrapped it in thick darkness?

The third interesting item is that science tells us that when the Earth was first formed it was not suitable for human life and we get that from Genesis 1:2 as well.

The fourth item is that these two verses from Genesis also tell us something important about whether or not you can use the Bible to tell how old the universe and the Earth are. What we have here is that the creation of the heavens and the Earth at this point is a done deal, that is, the heavens and the Earth were made. The correct interpretation of the Hebrew according to Whitefield implies THIS PART IS DONE. In the following verses of the text (the six "days" part) the verses tell about how God modified the Earth to fill it with life and people. Thus, right here, in just the first two verses the idea that you can tell how old the universe and the Earth are is shot to hell. The text gives no idea how long that initial creation period was. Arguing over how old the Earth and universe are is then completely pointless. Any age Science comes up with for the age of the universe and the age of the Earth will not discredit the Bible.

By the way most translations you see for the first two verses go something like this one from New King James version:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Yom One

"Yom" is the Hebrew word that is used in Genesis 1 to talk about the six "days" of creation. "Yom" usually means "day" but it could also be mean a "time period" depending on the context. In a couple of the 6 yoms so many things happen that it is obvious that the yom is longer than 24 hours. Yom One from the New Living Translation is:

3 Then God said, "Let there be light", and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day" and the darkness "night." And evening passed and morning came, marking the first day.

Another interesting point in these verses is that for this first "yom" of creation it begins with "Then God said" and ends with a phrase "and evening passed and morning came, marking the first day". Other translations will say something like "there was evening and morning the first day" where "day" is coming from yom. This happens in the next five "yoms" of creation as well. Because there was some creation going on and then there was evening and then there was morning young Earth creationists interpret each yom to be a literal 24-hour day. But another explanation goes like this. People in those days would actually start to rest in the evening and they would rest until morning. The phrase then means that God rested as people would rest after doing his creation for that yom. This means that God's work of creation ceased for a little while. Later on in the Bible God sets up the week for people that will follow this same pattern. You work during the day for six days while resting at night and then for the seventh yom you rest the whole day just as God rested on the seventh yom. Just because there are these two patterns, the human one and God's one does not mean that God's yom was the same as the human yom, it is just the pattern that is important.

Yom Two

For the second yom we have from the New Living translation:

6 Then God said, "Let there be a space between the waters, to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth." 7 And that is what happened. God made this space to separate the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens. 8 God called the space "sky." And evening passed and morning came, marking the second day.

Yom Three

For the third yom we have from the New Living translation:

9 Then God said, "Let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place, so dry ground may appear." And that is what happened. 10 God called the dry ground "land" and the waters "seas." And God saw that it was good. 11 Then God said, "Let the land sprout with vegetation every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came." And that is what happened. 12 The land produced vegetation all sorts of seed-bearing plants, and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And evening passed and morning came, marking the third day.

5 You placed the world on its foundation so it would never be moved. 6 You clothed the earth with floods of water, water that covered even the mountains. 7 At your command, the water fled; at the sound of your thunder, it hurried away. 8 Mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed. 9 Then you set a firm boundary for the seas, so they would never again cover the earth.

Much of the actual evidence from the very early Earth has of course been lost so it is difficult to say exactly what the early Earth was like. Some recent studies indicate that the Earth was cool enough to have liquid water and possibly continents quite early in its history. Some scientists think the world was covered or almost covered with water early in its history. (See Footnote 1) One scientist, Tovy Grjebine has speculated that initially the whole Earth was covered with water Footnote 2. He says that if the moon was in a geosynchronous orbit around the Earth (meaning the moon was stuck in one place in the sky, like today's communication satellites) the first continent formed on the side of the Earth facing the moon. In addition from the abstract Grjebine says this about the lighter elements that rose to the surface of the Earth:

These elements were deposited in the area facing the Moon for several reasons, and a single continent was formed. Its level continuously matched the sea level, so the continent was formed under shallow water.

For this yom we have the interesting point as to how long this yom was. For fruit trees to grow old enough to produce fruit takes a number of years and the fruit itself takes on the order of several months to form. The Hebrew words used here make it clear that "that is what happened" meaning that within this yom the fruit was produced meaning that the yom cannot possibly be a single 24-hour day. In The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder, pages 67-68 and 204-205, from the paperback version published in 1997 he quotes the Jewish theologian Nahmanides's 700 year old commentary that this creation of plants is something that merely began on the third yom but it continued over the following yoms. Based on this thinking you could also say that whatever was "done" on each yom also extended forward in time, it is more like God issued commands on each yom but the things only happen much later on in time. So for example when God issues commands to fruit trees to bear fruit he may be talking about every fruit tree that ever existed from the very beginning out to now and even into the distant future. This yom then contains an important argument that the 24-hour interpretation of yom is wrong.

Yom Four

Yom four has produced some interesting controversies. From the New Living Translation we have this:

14 Then God said, "Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them mark off the seasons, days, and years. 15 Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth." And that is what happened. 16 God made two great lights, the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, 18 to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And evening passed and morning came, marking the fourth day.

4 "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. 5 Who determined its dimensions and stretched out the surveying line? 6 What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone 7 as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?"

Also note that the young Earth creationist interpretation would have to include the idea that not only were stars produced, the light from those stars on the way from the star to the Earth also had to be produced! The nearest star is about 4 light years away and if that star was made on day 4 and appeared in the sky on day 4, all those particles of light from here to there had to be produced as well. So God would actually have to be faking the physical evidence! He'd have to make it look like the star was there 4 years before it actually was. And the universe is an awful lot larger than that. Our own galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter and there are distant galaxies that are many millions, even billions of light years away. If our own galaxy was only created 6000 years ago then all of it would not show up in the sky for almost 100,000 years (we are on an edge of a spiral arm) but it is there nevertheless. Likewise other galaxies would not show up in the sky for millions and billions of years. To fix this problem young Earth creationists guess that the speed of light was once much greater than it is now but this proposal has no serious support, it is only a guess on their part designed to save their interpretation.

Yom Five

From the New Living Translation we have:

20 Then God said, "Let the waters swarm with fish and other life. Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind." 21 So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird each producing offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 Then God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply. Let the fish fill the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth." 23 And evening passed and morning came, marking the fifth day.

And God said, The waters shall swarm with a swarming air breathing creature and a "flying thing" shall fly above the land across the face of the sky of the heavens. And God created (bara) the great dragons, and all the kinds of creeping air breathing creatures that swarmed in the waters, and all the kinds of winged flying things, and God had seen it as good. And God blessed them saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and the flying things shall multiply on the land. And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth time.

NOTE: No day 6 yet, except for this snippet that will go there:

Verse 1:27 says God created human beings. From the King James Version we have:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

So God made man (meaning Adam) like his Maker. Like God did God make man (meaning Adam). Man and maid (that is Adam and Eve) did he make them.

So God made man (the human race) like his Maker. Like God did God make man (the human race). Male and female (the human race) did he make them.

Of course God then says to human beings (or just to Adam and Eve?):

28 Then God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground."

31 Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.

Finally the creation process is summarized at the beginning of Genesis chapter 2, here it is from the King James version:

1Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 3And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. 4These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens

There is another important point to notice about the six yoms. There are 6 such creative time periods but there is nothing in the text to indicate how much time, if any time at all passes between each creative time period, a whole lot of time could pass and that makes pinning down when God did what extremely difficult. You can find arguments that go either way on this issue, some people believe they are consecutive and some don't. Again if you take the "there was evening and morning" phrase to mean a rest period then indeed there was time between the creative parts of the six yoms. Young Earth creationists believe there is no time between each yom.

Also once upon a time I was going through the book, Cracking the Bible Code by Jeffrey Satinover, a Jewish scientist. He relates that Jewish scholars have often taken those 6 "days" to be six time periods and not six 24-hour days. In fact he relates how one Jewish scholar did an analysis that indicated that the universe is 15.3 billion years old which is quite close to a common scientific estimate of 15 billion years. For an online source, see: Bible Timeline 1. This analysis came before Science even knew there was a Big Bang. Of course it is debatable whether or not the analysis is valid, maybe the guy just got lucky.

At any rate these verses of Genesis fit pretty well with the scientific evidence. In the Bible God frequently tells us what will happen in the future. He often tells it in a symbolic way that is not obvious until just before or just after the event happens. Now for Genesis 1 it may be that God designed the text so that it would not be obvious what happened in the past until now when our understanding of the universe has advanced far enough. It is pretty clear that Genesis 1 did not come from some ignorant shepherds but from Someone who really knew what happened long before Science came along and discovered it.

More Interpretations

There are many other interpretations of Genesis 1 going around. One of them that I've already mentioned is that on each yom God is simply issueing decrees that do not immediately come to pass, the things he says are destined to happen in the future however. Of course this thought comes from the usual human perspective where the world develops moment by moment, the past is gone and the future is not out there yet. That idea is inconsistent with the block universe model where everything has to be out there all at once. A block universe interpretation would be like the following analogy. Suppose the whole universe is a huge painting, with the big bang far to the left, the present in the middle and the future very far off on the right. For the first two verses of Genesis God could paint in the universe and the Earth from beginning to end but not every detail of the Earth goes into the painting yet. On Yom 1 God adjusts the atmosphere of the Earth and by doing so light (day) and darkness (night) appear. In terms of the painting, at a certain point toward the left of the painting God has painted in light and darkness on the Earth by lessening the cloud cover somehow, probably by making sure the Earth cools off by the right amount. On Yom 2 God "paints in" the boundary between the sea and sky by lessening the cloud cover even more. On Yom 3 God paints in the dry land from left to right starting at the point in our time where he wants dry land to appear. Also God paints in all the plants starting on the left somewhere to the right of where the first dry land appears and continuing all the way to the right, up to now and even into the future. In the following yoms God paints in animals and finally human beings. So in Genesis 1:27 God could be saying that he created all human beings across all of time, from the very beginning to us in the present to our children, and grandchildren and so on off into the distant future. With human beings painted in the whole work is now finished and people can start moving through the creation. God resting on the seventh yom may mean that with his work done he can sit back and watch us move through the universe the way people move through the Haunted Mansion. (NT version of resting on the 7th yom)

Besides the descriptive content of what went on in the creation process Genesis 1 says something else that is extremely important. At the time that it was written there were strange creation myths from Egypt, Babylon and other places that involved worshipping the sun, the moon, the Earth, the sea, the stars and animals. Local leaders such as the pharoahs in Egypt were worshipped as gods. Genesis 1 says that the things those people worshipped were simply things made by God, not gods as the neighboring cultures believed. Plus human beings from the lowest to the highest contain something that makes people much like God himself. Genesis 1 is therefore a great denunciation of the local religions.

The above analysis ought to make you confortable with what the Bible has to say about the origin of the Earth and life on Earth and the results of modern science. Nothing more really needs to be said but there is the position of young Earth creationists who will try and argue for their interpretation and you ought to be ready to understand their arguments and why they are not very good. So some young Earth creationist arguments need to be dealt with.

The first thing young Earth creationists have to do is to place the creation of the heavens and the Earth into yom one even though the text clearly says they were created before any of the six yoms of creation. This does not seem to be a particularly good way of interpreting the text. If verses 1 and 2 belong within yom 1 why aren't they there? They could have gone there you know. Sometimes the first verse is interpreted as an overview of what goes on later but we're still stuck with the second verse that says the Earth is already there in place and uninhabitable before yom 1.

The next thing young Earth creationists do is use Exodus 20:11. In the King James Version we have the following where made is coming from the Hebrew word asah:

For in six days (yoms) the LORD made (asah) heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

for six days (yoms) hath Jehovah made (asah) the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that {is} in them, ...

In my opinion it is fair to say that since Exodus 20:11 mentions 6 yoms it is referring to the 6 yoms and not to what was done in Genesis 1:1. You could object that Exodus 20:11 says that God made the heavens and the earth and that would include what happened in Genesis 1:1. I would say it is still fair to say that the heavens and the Earth as we know them now did appear during the 6 yoms. The heavens would be the Earth's atmosphere and the other objects in the sky (the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars). On the Earth, land appeared during the third yom. Some interpreters such as Whitefield have an additional argument that because of the way two different Hebrew verbs for make are used in these verses (bara for create and asah for make) it implies that Exodus 20:11 refers only to the 6 yoms. For those interpreters the use of asah in Exodus 20:11 excludes what was done in Genesis 1:1 where bara is used. Young Earth creationists disagree and say that bara and asah should be considered interchangeable.

Another issue young Earth creationists have with an old Earth is that there was a heck of a lot of death and destruction going on before human beings appeared on the scene. The young Earth creationist Biblical interpretation is that death and destruction only entered the scene after Adam and Eve sinned. With Adam created 6000 years ago all the mayhem must have happened after that so the world cannot be old. Before sin things should have been fairy-tale perfect. There are two scripture based arguments that some people think tilt the interpretation of Genesis to the six 24-hour days version. Both of them are based on the idea that death and destruction on the Earth only originated after the fall of Adam and Eve. Both can be argued away. The first one comes from Romans 5:12. In The Book translation we have:

When Adam sinned, sin entered the entire human race. His sin spread death throughout the world, so everything began to grow old and die for all sinned.

where it speaks of "everything" being affected. This presumably means that it's not just people who are growing old and dying, it would be animals too. Let me say I like the idea that originally God created everything perfect including no death among people and no death among animals. The old Earth theories then imply that there has been a lot of death among animals for millions of years and of course that does not square with The Book translation where "everything began to grow old and die".

But again there is a translation issue. The word that the apostle Paul used was the Greek word "anthropos" meaning man and NOT everything in the world. Thus here is another translation, the NIV one where we have:

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.

where sin affects people but not the world in general. Here we have the idea that sin had an effect on only the human race and so if animals were dying before sin entered the world it would not be a problem. (For a long version of this issue see this page by Glenn Morton: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/death.htm.) Another important detail is that there was a Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and after Adam and Eve sinned they had to be kept out so they could not eat from the tree and live forever. This suggests that people would need to continually eat from the Tree of Life in order to avoid death. When Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden death came to them and all their children because they were denied access to the Tree of Life. Then too, Adam and Eve had to know what God meant when he said that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil would result in death. They could know what death is by observing what was happening in the animal world.

Then there is the matter of "the world", the Greek word involved is "kosmos". Here is an analysis from Lee Irons taken from the page Animal Death Before the Fall taken from the Reasons to Believe website and also available at Animal Death Before the Fall:

... those who appeal to Rom. 5:12 to deny pre-Fall animal death, must also assume a certain preselected definition of kosmos or world. The world into which sin and death entered is assumed to be the creation as a whole, including the non-human realm. But this is not the meaning that Paul seems to have in view in the context. For example, in verse 13, Paul says, "Before the Law, sin was in the kosmos." But sin cannot be "in the non-human realm." It is more likely that the term kosmos here refers to the world of humanity - a common usage of the term with which we are already familiar in John 3:16: "For God so loved the kosmos, that he gave his only begotten Son." In fact, Paul uses the phrase "all men" in the second clause of Rom. 5:12 as a synonym for "world" (and again in verse 18).

Also see the page: Creature Mortality: From Creation or the Fall? by John C. Munday Jr. taken from the Reasons to Believe website. Also note, if there were animals eating plants then plants were dying. If there were bugs on the leaves (I have plenty of bugs on the leaves in my garden!) that were being eaten then these animals were dying as well. In the future in the New Jerusalem the trees that grow along side the River of Life will be bearing fruit that will be eaten so those cells will be dying as well.

So the right way to interpret Romans 5:12 is the NIV translation where death applies to people only, not animals and the romantic vision of the fairy-tale perfect world with no death even among animals is out. The Garden of Eden could still have been a paradise for a little while but the rest of the Earth was a mess, the rest of the world was prepared for people after the fall.

Young Earth creationists also bring up a second point. Their point is that all the death and destruction must have come after the fall comes from Genesis 1 where God declares that all He made was good. If it was good then there could not have been death and destruction going around, the death and destruction must have come after the fall. And my argument against that is that God knew perfectly well Adam and Eve were going to sin and the world would be changed, so how could God have said it was good knowing what was coming up? What's coming was not good. On the other hand God could easily have been looking ahead to his plan to rescue people from sin and to the time after sin and death are banished from the Earth and He was declaring that the whole plan with the happy beginning, the unhappy middle and the happy ending was good. By living in this unhappy world many people decide to give up sin and that is good. It is important to realize that even during the unhappy middle things are good in the sense that people and the angels are learning about themselves, sin and God and that is really what God had in mind when he created this world.

Starting in Genesis 2:5 we have God setting up the Garden of Eden and then the special pair Adam and Eve are created to tend the garden. You probably know the rest of the story. Adam and Eve are fooled by Satan into eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and are quickly banished from the garden. Adam and Eve then have two sons, Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel, people multiply on the Earth, become evil and are destroyed by Noah's Flood.

Adam and Eve are traditionally viewed by Christians today as the absolute first human beings on planet Earth and they lived about 6000 years ago. This interpretation of the Bible does not match up with the results of science, especially the science of archaeology where researchers have found that evidence for human beings goes back in time much farther than 6000 years ago. The age of humanity is the worst problem for Bible believers who want to reconcile the Bible with the scientific evidence. They can be reconciled but to do so requires going beyond the well-known interpretations of Genesis.

First we'll take a look at how the traditional Bible interpretation comes up with the result that mankind only goes back 6000 years. The interpretation comes from a listing of the descendants of Adam in two places, first in Genesis 5 we have:

1 This is the written account of the descendants of Adam. When God created human beings, he made them to be like himself. 2 He created them male and female, and he blessed them and called them "human." 3 When Adam was 130 years old, he became the father of a son who was just like him-in his very image. He named his son Seth. 4 After the birth of Seth, Adam lived another 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 5 Adam lived 930 years, and then he died. 6 When Seth was 105 years old, he became the father of[b] Enosh. 7 After the birth of[c] Enosh, Seth lived another 807 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 8 Seth lived 912 years, and then he died. 9 When Enosh was 90 years old, he became the father of Kenan. 10 After the birth of Kenan, Enosh lived another 815 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 11 Enosh lived 905 years, and then he died. 12 When Kenan was 70 years old, he became the father of Mahalalel. 13 After the birth of Mahalalel, Kenan lived another 840 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 14 Kenan lived 910 years, and then he died. 15 When Mahalalel was 65 years old, he became the father of Jared. 16 After the birth of Jared, Mahalalel lived another 830 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 17 Mahalalel lived 895 years, and then he died. 18 When Jared was 162 years old, he became the father of Enoch. 19 After the birth of Enoch, Jared lived another 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 20 Jared lived 962 years, and then he died. 21 When Enoch was 65 years old, he became the father of Methuselah. 22 After the birth of Methuselah, Enoch lived in close fellowship with God for another 300 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 23 Enoch lived 365 years, 24 walking in close fellowship with God. Then one day he disappeared, because God took him. 25 When Methuselah was 187 years old, he became the father of Lamech. 26 After the birth of Lamech, Methuselah lived another 782 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 27 Methuselah lived 969 years, and then he died. 28 When Lamech was 182 years old, he became the father of a son. 29 Lamech named his son Noah, for he said, "May he bring us relief[d] from our work and the painful labor of farming this ground that the Lord has cursed." 30 After the birth of Noah, Lamech lived another 595 years, and he had other sons and daughters. 31 Lamech lived 777 years, and then he died. 32 By the time Noah was 500 years old, he was the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

10 This is the account of Shem's family. Two years after the great flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father of Arphaxad. 11 After the birth of Arphaxad, Shem lived another 500 years and had other sons and daughters. 12 When Arphaxad was 35 years old, he became the father of Shelah. 13 After the birth of Shelah, Arphaxad lived another 403 years and had other sons and daughters. 14 When Shelah was 30 years old, he became the father of Eber. 15 After the birth of Eber, Shelah lived another 403 years and had other sons and daughters. 16 When Eber was 34 years old, he became the father of Peleg. 17 After the birth of Peleg, Eber lived another 430 years and had other sons and daughters. 18 When Peleg was 30 years old, he became the father of Reu. 19 After the birth of Reu, Peleg lived another 209 years and had other sons and daughters. 20 When Reu was 32 years old, he became the father of Serug. 21 After the birth of Serug, Reu lived another 207 years and had other sons and daughters. 22 When Serug was 30 years old, he became the father of Nahor. 23 After the birth of Nahor, Serug lived another 200 years and had other sons and daughters. 24 When Nahor was 29 years old, he became the father of Terah. 25 After the birth of Terah, Nahor lived another 119 years and had other sons and daughters. 26 When Terah was 70 years old, he had become the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

It should be noted though that for cultures in the Middle East numbers had special significance so that some people argue that the extremely long ages should not be taken literally, they should be taken figuratively, see for instance: Making Sense of the Numbers of Genesis. Among other things this article points out the ages are patterns of certain numbers and that it is unlikely that these patterns happened by chance meaning they are symbolic and not literal. Of course the obvious counter-argument is that God could have fixed the ages to fit the patterns so that the numbers can still be taken literally and the patterns are evidence that there was planning going on. If that isn't complicated enough the ages you find for each person are different in three different versions of the Bible, the three versions of the Bible to choose from are the Masoretic, the Samaritan and the Septuagint. We will proceed on the assumption that 4000 BC is close to the correct answer.

Now the current scientific chronology has neanderthal man appearing about 150,000 years ago. These days the scientific thinking seems to be that neanderthals are not closely related to modern humans. Neanderthals began burying their dead around 100,000 years ago. At about the same time cro-magnon man appeared. By 20,000 years ago neanderthals disappeared and the cro-magnons were producing simple tools and trinkets. Humans were in the Western Hemisphere around 12,000 years ago. At about 10,000 years ago farming had developed in the Middle East. So it looks like there is quite a problem trying to reconcile the scientific and Biblical results.

First it needs to be said that the interpretation and dating of human remains and artifacts has been iffy, see for instance the chapter on this in Jonathan Wells' book, Icons of Evolution. Stories are made up on the flimsiest of evidence and the small bone fragments found can often easily be attributed to monkeys not Neanderthals. And some data has been faked, the Piltdown man is a famous attempt at a forgery. More recently there is this case from World Net Daily, February 19, 2005:

A flamboyant anthropology professor, whose work had been cited as evidence Neanderthal man once lived in Northern Europe, has resigned after a German university panel ruled he fabricated data and plagiarized the works of his colleagues.

Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a Frankfurt university panel ruled, lied about the age of human skulls, dating them tens of thousands of years old, even though they were much younger, reports Deutsche Welle.

"The commission finds that Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years," the university said of the widely recognized expert in carbon data in a prepared statement.

A dentist name Dr. Jack Cuozzo has also written a book that is popular with young Earth creationists where he discredits many existing human artifacts. Cuozzo is among a number of people who claim that the neanderthal type of skull is exactly what you would find in people who lived to be 900 years old.

My impression is that it may be impossible to nail down the truth about human remains and artifacts. People with artifacts do not want them checked by critics either because they are cheating or because it may turn out that the age of the artifact is wrong entirely by accident. Either way there there is no reason to take the risk. Large scale cheating by the experts may be the way to reconcile the scientific and Biblical differences but there are other ways that have also been proposed so we'll look at them next.

One common way to try to save the Biblical account is to not take it quite so literally. In other places in the Bible writers have skipped generations. The word used for "son of" really means "descendant of". So suppose in the modern English language we have the statements: "A is the father of B and B is the father of C". Today WE would say C is the grandson of A or C is a descendant of A but in Biblespeak they would say C is the son of A. So if the writer of Genesis skipped some generations it could push mankind's origin back in time. Personally I can't go along with this, unless perhaps the translations from Hebrew are bad. In Genesis we have one person begetting another person at a specific age and we know how long everyone lived, thus making it possible to trace Adam back to around 4000 BC. Without these details the missing generations idea would work but many people believe in the idea anyway and assume that the creation of Adam can go back very far in time. Another reason to discount the idea that Adam and Eve go back in time much farther than about 4000 BC is that the descendants of Adam and Eve were shepherds, farmers and metal workers. Science says that sheep herding, farming and metal working were being practiced in the Middle East at that time. So Science and the Bible are in agreement on this point. If you go back much further in time there was no sheep herding, farming and metal working going on or if there was no one has found any evidence for these activities yet.

Now strangely enough someone thought that there is a translation/interpretation problem going on. Harold Camping has a different way of interpreting the text and his calculations give a date of 11013 BC for the creation of Adam (see: The Biblical Calendar of History. This date agrees very well with the birth of Civilization in the Middle East and Mesopotamia.

Science has already provided an easy explanation for some of the human-like remains and artifacts that go back 100,000 years, they can be from the neanderthal and cro-magnon species that were not the same thing as human beings. The key feature of real humans is that they have a soul that enables them to have a relationship with God. These species were supposedly doing the very human things of producing art and pottery and burying their dead. But then maybe these early people simply had the minds of children. Research has shown that chimpanzees and monkeys and some species of birds create and use tools. Also if you look at what computers can do, they can do things that are intelligent or somewhat intelligent (this depends on your definition of intelligence), computers don't have souls and so finding animals that do some intelligent things is not too surprising.

It would be nice if there was some Biblical support for the idea that there were some nearly human species around and surprisingly there is some. One puzzling bit of text is Genesis 6:4, here it is from the RSV translation:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim); and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.

Besides having other species around there is the idea that even the modern human species came in two varieties. Some had souls and some did not. The human variety without souls would really be classified as animals and not people. We'll call them the not-quite-humans. Adam and Eve become the first fully modern humans. For instance see Gerald Schroeder in his book, The Science of God where for one thing he points out that writing began just after the time of Adam and Eve giving an indication that these new people were considerably more sophisticated than the not-quite-humans without souls. This idea leaves the Biblical account being true and there are no theological problems either.

At any rate when God could have taken one of these not-quite-humans and given it a soul and named him Adam. It would still be perfectly true that Adam was formed from the dust of the Earth. Or for that matter Adam could be a special on-the-spot creation with DNA that could be only very slightly different from the not-quite-humans already in the world. Perhaps slight differences were needed for a body to accommodate a soul? As the descendants of Adam and Eve multiplied they would likely kill off the not-quite-humans or perhaps mate with them and the children they produce could be given souls. At the famous Tower of Babel incident the descendants of Adam were given different languages and thereby forced to move out around the world as God had wanted them to do. Then ultimately everyone alive in modern times can still be descended from Adam and Eve. That would satisfy the traditional Biblical belief that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve. In this scenario you could then see Adam and Eve and their descendants as a different batch of chosen people similar to the chosen people who came from Abraham. God was actively working with Adam and Eve and their descendants and showed how dedicated most of them were to evil. God put these people in a perfect environment and they sinned anyway. It is very symbolic. It goes to show how eager people are to sin. However with this alternative you have to wonder if there are still some not-quite-humans out there in the world today. It would be really terrible to have to tell some people they are not quite human! Of course an additional option is that at some point all the not-quite-humans were given souls. There is no mention of this anywhere in the Bible but Bible analysts will tell you that God simply does not tell us everything so this is a possibility.

There is yet another basic option available. God simply created lots of humans WITH SOULS plus a special couple Adam and Eve. Recall that there are two ways to interpret Genesis 1:27. If Genesis 1:27 is really saying:

So God made man (the human race) like his Maker. Like God did God make man (the human race). Male and female did he make them.

To look for Biblical evidence for this option we start by going back to Genesis 6 again:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

There are details involving Cain in the early chapters of Genesis that can be used to build a case that there were many other humans or near humans present at the time of Adam and Eve. In chapter 4 we have Cain killing his brother Abel. Then God pronounces judgment on Cain:

You are hereby banished from this ground which you have defiled with your brother's blood. No longer will it yield crops for you, even if you toil on it forever! From now on you will be a fugitive and a tramp upon the Earth wandering from place to place.

Cain replied to the Lord, "My punishment is greater than I can bear. For you have banished me from my farm and from you, and made me a fugitive and a tramp; and everyone who sees me will try to kill me"

25 Adam had sexual relations with his wife again, and she gave birth to another son. She named him Seth, for she said, "God has granted me another son in place of Abel, whom Cain killed."

There is another interesting detail to the incident. After Cain complains that everyone will want to kill him, God says:

The Lord replied, "They won't kill you, for I will give seven times your punishment to anyone who does." Then the Lord put an identifying mark on Cain as a warning not to kill him. So Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Then there is this in Genesis 4:17:

Cain had sexual relations with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Then Cain founded a city, which he named Enoch, after his son.

So at any rate there is a good chance that the Bible implicitly says that there were more humans around than just Adam and Eve and their children.

Of course the most commonly believed modern interpretation of the story of Cain has been that Adam and Eve were having lots of children and grandchildren that were not mentioned in the text and these are the people Cain is worried about. It is also where Cain gets his wife. Not much is recorded about how many children Adam and his descendants had. The one case you can look at is Noah who at the age of 500 had three sons, Genesis: 5:32 says:

By the time Noah was 500 years old, he had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.

25 Adam had sexual relations with his wife again, and she gave birth to another son. She named him Seth, for she said, "God has granted me another son in place of Abel, whom Cain killed."

Now this idea that there were many other humans around at the time of Adam and Eve is a pretty good one since it can fit the Biblical narative and it is consistent with the scientific results. But then you run into three problems to solve. First there is the traditional belief that Adam is the FIRST man in the sense that he is the first man that appears in time on the Earth. Second, Adam and Eve get credit for "original sin" that is passed on to all humans. Third Eve is named as the mother of all living. If these issues could be resolved in some way we would have a very attractive interpretation of the Bible.

In dealing with Adam as the first man there is this statement from Acts 17:26 we have to deal with:

26 From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.

Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth.

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under Heaven.

Another interesting item comes up in 1 Corinthians 15:45:

45 The Scriptures tell us, "The first man, Adam, became a living person." But the last Adam - that is, Christ - is a life-giving Spirit.

Another proposal is that Adam was merely selected as a representative of the human race. From the page, Genesis Interpretations there is this take on Adam being the first man:

Adam & Eve were two actors in the play. They were God's primary representatives for the human race (as Israel was). As such, their history & the history of their descendants is a microcosm of all humanity. Therefore when Adam is referred to as the "first" man in 1Cor 15, Paul could have been viewing this section in Genesis as one looks at a play. . It is God's play. (Was Hilary Clinton the "first lady"?) It wasn't important whether Adam was historically the first man, but he was the first man that God mentioned in the Bible and so holds a special position (in terms of what he represents) in the mind of God. Adam was a real person and the events in Genesis 2:4+ represent actual history.

When Adam sinned, sin entered the entire human race. Adam's sin brought death so death spread to everyone for everyone sinned.

So from the block universe perspective the history of the world was something that was carefully designed from the beginning. God chose Adam and Eve to play certain roles in the Garden of Eden because He knew what they would do. If they didn't play their parts just right the play would be a failure. Adam and Eve and their sin is in effect just a highly dramatized scene in the play that illustrates the problems of sinful people and the consequences of sin here on Earth. It makes the point that God wants a perfect relationship with man and will provide man with a perfect environment in return. So God set up Adam and Eve in a perfect environment and started a relationship with them to make his intentions known and then they go ahead and blow it. You can consider this a crystal-clear example of what sinners will do. If you or I or anyone else living today or in the distant past before Adam and Eve were put in the same situation, every one would still end up sinning. That's the way we are. If we could have played the parts just right we could have just as easily been the example but God chose Adam and Eve as the example. So you could say Adam is the spiritual father of all sinful human beings. There are other examples of spiritual fatherhood in the Bible. It was in Genesis 17:5 that God said to Abram:

5 What's more, I am changing your name. It will no longer be Abram. Instead, you will be called Abraham, for you will be the father of many nations.

16 So the promise is received by faith. It is given as a free gift. And we are all certain to receive it, whether or not we live according to the law of Moses, if we have faith like Abraham's. For Abraham is the father of all who believe. 17 That is what the Scriptures mean when God told him, "I have made you the father of many nations." This happened because Abraham believed in the God who brings the dead back to life and who creates new things out of nothing.

But it was the Lord's good plan to crush him and cause him grief. Yet when his life is made an offering for sin, he will have many descendants. He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord's good plan will prosper in his hands.

Analysts looking at the sin of Adam and Eve also notice what happened when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, from Genesis 3:4-7 we have the serpent telling Eve she would become like God, knowing the difference between good and evil:

4 "You won't die!" the serpent replied to the woman. 5 "God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil." 6 The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. 7 At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.

Next in line is the idea that Eve would be the mother of all mankind. In Genesis 3:20 it says:

20 Then the man Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all who live.

In addition to the possibility that the statement that Eve is the mother of all mankind is an overstatement people have proposed that just as Adam should be interpreted as a spiritual father of mankind, Eve should be interpreted as the spiritual mother, not the biological mother, of all mankind. In the article The Historical Adam by John McIntyre he gives his description of how Eve can be regarded as the spiritual mother of mankind:

We can object to the assumption that Eve was only one of the many Homo sapiens living in 4000 BC. How could "Eve become the mother of all the living" (Gen. 3:20) if other people were living at the same time? The answer is, as Augustine noted, that Eve's relationship to Adam is the same as that of the Church to Christ. Thus, Eve represents the Church that is the mother of all believers. Eve is the spiritual mother, not the biological mother, of all the living.

Another take on Eve: Why is Eve called the mother of all living? She is called the mother of all living because it was through her offspring that Jesus Christ was born and we can only have eternal life through Him. Not because we are all descendants of Adam and Eve. 1. Gen. 3:20- Eve is not said to be the mother of all living "things," the word can mean "relatives."

It is often hazardous to try to figure out why God does one thing rather than something else. After all His ways are far above our ways. So going around saying why God did this or that or why God would not have done something the way we think He should have done something (so He didn't) is pretty risky. Even so you do have to wonder about why there would be people on the Earth, probably with souls long before Adam and Eve. An obvious guess is that God wanted to show people and the angels what trouble human beings would get into all by themselves when they are completely on their own and without any direct knowledge of God. It is only with Adam and Eve that God breaks into the human world to try and start a relationship with people. With Adam and Eve and their descendants God ends up showing that sinners will still reject a relationship with Him - at least at first. Possibly one reason Adam and Eve and their descendants had such long life spans was so Adam and Eve could be there to give first person accounts about their encounter with God to anyone who was interested. Then God was able to show that most of their descendants still wanted to go their own way. For that matter God was able to use Adam and Eve and their descendants to announce his existence to the rest of the human race so that everyone could see their reaction. Based on history it is clear that the rest of the human race wasn't interested because no one took up the worship of the one true God. Again, making guesses as to why God had humans around long before Adam and Eve is hazardous but it seems to me that doing it this way would provide some worthwhile lessons.

The next issue to deal with is, is there any evidence for the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve and their descendants? The short answer is that some people think that there is. The clues as to the location of the Garden of Eden are these from Genesis 2:10-14:

10 A river flowed from the land of Eden, watering the garden and then dividing into four branches. 11 The first branch, called the Pishon, flowed around the entire land of Havilah, where gold is found. 12 The gold of that land is exceptionally pure; aromatic resin and onyx stone are also found there. 13 The second branch, called the Gihon, flowed around the entire land of Cush. 14 The third branch, called the Tigris, flowed east of the land of Asshur. The fourth branch is called the Euphrates.

That location is not the only candidate you can find. One place in Asia where four rivers flow from one source is the Pamir plateau in Western China. Nearby is the Tarim basin, an area surrounded by mountains that would do an excellent job of holding in the flood waters of Noah's flood. There is a Chinese tradition that this is the location of Noah's flood. Cush is assumed to mean the Kush in Hindu-Kush. One argument against this location is that the Pamir plateau is very high up in the mountains and therefore it is very cold in winter. This would not be a good place for a paradise. Another problem with the Chinese location is that the Bible names the Tigris and Euphrates as two of the rivers flowing out of Eden. To get around that detail the Pamir plateau interpretation assumes there is a different way of interpreting the text. For more details on this interpretation see for instance: Genesis Segment 4

Most people think that the Garden of Eden must have been located in Mesopotamia but to make that interpretation work you have to assume that the above translation of Genesis 2:10-14 is not right. Some people think that the river flowing out of Eden does not branch out into four rivers, instead it meets up with four other rivers. Now the Tigis and Euphrates meet near the Persian Gulf but that still leaves us two rivers short, the Pishon and the Gihon are missing. But research has found a dry river bed running across Arabia towards the northeast that emptied into the Persian Gulf. There is gold and semi-precious stones like onyx to be found along the path of the river. In other translations the "fragrant resin" is bdellium. It comes from trees of the genus Commiphora that were known to grow in Southern Arabia. There are other opinions about the identity of the Pishon river. As for the location of the Gihon, it is said to be in Cush, which people typically say is Ethopia but again scholars think there could be a translation issue involved here. The word should maybe be translated to be mean the land of the Kassites, an area in Western Iran. The two candidate rivers there are the Karkheh and the Karun. Finally the river of Eden could have been a spring that came from the Damman limestone aquifier. Of course there is also a tradition that the Garden of Eden was located in Mesopotamia. For more on this theory see: The Garden of Eden: A Modern Landscape by Carol A. Hill.

The final classic problem from Genesis is Noah's flood. God was not pleased with all the wickedness from the descendants of Adam and Eve, here in Genesis 6 it says:

5 The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. 6 So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart. 7 And the Lord said, "I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing - all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. I am sorry I ever made them." 8 But Noah found favor with the Lord.

11 When Noah was 600 years old, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the underground waters erupted from the earth, and the rain fell in mighty torrents from the sky. 12 The rain continued to fall for forty days and forty nights.

The young Earth creationist interpretation has the flood covering the highest mountains on the planet and killing everyone on the planet. You will find the global flood interpretation in most (or maybe all?) translations of the Bible. But again there is the issue about how to translate and interpret the text. It turns out that some of the key words involved could be interpreted different ways. The Hebrew word that is translated to "highest mountains" can also refer to "low hills". Which is right? The Hebrew words used to describe the earth are aretz and adamah and they can both be translated to mean either the whole world or the local land area. The young Earth creationist interpretation also insists that ALL human life was destroyed by the flood except for the 8 people on the ark but you can also interpret the Bible to mean that the story only applies to ALL the descendants of Adam except for the 8 people on the ark. So now if you have the belief that the the whole planet was covered in water and all human and animal life across the whole planet was killed you naturally produce a translation to fit that belief. So the traditional interpretation is only one way to interpret the text and the text can also be interpreted to mean a large local flood.

There is a long list of obvious problems with the global flood interpretation. Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? Then there are the animal problems. It is impossible to squeeze all the animals of the world into the ark and animals from distant places like Australia and the Americas could never make it to the Middle East. Then it is impossible to have enough food on board to feed them all and some animals have very specialized food requirements like, say eucalyptus for koala bears. Where was Noah going to get eucalpytus for the koala bears? How would fish used to salt water cope with fresh water or how would fish used to fresh water cope with salt water?

Then you have to worry about plants. All the plants on Earth would die out as well. Were any taken on board the ark? Plants are interesting because it is clear that some very old plants lived right through the flood without any damage whatsoever. One analysis of the Biblical chronology puts the flood at about 2348 BC while another analysis places it around 2455 BC. In the White Mountains of California there are bristlecone pine trees that live 4000-5000 years. In 1964 one of them was mistakenly cut down and the age of the tree as determined by tree rings was 4950 years meaning it was alive in 2986 BC meaning that if there was a flood it would likely be good and dead long ago and not alive until 1964. Other research with dead bristlecone pine trees has produced a record that goes back to 6500 BC. Here are some references:

• American West Travelogue - Ancient Bristlecone Pines - California
• Ancient Bristlecone Pine
• Nevada's Oldest State Tree, the Bristlecone Pine! (Geobopological Survey)
• Tree Ring Times from the University of Arizona, Fall 2001

Also, creosote bushes are very long lived, one in Joshua Tree National Park in California's Mojave Desert is 11,700 years old, see: Joshua Tree NP How did it survive the flood?

More physical evidence against a global flood can be found in glaciers from around the world. For many years now scientists have been drilling into glaciers around the world, the main purpose is to examine the ice in them in order to see how the earth's climate has been changing over time, people are interested in the amount of precipitation that falls and what the temperatures were at the time. One good location for drilling into the ice is in Greenland. Two ice cores have been drilled and they give the same sequence of climate events. Indeed ice cores taken from other parts of the world confirm the same sequence of climate events. At the top of a core you can date the ice by counting layers much the same way as you count tree rings in order to determine the age of a tree. Snow that falls in the summer is different from the snow that falls in the winter, using this fact and the right instruments you can count the layers back to about 14,500 years ago. Beyond that date scientists use various approximate methods to date the ice and their result is that the ice at the bottom is at least 100,000 years old. Throughout these records nothing ususual happens around 2500 BC and a flood would have floated all the ice away anyhow. For more on ice cores see the following especially the first one that deals specifically with young Earth creationist ideas:

• The GISP2 Ice Core: Ultimate Proof that Noah's Flood was not Global .
• Learning from Polar Ice Core Research
• GISP2 Home Page
• American Scientist: Rapid Climate Change
• Ice Cores That Tell The Past
• The GISP2 Ice Coring Effort
• The GRIP Ice Coring Effort

So there are an awful lot more problems with the global flood interpretation and you can find some more in these references:

• Noah's Flood: Global or Local?
• http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/localflood.html.
• The Noachian Flood: Universal or Local.

Now if science is not your cup of tea, if you insist on trusting the Bible rather than science, well then go straight to the Bible, to Psalm 104, where it says:

5 You placed the world on its foundation so it would never be moved. 6 You clothed the earth with floods of water, water that covered even the mountains. 7 At your command, the water fled; at the sound of your thunder, it hurried away. 8 Mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed. 9 Then you set a firm boundary for the seas, so they would never again cover the earth.

Another curious detail found in the Bible is the race of people called the "Nephilim" first mentioned in Genesis 6:4 (again many translations turn this word into giants). Again from the RSV version of the Bible we have:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim); and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.

So the flood would have to be a local flood. Exactly where on Earth it happened depends on an important detail that we have been ignoring. The flood must have happened very near the Garden of Eden. Where was that? Probably most analysts think Noah was in Mesopotamia. It is a very flat area and it is easy for it to flood. Some people have built a case that Adam and his descendants were there and that tablets from the area document not just the flood but also document the names and acitivities of Adam and his descendants. For more see:

Qualitative Hydrology of Noah's Flood.

There is one remaining "could it happen" issue with the flood. Presumably the current would move the ark downstream into the Persian Gulf. Instead the ark moved upstream into the mountains of Ararat. The only available way to move it would be to use the wind. Various caluclations done by physicist Alan Hill and reported in the article, Quantitative Hydrology of Noah's Flood show that

Depending on the weight of the ark, wind velocities average as low as 50 mph, but peaks near 70 mph are adequate to accomplish the task.

The final issue is, is there any physical evidence of a flood that big. The answer is that it is a tough issue to settle since there has always been a lot of flooding in Mesopotamia. It is hard to pick out evidence for one huge flood when there are floods every year and from time to time some of them are really very big floods. Some people believe that there is enough evidence for a huge flood at the right time. In one case in 1929, British researcher Sir Leonard Woolley uncovered deep layers of mud and clay in several spots and at the time the thinking was that this was evidence of Noah's flood however other sites did not show these deep layers. Other researchers are skeptical so it is best to say that this is an unsettled issue that needs more research.

A lot of people believe that the Garden of Eden and the descendants of Adam lived in Mesopotamia. On the other hand you can find analysts who think that the Garden of Eden was in the Pamir plateau located in what is today Western China. Nearby is the Tarim basin, an area surrounded by mountains that would do an excellent job of holding in the flood waters of Noah's flood. There is a Chinese tradition that this is the location of Noah's flood. The Pamir plateau does have four rivers flowing out of it and you can argue that these are the ones named in Genesis chapter 2. For more details why some people think this is the location, see for instance: Genesis Segment 4 and THE DELUGE OR NOAHIC FLOOD WAS IT UNIVERSAL OR LOCAL?. Then "Ararat" means highest peak so the ark would have landed on the highest peak in this mountainous area, an altogether different location that the mountains of Ararat. See: Genesis Segment 8 One argument against this location is that it is very high up in the mountains and therefore it is very cold in winter. This would not be a good place for a paradise.

There are other proposals to explain Noah's Flood but none of them happen in the right place at the right time. There is some good modern evidence for a massive flood in the Middle East. 12,000 years ago the Earth was in an ice age with ice up to about a mile thick covering what is now Chicago. With all that water locked up in ice on land sea level was a lot lower than it is today. But then the Earth started warming up again and the sea level began rising. Around 5600 BC the area of what is now the Black Sea was fairly dry but it had some freshwater lakes in it located at about 500 feet below sea level. At about 5600 BC water from the Mediterranean burst in causing a great flood, see the book, Noah's Flood by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. Later on an expedition filmed pictures of wooden buildings on the bottom of the Black Sea. The wood was preserved because the lower part of the Black Sea does not have any oxygen dissolved in the water. Unfortunately as it stands now the date for this flood does not match up with the usual date for Noah's flood. The date for the Black Sea flood is based on radiocarbon dating of certain shells and this evidence points to 5600 BC not 2500 BC. Of course there is always the Camping interpretation of the Biblical chronology and it puts the flood at about 4990 BC. This Black Sea flood proposal doesn't take into account the fact that the land dried out after the flood, it didn't, the land was completely covered from then until now although you can always speculate that while parts of the area were flooded and dried out other parts remained flooded.

There are a couple of other explanations that are sometimes mentioned. As noted before there is the proposal that since the Bible often skips generations the flood could have happened long before 2500 BC. If you go much farther back in time the Mediterranean Sea was also dry at one point and then it flooded in an even larger flood and some people propose that as Noah's flood. Plus there is still another proposal. About 12,000 years ago much of Europe and North America was covered with glaciers. As the climate warmed up lakes formed in the glaciers and then suddenly the sheets of ice collapsed sending large amounts of fresh water into the oceans and of course land areas near the glaciers would be flooded as well.

This completes the major items in Genesis that have caused so many people to say that science has proved he Bible wrong. The explanations here show that the Bible can easily be right if the text is interpreted in a non-traditional fashion. These non-traditional interpretations can disturb people who have embraced the traditional ones, for them these ideas will take a lot of getting used to. The great result, however is that science and the Bible do agree. There is a Biblical concept that to prove something is true in a trial you need at least two and preferably three credible witnesses. With science and the Bible in agreement you do have two credible witnesses. Also notice that the non-traditional interpretations don't change the theological issues in any way. We are all still sinners and we all still need to turn to Jesus to be cured.

Footnote 1:

• Researchers find new information about Earth's origins
• Early Earth Likely Had Continents, Was Habitable, According To New Study
• When the Earth Dried Out
• Earlier Water On Earth? Oldest Rock Suggests Hospitable Young Planet

Footnote 2:

See "The moon as the origin of the Earth's continents" by Tovy Grjebine in Journal Earth, Moon, and Planets, Springer, ISSN 0167-9295 (Print) 1573-0794 (Online) Issue Volume 22, Number 3 / May, 1980 DOI 10.1007/BF01259292 Pages 367-382 and The Moon as the Cause of the Earth's Continents Formation

Here are some additional statements that can't be taken literally:

• 1 Kings 10:24 "The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart."
• Acts 17:6 "But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other brothers before the city officials, shouting: "These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here,"
• Acts 19:35 "The city clerk quieted the crowd and said: "Men of Ephesus, doesn't all the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis and of her image, which fell from heaven?"
• Colossians 1:6 This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives, just as it changed your lives from the day you first heard and understood the truth about God's wonderful grace.
• Luke 2:1 (King James Version) 1And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

I can add a new radical interpretation to the "sons of God" used in Job thanks to the block universe. Once every saved person is resurrected they should be able to travel back in time in the spirit (probably not in the flesh) to actually see all that happens in the block universe. The sons of God singing then could then include all saved people across all of time including of course all the people living now.

There is a additional book not included in the Bible called the Book of Enoch. Supposedly it was written by Enoch before the flood. A verse from the Book of Enoch is quoted in the letter of Jude that is found in the Bible and so because of this some people take the Book of Enoch seriously. The Book of Enoch says that angels did indeed take humans as their wives and the result was a race of giants.

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