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It is very common these days for people in our modern age to say that Science has proved the Bible wrong. This opinion is largely based on a certain widely publicized interpretation of the book of Genesis by young Earth creationists. Everyone needs to realize that there are other interpretations of events in the early part of the book of Genesis and some of them fit rather nicely with current scientific beliefs. 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. This is not to say that people do not nit-pick certain details, they do, however none of them are a very big deal and over time more research could easily confirm the Biblical accounts.

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 and from God's perspective. On the Jewish calendar the year that started in September 1999 began the year 5760 since the creation of Adam. Another analysis where Abraham is born about 2165 BC has the creation of Adam in 4111 BC. 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.
• Evolution, powered solely by random forces created life without the need for a creator.
• Humans are older than the Bible says.
• There was no worldwide flood.

There is plenty of evidence for an old earth and there is no decent evidence for a young Earth. Young Earth creationists who tell you there is evidence for a young Earth are either lying or have been deceived by people who don't understand the evidence and the arguments. Plus their interpretations of the Bible are debatable and there are other interpretations that allow an older Earth and an older universe. The age of the universe issue has no adverse theological implications for the Biblical account that I know of and on the plus side there are two items. First, an old universe shows God is a really big guy with a lot of time on his hands. Second, a universe that is 15 billion years old gives people who would like to have a world without God a tiny opening they can use to embrace evolution. Evolution does actually sound reasonable in words, it is only when you study the details that you find out it falls apart but for people who are eager to have a world without God the 15 billion year old universe and the 4.5 billion year old Earth are just what they need. They can honestly believe there is no God. People get to try out a world without God to see if they like it and everyone can see the bad results that follow from such beliefs. I don't think many people really realize what is going on here on Earth, Earth is your chance to try out a world without God to see if you like it, if you like it you can spend eternity in a world without God but if you get sick of a world without God you can always ask God to take away your selfish (sinful) nature so you can spend eternity with God. The universe has to be old so many people can honestly believe that it is and assume there is no need for a God to create life and thus sample a world in which they think there is no God. Also, strangely enough then, young Earth creationists are helping atheists discredit the Bible so that people who don't want a God can honestly believe the God of the Bible does not exist.

If you examine the idea of random, unguided evolution closely you find out that the math says it cannot work in the amount of time available and the fossil record says it didn't so interestingly enough the claims by evolutionists are as flimsy as the claims by young Earth creationists. Both sides make the same fundamental errors in reasoning. I cover this in detail on another page.

Evidence that humans have been in the world for much longer than 6000 or so years is not necessarily 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 much more 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 re-interpretation as we learn more about the world. Many Christians seem to hate the scientific evidence because it does not agree with their theology 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.

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 my principle of interpreting the text based on known science there are still interpretations of the text that argue very strongly against young Earth creationism. Now I am going to review the major interpretations that you can find. I am not 100% committed to any particular interpretation because it's always possible something better may come up plus I don't feel obligated to believe one or the other and because in any case the main point of Genesis 1 is that God made everything and everybody.

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.

The first two verses of Genesis in the Whitefield translation are as follows where the word for created comes from the Hebrew word "bara" meaning to create out of nothing or to make an original creation (as opposed to a copy):

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).

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.

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. I am not up to date on when the sun turned on and probably any result you get from Science at this point in time is a tentative one anyway. (Well, one day I have to look this up. If I remember correctly I just saw an article recently speculating that the Earth was formed some place other than this solar system because the composition of the Earth is much different from the other planets in our solar system. Then supposedly the Earth simply happened by and fell into orbit around the sun.) The other thing that may be happening is that the Earth is so full of clouds that no light from the sun reaches the surface of the Earth and that is what makes the Earth dark.

The third 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 in this interpretation 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.

Unfortunately other people have other interpretations of the first two verses. Some people want to interpret the beginning of Genesis 1:1 to be "In the beginning of". They then change the vowel marking on the next word (bara, for create) which then changes the meaning to "creating of" giving a translation like this one from Rodney Whitefield:

In the beginning of the creating by God of ...

When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a shapeless, chaotic mass, with the Spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors.

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.

By the way this interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2 is not the same thing as another interpretation called Gap Theory. In Gap Theory it is proposed that all the fossils that scientists dig up came from an era that happened in the first two verses and that era ended when Lucifer rebelled and the Earth was destroyed. Then the later verses in Genesis 1 are an account of a re-creation of the Earth. With this idea the Earth can still be old and yet the Earth as we know it can be only 6000 years old.

Yom One

"Yom" is the Hebrew word that is used in Genesis 1 that is typically translated to "day". But it could also be translated as a "time period" depending on the exact situation. What happens in yom one is not especially controversial. From Whitefield's translation we have:

And God said, Light shall exist; and light existed. And God had seen the light as good; and God separated the light and between the dark. And God called the light "daytime" and the darkness he had called "nighttime" and there was evening and there was morning, one time (yom).

As a sidelight, there is a different interpretation comes from someone in the physics community. Physicists have noticed that light is a really fundamental part of the universe. If you accept the idea that the first two verses of Genesis 1 are a prologue so that creation begins on day one then you could see the creation of light as something really fundamental, something that makes the rest of the universe of space-time and matter possible. (See Light.)

The second interesting point in the above verses is the correct interpretation of the word "yom". Whitefield argues that "yom" in this context cannot be translated to mean a 24-hour day, it should really be translated as a "time period". If "time period" is correct then this wrecks the young Earth creationist interpretation as well. Also it is clear that some things that are created in later yoms could not happen all in just one 24-hour period and so yom needs to be translated as time period.

People who believe in the time period interpretation will point you to this statement from Psalm 90 (from The Book:

A thousand years are but as yesterday to you! They are like a single hour!

The third interesting point in these verses is that for this first "yom" of creation it begins with "And God said" and ends with a phrase "there was evening and there was morning". This happens in the next five "yoms" of creation as well. These two phrases then function like begin blocks in the ALGOL-like computer languages and enclose the actions of the "yom". I have never been happy with any interpretation I have ever found of "there was evening and there was morning". On the one hand it sounds like about a 12-hour time period, the time from sunset to sunrise. Is it implying that the creative work of the yom took place during the daytime part of a day? But this is really silly because half of the Earth is always in darkness. It's really unlikely that God did his creating only in the daylight. If He did it only in the daylight then it would take 24 hours to do the creation, not 12 hours followed by night time. And then it is given (Psalm 139:12) that to God day and night are the same, He sees things in the night as easily as we see things in the day. So for God to stop creating while one side of the Earth is facing away from the sun is completely unnecessary.

The best I've seen offered is that "evening" is being used poetically to indicate a slowing down of activity and the blurring of the world as night comes on. Whitefield argues that God should have used "night" not evening at this point if God wanted to make it perfectly clear that He is talking about a 24-hour day. (To me it still would not be clear because of the rotation of the Earth.) People also then argue that "morning" is being used poetically as a way to indicate a new cycle of creation activity is coming on. This evening and morning phrase is the best evidence I can find for young Earth creationism. Yet if Genesis 1 is supposed to be a chronological account of creation then the old age of the Earth clearly means that "yom" should be translated as "time period".

Yom Two

For the second yom we have from the Whitefield translation:

And God said, There shall be a sky in the midst of the waters and there shall be a separating between the waters to the waters. And God made the sky, and separated between the waters under the sky, and between those waters off of the sky; and it did come to pass so. And God called the sky a part of the heavens; and there was evening and there was morning a second time.

Yom Three

For the third yom we have from the Whitefield translation:

And God said, The waters under the heavens shall be gathered together unto one place and the dry shall be seen; and it did come to pass so. And God had called the dry "land", and the gathering together of the waters he had called Seas; and God had seen it as good. And God said, The land shall bring forth plant, grass yielding seed, and fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the land; and it did come to pass so. And the land had brought forth plant, grass yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing (making) fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God had seen it as good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third time.

The first interesting point here is the formation of dry land. Between this and Genesis 1:2 it is clear that the early Earth was completely covered with water. As of now if the land area of the Earth was spread out evenly over the whole surface of the Earth (by filling in the oceans) the world would be covered with water to a depth of 1.7 miles. Science tells us that eventually a circulation of rock and molten rock began and forced up land in certain places. Tectonic plates formed and where they bump into each other mountains are formed. So it looks like the Bible beat Science again.

The other interesting point has to do with 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 "it was so" meaning that within this yom the fruit was produced meaning that the yom cannot possibly be a single 24-hour day. On the other hand I ran across an opinion that this creation of plants is something that merely began on the third yom but it continued over the following yoms. (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.) 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.

Yom Four

Yom four has produced some interesting controversies. From The Book we have:

Then God said, "Let bright lights appear in the sky to give light to the earth and to identify the day and the night; they shall bring about the seasons on the earth, and mark the days and years." And so it was. For God had made two huge lights, the sun and moon, to shine down upon the earth - the larger one, the sun, to preside over the day and the smaller one, the moon, to preside through the night; he had also made the stars. And God set them in the sky to light the earth, and to preside over the day and night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God was pleased. This all happened on the fourth day.

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 more years. One proposal by young Earth creationists has been to guess that the speed of light was once much greater than it is now but so far this proposal has no serious support, it is only a guess on their part designed to save their interpretation.

Yom Five

For yom five from the Whitefield translation we have:

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: There is some stuff that will go here that hasn't been written yet.

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 determining the ages of things more impossible than it already is. You can find arguments that go either way on this issue, some people believe they are consecutive and some don't. 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. This analysis came before Science even knew there was a Big Bang. Of course it is debatable whether or not that particular analysis is valid, maybe the guy just got lucky.

More Interpretations

A second possible interpretation of Genesis 1 is that on each day when God said "Let there be ..." things did not happen on that day, they happened much further ahead in time. So for instance on day 6 when God said:

So God made man like his Maker. Like God did God make man. Man and maid did he make them.

There is another variation on this theme. As far as I know, it is solely mine, I haven't seen anyone else propose it. It comes from another odd result from modern physics called non-locality. It means that things are connected across all of space and time. It means that the whole universe is a "package deal". All of the past plus all of the future have to exist in order for the present to be here. Everything is interconnected. Past, present and future must all be "out there" and people are simply moving through space and time. It makes the world something like an amusement park ride, like the haunted mansion at Disney World. The ride would not work at all unless someone went to all the trouble of making the WHOLE ride first. The whole physical universe would not work at all unless God made the whole thing AT ONCE. We then travel though what He made just as we travel through the haunted mansion.

Or another way to put it would go like this. It is as if all of space and time is a huge painting. On the left side of the painting we have the past, in the center we have now and on the right we have the future. God goes and paints in various things at various times. Painters actually work like this. They cover the whole canvas with an approximate color everywhere and let it dry. Then they go and paint more details and let it dry. Then they paint more details and maybe make changes to the details they did before. This goes on and on until everything is just right and then the painting is finally unveiled for everyone to see. So think of God as operating in a second dimension of time working on his creation the same way. So first God goes and paints in the whole universe from the big bang out to infinity. This happens in verses 1 and 2 of Genesis 1. On the first yom God paints in night and day on the whole Earth from some starting point all the way out until the end of the Earth. For the second yom God paints in a sky. For the third yom God paints in the land and all the plants out to infinity. For the fourth yom God paints in the sun, moon and stars so that they will be visible from the surface of the Earth by making the atmosphere clear up. For the fifth yom God paints in sea animals and flying animals. For the sixth yom God paints in other animals and human beings and as it says:

So God made man like his Maker. Like God did God make man. Man and maid did he make them.

Another explanation of Genesis 1 is that it never was never really intended to be a detailed historical account of creation at all. The main point of Genesis 1 is that God made everything and everybody. At the time it was written there were strange creation myths from Egypt and Babylon that involved many gods. These people worshipped the sun, moon, stars and animals so in reality Genesis 1 is actually designed to be a rebuttal to the then prevailing ideas about the creation of the world from other cultures. Quoting the page, What Does Genesis 1 Really Teach? we have:

Conrad Hyer, in Is God a Creationist? The Religious Case Against Creation-Science, edited by Roland Mushat Frye (1983), says: In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-a-vis polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. Each day of creation takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures - creations of the one true God who is the only one, without second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order.

On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On the second day, the gods of sky and sea. On the third day, earth gods and gods of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon and star gods. The fifth and sixth days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity - while at the same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least, and not just pharaohs, kings and heroes, are granted a divine likeness and mediation.

The following section is especially messy and is still under construction!

How, then, does anyone get the young Earth creationist interpretation that the world is 6000 years old? It has to do with two Hebrew words plus a verse in Exodus 20:11. It has already been mentioned in Genesis 1:1 the Hebrew word used for created comes from "bara" meaning to create something new. This contrasts with the word "asah" which means to make or create out of existing things. Then in Exodus 20:11 we have two different translations. One, Young's Literal Translation is as follows where the Hebrew word "yom" could mean a day or a time period, an issue we deal with later:

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

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

One uncomfortable issue some Christians 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 I know of 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 I can see where that does not square with The Book translation where "everything began to grow old and die".

But there 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 apparently 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. In fact see this page by Glenn Morton: Death Before the Fall where the he notes that the Greek word anthropos used in this passage means men not animals so the passage says death spread to men not to animals making the NIV translation/interpretation the correct one. Glenn also notes that there was a Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve 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 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. Moreover Science has found out that living cells are in fact extremely complex molecular machines. The molecular machinery consists of things like hammers, motors, conveyor belts and assembly lines. Thus when a "living" cell dies, the machinery simply gets broken. Now consider a man made object like a watch. It consists of many very large parts. While it is working do you think of it as "alive"? If it breaks do you think of it as "dead"? Yes, poetically you can of course but since biological living things are so much different from human made things there is still a big difference. So if plant and animal cells (just machines) cease to function, what does that have to do with sin?

It also goes to show how you can get different interpretations based on how scholars translate a word, people start with a belief and then try and make the text fit their interpretation.

So I have to conclude that the best way to interpret Romans 5:12 is the NIV translation where death applies to people only, not animals and my 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 second scriptural reason for thinking 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 that whole plan with the happy beginning, the unhappy middle and the happy ending was good.

The age of humanity is the worst problem for Bible believers who want to reconcile the Bible with the scientific evidence. If the Biblical chronology is taken very literally mankind began about 6000 years ago. Scientific chronology has Neanderthal man appearing about 150,000 years ago. They began burying their dead around 100,000 years ago. At about the same time Cro-Magnon man appeared. By 40,000 years ago Neanderthals disappeared and the Cro-Magnons were producing simple tools and trinkets. At about 10,000 years ago farming had developed. It was only at about 5000 years ago that written language was developed. In a recent study (Neanderthal Taxonomy Reconsidered: Implications of 3D Primate Models of Intra- and Interspecific Differences by Katerina Harvati, Stephen R. Frost and Kieran P. McNulty, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 3, 2004, vol. 101, no. 5, pp 1147-1152) the authors conclude that neanderthals were not closely genetically related to modern human beings, they were a different species altogether.

First it needs to be noted that the interpretation and dating of human remains 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, as in the case of this story 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.

Despite the cheating my flimsy investigations so far makes me think there probably were humans or near humans who existed well before 6000 years ago. I have never run into a decent argument against this position.

One 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 6000 years ago. Without these details the missing generations idea would work but some people believe in the idea anyway.

A second way to save the Biblical interpretation comes from Gerald Schroeder, again in The Science of God. His explanation is that the "people" before 6000 years ago were people without souls, they were only near humans who without souls were nowhere near as capable as "the Lord's people" who began with Adam and Eve. Effectively the older humans would be classified today as animals and not people. Schroeder points out that writing began just after the time of Adam and Eve giving an indication that "the Lord's people" were considerably more sophisticated. This interpretation still leaves Bible believers with the Biblical account being true and there are no theological problems either. You could be unhappy with this interpretation because the idea that there were creatures who looked like humans but were not human is somewhat upsetting. The not quite humans were 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. On the other hand 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. If the result that humans are not related to neanderthals is true then we actually have a non-human species doing intelligent things we would normally think only humans could do.

There are a couple of mysterious items in the early chapters of Genesis that imply that there were more humans around at the time than Adam and Eve. There is a curious little bit of text in Genesis 6:4, here it is taken 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.

To be fair about it, other translations treat this text differently, here it is from The Book:

In those days, and even afterwards, when the evil beings from the spirit world were sexually involved with human women, their children became giants, of whom so many legends are told.

There is another curious detail in the early chapters of Genesis that could be used to build a case that there were many other humans or near humans present at the time of Adam and Eve. (And there is an argument against this as well, we'll consider that later.) 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"

Later on Eve gave birth to another son and named him Seth (meaning "Granted"); for as Eve put it, "God has granted me another son for the one 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.

So at any rate there is a certain chance that the Bible says implicitly that there were more humans and/or near humans around at the time of Adam and Eve and so it could be these humans and/or near humans who produced the remains and artifacts that go back on the order of 100,000 years. Some people also guess that there were many humans around and Adam was merely selected as a representative of the human race and given a spirit that enabled him to know God and to know the difference between good and evil.

To be fair about it some people figure that Adam and Eve had many children besides Cain and Abel. It is given that Seth was born when Adam was 130. We don't know when Cain killed Abel. So we have almost 130 years during which time quite a few people could be born and those are the people Cain is worried about. On the other hand, why would Eve mention that Seth was a replacement for Abel if she already had many other sons?

The next problem from Genesis is Noah's flood. The young Earth creationist interpretation has the flood covering the highest mountains on the planet and killing everyone on the planet. But then there is no physical evidence for such a massive flood. Plus of course you see many details in the Biblical text that imply that the flood was local and not global. Young Earth creationists have to come up with all sorts of very creative suggestions to fix the problems that arise from their global interpretation. The major reason young Earth creationists insist on the global interpretation is that it fits some of their other theology.

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 mean other things. 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. So now if you have the belief that the the whole planet was covered in water you naturally produce English to fit that belief.

Some of the most obvious problems with the global flood are that it is impossible to fit all the animals into the ark, it is impossible to feed them all and, of course, all the plants on Earth would die out as well, they would have to be taken on board the ark as well. Within the text of the Bible itself it is given that the wind blew some of the water away. Just where would the water go if the whole Earth was covered?

There is also a fair amount of evidence that many plants survived the period of the flood. 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

Second, note that creosote bushes are rather 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 this record nothing ususual happens around 2500 BC so this argues against the global flood as well.

Another curious detail found in the Bible is the race of people called the "Nephilim" first mentioned in Genesis 6:4. (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.

There are an awful lot more problems with the global flood interpretation. I found a nice collection of them at: at: Noah's Flood: Global or Local?

It all makes me wonder how we ever got the worldwide flood interpretation in the first place. In fact if you ask me the worldwide flood interpretation is the interpretation you would get from someone who was interested in discrediting the Bible.

You can only preserve the global flood idea by invoking miracles right and left, for instance the ark could be bigger on the inside than on the outside, God could supply large amounts of food out of thin air and God re-created the whole Earth after the flood, including re-creating plants to cover up the effects of the flood.

So since it is pretty safe to assume that the flood was confined to some part of the Middle East the next question is: what kind of evidence do we have for a large local flood in the Middle East? The answer is I haven't found any solid evidence for a flood around 2500 BC. It is known that there have been very large floods in Mesopotamia over the years. 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. The opinion these days is that this evidence does not show evidence for Noah's Flood.

There is some good modern evidence for a massive flood in the Middle East. Around 5600 BC 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. Ancient legends seem to talk of this event as well, giving a version similar to the Biblical story of Noah even down to one family being saved on a boat, 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. Wood could be 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 apparent 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. Perhaps more tests will give a better date for the flood in which case the Black Sea flood would be Noah's flood. Of course as noted before there is the proposal that since the Bible often skips generations the flood could have happened before 2500 BC and then the Black Sea flood would almost certainly be the Biblical flood. 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.

Of course the final thing to say is that even if there is no good physical evidence for a huge flood in the Middle East that doesn't mean it won't turn up sooner or later. Legends from many ethic groups around the world all talk of a huge flood and the Middle Eastern legends contain details quite close to the Biblical account. It makes researchers think there is a common origin for the flood stories.

Not everything is solid yet but with more research things could easily end up verifying the Biblical accounts in Genesis.

I ran into a second nice little case of how the writer of Genesis may have gotten it right. There is Sir Isaac Newton's famous second law of motion, F=ma and theoretical physicists have very recently been able to derive it from more general principles and in this theory light is necessary to make our universe work properly. For a popular scientific account see: Brilliant Disguise: Light, Matter and the Zero-Point Field. (For a heavier scientific discussion see: California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics - zero point field, zero point energy, ZPF, ZPE and in particular the article: Inertial Mass and the Quantum Vacuum Fields.) The author of the web page is astrophysicist Bernard Haisch and he wrote at the beginning of his essay:

"God said, Let there be light, and there was light."

It is certainly a beautiful poetic statement. But does it contain any science? A few years ago I would have dismissed that possibility. As an astrophysicist, I knew all too well the blatant contradictions between the sequence of events in Genesis and the physics of the Universe. Even after substituting eons for days, the order of events was obviously wrong. It made no sense to have light come first, and then to claim that the Sun, the moon and the stars - the obvious sources of light in the night sky of the ancient world - were created only subsequently, be it days or eons later. One could, of course, generalize light to mean simply energy, and thus claim a reference to the Big Bang, but that would, to me, be more of a stretch than a revelation.

As encouraged as I am, it is still too early to say whether history will prove us right or wrong. But if we are right, then "Let there be light" is indeed a very profound statement, as one might expect of its purported author. The solid, stable world of matter appears to be sustained at every instant by an underlying sea of quantum light.

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