Copyright 1998-2010 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.

It is very common these days to hear people say that Science has proved the Bible wrong. This opinion is largely based on a widely promoted interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis by some Christians who claim that the Bible clearly says the Earth is only 6,000 years old. These people are called young Earth creationists. Their interpretation does not agree with the scientific evidence and it is why many people think science has proved the Bible is wrong. Critics have said that this whole creation story was made up by a bunch of ignorant shepherds in the Middle East. In this chapter we'll see that the young Earth creationist interpretation of the Bible is very bad even using the outmoded perspective of presentism. Then we'll see that all the problems you encounter with the account in Genesis 1 vanish when you interpret the text from the block world perspective.

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 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-like perfection of the Garden of Eden and how wonderful things were for a little while and how wonderful they might have been forever.

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 scrutiny. It is clear that the Bible does NOT tell us how old the Earth and the Universe are so this is not an issue.

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.

Interpreting the Bible is not always easy because God likes to be poetic. His poetic approach is very effective at making His writing beautiful and inspiring, it touches the heart and the imagination but it really plays havoc with the people of today who are used to reading dull, dry scientific textbooks. Physicist Paul Dirac had this to say about science and poetry:

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Understanding natural language is often harder than you think even when the writer is not being poetic. People know an awful lot about the world and they put together the words in a sentence into an overall image that makes sense and this process happens very naturally and easily. On the other hand take computers. Computer scientists have been interested in getting computers to understand natural languages and in trying to do this an awful lot of problems come up. 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 Revised Standard Version (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.

In this chapter we are going to look mainly at the text of Genesis chapter 1 along with some additional references to creation scattered around the Bible. We will be dealing with the creation of the universe and the Earth. Before starting the text a science reminder is in order. In the block world version of the creation everything across all of space and time has to be there at once or the whole universe won't work. The past, present and future must all be there "at once". At first glance the description you find in Genesis 1 does not seem to match up with this requirement. In Genesis 1 the usual interpretations assume presentism is true and then from this perspective it looks like God creates things over the course of six "days" and then stops creating and rests on the seventh "day". To be consistent with the block world all these things had to pop up AT ONCE not over the course of six days so the universe and the Earth and plants and animals and people across all of space and time would all have to pop up all at the same time. But there is a way to make the whole thing work in the end. For now we'll just interpret the text using the conventional human viewpoint of presentism and make some comments on where this perspective breaks down.

Genesis 1, verses 1 and 2

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 that young Earth creationists use as well. But is the typical English translation right and do the additional arguments hold up? The fact is that there are plenty of problems with this interpretation and so there are a lot of arguments to cover.

We'll start with an interpretation 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. There are some translation and interpretation issues involved with these two verses so in parentheses you'll find some Hebrew words behind the English words. Farther on we will look at these issues. The Whitefield translation is:

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 (tohu and bohu), 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".

The second item to note is that the Earth was dark. This might mean that the Earth was formed before the sun turned on. Or 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. Now there is an interpretation and translation issue with verse 2 involving the Hebrew words tohu and bohu. In most translations you will find that the first two verses come out something like this translation taken from the New King James version of the Bible:

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.

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 if you assume the current human perspective of presentism. People who tell you that the Bible clearly teaches that the Earth and the universe are only 6000 years old are not interpreting the Bible correctly even assuming presentism is true.

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 mean a "time period" depending on the context. In a couple of the 6 yoms the things that happen make it obvious that the yom would have to be longer than 24 hours if God is working within our dimension of time. 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. There is no telling how long the rest period was so that makes pinning down how long it took for God to do this and that a problem as well. 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 a human day, it is just the pattern that is important.

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 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.

In this yom plant life appears on Earth. This gives rise to a number of interesting issues. Plants were needed to produce oxygen for the Earth so it is not surprising that plants are the first living things created on the Earth. This fits well with the science. On the other hand the fossil record shows that early plants were much different from our modern plants. For instance actual fruit producing trees don't occur until fairly late in the history of Earth. If the account of creation being given here in Genesis 1 is supposed to match up with the appearance of life on Earth then this account of creation clearly fails to match the record of life on Earth. There were no fruit trees early on. For that matter all the plants that ever existed could not be present from the very beginning because some of them, like flowering plants depend on animal life that hasn't been created yet. This has led some commentators to say that the creation of plants is not something that happened all at once in one yom but instead it is something that happened over all the remaining yoms as well. They say that God issued commands at this point in time that were destined to happen in the future. In later yoms animals will be created too and not all of them can show up at exactly the same time, they must show up over a long stretch of time. These problems are related to the assumption of presentism and they will vanish by the time we finish.

Finally if you take the young Earth creationist position that this yom was merely 24 hours long you have a serious problem. 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 this yom cannot possibly be a single 24-hour day.

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

For 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.

20 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. 21 And God created (new things) the great "dragons" and all the "kinds" of the creeping "air breathing" creatures that swarmed in the waters, and all the "kinds" of winged "flying things"; and God had seen it as good. 22 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.

For yom six we have God creating land animals first:

24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Next in yom six God creates human beings. From the New Living Translation we have:

26 Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground." 27 So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Verse 27 is interesting in that it has been interpreted two ways. Some people think it should be interpreted as meaning that God made Adam and Eve at this point in time. Young Earth creationists assume that the creation of Adam and Eve that is described in Genesis chapter 2 actually takes place on day 6 of the creation. A really basic argument against this is that a lot had to happen in 24 hours. Animals had to be created on yom 6. Adam had to be created. Animals had to be brought to Adam so he could name them. Eve had to be created. In addition to having a lot to do in one day there is no point in the text of chapter 2 where you can say that the sixth day ends and the rest of human history begins. Another interpretation of this verse is that God created mankind at this point. That means that He created a lot of people at this point and not just Adam and Eve. Some interesting implications of this interpretation come up later in this chapter and again in the next chapter.

Another important item is verse 31:

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

The seventh yom also brings up a controversy. It does not have any "evening and morning" phrase so it is different from the other 6 yoms. If you look at Hebrews 4 the concept of rest and the seventh yom comes up again. Hebrews 4 talks about believers entering God's rest while unbelievers will never enter His place of rest. Hebrews 4:4-6 says:

4 For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: "And on the seventh day God rested from all his work." 5 And again in the passage above he says, "They shall never enter my rest." 6 It still remains that some will enter that rest, and those who formerly had the gospel preached to them did not go in, because of their disobedience.

Following the summary of creation, Genesis 2 goes on to describe the creation of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. People sometimes say this is a second version of the creation story that is odds with Genesis 1 but the best interpretation of the text is that God is dealing with a small area of land where he creates Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve and the creation of humanity comes up in the next chapter.

There are many other interpretations of Genesis 1 going around. One of them that we've already mentioned is that on each yom God is simply issuing decrees that do not immediately come to pass but the things He says are destined to happen in the future. 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 world idea where everything has to be out there all at once so as we mentioned before at first glance it looks like Genesis 1 fails a very important test. It is however possible to interpret the text in a such a way that it fits in with the block world and then all the problems you encounter with the usual interpretations of Genesis disappear.

For the block world interpretation of creation we'll use the analogy that creating the world is like creating a huge painting. 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 (from far left to far right). We will call this the yom0 version of the painting or the yom0 version of the heavens and the Earth. On Yom 1 God creates a new painting of the Earth and the universe. We'll call this the yom1 version. At some point in time (our time) to the left of the painting God starts painting in light on the Earth and He keeps on painting in the light all the way down to the end of the Earth. In practice He isn't painting of course, He has to fiddle with the atmosphere to make that light appear by decreasing the thickness of the clouds. Then God rests but He comes back to His painting on the next yom.

On Yom 2 a new version of the heavens and the Earth is created, we'll call it the yom2 version, here God paints in the boundary between the sea and sky by lessening the cloud cover even more and again He paints from some point on the left all the way out to the end of the Earth. God rests a little while before doing more painting on yom 3. On Yom 3 God paints in the dry land from left to right starting at the point in time where he wants dry land to appear. At this point God also sets the boundaries for the seas but this is a boundary that we know varies over time. During ice ages sea level is lower because of all the ice stuck on land. When the Earth warms after an ice age, the water melts, flows into the oceans and sea level rises again. From time to time some land areas will also sink or rise up for no apparent reason. Rivers create new land when they reach the sea and soil drops out of the river to form the river delta. Then from time to time brand new volcanic islands pop up from the sea and in some cases a volcanic explosion will destroy an entire island. So this setting of the boundaries of the sea has the implication it is done over the whole history of the Earth and it is an indication that here in Genesis 1 God is speaking from the block world perspective. Also on yom 3 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. Then of course fruit trees would be painted in rather late in the history of life on Earth, not at the very beginning. This is another indication that God is speaking from the block world perspective. Of course we'll call this the yom3 version of the heavens and the Earth.

In the yom4 version the clouds lessen to the point where you can see the sun, moon, stars and planets. In the yom5 version and the yom6 version God paints in animals and finally in the yom6 version God paints in human beings. So from this perspective Genesis 1:27 God is 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 (human consciousness) can start moving through the creation the way people move through the haunted mansion. God resting on the seventh yom (yom7) means that with this work done He can sit back and watch us move through the universe.

What's going on in the painting analogy is that the yoms represent a second dimension of time. In figure 1 (don't look for it, it is not there yet) the layers piled on top of each other represent these yoms. These yoms are completely unrelated to our familiar dimension of time that goes from left to right in figure 1. So the whole young Earth creationist idea that each yom is 24 hours of our time is completely thrown out the window. That is simply a bad interpretation of the text and so it is no wonder that the traditional Biblical accounts using presentism do not seem to make sense and do not match up with the results from science. Again with this block world interpretation of Genesis 1 there is nothing in the Bible that tells us how long it is from the Big Bang to the creation of the Earth and how long it is from the creation of the Earth to the creation of people. So once again any age science comes up with for the age of the Earth and the age of the universe can't discredit the Bible because the Bible just does not say.

Now God could have done all this creating instantly, He could have just produced the final yom 6 version of the universe from the very beginning but it appears He wanted to set up a pattern of working for 6 days and resting on the seventh and He wanted to include the idea of working during the day and resting at night so that human beings would follow the same pattern.

There is an important insight that comes from God's statement that He rested on the seventh day. How could God manage to rest on the seventh yom if presentism was true? He just couldn't sit back and take 24 hours off along our dimension of time. He'd still have to be in control of everything that was happening during those 24 hours. He'd still have to be at work! The idea that He could take 24 hours off and everything would be OK actually comes from the atheist perspective on the world that everything moves around automatically by simply following the laws of physics. The thinking is that God can take 24 hours off because everything will simply follow on course according to the laws of physics. So the the usual worldly interpretations of Genesis 1 based on presentism, including young Earth creationism cannot possibly be true. God's yoms cannot be along our dimension of time. On the other hand with the block world and the second dimension of time God can rest on the seventh yom in that second dimension of time. So the statement about God resting on the seventh yom can only be true if the block world is true and a second dimension of time is involved.

The idea that there is an extra dimension of time is an interesting issue in physics. Is there any evidence for an extra dimension of time? It turns out that certain theories in physics propose that there are more dimensions of space and time than the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that we know about. The extra dimensions don't show up very well because they are very tightly curved. Some physicists take the idea very seriously and some have proposed ways to detect the extra missing dimensions. For various reasons physicist Itzhak Bars proposed that there is a second dimension of time (See for instance: A Two-Time Universe? Physicist Explores How Second Dimension of Time Could Unify Physics Laws). Is this second dimension of time the dimension of time that God is using in Genesis 1? My opinion is maybe but not necessarily. If the second dimension of time in Genesis is the same as the second dimension of time proposed by physicists then there would be one vast universe where the state of the universe in each yom would be connected to each other. In this case you could in principle travel from yom0 to yom1 to yom2 to yom3 and so on up to yom7. As you moved from yom to yom you could see how God's creation evolved from one yom to the next. On the other hand my guess is that the universe in each yom would be completely separate from the others, you could not travel from one yom to the next. In this case even if science never finds evidence for a second dimension of time in our universe the Biblical account can still be true.

With this interpretation of the Creation where God is working in a second dimension of time in the block world it is pretty clear that Genesis fits in VERY 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 and the other portions of text scattered around the Bible that have to do with creation it appears 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. Given the reluctance of Science to embrace the block world perspective on the universe it would be fair to say that the Bible has proved that the science is right!

Even if people have not managed to get the correct interpretation of Genesis 1 until now Genesis 1 still had two important messages for people that still came through clearly. First God made everything and everybody, this world did not happen by chance. Second there were religions in the Middle East in Old Testament times and there are religions throughout the world and across time that have had people worshiping the things in the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, the land, and the animals. Genesis 1 is a great denunciation of these religions. It says the things are just things and not gods to be worshiped. It says that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God and that the rulers of nations such as the Egyptian pharoahs or The Inca of the Incan empire who declared themselves to be gods are nothing special. All people are equal.

The above analysis ought to make you comfortable 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.

First young Earth creationists insist the universe and the Earth were created in six days. In order to make the story fit their interpretation they have to assume that the Earth appeared on day 1 or maybe day 2. But the text clearly says that all that happened on day 1 was the creation of light. Notice that there is no mention of the Earth being formed on day 1. Surely the creation of the Earth would be such an important event that that it merits a mention on day 1 if that's when it happened! But there is none. Neither is the Earth formed on day 2 where the text speaks of the waters of the Earth being separated from the waters of the sky. This implies that the Earth is already there. Taking the Bible literally the Earth was in place in verse 2 and that was before day 1. So the six days interpretation is clearly silly and goes against what the Bible actually says. What did happen during the six "days" was that the Earth was remodeled to make it favorable for life and people.

But then young Earth creationists have used Exodus 20:11 to bolster their case. 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.

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 starts with the statement from the apostle Paul in 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 interpretation implies that there has been a lot of death among animals for millions of years and of course that does not square with The New Living 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. Then there is the case of plants. If animals were eating plants the plant cells would be 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. If that fruit consists of living cells then those cells will be dying as well. (These days we know that living cells are really just very complex molecular machines so they are not "alive" in the magical sense that ancient people thought they were.)

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.

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 for after the fall.

Young Earth creationists also bring up another point. Their point is that all the death and destruction we find on Earth must have come after Adam and Eve's sin. If there was death and destruction before Adam and Eve sinned then what God made could not have been good at that point in time when God said His creation was good. Unless God was looking at his whole plan from beginning to end to teach people and angels about sin and to rescue people from sin and to the time after sin and death are gone for good and He was declaring that it ALL was good. This learning experience is after all what God actually had in mind when he created this universe. It is the learning experience that is very good.

Now for another note on young Earth creationism. For many people young Earth creationism has become their religion. For people involved in the religion of young Earth creationism you had to believe what the young Earth creationist leaders said or you couldn't be a real Christian. Pride showed up among many young Earth creationists as well, pride in being better than "those other people" who don't believe what we believe. Young Earth creationism is a trap similar to what the apostle Paul talks about in Galatians chapter 6. In Galatians Paul talks about how certain people at the time insisted that in order to be a true believer you had to be circumcised. So Paul says this in Galatians 6:13:

... They only want you to be circumcised so that they can brag about it and claim you as their disciples.

... They only want you to believe in young Earth creationism so that they can brag about it and claim you as their disciples.

It doesn't make any difference now whether we have been circumcised or not. What counts is whether we really have been changed into new and different people.

Finally young Earth creationists have always assumed that it didn't make any sense for the world to be extremely old with death and destruction going on all over the world. But God had his own idea. An Earth that is billions of years old gives some people the tiny opening they need to jump to the irrational and unscientific beliefs of evolution and atheism that expose them as fools, it is a nice humbling experience for those people and a great lesson for everyone else as well. It also makes it possible for God to show that some people just plain don't want there to be a God and that is a very interesting thing to understand as well. It wasn't just atheists and evolutionists who were exposed as fools, young Earth creationists were exposed as fools as well, first when they mis-interpreted the Bible and second when they insisted you had to be a young Earth creationist in order to be a Christian. The way God handled the creation and His description of it has turned out to be very educational, it is a nice example of how His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.

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 whose image fell down to us from heaven?"
• Luke 2:1 (King James Version) And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
• Daniel 2:37-38: 37 Your Majesty, you are the greatest of kings. The God of heaven has given you sovereignty, power, strength, and honor. 38 He has made you the ruler over all the inhabited world and has put even the wild animals and birds under your control. You are the head of gold.
• Daniel 4:22: That tree, Your Majesty, is you. For you have grown strong and great; your greatness reaches up to heaven, and your rule to the ends of the earth.
• Daniel 5:19: He made him so great that people of all races and nations and languages trembled before him in fear.