Nice, tough question, Rose.
Since the whole Flood discussion, though a part and parcel of the “Genesis-is-literal” debate surrounding this question, is not directly applicable to the six-days question, look at the following series of items:
The Earth’s surface is composed of rocks, consisting of igneous (cooled molten rocks), sedimentary (evidently laid down in layers like what might happen along a streambank after numerous freshets), and metamorphic (from applying heat and/or pressure to the sedimentary rocks, a la baking a cake or a casserole). Some relatively common elements – carbon, potassium, rubidium, zirconium, thorium, along with uranium and a couple of others – include radioactive isotopes which evidently break down at constant rates. Using these, and we don’t need to go into advanced geophysics, it’s possible to come up with dates for when the rock was laid down, or at least when it achieved its present state in the case of the metamorphic ones. Now, mostly this will apply to the igneous rocks, giving frames for when the sedimentary ones were laid down according to they formed on top of the igneous, were laid down before it, or it intruded into gaps in them. (Figuring that out only requires a little common sense, like noting that the limestone alongside the basalt intrusion is partway changed to marble by the heat of the basaltic lava).
Now, in the sedimentary rock are fossils that appear to be the remains of life forms that existed at the time they were laid down. It doesn’t take much imagination at all to recognize that a thing in the rock that looks like an oyster shell in every detail probably was an oyster shell. And there’s an easy process, in operation today, where the process of petrifaction takes place – the organic matter is transformed into rock by dissolution and replacement by minerals dissolved into the water. I recall reading of a stone newspaper found in a cave – where someone had taken refuge in the cave, abandoned a newspaper there, and the woodpulp was replaced over a number of decades by calcite dissolved in the cave water, preserving a readable “fossil newspaper” of limestone.
Okay. Now, in the absence of man, God, devil, angel, Vishnu, fairy, elf, Invisible Pink Unicorn, or other supernatural intervention, it seems reasonable to read the record of the rocks as an accurate account of what happened. It takes some skill, and is not precise – details keep changing with increases in our knowledge – e.g., the Napa Valley deposits in California is explained by a quite different process now than when I learned geology in the late Sixties – but that seems reasonable.
Bring a supernatural force into the picture, and things are a bit different. An omnipotent deity – call him “J” after the usual name used by the main two writers of Genesis – could very easily have worked up the process according to the Genesis account, in six days, or a fraction of a nanosecond for that matter, imbuing His creation with false evidence suggesting what geologists and paleontologists think they know about it. And, of course, we’re not limited to the Judaeo-Christian approach here – this sounds very much like the sort of cosmic practical joke that would appeal to Loki, for example. Anyone with a background in Native American mythology could come up with other “trickster gods” for whom it would be the precise sort of thing they would be inclined to perpetrate.
However, there are two things that mitigate against this Young-Earth Creationism being the case in the view of the Christian:
- He is, by all the evidence we have, not the sort of God to perpetrate this sort of cosmic shell game on people. His interest, by His own account, is in bringing people to come to know and believe in Him out of love rather than by force or compulsion.
- That first chapter of Genesis is written in the literary genre called “myth” – stylistically the simplified explanation of divine doings in an easy-to-remember, repetitive format. This statement would be true even if Young Earth Creationism and Literalist Christian Cosmology were the absolute truth – it’s not a judgment of truth value but of literary style. Being such, though, it can be quite “true” without its individual elements having literal veracity – in the same way that, for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan conveys a truth about what human beings ought to do toward one another without being the literal account of one Eliezer Ben Judah who was rescued after being robbed and assaulted by Eliah of Shechem, a Samaritan. (And you might take into consideration that Jesus specifically picked the despised, heretical ethnic minority for his hero for that story.)
So my conclusion is that it is one excellent myth in the Campbellian sense – a vibrant, vivid story, told in the repetitive format that becomes memorable – of God’s action in Creation – not a literal account opposed to science, but the process science describes in technical language attributed to the One Who accomplished it and portrayed in vivid poetry.
Does that help?
{fixed italics. --Gaudere}
[Edited by Gaudere on 08-17-2001 at 06:19 PM]
