Exactly six days of creation - why is this so important?

Factual Questions
1

A friend goes to a conservative Christian church that espouses a form of biblical literalism. We both have an interest in science so, inevitably, we sometimes discuss evolution and creation of life.

He can’t bring himself to accept that the theory of evolution may be correct, and after long discussion it seems to come down to the Genesis passage about the six days of creation. His church teaches that some parts of the bible are meant to be viewed in certain ways, but that Genesis is meant to be taken literally. If not for those six days, which must be 24-hour periods according to his church, he might not have an obstacle to reconciling his faith with modern science.

My question to him is, why is it so critically important that the six days mean 24-hour periods?

Googling around the web, there appear to be several flavors of creationists, some of which are fine with interpreting each “day” as gaps of time and development. If even the biblical literalists acknowledge that the bible contains allegory, parables and such, why is it so important that this one particular section of Genesis be taken absolutely literally?

I’ve put this in GQ for now - mods move to GD as needed. But insofar as it’s possible, I’m hoping for a factual answer about how various Christian groups feel they need to interpret the bible.

2

It is not so much that this one part must be literally true. All parts of the Bible are equally literally true, excepting those parts that are specifically stated to be a parable.

I cannot speak for this person’s preachers, but Genesis is the first book, and everyone is familiar with its story. It is also the most obvious and well-known example of where science seems to contradict a literal meaning of Scripture, and so serves as a bellwether for an individual’s acceptance of the rest of Scripture.

(Personally, not that you asked, but my God is capable of using allegory, and any failure to understand is squarely on my shoulders. It is one of the things I hope to ask about at the time of my Judgement. Of course, if “form of worship” really is 80% of our final grade, then I am going to Hell, going straight to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.)

3

Belief in six days of creation doesn’t in and of itself preclude the acceptance of evolution. The theory of evolution is about the origin of the diversity of life, not about the origin of life itself. It is perfectly consistent to believe that Og created the world in six days, and that the animals he created began evolving from that point.

4

You are looking at it backwards. The whole point of Creationism (not, perhaps for your friend, but for the people who dreamed up and promoted the Creationist movement in the first half of the 20th century) is to attack the theory of evolution, and the conventions of Biblical interpretation (which bear little resemblance to those used through most of the history of Christianity) are geared accordingly. Rightly or wrongly, the theory of evolution, and the eugenics movement with which it was quite strongly associated at the time, was seen as liable to encourage leftist (i.e., progressivist) political attitudes by early 20th century conservatives, and the promotion of a rather selective Biblical literalism was a strategy to oppose that. They created a monster which has now got quite out of control.

It is true that there was some opposition from some (by no means all) Christians to Darwin’s theory when it first appeared in the mid 19th century, but that conflict between religion and evolutionism had very different roots (in what was called “Natural Religion”), and was not really motivated by, or dependent upon, Biblical literalism at all. But that form of Christian opposition to evolution had largely faded away by the early 20th century. The Creationism we see now was essentially a product of political/ideological conflicts in America in the 1920s and 30s.

5

One thing you need to know/remember is that the Hebrews were big on Numerology. There is/was great symbolism in numbers. Part of that goes back to the fact that they had no number symbols, but rather each letter in the hebrew alphabet was assigned a number. Thus when they’re talking about the “Number of the Beast” being 666, what they’re really saying is that the numbers in the name of this person add up to 666. There’s a whole “science” of how and what numbers words add up to and the synergy between them.

That being said, for some odd reason, six is the number of man. Why it isn’t five, when we have five fingers and toes on each hand or foot, I don’t know. Unless Count Rugan was in charge of deciding this or something. Seven is the number of heaven.

There is also the tie in to the number of days in the week and the Sabbath, giving man’s world the same form as God’s. In other words, work hard creating for the six days of the week and rest on the seventh. This is probably the biggest one, creating a mirror in heaven of what we do on Earth, and then casting that same pattern on God’s Creation so that instead, we see our own earthly pattern as being a mirror of the (true) heavenly pattern.

6

The Sabbath thing is what I was going to mention. oddly, though, most Fundamentalist Christians don’t seem to celebrate it anymore.

I’ve also been told that the text specifically refers to morning and evening, and so must be literal 24 hour days, despite that the word used for day can mean longer periods of time.

7

Just an interesting side note- it actually refers to evening and morning (not the other way around), which is the basis for Jewish days starting the night before, so that Jewish holidays run from evening to evening.

8

In discussing science, we talked about the fact that different branches of science point to similar findings, and in so doing support accepted theories. Geology suggests the Earth is billions of years old, not thousands, and biology suggests that species have evolved over long periods of time. Following this train of thought, we came to how evolution is supported through many cross checks, and it became the focus of our discussion.

For my friend, rightly or wrongly, the six days represent the line in the sand. He feels that to accept an interpretation of other than six 24-hour periods would be opening the door to all kinds of things his church seems to object to.

So my question, rephrased, is would his internal belief system collapse if he were to accept something other than six 24-hour periods? I agree with you that he could be consistent in his beliefs under slightly different interpretations, but he’s very wary of going down that road.

Looking at it from outside the box, I think he’s loopy and deluded. But it’s interesting to examine the internal reasoning.

9

As has already been pointed out, most people take it as zstory, not a cosmological treatise but a statement about God, his purposes and methods.

It is however worth noting that part of the ‘six days’ meme derives from the arbitrary breaking of the Bible into chapters around 1200 AD. In point of fact the Priestly source creation story continues 3.5 verses into chapter two, and describes the creation of the Sabbath. Those of us from Christian and/or humanist traditions miss the importance of this – it’s rather hard to overstate the importance of the Sabbath in Jewish tradition, and this describes it as an integral part of Creation itself.

10

None of these answers quite get to the point of why a day must be the 24-hour day that corresponds to a revolution of the earth.

I can’t speak for his particular sect, but I think the answer lies in the um, evolution of the way sects have formed over time.

The List of Christian denominations page is a useful reminder that the entire history of the Church is one of splits, heresies, schisms, and re-creations.

Polycarp could give details better, but a quick broad survey would show that there were numbers of sometimes literally warring factions in the early Catholic Church over basic and divergent interpretations of the source material. (The source material, i.e., what to include as the books of the New Testament, itself wasn’t fixed for hundreds of years. Purported Gospels continued to be written, or “found” as late as, IIRC, 800 CE. List of Gospels.) It wasn’t until Constantine converted to Christianity and called the First Council of Nicea in 325 that the Catholic creed was set in place. Modern Roman Catholicism stems from this and the power of the Church in the former Roman empire kept it going as a more or less coherent body in western Europe, but Orthodox Christianity split into a separate body centered in of all places Constantinople. (Yep, he was that influential.)

When Martin Luther split off what became Protestantism as a body of understanding that did not require the intersession of a hierarchical church to interpret for you, Protestant sects immediately began to increase in number. Or without number. I doubt anybody knows how many individual sects exist. For that matter I have a standing bet that no one can tell me what all the doctrinal differences are that separate the 40 or so American Protestant churches that have more than 1,000,000 nominal adherents. (Perhaps a handful of Professors of Comparative Religion can, but not in a closed book final. :))

From the outside, all of these fine lines are distinctions without a difference. Internally, however, they are of the greatest importance. They are what define a religion and what separates that religion from all others. Without these doctrinal definitions, there would be no religion there of that name in the first place. It’s of supreme crucial importance to enumerate them and defend them at all costs.

And that’s why some sects have latched onto the definition of the day in Genesis as being 24 hours. Other sects don’t. That may seem simplistic but it’s equivalent to every other hairsplitting distinction that tore groups asunder over the last 2000 years. Your belief is not my belief. I will cast you aside because of these differences. Or I will start my own church - a trivial matter in Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism - to insure that my differences rule your belief.

None of this is exclusive to Christianity, of course. All the fatwas, rules, edicts, and proscriptions found in Islam are from hundreds and hundreds of sects that proclaim their beliefs to be supreme and want to force others to behave similarly. Christians who look to their history have no cause to complain about the similar behavior of others. They do complain, but I complain that nobody knows history these days.

As long as I’m being long-winded, another irony is that Christians, especially those of the Creationist persuasion, like to talk about science being a belief no different from religion. But even this short potted history shows otherwise. Science comes to a consensus based on the source material and then keeps it, adding that consensus to all the others to get a unitary whole that governs the behavior of all scientists as they do experiments. The consensus changes as new information is found but is always incorporated. Otherwise, no one could tell the value of a experiment’s results. This is the opposite of religion, which starts with a source of information not to be changed or added to, but each experiment - each sect living its life in a particular time and place - changes the interpretation of that source material and splits into smaller and smaller groups with mutually exclusive claims. There are no ways of looking at the universe that can be more opposite than science and religion. (Linking science and atheism also doesn’t work, since atheists have no consensus and no unity. Nor can a lack of belief equate to a belief.)

Fun as this is, the answer to the OP is that the belief that a day must be a day is important because that’s what they believe. Circular, but true.

11

The “days” in Genesis simply can’t be literal, since God doesn’t even separate day from night until the Fourth Day.

12

None of this seems to clearly answer the OPs question, which is very interesting. The literalistas insist on that the days in creation must be like any other day, despite the story decribing some of those early days as quite different from the rest. I think the indications in the earlier posts about ‘Biblical Truth’ may be at the heart of it, but it all makes it sound like God is then constrained by the Bible, which the Bible later denies when it says God changed his mind about things. Good God, I get it. They accepted these things at some point, and lost their minds trying to reconcile that belief with reality.

13

The weird thing is, one of the Psalms contains a line, “A thousand years are but a day to thee, oh Lord”. So even the most literal-minded fundamentalist is not required to believe in a 6 x (24hours) Creation.

14

No, God supposedly created light and darkness and used them to divide day from night on the first day. What’s confusing is that apparently the initial source of the light was not the sun, the moon, or the stars - which God created on the fourth day.

15

But here’s a puzzler. Here’s the timeline as specified by Genesis 1:1-31

Day One: God created heaven and earth, light and darkness, and divided day from night.
Day Two: God created the firmament and used it to seperate heaven and earth.
Day Three: God created dry land and plant life.
Day Four: God created the above mentioned sun, moon, and stars.
Day Five: God created marine life and birds.
Day Six: God created land animals and human beings.

Then there’s the timeline as specified in Genesis 2:4-25. This doesn’t break things down on a day-by-day basis but it does list the order God created things in. Heaven and earth, plants (in seed form), water, Adam, land animals and birds, and Eve.

So ask a literal creationist this question: Which did God create first, animals or humans? Genesis 1:20-22 says birds were created a full day before man was created. But Genesis 2:19-20 says Adam was present when God created the birds and was naming them as God created them.

16

Your friend knows that not all days are 24 hours long? Over the course of a year, the extra time adds up to about 6 hours, that’s why we have leap year.

17

The usual explanation is that Genesis 2:19 can be translated (as in the NIV) “the LORD God had created the beasts of the field…” so that the prior creation of animals before humans is recognized. That contradiction therefore is only relevant in your dealing with a KJV-Onlyist.

18

I think the sticking point about 6 24-hour days may have something to do with Biblical inerrancy, and the KJV version being an inerrant translation. Apparently some fundamentalist sects are adamant on this particular point, and that would lead to day being taken literally despite the Hebrew word’s meaning of day/era/time period (and, I might add, the clearly metaphorical usage of day in many places in the Bible). But I don’t really know much about it.

19

I was surprised in reading a book on the history of Scientific Creationism (titled, appropriately “The Creationists”) how deeply rooted the movement was in Seventh-Day Adventism, although none of the major spokesmen (the Morrises, Ken Ham) are SDA AFAIK.

William Jennings Bryan btw was kinda unique- he was not a Young Earther, totally acknowledged the Six Days may have been symbolic, and his political reason for opposing Evolutionism was that he held to a humanitarian Christian Progressivism that regarded Evolutionary thought as promoting Social Darwinism, unbridled capitalism & militarism.

20

There’s another theory that sometimes rears up & is skewered by many Old-Earthers & all Young-Earthers- that there was an original Creation of millions/billions of years old, which was destroyed by Lucifer when he fell and was then remade by God in six literal days. This Creation I included the dinosaurs, giant mammals & even primal humans.