I used to be a young-earth creationist and believed that the Bible was on my side… then I believed in an old earth and stopped being a Christian since I didn’t think the two were compatible.
Anyway, I think that if you read the Bible without bringing along beliefs about the age of the earth it says pretty plainly that God made the universe (the heavens and the earth) in six days, and rested for one day.
Besides the verses in Genesis, which talk about there being an evening and morning (which literal days have) there is also Exodus:
Exodus 20:9-11 (NIV)
Exodus 31:15,17 (NIV)
As far as Genesis goes, I guess some people might say that it is ridiculous to have evening and morning without the Sun… well it said that God already divided the light from the dark and that’s all that’s really needed to have evening and morning. It also shows that God can be the source of light and life rather than the Sun (i.e. don’t worship the Sun). It also mirrors Revelation 21:23. (“The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”) That’s a common pattern with Revelation… e.g. it talks about the “tree of life”, “the ancient serpent”, and it is a restoration of paradise…
So if you believe in the Bible as well as a world that is billions of years old, how do you explain the creation week in Genesis in Exodus…?
One word: metaphor. Is the Bible saying it’s a metaphor? Doesn’t seem to, but I’m an atheist so it’s not my problem. But not everybody takes the Bible to be literally true.
There is a scheme that attempts to reconcile the 6-day Genesis account with the appearance of life over a very long period of time and with an old Earth - it’s called the day-age model, or sometimes OEC (Old Earth Creationism). It still seeks to adhere to (what the proponents describe as) a literal interpretation of the Genesis account, just that ‘day’ might mean ‘a period of time’, rather than specifically a 24 hour period.
It is flawed in that the order in which life appeared on the Earth (from the geological/fossil evidence, while it superficially resembles the Genesis description, is actually ordered in a different sequence; Genesis describes trees (or even, being charitable, vegetation of some kind or another) on the land before there was animal life in the water - also, birds (or again, being charitable, flying things of some sort) make an appearance before land animals. Both of these sequences are sharply at odds with a vast amount of hard evidence.
I think God was misleading his people in Exodus… he could have made everything clear by saying “For according to the creation story, the Lord made the heavens and the earth in six days…” or “For in six days the Lord revealed what he had created in the heavens and on the earth…” or “For in six periods of time, the Lord made…”
For most of the history of the Jewish people and Christians, they believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Their belief in a longer date came from other places AFAIK, like geology.
God is supposed to be omnipotent… and he should have had the insight to see that people would mostly take his metaphors as being literal.
BTW, there are a lot of metaphors in the Bible, but they are fairly obvious to the reader. God shouldn’t use metaphors that require a modern-day knowledge of basic geology, paleontology, etc, in order to spot the metaphors.
I agree. There’s nothing that I can see that indicates those bits are intended as metaphors, and you raise a good point- what’s the use of a metaphor if people don’t even know what it is? But as I said above, this not my problem.
John, what everybody misses in the Genesis 1:1-2:4 story (and note where the break in narrative comes; it’s not at the end of chapter 1) is that God is said to have created in seven, not six days. Remember that this story was not told for Christians but for Jews. On the seventh day, God created the Sabbath – it’s part and parcel of Creation, not a later human-invented add-on. cmkeller or zev_steinhart can speak to the importance of the creation of the Sabbath in Jewish thought, but the fact that it is, is integral to their conception of the world.
The entire story is best read as an extended mythopoeic metaphor for something quite real – God called the Universe into existence, by His Word, in an ongoing process, including provision for mortal human beings of a time of rest and refreshment and union with Him.
The Round Table may well have been a part of what Artorius of the Britons used in his uniting of the Celts to repel the invading Saxons – but the medieval chivalric stories transformed it into something that spoke to their time, and modern skepticism has done something quite different with it. What we need to do is to read the Jewish Creation stories as story – something told to make specific points about the divine nature and about human nature – not as methodological treatises regarding cosmogenic techniques used in Universe- and world-creation.
In other words, hear it with the same breadth of meaning as “sailing the Seven Seas” and don’t try to pin down exactly what division of world oceans and seas constitute the seven distinct seas referenced – the meaning is using the panthalassic hydrosphere to travel anywere on Earth, not voyaging on seven specific seas. Likewise, whoever wrote Genesis 1:1-2:4 was not interested in teaching cosmology and origins-biology but rather trying to drive home some quite important points about the nature of God and His relationship to His creation.
He didn’t. Augustine of Hippo recognized before 400 C.E. (from Chapter 19 of his de Genesis), that the stories in Genesis were intended for their moral value rather than their historical value.
Augustine may have been forward looking, but he hardly qualiifes as a modern scholar of science.
I’ve always interpreted Genesis 1 to be the recreation of earth, not the initial creation. First god created the dinosaurs and they roamed the earth for a long long time. Then god decided that they weren’t the best creatures he could have come up with, so smooshed the world like a kid’s play-doh creation and started over again; we know he had no qualms about killing off his creations from the Noah story. Genesis begins while he’s resculpting.
Genesis 1 reads like a poetic, not a scientific or a historical, description of Creation. But I wonder how the people thousands of years ago, at the time this was first written down or even before, understood it, and how literally they took it. I find it kind of amazing that people that long ago were able to imagine a time when there was a universe but no Earth, and then an Earth but no life, and then life but no people…
The thing that puzzles me is that people even argue about evolution/creationism. It seems to me that if god is powerful enough to create our universe, god is also powerful enough to create it in a way that matches one or both of the evolution/creation theories. Furthermore, it seems to me that god’s power would also extend to creating the universe in such a way as to ensure that we wouldn’t know which theory was correct.
Essentially, we have no way of definitively knowing whether the universe evolved over billions of years or sprang into being as we know it 10 minutes ago. That said, it makes a lot of sense for us to proceed from this point as if evolution were the process that created all of this around us as it appears to be the most logical way of addressing what we are and what we will become. It seems a waste to curtail or otherwise disuse our curiosity and cognitive abilities by adhering to dogma that is at best neutral on the issue of investigating life, the universe, and everthing.
Keep in mind (or, if you weren’t aware of this before, add it to your considerations) that Genesis is not a single work in which Genesis 2 was composed immediately or shortly after Genesis 1 as a continuation of the same story.
Genesis 2, from the middle of 2:4 on, was written about 150 years before Genesis 1 (plus a tiny opening fragment of Genesis 2). And, despite hypothetical possibilities due to Biblical longevity, not by the same author. The “God created world in 7 days” is not the same creation story that contains Adam and Eve.
God can create things with age. He created stars that were shining, even though those stars were billions of miles away and the light from those stars would have taken years to reach the earth. He created Adam and Eve with age, full grown. It took God six days to make the Earth, but the Earth was not necessarily six days old when God finished making it.
No disagreement there, Ahunter3. My point is that in the OEC scenario, God finished creating at least 1/7th of the time since the Big Bang ago, which is roughly 2 billion years.
I wonder if those who say day is a metaphor, or could be more than a real day, have actually read Genesis, or just saw the picture book version. For, as the OP so cogently pointed out, it does not just say day, it says “it was the evening and the morning, the nth day.” And that is indeed what it says in Hebrew. So day means day.
elfkin477 if he was resculpting, and starting from scratch, how come he forgot to get rid of the sharks and the horseshoe crabs?
Thudlow, perhaps you are forgetting that the first words are “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth?” So they didn’t imagine a universe without an earth.
If God was in anyway involved in writing Genesis, he could have gotten it right, and left the metaphors for something else. Even a rabid atheist like me doesn’t say the NT is incorrect because there is no real prodigal son, after all.
Twin’s answer is a classic answer to the problem of reconciling the “Biblical” age of the Earth with the scientific evidence.
For me, personally, the issue is not all that important. I’m willing to entertain YEC. I’m also willing to entertain OEC. With some privisos, I’m willing to except evolution. I read Discover, Scientific American and National Geographic.
Orthodox Judaism teaches that the Torah is not a science book or even a history book. That’s not it’s purpose.
It’s not really all that important to me whether the universe is 6000 years old or 15 billion years old. Whether the universe came into being with a “Big Bang” or through some other method is an interesting debate, but not something which will cause an alteration in my life one way or the other.
For me, the important aspects of Genesis is right in the first verse: God created the universe and the world that we live in. The hows and the wherefores may make up an interesting debate, but it’s not really all that important to me. The important thing is that God created the universe and did so with a Purpose; and it’s up to us to live according to that Purpose.
There are many lessons that one can learn from Genesis and the way it describes the account of the Creation of the World. But I don’t think scientific lessons are among them.
Well, I guess that settles that. :rolleyes: Even all the other creationists are wrong because that’s what God did, nevermind that the Bible says no such thing.
The Earth is not simply “aged” like a piece of furniture or “full grown” like a living thing. The Earth contains evidence of a lot of events having taken place, like the Ice Age and the ateroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. A layer of sedimentary rock contains a lot of clues as to what kind of environment existed when it was being laid down on the surface, including the fossilized remains of the creatures who lived in it. And these layers can be buried deeply beneath other, very different layers. A lot of time was needed for all these events to occur.
But not everybody takes the Bible to be literally true.