Space For Doubt

The Bible has a particular way it conveys creation. Well actually it has several ways it does this. Sometimes they don’t agree. In any case, a plain reading of the text can leave the reader, the curious scientifically minded reader at least, with a number of questions.

To set the stage, let’s establish the traditional interpretation.

• Creation happened roughly 6000 years ago
• The earth and its contents were created in six 24-hour periods
• There was no death or decay prior to the fall of man
• All humanity is descended from Adam and Eve

That mostly covers it. There may be some other small points but we can build from here.

Creation Dating

As far as the dating of creation, I covered that extensively in my dinosaur dating deep dive post. The earth is MUCH older than 6,000 years. I’ll summarize a quick list of reasons why.

• Radiometric dating has revealed the age of the earth going back to 4.5 billion years. Many layers of strata, with previously living organisms fossilized within, show earth supporting life for quite some time.
  • Dinosaurs especially are the stand-out here. Life that existed hundreds of millions of years before we did.
• The presence of certain isotopes in the quantities we find them also lends credence to the age of the earth. This involves some technical jargon on radioactive decay, so I’ll just leave it at that.
• The presence of an iridium layer dating to ~66 MYA (just one example of such oddities) around the globe at the same strata. Iridium is commonly found in meteorites, and to some extent, deep within the earth. It is theorized that a meteorite impact at the end of the dinosaur era, caused an extinction event. This impact spread iridium around the globe in an uniform layer (Similar to radioactive fallout from an atomic weapon) Why would God just randomly put a very light and even layer of iridium around the earth during creation? It’s not enough to mine and use for any purpose. Just enough to measure. Examine the why here. It just wouldn’t make sense.
• Lake bed layering provides hundreds of thousands of years worth of “record keeping,” similar to tree rings.
• Ice cores that stretch back to 800,000 years ago.
• Archaeological disagreement: Unbroken history of occupation going back 9,000 years (7,000 B.C.) in some areas of the world. That’s hard to do if the earth is only 6,000 years old.
• Gobekli Tepe, the first known human settlement dates to as old as 9,500 B.C.E.

Creation “Days”

Right away, there’s a problem. It’s front and center in Genesis 1:16. (We’ll skip the confusing verse 6 for now). The sun and moon are created, but somehow there have already been a number of days. Days are tracked by the rotation of the earth as relative to the sun. So how would we keep track of a “day”, or in the traditional interpretation, a 24-hour period, without the sun? I cover this more here.

These are obviously analogous time periods and not a specific prescription for the length of this “day”. What if a day in creation was hundreds of millions of years?

Suddenly, our old earth, our old life on the earth, our fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, all just makes sense. God first formed the physical planets, the sun, etc. Then with respect to the earth, He separated the sea and the land. He created living plants, and subsequent sea life and then land creatures. All on different “days”. All culminating in His creation of man. Yet, all in about the same order as science seems to suggest, albeit on a grand time scale.

This would also be the place to mention that if you want a literal reading of the Genesis creation story, you are forced to choose between the accounts in chapter 1 and chapter 2. They are not compatible accounts. That’s always a sore subject with traditionalists. It’s also one that has created some frustratingly absurd and tortured apologetic arguments in attempts to harmonize the two.

Death and Decay

There was indeed death before the fall, both plant and animal death. Outside the garden would conceivably be a rough place where death was as routine as it is today.

Why? Well, let’s do a little thought experiment.

Let’s look at carnivores. Tigers, snakes, hyenas, spiders, you name it. All of these creatures survive by killing and eating other creatures. When God created them, did he create a spider to eat….a blueberry?

To hold the view of no death whatsoever requires a particular willful ignorance of biology. Did God suddenly alter, and massively so, the biology of the animal kingdom after the fall of man? The mechanical parts needed for chewing/digesting plants differ greatly than those needed for killing, tearing, and digesting flesh. The instinct to hunt and kill are not needed for a plant. It certainly is for other living things.

Likewise plants would become wildly overgrown without plant death. How would that work? Without some plant death, how would the supposed entire herbivore animal kingdom eat?

Clearly there was death, at least outside the garden. Adam and Eve appear to have known what death was as well.

We have Genesis 2:17 as an indicator. God tells Adam and Eve in the day they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they will die. There’s actually a bit to unpack there.

• How did they know what good and evil was?
• It appears they did know about death. How? If death was evil and it only occurred after the fall, how would they understand what it meant? Especially if they hadn’t eaten of the tree yet?

It’s human death that appears to have not been on the scene yet.

Conclusion

The Genesis creation account reads like an etiology and poetry. It’s a mythological story conveying a purpose and reason behind why we’re here. We have good evidence to believe the people of ancient Israel understood it to be exactly this.

We accept things aren’t “true” in the bible all the time. I bet you haven’t even realized it.

Look at John 12:24, literal words of Jesus. “…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

No one today believes seeds must actually die. In fact, a truly dead seed cannot bear anything as it won’t sprout. It won’t grow. Yet we today effortlessly read past this and understand the point He is making. We aren’t warned “this is an analogy!”. The people back then may well have believed a seed does die when it goes into the ground.

The point is, Jesus was speaking to them in terms they understood.

Genesis was speaking to the people of its day in terms they understood.

The amount of mental gymnastics and wild theories needed to adhere to a strict literal interpretation of creation are just wild. You have to not believe what your eyes see with God’s first book. You have to doggedly deny plain fact.

I am of the mindset that the truth should not create an abundance of problems in order to believe it. Those adhering to a Young Earth Creation model create an absurd order of problems that need to be explained to maintain that belief. The incongruence of idea and evidence is truly next level.

I have no choice therefore, but to believe in a creator that created in a way that makes sense with what I see, and in congruence with science and logic. Not with what I read in a book written by a fallible humanity, and misinterpreted thousands of years later by the same.

Peace