What truth is communicated in Genesis One?
A remarkable feature in the text is that God creates the entire Universe through speech. He said “let there be light”[1] and there was. My son learnt how to code through a tutorial that outlined the intricacy involved in making an animated monkey pick up a banana. Even this simple command required a complex sequence of numbers, letters and symbols. Yet when it worked, the written code produced a drastically different form: a colourful world with a monkey picking up a pixelated banana and no number/letter sequence in sight.
Francis Crick, who was an atheist, likened DNA to the "language of life" when he presented his ground-breaking findings of the DNA double helix. Genesis One presents an image of a God so powerful that all He has to do is speak life into existence, using the language of DNA that He is fluent in. Computer code seems incomprehensible gibberish to the untrained eye, yet is capable of forging what you’d least expect to arise from a binary sequence: detailed, colourful, ordered, simulated worlds with animated creatures. You could liken this to God using His voice and unlimited power to speak the Cosmos into being.
But if Genesis One is meant to be interpreted literally, then the passage would have to describe, to pre-computer generations, how God’s creative language is similar to programming code. It would have to describe to pre-quantum generations how God creates -- possibly by collapsing the wave function of atoms into concrete forms[2] through observing the wave’s infinite possibilities. Instead, I propose that Genesis One was written with beautifully simplistic phrases to effectively communicate God’s power, abilities and purposes. Yes, it conveys a massive oversimplification of how God created the Universe, but the simple statements pack a serious punch and express everything that we need to know. Genesis One articulates Truth – Truth that is broader than a purely scientific explanation and can resonate with every generation that hears it.
7-day Creation – interpret literally or symbolically?
Why does the account state that all of God’s creative acts took place over the course of a week? How is the term “day” meant to be interpreted? Different thinkers have argued that in the Hebrew language “day” can be translated as an ‘epoch’ or an ‘age’ of time. In the Bible it says that from God’s perspective “a thousand years in [His] sight are like a day that has just gone by”[3]. Secular science dates our universe at 13.75 billion years of age. Before Einstein's Special Relativity Theory, time was seen as a constant - wherever you go in the universe, one second will be the same length of time everywhere. However, this belief has been drastically altered by Einstein's findings that time is affected by gravity. Many films set in space have done a good job demonstrating that astronauts travelling at incredible speeds into deep space would experience time passing at a different rate (much slower) than time passing by on Earth. So much so, that any sons and daughters left behind could be older than them when they return. The speed of light experiences no time passing at all; time is relative depending on where you are positioned in the universe and what speed you are travelling. In the Bible, in 1 John 1:5, it says that "God is light and in him is no darkness at all". Dr Gerald Schroeder argues that from God's perspective, the amount of time that has passed since the Universe began to exist may seem like a mere 7 days has gone by.
Two adjacent and contradictory Creation accounts?
In Genesis chapter two, we get a different image of God – a God who is not afraid to get His hands dirty and get stuck in, but only when it comes to humanity. Later on in the Bible, God is described as a Potter and we the clay[6], but here in chapter two we get to see this Potter in action when He makes humans “from the dust of the ground”[7]. God spoke everything else into existence; almost in a detached, indifferent way compared to the hand-crafting involved in forming human beings.
Imagine a head architect instructing workers to build a skyscraper – this architect utilises his authority to read out instructions to the workers and they do the heavy lifting and hard graft. This architect supervises the project from afar but still with a meticulous eye for detail, and at the end he is proud of the outcome. However, if you saw that same architect painstakingly fashioning an object to go inside the building, that might get your attention and make you want to find out more. What is so special about that object that the architect trusts no one else to mould it but himself? In Genesis Two, God’s personally hand-crafted creations are made and given names: Adam and Eve.
The contradiction seems to lie when comparing the order of Creation in Genesis 1 with Genesis 2. In Genesis 1, Adam and Eve are made on Day 6 after plants and animals have already been created. In Genesis 2, Adam is made first, before plants or animals exist, and then Eve is made last. How should Christians interpret this?
Were Adam and Eve historical?
St. Paul refers to Adam as if he were a historical figure in many Biblical letters[8] and Luke traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Adam. This causes embarrassment for some Christians who don’t want to be associated with the controversial connotations attached to the Adam and Eve story which seems to defy science. To avoid the necessity of accepting them as real people, some Christians argue that the whole Bible should be interpreted as a narrative – none of it is meant to be literal history. Then you don’t have to accept Paul’s statements about Adam and Jesus’ genealogy, as they are just myths and legends with a purely symbolic meaning.
The issue I have with this reasoning is that it weakens Christianity’s offer of hope if everything it teaches is mythological. If Jesus’ resurrection is just a symbolic story, with no basis in historical fact, then what good news does it have to communicate with the world? Paul said “if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.”[9] How do you explain historical documents that testify to the disciples’ executions because they would not renounce their faith in Jesus, even when threatened with death? If someone asked you to give up believing Harry Potter and the wizarding world were real or face torture and death, I’m pretty sure that would snap you out of your escapist fantasy.
But if the Bible does teach historical fact, then are Christians doomed to be forever mocked by atheists for accepting the historicity of Adam and Eve? Well, even in random, unguided evolution there must have been a first female to propagate the rest of the ‘mutated’ hominin species. Darwinian evolution is powered by random, beneficial mutations giving rise to new species. But if the mutations are random, then you wouldn’t expect humans to arise in multiple locations around the globe simultaneously – the descendants must originate from the first of the new species of its type[10]. Species have to be very similar to each other in order to successfully reproduce and create fertile offspring. If there was a first female hominin, then we may as well name her, and that's exactly what scientists have done – "Mitochondrial Eve"! An article in New Scientist says "If you trace back the DNA in the maternally inherited mitochondria within our cells, all humans have a theoretical common ancestor. This woman, known as “mitochondrial Eve”, lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa."[14]
Two creation accounts are presented next to each other in Genesis One and Two. The first shows the order and progression of Creation from the beginning of time. The second puts humans front and centre, created intimately with God’s undivided attention and entrusted with roles and responsibilities. We are here for a very special purpose[11] and God wanted to clearly communicate this and how He views us.
And yet...
Latest scientific discoveries have made me wonder if the 7 Day Creation was meant to be accepted as literal truth after all. Day One records God speaking light into existence and Big Bang Cosmologists theorise that photons were created at the moment of the Singularity stretching outwards. Photons are light particles[12]. Many atheists mock the Day 4 account of Creation which states that God made the stars and sun after the formation of light. So, I was intrigued by the discovery of photons existing before star formation. Steve Robinson (https://www.earthhistory.org.uk/) argues that a giant quasar at the centre of our galaxy was the source of light that God created on Day One and therefore the Earth was created on Day Two, with plants appearing on Day Three without the need of our Sun to give light, until it was established on Day Four.
Some secular Origin of Life theorists are exploring the possibility that life began in deep sea vents, which would concur with Day Four’s version of sea creatures being the first life forms on Earth. And we know that humans were the last species to arrive on the scene as Day 6 also indicates. The 7-day account portrays a journey through time of increasing complexity and greater diversity of life-forms, and that is what Darwinian evolution attests too as well. The Genesis account was written roughly 3500 years ago and Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published in 1859, but bizarrely they both paint a similar trajectory. Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution has some large issues that need investigating, but I’ll save that for a later post. The main areas of contention are over the timescale of these two models and if there is intelligence behind life arising or not. Secular science argues for a universe that is nearly 14 billion years old whereas the Biblical model points to a much younger universe.
Is there any evidence for a younger universe?
Radioisotope dating works by measuring the radioactive decay of an element such as Uranium 238 into its more stable daughter isotope Lead 206. Secular scientists conclude that it takes 4.46 billion years for half of Uranium 238 in a sample to decay to Lead 206 by emitting alpha particles, which are helium nuclei composed of two protons and two neutrons. This process is known as alpha decay[15].
To work out the age of a rock you look at the ratio of parent-daughter isotopes in the sample and calculate how much uranium 238 there must have been at the beginning, from the presence of the daughter isotope. This tells you how much time must has passed.
This process largely relies upon assumption as it is impossible to know how much radioactive material was originally present in a rock before it solidified. What if there was Lead 206 already present? If there was, this would mean that not all the Lead 206 has come via radioactive decay over millennia. If you make the assumption that all the Lead 206 has come from Uranium 238 then this is going to drastically alter the estimate for the age of the rock.
Darwin’s Theory of Unguided Evolution existed a couple of centuries before radiometric dating was invented. Therefore, there was an acceptance in the public consciousness that the universe was billions of years old because how else to explain unguided evolution unless the Earth and Universe are extremely old? Therefore certain assumptions about the ages of rocks existed prior to the use of radiometric dating techniques. But just to reiterate - there is no way of knowing for certain how much parent element was trapped in a rock at the beginning as no one was there to observe it.
Imagine walking into a kitchen and seeing a sink half full of water and a dripping tap above it. It might be reasonable to assume that the sink got filled with water solely from that dripping tap and so it must have taken half a day approximately for the sink to have filled to the extent it has. Unbeknownst to you, someone had just left the room who had half filled the sink and not turned the tap off properly. That water took 30 seconds to fill the sink and it wasn’t as a result of the slowly dripping tap over many hours. Your initial assumption was reasonable but not true in reality. How do secular scientists know for certain how much parent element was in that rock initially to produce daughter isotopes from? The answer is, they don’t - they make assumptions because they are already committed to believing the earth is billions of years old.
An example to demonstrate the danger of faulty assumptions when applied to radiometric dating occurred when some Creation scientists took some rock samples from the site of Mount St. Helen’s in America where there was a volcanic eruption in the 1980s. These rocks were only 10 years old due to the magma cooling after the eruption. The rocks were sent to a laboratory to carry out radiometric dating to obtain an age for the rocks. Now this was obviously a test because the Creation scientists knew how old the rocks were, but they didn’t tell the lab in advance where the rocks had come from. The date they received back was in a range of 340,000 to 2.8 million years! Why? Obviously, the assumptions were wrong, and this invalidates the ‘dating’ method.
The lab used the potassium-argon dating method and they made assumptions from the start about how much parent element they should expect to see if a daughter isotope was present - they were clearly already committed to an Old Earth view[16]. The response back from the lab inferred that radiometric tests are not accurate for rocks that we already know the age of (recent ones) but it is accurate for rocks that we don’t know how old they are (because no witnesses lived to see it form as it was so far back in time). That doesn’t sound like a reliable scientific method! It’s full of guesswork and assumptions based on preexisting hypotheses that they’ve already subscribed to.
Another problematic issue with secular views on radioisotope dating is known as the Helium Problem - where is all the excess Helium from the radioactive decay that has been occurring for 4.5 billion years on planet earth? That timeframe should give ample opportunity for the excess Helium to diffuse out of the decaying rocks and make its way into the atmosphere where we should be recording huge levels of Helium, but we don't. Helium diffuses so rapidly that all the helium should have leaked out in less than 100,000 years. Not only is the Helium not in our atmosphere but it is still found trapped in Zircons in the oldest rocks on earth. So why are these rocks still full of helium atoms? Maybe billions of years haven't gone by since the decay took place.
Rock fossils have been found which have samples of trees encased in them but when these rocks were radiometrically dated, the ages for the rocks came out at millions of years but the carbon dating of the trees came out with a young age. How can the outside of the fossil be much much older than the organic material found inside it? This highlights further inadequacies for the use of radiometric dating to give a trusted age of the Earth[17].
DNA extracted from bacteria that are supposed to be 425 million years old brings into question that age, because DNA could not last more than thousands of years. Likewise dinosaur fossils have been found that contain blood vessels, proteins and DNA which is not consistent with their supposed 65-million-year age. All of these organic compounds could not stay in tact that long, even in fossilized form. It makes more sense if the remains are thousands of years old[18].
It is well known by secular scientists that the moon is gradually moving away from the Earth. Tidal friction causes the moon to recede from the earth at 4 cm per year. It would have been greater in the past when the moon and earth were closer together. The moon and earth would have been in catastrophic proximity (Roche limit) at less than a quarter of their supposed age. This would have decimated any early life that formed as the current size and position of our moon is uniquely placed for life to thrive - almost as if God set it there itself in our recent past.
Volcanically active moons of Jupiter are consistent with youthfulness (Galileo mission recorded 80 active volcanoes). If these moons had been erupting over 4.5 billion years at even 10% of its current rate, they would have erupted their entire mass 40 times. This does not fit with the supposed billions of year’s age for the solar system.
Carbon-14 in coal, oil, fossilized wood and diamonds sugg
est ages of thousands of years and clearly contradict ages of millions of years. Carbon dating is the method used by secular scientists to date young earth artefacts instead of radiometric dating which is used for supposed old earth artefacts. There should be no Carbon-14 found in the items listed above because they are supposed to be millions of years old.
That is because Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years. That means that no matter how many carbon-14 atoms were present when something died, after 5,730 years only half of them are left — the rest have decayed to nitrogen. And after 11,460 years (two half-lives), only a quarter of the original carbon-14 atoms are left, etc. Why then can we detect Carbon-14 in these “old” materials? Secular scientists try to dismiss these findings as contamination and yet never make the same concession with old earth rocks. They do not concede that daughter isotopes could have arisen in rocks via contamination but that they could only ever arise from the long decay chains of parent elements. This seems inconsistent to me.
Human population growth is another issue. If humans separated from apes a million years ago then where are all the people? When the population doubles from 16 to 32, it does not seem like much, but when it doubles from three billion to six billion it seems like a lot more. But, it is exactly the same rate of growth. Given enough generations, the number of people being added with each generation becomes astronomical. It’s like compound interest on an investment—eventually the amount being added each year becomes very great. The population grows when more people are born than die.
The current growth rate of the world population is about 1.7% per year. It is relatively easy to calculate the growth rate needed to get today’s population from Noah’s three sons and their wives, after the Flood. With the Flood at about 4,500 years ago, it needs less than 0.5% per year growth. That is not very much compared to today’s current 1.7% rate. Evolutionists claim that mankind evolved from apes about a million years ago. If the population had grown at just 0.01% per year since then (doubling only every 7,000 years) there could be 10 to the power of 43 people today—that’s a number with 43 zeros after it!
Maybe the way out of this mess is to propose that extinction events have wiped out early human ancestors, like we know happened to Neanderthals and Denisovans, for example. But there are nowhere near the high number of ‘Stone age’ human skeletons and artefacts that we should expect to see if we have been around for a long period of time. There are not even enough for 100,000 years of a human population of just one million, let alone more people into the trillions. If you add in the fact that the length of recorded history when you study the origins of various civilizations, writing, etc., all arrive onto the scene abruptly about the same time several thousand years ago, this begins to create a very good case that human history is very young.
Advances in knowledge about DNA genetics have led to the conclusion that human populations can’t live healthy for very long. Telomerase disintegration (the structures at the end of chromosomes to stop the DNA unravelling, a bit like the plastic tube called aglets on the end of your shoelaces) and harmful mutations increase in populations over time and certainly could not last up to 200,000 years which is the secular age given for when Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. This suggests our genomes are young.
Experiments show that with conditions mimicking natural forces, coal forms quickly; in a matter of weeks to produce brown coal and up to a few months to form black coal. It does not need millions of years. This is the case for oil and opal too.
The old age dating of the earth relating to Milankovitch cycles is flawed. These have been used by secular scientists to provide a reason for the distinct and even sedimentation patterns seen in rock layers, such as the chalk beds of the Cretaceous, a period dated 145 to 65 million years ago. Milankovitch cycles propose that every 20,000 years, the Earth's tilt and orbit around the sun is altered slightly, which has a knock-on effect to the climate temperature and can create either a warmer/drier climate or a cooler/wetter one, affecting the sedimentation pattern to change from a distinct chalk layer, to one with chalk mixed with clay (marl). Steve Robinson proposes that the annual pattern of changing seasons (and temperature variations) is a better explanation for even and regular sedimentation patterns of chalk-marl and thus leads to a much younger earth.
If 20,000 years has gone by between each distinct layer of chalk-marl measuring around 40 cm, this gives a sedimentation rate of 0.04 mm, or half a hair’s breadth, per year. That is difficult to imagine on a planet as tumultuous as ours. By contrast, if the chalk-marl couplets were laid annually, the sedimentation rate is a much more realistic 2.2 mm per day.
Our world is volatile and constantly changing. If the rock layers are billions of years old, then each new addition of sedimentation would equate to tiny measurements per year (0.04mm). This does not fit with what we know of violent coastal erosion; sedimentation laid down quickly in vast amounts during natural disasters, etc.
What does the evidence point to?
From a theological point of view, believing in an old Earth with millions of years of death before humans arrived on the scene is problematic. Why would God use such a wasteful and capricious method of creation to bring forth life and then claim that humans are responsible for death and suffering entering a good creation through their sin? Jesus’ death is seen as a sacrifice that only he could pay as the innocent Son of God who knew no sin. The atonement makes no sense if Jesus’ sacrificial death was to renew the whole creation of sin that was originally God’s fault in the first place. However, if you are not a Christian, this line of argument will likely not convince you. I include this point, however, as it is essential some Christians to see that accepting whatever secular science tells you about the origins of life can attack more of your faith than you might realise. Many Christians call themselves theistic evolutionists - they accept Darwin and the Big Bang occuring billions of years ago because if Science says it then it must be true - then they are quick to throw out Old Testament scriptures in the process. But this line of thinking also challenges Jesus’ existence, His death and His resurrection. If human sin wasn’t responsible for bringing death into a good creation (as it existed millennia before we arrived on the scene) why can we now trust that Jesus’ death and resurrection offers the final victory over the grave for everyone who believes in Him?
Another major area of concern for some people who want to argue for an old universe is known as the distant starlight problem. I.e. we know the speed of light (it takes light (in a vacuum) about one year to cover a distance of 6 trillion miles) and if we are seeing stars from the other side of the galaxy, then it must have taken X amount of billions of years to reach our eyes on this planet. Therefore, our universe HAS to be old otherwise we wouldn’t see those stars. This is an interesting conundrum. Different thinkers have tried to respond to this problem by arguing that the speed of light was different in the past. The Bible explains how the early earth was very different in atmosphere (there was no rain but the ground was watered from below; people lives hundreds of years which implies minimal radiation, etc.) so the theory goes that during creation week, the natural laws were different from today. Even secular theories state that at the moment of the Big Bang, all matter and energy that would ever exist were formed at that point and no new additional matter is now formed as energy cannot be lost, it just changes form. Therefore, even secular theories posit that natural laws were different at the very beginning of time to what we have today. Genesis teaches that God was similarly creating new matter, energy and laws, out of nothing, in the first Creation week, so we shouldn’t necessarily expect conformity between the past and the present. The speed of light could have been different in that first Creation week.
Others like Jason Lisle have argued that we only know the two way journey of the speed of light (for it is impossible to calculate the one way journey). Therefore, the eye of the observer may be receiving light instantly, whereas the round-trip speed corresponds with the figure that scientists have calculated. I’m not so convinced with this approach without firm proof but the first theory seems plausible to me for reasons I will explain below.
It’s worth pointing out that secular scientists who propose the Big Bang theory have a distant starlight problem of their own due to the uniformity of the Cosmos Background Radiation. Light is required to travel a distance much greater than should be possible within the Big Bang’s own timeframe of about 14 billion years. This serious difficulty is called the “horizon problem.” In this model, the universe begins in an infinitely small state called a singularity, which then rapidly expands. When the universe is still very small, it would develop different temperatures in different location. Let’s suppose that point A is hot and point B is cold. Today, the universe has expanded, and points A and B are now widely separated. This expansion occurred in the blink of eye, so points A and B were transported away from each other at incredible speeds. However, the universe has an extremely uniform temperature at great distance; A and B are now the same temperature. We know this because we see electromagnetic radiation coming from all directions in space in the form of microwaves known as the “cosmic microwave background”.
The problem is this: How did points A and B come to be the same temperature? They can do this only by exchanging energy. This happens in many systems: consider an ice cube placed in hot coffee. The ice heats up and the coffee cools down by exchanging energy. Likewise, point A can give energy to point B in the form of electromagnetic radiation (light), which is the fastest way to transfer energy since nothing can travel faster than light. However, using the big bang supporters’ own assumptions, there has not been enough time in 14 billion years to get light from A to B; they are too far apart. This is a light travel time problem—and a very serious one. After all, A and B have almost exactly the same temperature today, and so must have exchanged light/heat multiple times.
What’s the solution? Well it means that the universe doesn’t have to be old just because we see distant starlight, otherwise there would be no issue with the speed of light in models arguing for an older age. As creation scientists research possible solutions to the distant starlight problem, we should also remember the body of evidence that is consistent with the youth of the universe. We see rotating spiral galaxies that cannot last multiple billions of years because they would be twisted-up beyond recognition. We see multitudes of hot blue stars, which even secular astronomers would agree cannot last billions of years. In our own solar system we see disintegrating comets and decaying magnetic fields that cannot last billions of years; and there is evidence that other solar systems have these things as well. Of course, such arguments also involve assumptions about the past. That is why, ultimately, the only way to know about the past for certain is to have a reliable historic record written by an eyewitness. That is exactly what we have in the Bible. So for now, I favour the view that when an omnipotent creator declares “let there be light” in the unique Creation Week which had humans being formed as adults, not born from the womb, and stars made after light, etc. that this all-powerful Creator could make it so that we see that light in an instant as he “stretched out the Heavens like a thin cloth” (Isaiah 40:22). I think it likely that the light we receive from stars today from distant galaxies represent them in real time, not from light that left them billions of years ago and has only just reached us now. This might actually be hinting at Jason Lisle’s theory after all…
In Summary
If you are not a Christian, I would present to you that if God is real and inspired the writing of the Bible, then you should expect it to be true and have science verify it. But that doesn’t mean you should expect the Biblical accounts to read like a graduate-level textbook of scientific knowledge. How would ancient generations have been able to access the Holy Scriptures in that scenario? The writing of Genesis is able to communicate deep truths about Creation in a format that will enable all humans to access it at a level they can understand, no matter the time period in which they lived. Having said that though, there are indeed many areas of Science that are validating the claims of the Bible. Keep reading to find out more….
References & Footnotes [1] Gen 1:3-5 [2] See a previous post on ‘Miracles & the Quantum Realm’ [3] Psalm 90:4 [4] See four-part series on ‘Why did Jesus have to die?’ And the four part ‘My Purpose?' series. [5] Isaiah 65:17 [6] Isaiah 64:8 [7] Genesis 2:7 [8] 1 Tim 2:13, Romans 5:12-21 [9] 1 Cor 15:17 – see my four-part series on ‘Why did Jesus have to die?’ [10] This poses an issue for random, unguided evolution for starters – you need a randomly mutated male and female of the new species to arise at the same time, and then happen to find each other, in order to have offspring. Not every species can have viable offspring with another – if they are too genetically dissimilar their fertility will not be a match and so no offspring propagated. [11] See ‘My Purpose?’ Series [12] Photon epoch - Wikipedia [13] Luke 18:27
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