Moving this to Sophia now
Title: Yomology
– What is a ‘Yom’ worth today?
Subtitle: Can Genesis 1 only mean that God created the Earth and Life in
the span of 144 hours?
Author: Christopher
Travis Haun for http://rethinker.net/sophia
Update: November 2008 (started.
Not yet to rough draft stage.)
Copyright: This rethink may be reproduced freely so long as no changes or
charges are made
Feedback: Please feel free to send any criticism, suggestion, or question
to cthaun[at]rethinker[dot]net
-
Genesis
1
Lamentably, I cannot read ancient Hebrew. When I read an English translation of Genesis
1 with my non-Hebrew eyes-mind it sounds to me like God created the Earth,
plant life, animal life, mankind within six literal 24-hour days—within 144
hours. It also seems to sound like to
my non-Hebrew mind from the same reading that God probably also created our
solar system and very possibly the entire cosmos with its billions of galaxies
in the same 144 hours. My
American-English mind expects all writers of history to be very exact with his
dates and expressions of time. I
naturally expect this of Moses and the Genesis account. But since Genesis 1 was not written in English
and it was not written by a man with a modern American-English mind like mine,
I feel an obligation to doubt and rethink my reflex interpretation. When I attempt to set aside English literary assumptions
and attempt to begin to imagine how an ancient Hebrew would tell the story told
in Genesis, I find additional reason to wonder about the easiest interpretation
of Genesis 1.
I want to be cautious here,
however. For many Christians who are
serious about the Bible, the issue of the six literal days of creation has
become something of a “fundamental” of faith which helps them divide the
faithful—those unwilling to compromise the truth of the literal interpretation
of the unchanging Bible—from those who have compromised with the humanistic and
worldly forces of godless science which pervert the simple truth. I too take the Bible seriously and I too do
not want to compromise in my interpretation of the Bible. And while I would tend to side with the fundamentalists
who insist on a “literal interpretation” of the Bible, I would also remind that
a “normal hermeneutic” does not always require a “literal interpretation” if the
genre demands it. When the Hebrew text
is speaking poetically, metaphorically, or in some otherwise characteristically
picturesque way, for example, we don’t take that literally. When Solomon is singing poetically about his
bride’s neck being a tower, her hair a flock of goats, and her teeth a flock of
sheep, even the simplest minded reader is able to recognize that this is not
the opportunity to exercise the strictly literal interpretation.
It is also an obstacle for
non-believers to come to faith in the factual reliability of the Bible. When talking with university students and
asking what their biggest obstacle is to belief in the factual reliability of
the Bible, most of the doubts come from the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Perhaps the greatest obstacle for thinking
people is the notion that this universe (which has an appearance of age to
thinking people) was created in 144 hours about 10,000 years ago. The temptation to compromise is real. The man who wants to be scientifically
respectable may be tempted to compromise here.
He doesn’t want the educated world to laugh at him as a dolt
anymore. So he compromises on the…..
Either way—whether Genesis 1 allows
for both a young-earth and an old-earth interpretation or only a young-earth
interpretation--this rethink is not an attempt to question the inerrancy of the
Bible. Nor is it even really an attempt
to question the perspicacity of the Bible.
It is above all an attempt to rethink our methods of translating and/or
interpreting ancient Hebrew storytelling genre for modern English minds.
The most famous creation account in
the ancient Hebrew Torah is Genesis
1. In this account, the author,
Moses under the prophetic guidance of the Spirit of God, summarizes the events
God caused/superintended to make planet earth suitable for and populated with
life as we know it. He summarizes the
events as having happened in six consecutive days.
Here is my attempt to summarize his
summary:
1.
On
the first day of creation God did something
involving light which ultimately makes our terms day and night meaningful.
2.
On
the second day God did something
involving water and sky that presumably helps make the earth inhabitable for
life.
3.
On
the third day He did something with
water and land which allowed seed-bearing plants to begin to flourish.
4.
On
the fourth day God did something
involving sources of light inside our solar system and involving stars outside
our solar system that made it possible for us to define seasons, days, years,
day, and night.
5.
On
the fifth day, God created animal life in the sea and bird life to fill the
sky.
6.
On
the sixth day, God created several types of land-dwelling animals and
mankind.
Despite the fact that the events of
the first four days are extremely ambiguous, there remains sufficient detail in
the events of all six days to allow the modern reader to be impressed with a
high potential for at least partial harmonization with the competing account
given by modern science. Without doing
violence to the text and without doing freakish mental contortions it is
possible to make sense of all the events of the six days in a way that
harmonizes sequentially and coherently with the events described by the
empirical scientific disciplines of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Out of all the thousands of
creation accounts collected from people groups all around the around the world,
which other account describes (in poetic language) what could be the need for
fine-tuning of the orbits and rotations of planets in our solar system followed
by the need for stabilization of a hydrological cycle before plants can grow on
land? What other account firmly
establishes plants as flourishing before animal life in the oceans? What other account sequences various types of
land animals before the special-creation of man?
Other than that the harmonization
seems admirably possible.
The apparent harmony in sequencing
Genesis 1 with the modern sciences naturally leads some people to question
whether the timing of the events may not also be harmonized between Genesis 1
and the modern sciences. A perfectly
literal, face-value reading of Genesis 1 seems to present that all the events
involved in getting earth prepared for life and inhabited by plants, animals,
and mankind occurred in the span of six literal, twenty-four hour days—144
hours. The modern sciences, however,
would tend to space out the events from the formation of the earth some 4.6
billion years ago, to the appearance of simple life 3.68 billion years ago, to the emergence of homo sapiens about
200,000 years ago.
Interestingly, a 2007 edition of
wikipedia’s page on “History of the Earth” felt compelled to represent the 4.6
billion year history of the earth as if it were a “single 24-hour period.” Since then the wiki has been edited and no
longer does so. But see how its first
paragraph began:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth
The
history of Earth covers approximately 4.6 billion
years (4,567,000,000 years), from Earth’s formation out of the solar nebula
to the present. This article presents a broad overview, summarizing the
leading, most current scientific theories. Due to the difficulty of
comprehending very large amounts of time, the analogy of a single 24-hour
period will be used, beginning exactly 4.567 billion years ago, at the
formation of Earth, and ending now. Each second
of this period represents approximately 53,000 years (or 53 millennia). The Big Bang and origin of the universe, estimated at occurring 13.7
billion years
ago,[1] is equivalent to taking place almost
three days ago—two whole days before our clock
began to tick.
Even the scientific minded modern
man who is attempting to communicate such an unfathomably long period of time
may then be inclined to treat it as a matter of days for the sake of minds less
accustomed with dealing with large numbers (millions and billions) being enabled
to handle it. Could it be that Moses/God
was doing something different? Perhaps
Moses, educated in the greatest schools Egypt had to offer, could naturally
fathom billions. But what about the
masses of brick-layers and shepherds he was leading?
In terms of intellectual obstacles for people believing in the ancient Hebrew creation account, as found in Genesis1…
Yom?
What’s a yom? What can yom
mean? More specifically, what are the
possible and preferred meanings of the Hebrew word yom mean in the Hebrew of the creation account in Genesis 1? The narrative in Genesis 1 depicts God
creating our cosmos and life on earth in six ‘yoms.’ For those who take the Genesis 1 creation
account seriously—as I do—the proper meaning of the word yom in the context of Genesis 1 can—should?--make the difference
between whether we can believe that our vast cosmos, earth, life, and modern
man was created in a mere total of 144 hours (six literal days) or something
much longer. If yom in the context of Genesis
1 and by the rules of ancient Hebrew grammar can only mean a 24-hour period,
then the reader is faced with the need to make a choice: either (1) all creation [the cosmos, the
earth, all plant and animal life, and modern man/ woman] was created inside a
span of 144 hours or (2) the Genesis 1 creation account cannot be taken
seriously and literally at the same time.
If, however, a yom can or should here embrace a long-undefined-finite
timespan, there is a possibility for harmony with the apparent 14+/-3 billion
years our cosmos seems to have existed for and/or the 4.5 billion years which
our planet earth seems to have been around for according to the majority of
scientists of the later 20th and early 21st century.
“1:3-5. The pattern for each of the
days of Creation is established here. There is (a) the creative word, (b) the
report of its effect, (c) God’s evaluation of it as “good,” (d) at times the
sovereign naming, and (e) the numbering of each day. Regarding the word day (yoÆm)
several interpretations have been suggested. (1) The days of Creation refer to
extended geological ages prior to man’s presence on earth. (2) The days are
24-hour periods in which God revealed His creative acts. (3) They are
literal 24-hour days of divine activity. In favor of the third view is the fact
that the term yoÆm with an ordinal (first, second, etc.) adjective means
24-hour days wherever this construction occurs in the Old Testament. Also the
normal understanding of the fourth commandment (Ex. 20:11) would suggest this
interpretation.” -- The Bible Knowledge
Commentary
From a strictly linguistic
standpoint, the ‘rules’ of Hebrew grammar and usage are such that most Old
Testament and Hebrew scholars tend to prefer the literal reading of yom in
Genesis 1. Although yom certainly can
mean undefined but finite periods of time in many other OT passages, in Genesis
1 it seems to be qualified in two ways which tend to incline most Hebrew
translators to prefer taking it as literal days. The first qualification is that of first
day, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day. The second qualification is “morning and
evening.” However, these rules of
context are general descriptive rules which should be considered inviolable
when there is not many instances of the same usage in to draw principles
from. There is room for debate here and
there is room for uncertainty. [I hope
someday to be able to list all the possible usages of yom and its cognates in
future revisions of this rethink.] This alone
leaves the door open slightly for a day-age theory to be considered a
legitimate (although not linguistically preferable) theory which we should be
open to consideration without doing any violence to Hebrew grammar. Not surprisingly then, several notable Hebrew
scholars--Gleason Archer and Walter Kaiser being prime examples--do not see an
interpretive problem with taking the yom in Genesis 1 to mean a lengthy period
of time. The main issue is that of how
Hebrew grammar works and on this basis we may have a preference, but we may not
have reason for dogmatic certainty.
From a literary standpoint, that same
door opens wider, in my opinion. For
although we have two “qualifiers” in the immediate Genesis 1 context which
should inline us towards the literal day interpretation, we have another issue
in the context of the early chapters of genesis which inclines me more toward
the long-day theory. The first eleven
chapters of Genesis together are a super-fast moving, compressed, summarized,
preface to the Genesis 12 where the story of Abraham begins. It’s as if Moses were being led by the Spirit
of God to provide a quick sketch in fast forward of the history from creation
to Abraham before slowing down to focus on what God was doing with
Abraham. In such a whirlwind tour, I
would expect a compressed account of creation.
I would expect a literary device such as “on the first day God created
this, on the second day he created that” to facilitate the sweep of creation. One possible objection to this could be
Moses was able to write numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Logical standpoint,
Philosophical standpoint,
Are we opening the pandoras box of
humanism? By leaving fideism for
thinkingism?
I hesitate to dare to rethink this
question for at least three reasons.
First, the more deeply I attempt to
rethink it, the more deeply I feel the discomfort caused by the turbulence in
the already uneasy alliance of faith and reason. My rethinking of ‘yomology’ has had a dynamic
history in the past two decades and my emotions are tied into it deeply. It’s difficult for me to detach my emotions
to attempt to achieve some modicum of objectivity for this rethink. Also this rethink is frightening as it could
be the earthquake that could demolish the ‘city’ in my mind I’ve already had to
rebuild.
The first opinion I achieved was that
of literalness. In my early teens I
became quite dogmatic about the earth being 6,000 years old and created in six
literal 24-hour days. This opinion was
formed through the reading of Henry Morris’ now classic book Scientific Creationism and through many
visits to the semi-scientific Creation Evidence Museum. There are many at this point who will assume
that I was simply being an anti-intellectual and anti-scientific just like all
students who grow up as Fundamentalist Christian. But in defense of the teenage me, I actually
observed (with my own eyes) an excavation along the Paluxy River which seemed
to prove that human footprints were found in the same strata of rock as
dinosaur prints . That along with talks
about the rate of decay of the earth’s magnetic field, the half life of
polonium halos, the rapid erosion of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, and iron tools
being unearthed in strata so old that mammals weren’t even yet a twinkle in the
eye of Evolution certainly seemed scientific to me at the time. I somehow managed to summon up the courage to
ask my high-school biology teacher to read and consider my copy Scientific Creationism. (He politely declined.) I spent so many years convinced of young
earth creationism and so convinced that anything other than
young-earth-creationism was nothing less than humanistic, atheistic conspiracy
that it proved a very slow process for me to even begin to rethink these conclusions.
Second, should the meaning of a
single word in a single chapter be allowed to exert as much power as it
apparently does for me (and perhaps several million others who take Genesis 1
seriously)? By principle I’m not comfortable
with “wrangling over words”--especially a single word. But perhaps some words deserve to yield more
power than others. If there is an
exception to this general rule of mine, perhaps—just perhaps—the exception may
be yom.
Third, the debate is a first and
foremost linguistic one. It’s a question
of Hebrew grammar—of ancient Hebrew grammar and usage. The fact that I have not even gained a
mastery of the basics of Hebrew grammar gives me more than a little pause for
obvious reasons. Who am I to dare to
rethink something that I have no authority to scrutinize? This is a very fair question to which I
probably cannot feign fair answer. But
the question extends beyond me to the armchair Hebrew grammarians and even to
the professors of Jewish, Christian, and secular schools who have eaten,
breathed, and drunk from the streams of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic writ for
half a century or more. When they
observe Hebrew usages and formulate the descriptive rules of Hebrew grammar, to
what degree of certitude can they make judgments on Moses’ use of yom in
Genesis 1? How audacious am I to even
dare to probe into such a sub-question?
I have the disadvantage of not
knowing the rules of Hebrew grammar as they stood some 3,500 years ago. The professors who have worked hard to try to
coax those rules out of the text have made it clear that that the word ‘yom’ was used in more than one way. It was at times used to mean a literal
24-hour day. At other times it was used
to
ts ‘yom’ was used in the sacred writ of the Hebrews to include finite
but long eras of time. These two facts
are not in debate. They are axiomatic to
the debate however.
I want to believe it.
Why?
Because I’m one of the warriors
hidden in the belly of the Trojan horse just hoping to deceitfully help open
the gates for the forces of humanism to spill into Christian
fundamentalism? No.
Because I’m embarrassed that I cannot
be taken seriously by academia if I believe the world is was created in 144
hours and is 6000 years old? No.
When my faith in the bible and God
was shaken, it was actually hugh ross who helped bail me out. General relativity. Not 19th century astronomy but 20th
century astronomy. So I hope the rules
of Hebrew grammar can show that yom
in Genesis 1 may possibly mean millions or even billions of years.
Do I have faith in modern
science? I’m open to surprises. Science has an interesting way of being
rewritten every few years.
Linguistic and Cultural Humility
Why do we dare to hold firmly to strong
opinions on Genesis 1 when we cannot even read it in the original
language? When most of us have never
even studied a non-indo-european language?
So we are forced to rely on translation teams to attempt to vehicle the
meaning into our language. In every
English translation we find the pattern of, “on the first day, God created a,
b, c,” and “on the second day God created d, e, and f,” and “on the third day
God created g, h, and I. . .” I am not
calling into question the scholarship or intellectual fitness of any
translation team of any English translation of the book of Genesis here. But I have invested time and effort into
translating between English and three similar indo-european languages
(Hellenistic Greek, modern German, modern Spanish) and a bit of a
non-indo-european language called Raramuli.
I’ve also had a smattering of other non-indo-european language
experience in the broader study of linguistics. Translation is often a difficult thing
between any two languages. Translation
is often a very difficult thing between an ancient non-indo-european language
and modern English. Thus the need for
humility rather than vehemence, for humility of mind rather than dogmatic
assumption. For when we approach
Genesis 1 we are foreigners. We are
speakers of an indo-european language attempting to make sense of a
non-indo-european language. We are
“moderns” trying to read a text which is not just of another language but of
another language tree. We are trying to
read a text which is 3,500 years old.
We are from different worlds
too. We are urban moderns with an
exacting language of well over 400,000 words attempting to understand a
notoriously poetic and picturesque language of very few thousand words. Even the very letters of the Hebrew alphabet
are pictures. We are used to words
having few possible meanings attempting to read a language which is known
almost every word having multiple possible meanings. We are used to a language known for exacting
jargon attempting to make sense of a language known for its use of
pictures. Linguistically, there is
ample room for humility and for open mindedness.
The Hebrew professor at the seminary
I studied at (which incidentally has consistently sided with the young-earth
side) was quick to always remind his students that it was the original
manuscripts written in the original languages which were “inspired.” What we read today as “the Bible” is a
translation from the originals. And no
translation team pretends to have produced an inspired translation. The Holy Spirit superintended the writings
of the books of the Hebrew Bible but there is not the slightest guarantee that
he inspired the translation attempts.
To attempt to understand the Bible we need to do our best to strip off
our English spectacles (through which we see and interpret everything) and
attempt to put on a set of Hebrew spectacles.
I now seems audacious to me that a 21st century man who has
never touched a plow or herded sheep or spoken a naturally poetic language
dares to assume that whatever understandings appear in his mind when he reads a
translation of Genesis 1 are the same understandings that an ancient Hebrew
mind would have assumed when hearing the Torah read aloud among the assembly of
Israel. This assumption is not just
worthy of rethinking; its worthy of the same levels of derision deserved by all
other manifestations of snobbishness we modern English speaking people often
project on anything ancient and foreign.
This is the classic question of whether the mountain must come to the
man or whether the man must come to the mountain. To approach this mountain, I think we must be
diligent to leave our English minds, prejudices, snobberies, preunderstandings,
predilections and assumptions behind and approach the text as if we were
ancient Hebrew minds hearing it read by the prophet Moses himself. I’m not sure this is even possible for
us. But I think it good to try.
Not only is there linguistic and
cultural reasons for humility as translators and interpreters; there is
historical precedent for humility as well.
The Western Church held dogmatically (and viciously) to the idea that
the sun and stars all revolved around the earth long after scientists with
their silly telescopes and silly mathematics started to suggest that maybe the
earth revolved around the sun. Few
Christians today hold the old view. But
think of how much opposition it faced by Christians who felt they were
defending God’s truth? (And who were, in
retrospect, obviously wrong.) Think of
how many Christians in Europe in the middle ages assumed that the earth was
flat. Was this also not the official
position of the Church? Today few
Christians believe that the earth is flat.
But think of how long it took for the Christian consensus to stop fighting
what now seems obvious. Depth of
sincerity and degrees of confidence are not tests for truth. To those who are keen on the discoveries of
astrophysicists between the year 1900 and today, the question of whether the
universe is either 6,000 years old or if it is over 11 billion years old is in
the same category of the question of whether the earth is flat or basically
round. Einstein’s theory of General
Relativity is one of the most scientifically sound and tested theories of the
day. But few Christians even know what
this theory says or how it has been tested.
Just based on the possibility that young-earth creationism is the
current version of what will ultimately prove to be the latest flat-earth
theory endorsed by the anti-scientific Church, the question of long creation
days deserves reconsideration.
There are books and chapters devoted
to the debate of what a Yom is. I am not
trying to reproduce them. Instead I’ll
offer only a little teaser, a succinct bit by Hugh Ross from a short pamphlet
entitled How Long were the Genesis 1
Creation Days?
What
does the Bible mean by “day?” Genesis 1
declares that God miraculously created Earth, life, and mankind in six
“days.” Were these 24-hour days or long
time periods? To answer this question,
it is important to examine the meaning of yom,
the Hebrew word translated day. Like the
English word day, yom has multiple literal meanings. It can refer to the time between sunrise and
sunset, a portion of daylight, a 24-hour period, or a longer but finite time
period. All these are appropriate
translations. . . The six major stages
of creation were represented by the six days.
No rule of Hebrew grammar requires that yom must be interpreted as a 24
hour period. Given the purpose of
Genesis 1, the content of other creation passages in the Bible, and the fact
that over forty instances in the Old Testament use yom to refer to a period
longer than a 24-hour day—to interpret the Genesis days as long periods of time
seems reasonable and appropriate.
Moreover, the only word in biblical Hebrew that could be used to refer
to a long finite period of time is yom.
Some
people argue that the “evening and morning” statement at the end of each
creation “day” proves they were 24-hour periods. However, the Hebrew words for “evening” And
“morning” have multiple meanings. The
Hebrew word for evening, ‘ereb, can mean the beginning of darkness; dusk,
twilight, or nightfall; closing, ending or completion. The Hebrew word for morning, boqer, can mean
the breaking forth of light; dawn, daybreak, or morning; dawning, becoming, or
origin. Thus, a perfectly acceptable
translation of this phrase is the ending of one time period and the beginning
of another. Daniel 8:26 uses the
“evening and morning” phrase this way.
The passage describes a vision that clearly covers many years. This scriptural usage indicates that this
phrase can refer to a long period of time.
Further
support for long time periods comes from the events of the sixth creation
“day.” Genesis 1 states after the land
animals were created, God created Adam and Eve.
Genesis 2 indicates Adam worked the garden, named the animals, and
experienced his “aloneness before Eve was created.” These activities would likely take weeks,
months, even years to complete. Upon
seeing Eve, Adam remarked “Happa’am,” an expression meaning, “at long last.”
This teaser is not meant to be a
silver bullet to end arguments. It is
meant to introduce. If it whets the appetite
for fuller argumentation, further reading can be pursued using the links I’ve
included at the end of this rethink.
In my process of rethinking, the most
serious young-earth creationist rebuttal argument to what Ross says would sound
something like:
The "days of creation" referred
to in II Peter and in Psalms were literal and did not span eons of time. The
Hebrew word for day, yom, can mean a long period of time. However, if it's
qualified in the Hebrew with an ordinal number-first, second, third, fourth,
fifth-it always means a regular day. In Genesis 1, the evening and the morning
are the first day. The evening and the morning are the second day. In the
Hebrew it was qualified every time. Any Hebrew scholar will tell you that it
really means "days."
I have struggled with this argument
more than any other component of it. I
still am not fully at ease with my rethought conclusions, to be honest. Several Hebrew scholars I respect hold that
Yom should be read as a 24 hour, literal day.
But other equally respectable Hebrew scholars are open to the
possibility that it can legitimately be understood as periods of time. After my attempts at listening to both sides
and rethinking the matter, I now think that it would be more proper to say:
most Hebrew scholars would tend to
say the normal and most natural and most preferred meaning of Yom when so
“qualified” would probably be a literal 24 hour day
most respectable Hebrew scholars
would admit (if pressed) that there is not any inviolable grammatical rule in
Hebrew which absolutely insists that it must be read as a literal 24 hour
day.
But the first crowbar which began to
slowly pry open my closed mind to the possibility that a Yom could truly mean
either a day or a finite period of time came from one of the most respected
Hebrew scholars of our century. In the
late 1970s and early 1980s, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy met
to try to establish a conservative, evangelical consensus on the inerrancy of
the Bible in the face of encroachment of liberal and neo-orthodox challenges
that the Bible (especially Genesis) was full of scientific and historical
error. In 1982 the scholars and
theologians listened to papers read by young-earth creationist Henry Morris
(who was not a Hebrew scholar) and by Gleason Archer (professor of Semitic
languages and culture), deliberated for hours on the question of literal 24
hour days, and judged that adherence to six-consecutive twenty-four-hour
literal days was not essential to believe in the Bible as inerrant. Other very respectable Hebrew scholars (e.g.,
Walter Kaiser) could be cited since that time as admitting room for variance in
the semantic parameters of yom, even in combination with qualifiers. Both Westminster Seminary and the PCA
denomination—neither of which have reputations for compromising with the forces
of theological liberalism--set some of their top scholars to try to come to
conclusions on the matter and they both concluded that we should be open to
both interpretations as legitimate.
So I have begun to think. . .
linguistically speaking, there is no
persuasive objection to considering the Genesis 1 yom to be a period of time
one is not challenging the inerrancy
of the Bible by considering the Genesis 1 yom to be a period of time.
Beyond that as my understanding of
Genesis as a narrative matured, and my understanding of the genre of the
narrative began, it has begun to seem more natural to take the first twelve
chapters of Genesis are a fast-moving overview of all history prior to Abraham. Everything in Genesis 1 through Genesis 12
seems to be like watching a story in fast-forward. We’re getting highlights of important things
in rapid succession. It’s like a preface
that sets the stage for the story of Abraham.
With Abraham the story slows down.
This notion makes me inclined to feel that as a literary device, the
part of Genesis 1, set in place among all the chapters of Genesis and treated
as a whole, has a natural reading of a condensed overview in fast forward. The natural reading to me is that long
periods of time are summarily compressed into days as a literary device. These are events that really happened in real
history; they are not myth. And I
believe the sequence of events is right—amazingly right. It seems not unnatural that a poetic and
picturesque language would use “day” and “morning and evening” as non-literal
literary devices in such a context.
Another way of getting around the
obvious appearance of old age of the universe which I heard often and had to
rethink was the appearance-of-age theory.
This theory basically suggests that just as God presumably created Adam
with the appearance of age, so too God may have created the universe to have
the appearance of age. So the lights
which our eyes are seeing tonight from stars that are millions of light-years
away aren’t actually millions of years old.
God created those stars 6000 years ago and placed photons so close to
our earth that they’re really only taking 5000 years or so to reach us. There are many possible ways to treat this
possibility. One difficultly with it
which is that maybe God created the entire universe two seconds ago and created
memories to fool me into thinking what I remember actually happened in the past
when it really did not. This is all
simply not helpful to me. If one is
possible, so is the other. And then I
might as well just start assuming that reality is just in my mind and being
created in my mind afresh every second.
So, again, this is not a helpful angle for me.
Another related difficulty with this
appearance-of-age theory is that if I am expected to distrust the data that
comes to my senses for my mind to make sense of—data like starlight from stars
that are millions of light-years away but were only created 6000 years ago—then
I am not able to trust other sensory data—like the light which bounces off of
the page of my English translation of Genesis 1 and into my eyes which my mind
then tries to make sense of. I can’t
play the first game without being consistent and calling the second a game
too. If the appearance of light from
stars doesn’t really reflect reality, then light from pages of a Bible can’t be
trusted either.
There is a real element of Plato
versus Aristotle here then?
This gives a sense of how my rethinking
led me to where I’m at today. Feel free
to email me at if you would like to encourage me to rethink this matter
further.
Should Bible-believing Christians let
this matter divide them?
Is this what Rabbi Sha’ul warned his paduan
Timothy about so pedantically in the letters known as 1st and 2nd
Timothy?
. . . he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in
controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious
talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between men of corrupt mind,
who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to
financial gain. . . Warn them before God against
quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen.
. . Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid
arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord's servant must
not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.
Those who oppose him he must gently instruct. . . .
If you would like to rethink the
matter further, perhaps consider the following books and links.
Books:
The
Genesis Debate : Three Views on the Days of Creation (Paperback)
by J.
Ligon Duncan III (Author), David
W. Hall (Author), Hugh
Ross (Author), Gleason
L. Archer (Author), Lee
Irons (Author), Meredith
G. Kline (Author), David
G. Hagopian (Editor)
The topic: the meaning of
the word day as used in Genesis 1. The exchange begins with J. Ligon Duncan,
III, and David W. Hall, who present their case for interpreting the
"days" as six sequential twenty-four-hour periods. Second, Ross and
Archer make a case for interpreting the creation days as six sequential long
time spans. Lee Irons and Meredith G. Kline present the view that the days in
Genesis provide a non-sequential literary framework. Each team then responds to
the others' views.
A
Matter of Days: Resolving a Creation Controversy (Paperback)
by Hugh
Ross
Jobe
Martin?
Links (both sides of the debate):
·
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/j_p_moreland_age_of_earth.shtml
·
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/starlight_koukl.shtml
·
http://www.reasons.org/resources/fff/2001issue07/index.shtml#fossil_lines
·
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/notable_leaders/index.shtml
·
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/pca_creation_study_committee_report.shtml
·
http://www.wts.edu/news/creation.html
·
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/0823ross_full.asp
·
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/docs/TJv16n1_Gen_Debate.pdf
---Boneyard---
It could be argued that the six
creation days encompass the creation of the entire universe, the formation of
the earth, and the creation of life. Or
it could arguably be a description of the preparation of the earth for life
followed by the creation of life.
I say “something” here because I
don’t believe there is enough data in the text for even a skilled Hebrew
scholar to press out great detail about what it can and cannot mean. I urge great caution in attempting to figure
out how God did what he did. I prefer to
say “something” because I do not want to “go beyond what is written.”
Ambiguity? On the first day when light was introduced
into darkness, what can this mean? Could
it refer to a creation event of the entire universe in an initial form readily
described as “light?” Perhaps “light”
here could encompass the entire spectrum of electro-magnetic wavelengths of
radiation. Perhaps not. Perhaps “light” could serve as a suitable
term for the pre-atomic state of what we today recognize as “matter.” Perhaps not.
Perhaps instead it could mean that God ignited the sun (triggering the
powerful fusion process which now sends its light to our planet in a journey
that takes about eighteen minutes) and set the rotation of the earth in
relation to the earth’s sun. Perhaps
not. Perhaps it could instead mean that
from the standpoint of observation on the earth’s surface, God made it so that
light from the already long-burning sun could finally pierce the atmosphere of
the already spinning planet. Perhaps
not. These all seem like fairly good
educated guesses to try to make sense of what Moses wrote. But I can see no logical right for anyone to
believe they have left the realm of guessing and actually entered the realm of
firm and confident conclusions. The
similarity and apparently overlap between the first and fourth days should add
to our perplexity.
The only event that seems arguably
grossly out of proper scientific sequence to me is that of the birdlife. Also the emergence of land out of what seems
to sound like a world with a surface only of water is not something I’m
comfortable with trying to make sense of.
But on the whole I’m impressed with how such an ancient (3,500 years
old?) account of creation comes so close to what the modern scientific
consensus would seem to offer regarding the sequence of the same events.
To be fair, there are other theories bible
interpreters have come up with. There are
perhaps as many as sixteen distinct creation theories which attempt to make
sense of Genesis 1.