Yes, indeed it does! Contemporary scholarship is aware of many, many undeniable similarities between historical events, cultural traditions, and even cultic practices (temple construction and ritual) as recorded in the Bible and those recorded in the sometimes-earlier legends of various ancient pagan civilizations. Does this mean that the Biblical material is stolen, copied, or derived from pagan sources? Is the Hebrew Bible copycat literature? If so, should we question the Bible’s inspiration, inerrancy and authority?
The Flood Tablet. This is perhaps the most famous of all cuneiform tablets. It is the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic and describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world. Like Noah, Utnapishtim was forewarned and built an ark to house and preserve living things. After the flood he sent out birds to look for dry land. Photo by Mike Peel.
Which came first?
There may be copying, but it isn’t always clear who copied whom.
Most of you will have either heard or read somewhere that the Genesis Flood story is similar to pagan legends such as the ancient Gilgamesh Flood Myth. Since “everyone knows” that the pagan work is mythological and came first, then “surely the Biblical record must be mythological as well, and so it should not be believed by intelligent people.” The Hebrew Bible is copycat literature, right? Plagiarized!
Did the Babylonian Flood Mythreally precede the writing of Genesis? The pagan myth resides primarily on Tablet 11 (of 12) of the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains gaps (lacunae) but is the most complete version known. This version is dated to the period 1300–1000 BC. Wikipedia claims that this is hundreds of years before Genesis was written, but by conservative Evangelical dating, Genesis can’t have been written any later than around 1406 BC, 40 years after the Exodus, when Moses died. However, earlier Gilgamesh tablets dated to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, 2100–2000 BC seem to contain an abbreviated version of the Flood Myth.
Common Origin?
For me, it isn’t worth quibbling about who scooped the story, because the actual event preceded both the Genesis account and all the flood myths in the world—of which there are a great many. A key reason for the existence of any cultural parallelism was that the different cultures shared a common ancestry.
Although writing began to appear as early as 3200 BC, history and legends were mostly propagated by mouth until well after Ur III. Everyone on earth was descended from Noah, and the story would certainly have spread from Babel along with humanity itself.
According to Ussher, the Flood occurred about (circa) 2350 BC and the Tower of Babel c2200 BC. I think those dates may be just a bit off. History records the 1st Dynasty of Egypt beginning c3100 BC. That had to be years after the Flood, and likely years after the Tower. Sargon the Great (probably Nimrod of the Bible) began ruling from Akkad from c2350 BC, and that would necessarily be some years after the Tower dispersion.
Whatever the dates, knowledge of the Flood would certainly have persisted as cultural lore for hundreds or even thousands of years—dinner-table tales passed from generation to generation.
Perhaps as important is the possibility that the immortal “sons/angels of God” that He placed over the scattered nations would always know of the Flood and would have engineered religious observances that exaggerated their own roles in His cosmos. This is a topic that will be foreign to most of you. I wrote about it in detail in Gods and Demons. Here I will just include one relevant passage:
8 When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God. 9 And his people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, Israel was the line of his inheritance. —Deuteronomy 32:8–9 LXX-B
I would suggest that, instead of viewing such parallels as evidence that Scripture is mythical, it is more productive to view them as evidence that there may be more truth in the pagan writings than previously realized.
What constitutes a myth?
In a short blog I just released a day or two ago, titled Religion vs. Mythology, I endorsed an Egyptologist’s definition of “mythology” as allegorical stories about primordial events, which aren’t necessarily meant to be believed, but are rather intended to convey a particular worldview.
The Biblical Flood story, whether myth or history, is clearly a polemic (a “controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine”—Webster) against pagan flood mythologies. The ubiquity of the mythologies supports belief that the Flood was real. I see nothing in the Biblical story to make me think it is not historically accurate. I’ve written a number of articles on the subject (see, for example, Fountains of the Deep and Ships, Boats, Floats and Arks).
What about creation stories? Like the Flood stories, they are ubiquitous in the ancient world. We observe a universe, in which we all reside. Obviously, it exists, so that ubiquity is not surprising. I believe in causality. If something happens, including creation, then it was caused. I have way less confidence in the idea that the universe just popped up spontaneously, or that it has simply always existed, either on its own or as a bud on a multiverse that has always existed, than in the idea that it was created.
The pagan creation stories are clearly mythology. Is Genesis 1?
The Egyptian creation myth
In my article Genesis 1:1–5, Day 1, I presented an artist’s conception of the Mesopotamian version of creation and described how it also seems to picture the Genesis 1 account. One way that historians differentiate between “religion” and “mythology” is that religion is meant to be believed in all its detail, while mythology is intended to impart lessons or principles, without requiring slavish belief in the story itself. Though I didn’t word it quite this way, what I suggested was in a sense that Genesis 1 deliberately presents a mythological picture, obvious to Moses’ audience, in order to teach the superiority of the God of Israel over the gods of the pagans. By definition, that constitutes a polemic.
Here, I will go into a bit more detail on the specifics of the Egyptian version.
Egyptian version of creation. Note the vaguely organic shapes on “earth” and the stars on “sky”, with the sun suspended in “air”.
In the beginning, there was the Ogdoad, a group of eight frog-headed “primordial gods”, in four pairs (both brother/sister and husband/wife):
Hok and Hoket, whose defining attribute was Formlessness.
Amun and Amunet, whose defining attribute was Invisibility.
Kuk and Kuket, whose defining attribute was Darkness.
Nun and Nunet, whose defining attribute was Fluidity.
As a group, the Ogdoad represents a chaotic state, reminiscent of Genesis 1:2 (“without form, and void (or hidden), and darkness on the face of the waters“).
Out of this watery chaos rose a primordial hill, on which stood Atum, from whom all else arose. He created himself and is the father of Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture).
Shu and Tefnut had two children, Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). This pair is pictured above wearing brown and blue, respectively. In some versions, their father, Shu, is jealous of the incestuous relationship of Geb and Nut and has squeezed himself in between them—”air” between “earth” and “sky.”
Moving beyond the creation of the cosmos, Shu and Tefnut have four children, the pairs Isis and Osiris (the good guys) and Seth (evil) and Nephis (good).
Genesis 1 in the Bible clearly describes the same cosmos as the Egyptian version (and those of other ancient pagan cultures). Clearly, the Bible teaches that the God we worship is Creator of all that exists. To me, that is indisputable. But at the same time, the description presented in Genesis 1 is too much like the pagan myths (but with Yahveh replacing all the pagan gods) and too little like the universe we live in to be taken literally. I would describe it as a polemic against the pagan versions, presented allegorically, like prophetic vision and Jesus’ parables.
The Bible’s use of non-Biblical sources
Still scandalized that the Bible stoops to make use of non-Biblical sources?
In the same way that modern scholarly writers frequently cite earlier sources, so did the Biblical writers. As I mentioned in some detail in Gods and Demons (under “Source Materials”), there are some 100 Biblical references to non-canonical sources actually cited by name by the Scriptural writers. A list can be found on Wikipedia.
Since few of these are now extant, you will often hear them referred to as “lost books of the Bible.” This terminology is unfortunate because it implies that they are inspired works that have somehow slipped through the cracks of history. Not so—I’m pretty sure that if God cared enough to oversee their writing in the first place, He would have protected them from loss.
But what if some of those lost writings were inspired? Then I’m quite comfortable assuming that they were written for a specific time and/or place in history and are no longer relevant. I refuse to waste my energy speculating on possibilities like that since it is all in God’s hand.
Another “but”: If inspired text references other writings, shouldn’t we consider them as inspired as well? Consider the following, for example,
[19] Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel. —1 Kings 14:19 (ESV)
What this tells me is that the Biblical writers researched their material. It wasn’t merely whispered in their ears by the Holy Spirit. When Christian writers today cite Josephus, they are acknowledging that he was a 1st Century historian who had access to sources that are now unavailable. We believe that Josephus was mostly pretty accurate, so we use what he says where it makes sense, even though we know that (a) he did make occasional demonstrably incorrect statements; and (b) he did write with certain political biases, for a Roman audience. When we cite him without qualification, we are endorsing (at least provisionally) the material applicable to our own work, but not at all the rest of his writings. When a Biblical writer does the same, we aren’t to think that the source material is infallible, just that the Holy Spirit has infallibly endorsed the ideas gleaned from it.
Another use of the term “lost books of the Bible” is in reference to the so-called deuterocanonical (“second canon”) books. These include the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books found, for example, in Catholic bibles. Also sometimes included are various “gospels” that some folks think should be regarded as canon. They are not “lost” in the sense of being non-extant. All I’ll say about these is that many good books have been written about the selection of Christian canon, and I’m happy to take the position that the Church Fathers did the best possible job in setting the official canon. Though there is much I think can be learned from these sources regarding historical and cultural issues, and common beliefs that were held by ancient peoples, I agree that they cannot be considered inerrant.
The Bible also contains a number of actual quotations from extrabiblical sources like the Book of 1 Enoch. That a non-canonical source was quoted does not mean that the source was Spirit-inspired, only that the Spirit approved the material from that source that was used by the Biblical author. That a passage from 1 Enoch was quoted by Jude and Peter likewise does not imply that the Book of 1 Enoch was inspired; but it does invest the quoted passage with a “seal of authenticity.” In other words, Jude and Peter were inspired in their restating of the quoted words.
I think that we sometimes err in not paying enough attention to such quoted material. Consider, for example,
14 It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, 15 to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” —Jude 1:14–15 ESV
Jude may be the most underrated book of the Bible. At first glance it seems to have a very simple theme: In times past, and still today, God condemns heresy and wickedness. We are familiar with most of the historical examples of bad behavior given in Jude. Most studies treat them as simple examples of sinful humanity. I think there is way more to it than that. Pending a future blog on the subject, I’m just going to state now that the verses quoted above can’t be understood without also reading the source material, which in this case is still available.
Before getting into this, I’ve been asked why I keep alienating my friends by harping on a version of Creationism that most of them consider to be unbiblical. I can respond to that in several ways:
First, I’m not really “harping” on it at all. This is a multipart series that I’ve planned for quite a while, to replace something I did years ago. I’ve still got two or three chapters to write before I’m finished with it. I did the same thing with my series on The Jewish Feasts.
I’ve been vitally interested in both theology and astrophysics since, literally, my pre-teen years. I write about what interests me most.
I don’t consider that one’s interpretation of Genesis 1 is a “fundamental of the faith“, but many of my friends do, and I am convinced that the currently mandatory “Genesis Flood Theory” is an unnecessary stumbling block for many lost souls.
Although many wonderful Christians would refuse to fellowship with me because I’m not a Young Earth Creationist, I don’t feel the same about them; but I suppose I’d like to convince them that I’m “righter than they are.”
As stated below, “With respect to the question of Creation, the central, foundational Truth of all Scripture is that the One, True, Eternal, Triune God, by His own power, created and sustains all else that exists in the cosmos.“
Moving on…
My views are driven by several axioms:
God is both omnipotent and sovereign, so He can do whatever He wants to do, however He wants to do it!
The Bible, as originally written, is the inerrant, irrevocable,Word of God.
The Bible we now possess (at least insofar as the accepted canonical books are concerned) is substantially the same holy Word as the originals, but subject to a very limited extent to human error in translation and interpretation.
Correct interpretation (exegesis) of Scripture requires a consistent hermeneutic, which among other factors, includes recognition that some scripture is not meant to be taken literally, as discussed in the next section in relation to The Golden Rule of Biblical Interpretation.
A consistent hermeneutic also must require recognition of the cultural background of both the writer and the ancient reader.
Though Holy Scripture is as valid and vital today as it ever was, correct interpretation demands unequivocally that modern culture and tradition not be anachronistically imposed on the writers and readers of the day in which they were written.
Because God is not a liar or an author of confusion, we must recognize that the testimony of God’s Word cannot conflict with the testimony of His Created World when both are rightly understood.
Hermeneutics and the Golden Rule of Biblical Interpretation
“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”–Dr. David L. Cooper (1886-1965), founder of The Biblical Research Society
The above quote is known by many expositors as “The Golden Rule of Biblical Interpretation.” I read somewhere that this has often been shortened to “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense, lest it result in nonsense.”
Implicit in the above is the assumption that the “plain sense of Scripture” sometimes does not seem to make sense. Certainly, when that is the case, you must first question your own common sense, but that doesn’t always solve the problem.
Few conservative Bible scholars believe that every word of Scripture is meant to be understood literally.
That is troubling to many, because the alternative opens the door to subjectivism and arbitrary conclusions. Yet almost all the great conservative Bible commentators practice a hermeneutic (a set of formal principles for Biblical interpretation) that allow for non-literal text, including parables, figures of speech, anthropomorphism, poetic exaggeration, and a host of other confusing factors. Not to mention translational difficulties.
None of that subtracts from the central truth that “all Scripture is God-breathed.” It is axiomatic to me that the Bible is inerrant in its original language and the original manuscripts. Yet some folks read my opinions, especially respecting emotional themes like creation, and make snide comments like, “So you believe it’s inerrant except when it isn’t!”
So, to clarify, I don’t think there are any substantive problems with corruption of our Scriptures over the millennia. There are, however, problems with translation, but few of those are impossible to unravel, with sufficient attention to the linguistic and cultural background of the inspired humans who penned the words, and those to whom the words were written.
There are also “mysteries.” Most Evangelicals are happy to admit that Paul revealed things hidden within Scripture that were mysteries with respect to the New Testament Church. The Church itself being one of the chief mysteries! The dual advents of Messiah are another mystery now revealed. Yet many seem unwilling to consider that some things are still mysterious.
What I consider to be the biggest factor of all that contributes to doctrinal confusion and infighting in the Church is that some misinterpretations are imbedded into a nearly impenetrable wall of tradition.
Unfortunately, the reason there are so many Christian denominations in the world, and the reason they often have so much trouble getting along, is that each has its own particular list of what constitutes “axiomatic and fundamental truths.” For example, I was brought up in a “fundamentalist” sub-denomination of Baptists that teaches there is no such thing as a universal Church of all believers; only local churches are Biblical. To them this is an axiomatic and non-negotiable Truth, based in part on the simple fact that the Greek word translated “church” is ecclesia, which literally means “assembly.” After all, how can people scattered across the world and across many ages possibly assemble together?
With respect to the question of Creation, the central, foundational Truth of all Scripture is that the One, True, Eternal, Triune God, by His own power, created and sustains all else that exists in the cosmos.
That fact is stated clearly and concisely in just one verse: Genesis 1:1.
As for what that process looked like and how we should interpret Genesis 1:2–2:3, I regard that as still a mystery.
A 6,000-year-old universe and the Genesis Flood Theory of today’s Young Earth Creationists does not meet the commonsense test, not because God can’t do whatever He wants, but because the clear evidence of centuries of careful observation and analysis by very smart and dedicated professionals, both Christians and otherwise, can’t be ignored. God is not the Author of Confusion. He doesn’t plant lies in front of our face to test our faith.
Moreover, the universe is demonstrably dynamic, changing over time even as we observe. That isn’t “evolution”, it’s simply the application of forces and interactions decreed by God. We understand the physics of supernovae (the implosion of giant stars) and we observe them happening. We understand the process of star formation, and we see examples of every stage of that process. We can’t see the movement of stars and galaxies, but we can measure their movements using Doppler shift, similar to the clocking of a speeding car.
Limitations of Science
When I was young, scientific method was viewed as a simple, 3-step process:
State a hypothesis.
Form a tentative theory.
“Prove” the theory, which then becomes a law.
But so many of the “laws” found under that paradigm have been subsequently found to be limited in scope (for example, Newton’s laws of motion are now known to be invalid for very large and very small masses), that the paradigm has changed:
Now, hypotheses still become tentative theories, but once a theory has become so well proved that it is accepted as true by most authorities on the subject, it still doesn’t get promoted to “law”. That is why it is utterly meaningless to say that “The Big Bang Theory” is just a theory!
Scientists now look for certain characteristics of a theory to judge how “well established” it is:
Obviously, the more evidence supports a theory, and the less that appears to contradict it, the stronger it becomes. This evidence may be experimental, or it may be observational. If it is statistical in nature, then the results must be well within a recognized margin of error.
To be considered a truly “scientific“, a theory must be judged to be “falsifiable.” That means that for all practical purposes, if there is no conceivable way that a theory can ever be proven false, then it must remain speculative in the minds of those who are not predisposed to take it on faith. This principle is the tool of choice for those who wish to exclude all discussion of religion, or “Intelligent Design“, as an alternative explanation.
For a theory to become intrenched as factual, it is also necessary for it to successfully produce demonstrably true predictions, by means either of observation, logical arguments, or mathematics.
The strongest theories are those that can be expressed by mathematics, because mathematics is the only truly “exact science“. Two plus two always equals four in our base 10 number system. The circumference of a circle divided by its diameter always equals pi (3.1415926…) in a Euclidean frame of reference.
Proving the Bible
Something I see online over and over again online is well-meaning Christians exclaiming over interesting archaeological finds that, “They prove that the Bible is correct.” No, they don’t! Science will never prove Scripture, and that is by God’s design, because He wants us to live by faith, not by sight. The most that science can do for us is to confirm the faith that God has already supplied to us.
At the same time, if we are worried that science will contradict our faith, then our faith is weak to begin with!
God has written of Himself in both Scripture and creation. The purpose of science is to help us understand creation. Embrace it!
Moses was a prophet!
According to Scripture, Moses was the greatest prophet of all times, other than Jesus. He didn’t personally see any of the events of Genesis, so how did he know what to write? Both the Old and New Testament contain numerous references to non-canonical source writings. Moses himself references The Book of the Wars of the Lord (no longer extant) in Numbers 21:14, which recorded some contemporary events, but I know of no sources that he could have used for events prior to the invention of writing. He could have gotten his information only from God. After-the-fact prophecy, so to speak.
How was that information communicated to him? Perhaps verbally, because we know that he and God talked to each other directly. Having nothing concrete to go by, I personally assume that from Genesis 11:10 forward, Moses’ inspiration was primarily verbal.
Verses 10–32 of chapter 11 constitute one of eleven so-called toledoth in Genesis. These primarily genealogical blocks of Scripture were included by Moses and are believed to be intended as section dividers.
Because the first 11+ chapters of Genesis consist of abbreviated, flowery accounts of earthshaking historical events, I see them as poetic discourse, a different genre from what follows. For that reason, I suspect that these chapters were conveyed, at least in part, via visions or dreams. There is a theological label for prophetic visions of past events: Preterism. A “full preterist” believes that all prophecy describes the past, in effect dismissing the possibility that prophets could foretell the future. I am far, far from that position! I am a “partial preterist” in that I refuse to dismiss the possibility that God can also reveal the unseen past to his prophets.
Typically, prophets preached and reported the content of visions and dreams, but not necessarily their interpretations.
Previous posts in this series on the topic of creation
In The Hijacking of Creationism, I laid out several of the views that Evangelical scholars have historically held in order to account for the apparent ancient age (13.8 billion years) of the universe. In particular, I focused on The Genesis Flood Theory, and its popularizer, Henry M. Morris. Today, 1/10/2024, I expanded on my bio of Dr. Morris. Yes, I am a little bit brutal with him, but his writings were frequently brutal towards those who disagreed with him.
In Does Science Trump Theology? I explore the intellectual domains covered by the two disciplines, similarities in the two, and how they should work together in Bible interpretation.
In Fountains of the Deep I draw on my own geological engineering background to present what I believe to be the most likely mechanism of the Genesis Flood. This mechanism is unlikely to have caused the distortion of the earth’s surface that followers of Morris demand. Incidentally, the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe is as firmly rooted in astrophysics and cosmology as the 4.54-billion-year age of earth is in geology. One of these days I’d like to hear a Young Earth Creationist explain how the Genesis Flood accounts for the cosmologic appearance of age.
In Geology a Flood Cannot Explain I randomly describe, from my own professional knowledge, a number of well-known geological features on earth that absolutely could not have been affected by a flood of any magnitude.
Fluid Mechanics courses for civil engineers are mostly irrelevant to understanding of the Genesis Flood, because they focus primarily on hydrostatics (forces exerted by water pressure on fixed structures like dams and canal locks), and laminar flow in engineered open channels and pipes. To the extent that they cover turbulent flow in natural channels like riverbeds, the primary interest is erosion of friable soils, sands and gravels. Before erosion can occur in solid rock, weathering must first break the rock down into smaller pieces, which is a process which usually takes years, if not centuries or longer. [I explore this fact in a post, Geology and the Saudi Sinai, part of a series on false evidence for believing that “the real Mt. Sinai” is in Saudi Arabia.]
Revisiting Genesis 1
I would like to take another look at the first few verses of Genesis 1 to present some ideas that you may not have considered before.
Prologue: Gen 1:1–5
Below, I present three very legitimate translations. The first is from an Evangelical favorite, the English Standard Version (ESV). The second is from the Jewish Publication Society (JPS). The third is from a new work, The Hebrew Bible, translated by Robert Alter over a 30-year period. Alter is a modernist, and not someone I would look to for dogma or Christian commentary, but from reading his books, I am convinced that he is, to his core, a top authority on Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern literature. I don’t believe that his translations are colored by any sectarian presuppositions, and that makes him my top comparator while trying to separate what the Hebrew Bible says from what tradition claims that it says.
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. — Genesis 1:1-5 (ESV)
1 When God began to create heaven and earth— 2 the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water— 3 God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day. — Genesis 1:1-5 (JPS)
1 When God began to create heaven and earth, 2 and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, 3 God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He Called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day. — Genesis 1:1-5 (Alter)
Before considering the difficulties posed by creation of light on “Day 1” (verses 3–5), we first need to consider verses 1 and 2.
Verse 1: I think that the ESV Study Bible, with a couple amendments, states the interpretive problem in verse 1 fairly well:
[Verse 1] can be taken as a summary, introducing the whole passage; or it can be read as the first event, the origin of the heavens and the earth (sometime [on or] before the first day), including the creation of matter[, energy], space, and time. This second view (the origin of the heavens and the earth) is confirmed by the NT writers’ affirmation that creation was from nothing (Heb. 11:3; Rev. 4:11). … Heavens and the earth here means “everything.” This means, then, that “In the beginning” refers to the beginning of everything. The text indicates that God created everything in the universe, which thus affirms that he did in fact create it ex nihilo (Latin “out of nothing”). The effect of the opening words of the Bible is to establish that God, in his inscrutable wisdom, sovereign power, and majesty, is the Creator of all things that exist. — Dennis, Lane T. and Wayne Grudem, eds., The ESV Study Bible. Accordance electronic edition, version 2.0. Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2008 (emphasis added, my additions are in brackets).
Probably half of the sources I use assume that verse 1 is a summary for what follows, ignoring the fact that none of what follows explicitly mentions the origins of the earth as a rocky planet covered by water. This view necessarily assumes that God created the individual building blocks (sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules, and the forces that bind them) concurrently with forming them into the finished product. This is not outrageous but leads to a crucial contradiction which I will discuss below—namely that light is produced by matter, and is a manifestation of electromagnetism, which is an essential binding force.
The other half of my sources take the “first event” approach. Most of those place verse 1 on day 1. If you take it prior to day 1, then you more or less put yourself potentially in the “Gap Theory” camp, which I have occupied, but which is anathema to Young Earth Creationists because it can imply death before The Fall. I’ll save my comments on that objection for another post in this series. Unfortunately, this view is subject to the same contradiction regarding electromagnetic binding.
The ESVSB contention that “[the] Heavens and the earth … means ‘everything’” assumes that the wording of the Scripture is a merism, a figure of speech that encompasses the first element, the last element, and everything in between. This assumption is not provable, but rather can only be taken on faith—which I do. It is a figure of speech used frequently in the Bible.
The term “the heavens” is hashamayim in Hebrew. It is a plural form and is usually rendered as such in translations. Up to seven heavens were recognized in ancient literature, but most scholars today differentiate between just three heavens:
The atmosphere around and above us.
The cosmos beyond earth’s atmosphere.
The heavenly realm inhabited by God and his host.
I would rather prefer a more general statement that the term “heavens” means everything above the surface of earth: As explained below, Moses and his readers would have envisioned several elements:
The sky of air and birds.
A solid dome (the “firmament“) from which hang the suspended sun, moon and stars.
An ocean above, connected at the edges to the ocean below, and held up by the dome, (KJV, “firmament”).
The home of God and His Divine Host.
The first event view is supported in particular by the JPS and Alter translations above (“began to create”), which place verse 1 at the beginning of what might be interpreted as a string of creation events, those described in the remainder of the chapter, and anything subsequent.
Verse 2: In verse 2, there are actually four separate interpretive issues, which I will gloss over here:
“Without form (or formless) and void” and other translations, such as Alter’s “welter and waste.” The Hebrew, tohu wabohu, is linguistically of limited use to our understanding, because its usage in literary history is insufficient to allow a definite interpretation. Guesses range from “total chaos” to “undeveloped and unpopulated.” Halter deliberately chose his alliterative nouns to emulate the poetic language of the Hebrew rather than to take a position on precise meaning. Whatever the meaning here, I have generally pictured the state of the planet as an earth totally covered by water and shrouded in mist, which works very well with a Gap Theory and a flooded earth. However, I’ll mention another (better?) view below.
“Darkness.” The Hebrew choshek can mean things like darkness (perhaps because light is absent), or obscurity because light has been masked or reflected away. Again, obscurity works best with Gap Theories, but see below.
“The Deep.” The Hebrew tehom means either the deep sea, or the deep source waters of terrestrial springs which were viewed as interconnected with each other and with the sea (see Fountains of the Deep, where I discuss this in some detail).
“The Spirit of God“, “a wind from God”, or “God’s breath.” The Hebrew ruach, can mean any of these things, and probably means all of them here. See God with the Wind for an in-depth discussion.
The overwhelming problem with Light on Day 1:
The definition of light
Just what is “light”, anyway? If you think of it as simply, “the absence of dark”, then you are way off base—it’s the other way around. As a noun, “dark” denotes a concept (the absence of light), rather than a tangible thing. “Light” is something very real and specific. I suspect that all of my readers have had enough education to realize that light is electromagnetic energy. All of you will no doubt have seen some version of a spectrum diagram:
The problem is that most folks have a tendency to think of visible light as something that is fundamentally different from the rest of the spectrum, because our vision only detects wavelengths in a narrow band between about 400 and 700 nanometers. But the wavelength of electromagnetic energy is really an expression of how energetic the wave is. X-rays and gamma rays are fundamentally the same thing as visible light, just more energetic. Radio waves, radar, and microwaves are fundamentally the same thing as visible light, just less energetic. All of these things are emitted by matter, travel at roughly 186,000 mps as waves, and are detected in the form of massless particles called photons.
So, if God literally created light on a literal Day 1, did He create just visible light, or the entire spectrum? If He just created visible light, then I have to ask, “visible to whom?” Humans all differ slightly in their light sensitivity. Bats, most amphibians, and many fish and insects see well into the infrared. Many species of insects, fish, and even mammals (including dogs and cats) can see into the ultraviolet. Using instrumentation, humans can now “see” all wavelengths of electromagnetism.
And what do we even count as visible to a normal human? Sunlight reaching Earth’s surface on a sunny day is around 52 to 55 percent infrared, 42 to 43 percent visible light, and 3 to 5 percent ultraviolet. A biologist might say that “visible” means detectable using only our eyes, but we also detect longer and shorter wavelengths with other organs.
On the long-wave side of the spectrum, infrared (“below red”) is felt as heat on our skin; microwaves can penetrate skin, and if powerful enough, could even boil the water in blood and cells near the surface; and even longer UHF and VHF radio waves have been documented to set up resonant vibrations in structures like teeth with metallic fillings.
On the short-wave side of the spectrum, ultraviolet (“above violet”), which can cause sunburn and later melanoma; x-rays penetrate completely through our bodies and can cause damage to inner organs over time or can cause or kill cancers; unshielded gamma rays can cause catastrophic damage to human bodies.
Contrary to the diagram above, cosmic rays are not primarily light or even electromagnetic energy in any sense, but rather are characterized by alpha and beta particles (helium nuclei and protons) traveling at close to the speed of light, and thus possessing some of the same quantum properties as light.
The source of light
Light that reaches us from the sun is largely in the range of visible and near-visible light, but it starts out in the sun’s reactive core as gamma rays, high energy (short wavelength) byproducts of nuclear fusion. These gamma rays begin a “random walk” out of the sun’s core and through its conduction zone, repeatedly colliding with particles in the dense surrounding soup of hydrogen and helium ions, changing directions randomly, over and over again, and gradually losing energy (thus shifting to more benign longer wavelengths). Eventually, after something like 100,000 to a million years, they reach the sun’s surface and fly off in all directions at the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second.
Structure of the sun, from theuniverse-michael-lawson.weebly.com
An even more important consideration (mentioned above) is that, in the universe God created, electromagnetic energy (let me just call it “light” here, for brevity) is always associated with matter. There are a number of ways that light can be generated, but it always begins with matter. I’ll mention a possible exception below, under the heading “sh’kinah“, but for now, I’m talking about the light that all of us experience.
It is worth mentioning that all light is invisible until it strikes a detector. If you are in an empty, dark place and someone shines a flashlight past you, you may see the glowing source, but you will not see any trace of the beam, which consists only of a jiggling electromagnetic field, unless it strikes an air or dust molecule and reflects into your eye.
Most light in the universe is generated by stars like our sun, but all matter generates light, usually much less energetic than stellar gamma rays but still light, even if it is well below our range of sight. The human retina is populated by several types of light receptor: “cones” for detecting color when the light intensity is strong enough, and “rods” for detecting black and white in low light situations. My cat, Anna, can see me very well in a darkened (but not totally dark) room, because her retinas are mostly populated by “rods”.
Matter that is not heated to a glow, still generates heat, and that heat energy is radiated as light in the infrared region. If raised to a high enough temperature, the energy of the radiated light will eventually climb into the visible region, first red, and when hot enough, all the way to the blue side of the spectrum.
[Note: This is why the red and blue markings on faucets and automobile heater controls are so confusing and counterintuitive to me. To any scientist and most engineers, it should be red for cold and blue for hot, in spectral order.]
I took the photo of Anna, below, using an infrared sensor. The color isn’t real. The sensor’s pixels map the wavelengths of the infrared light in the scene and use an algorithm to determine the temperature that the pixel is “seeing”. False color is then added to encode it, as per the scale on the left. The warmest parts of the photo are her eyes, about 96°F. Next warmest is her face, followed by her tummy and legs. Her cold nose and the thick fur on her back and tail matches the cooler temperatures of the table she’s lounging on and the room to the right. The blue areas, our front door and glazed side panels, are quite cold. It was winter, and the windows here are single-glazed and very poor insulators.
In this photo, the small amount of heat registered from the window is a combination of heat from Anna and the room itself, being reflected back towards my sensor, heat generated by the window glass itself, and heat from outside conducted (see below) through the glass and woodwork.
All matter generates heat provided that its temperature is above absolute zero (−459.67°F). In the presence of any heat at all, the sub-atomic particles in atoms and molecules vibrate. The quantum mechanical mechanism causing this is beyond my scope here, but that vibration causes a release of energy in the form of heat. Heat energy is propagated in one or more of three ways:
Conduction – If two objects are touching each other, then the heat stored in the hotter will flow to the cooler (that’s the “first law of thermodynamics”).
Convection – In a gas or liquid, heat energy from a hot container will flow to the fluid by conduction and then the heated fluid will rise, setting up a convection current in the liquid.
Radiation – Whether or not either of the above occur, there will always be some heat flow in the form of electromagnetic radiation. To me, that is light, whether I can see it or not!
Absolute zero is theoretically unobtainable, because an object at absolute zero would cease all motion, including vibrations within the nucleus and movement of the electrons. All liquids and gasses (including the atmosphere) at this temperature would immediately solidify and collapse to a dense, inert lump, which I don’t believe describes the condition of earth in Genesis 1:2.
This is why I think that it would make no sense for light to have been created subsequent to the creation of matter in Genesis 1:1, whether you interpret that as a summary or a first event.
Since light is so intimately connected with matter, it is unthinkable to me that light would have come first.
Verses 4 and 5 are also difficult for me to accept in a literal sense. “Day and night” are conceptual nouns, and night simply refers to the shadow caused on one side of earth as it rotates away from the sun. But the sun isn’t created until Day 4. Some would say that this verse is where God created time. But time, as now understood by physicists, is part of the fabric of the universe itself (see Implications of God’s Omnipresence and Eternity in Space-Time).
sh’kinah
God’s own sh’kinah is also a light source, and one not connected with matter. It is the light source that led the Israelites out of Egypt, that lit up the top of Mt. Sinai, that resided in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and later the Temple, and that was described in the visions of several of the prophets.
Some commentators have suggested that God’s sh’kinah is the source of the light that God “created” on Day 1. This is absolutely a possibility, but if true, even if it functioned in exactly the same way as the light that we are familiar with, is it meaningful to say that God “created light” on Day 1 if the light he created was fundamentally different from the light that we know? On Day 4, God assigned the responsibility for light-bearing to the sun, moon and stars. In any case, I think the sh’kinah is one of God’s native characteristics, not a later creation.
“Let there be light…”
The Hebrew for this phase is yehi or. With its many linguistic modifiers, Yehi appears 3,561 times in scripture, so it is well understood. To my knowledge, there is complete agreement on the translation here, “let there be“. I am not aware of any context in which it clearly denotes a creative act. It is like saying, “Hey bub, flip on the light, will ya’?”
Interpreting verses 1:3–2:3
As for me, I don’t think that Genesis 1:3–2:3 can be a literal description of how God created the cosmos, because these verses do not describe the immensely complex universe in which we live!
In The Hijacking of Creationism, I mentioned a number of alternative theories proposed by conservatives to explain this passage, as listed in Millard Erickson’sChristian Theology. Another such list is presented below:
Concordist and Non-Concordist Interpretations of Genesis 1, from an article at biologos.com, “Comparing Interpretations of Genesis 1“, by Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma
The authors of the above table define “concordism” as follows:
In concordist interpretations, God made the earth using the sequence of events described in Genesis 1. In non-concordist interpretations, God created the earth using a different timing and order of events than those described Genesis 1.
According to 19th century theologian, minister and writer, C.I. Schofield, Genesis 1 describes God’s miraculous 6-day rebuilding of an ancient earth after a previous judgement (of earlier humans and/or angelic beings) by inundation. This is a Gap interpretation, from the left side of the table.
What has long intrigued me about Schofield’s Gap Theory is that in the sequence listed, Genesis 1 describes precisely how earth would most likely have recovered from a general flood like that of Noah’s day. If that is true, then both floods were miraculous inundations of the entire planet, and the unnaturally rapid recovery in both cases was also miraculous. This is why I have for years called myself a “gap guy“, or more recently, a “two-flood” guy.
Still, I am no longer adamant about Gap Theory, because it can’t be proven one way or the other, and I don’t share Schofield’s opinion that the judgement leading to the earlier flood was connected to angelic corruption on earth. There is no Biblical evidence of angelic rebellion before Satan appears in the Garden of Eden.
More importantly, after doing extensive study during the last several years in the course of thinking about this series on Creation and another post on Gods and Demons, I feel drawn to a different interpretation that would be much more comprehensible to the people in Moses’ day and well beyond.
A better idea
What was the cultural background?
Regarding the culture of Moses’ day, it is inconceivable that he or his readers would have had the intellectual tools needed to process concepts like mass, energy, the nature of light, or even cosmically vast distances and time scales or a spherical earth.
We tend to think of ancient civilization as a scattering of isolated small city states like Sumer, Akkad, Elam, and even Egypt on the far end of the Fertile Crescent, but they all had a common heritage going back to Babel and even to the Flood.
And even in the distant past there were frequent interactions among peoples. Both war and peace brought people together, either in conquest or in trade. Consequently, there were many similarities between regions, in culture and religion. Though the names and functions of the pagan gods differed somewhat from region to region, there was general agreement about the nature of the world and the duties of the godhead in maintaining its order.
The region that became Israel was part of this milieu. The Israelites were descended from Abraham, who was Mesopotamian. Their later heritage was Canaanite and then Egyptian. The Torah (“Teachings“, the “Five Books of Moses”) that God delivered to His people, had the singular purpose of revealing Himself and His Divine Will to humankind.
In Moses’ day, as in Noah’s and even Jesus’ and beyond, the Israelites shared the beliefs of their Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) neighbors about cosmology (the nature of the heavens and the earth). Though their concept was, of course, deeply flawed, it was functionally adequate for millennia, and it diminished God’s role only in that it ascribed His creation to false creators. The following diagram shows the essence of what was universally accepted as true cosmology in the ANE.
Note that this is also clearly the cosmology described in Genesis 1!
Composite artist’s conception of the Ancient Near Eastern view of cosmology. Source unlisted.
The earth was a roughly disk-shaped island floating on the sea (possibly supported on “the pillars of earth”) and covered with a dome, the “firmament” of KJV. The sea was not only below the earth and feeding its springs (the “fountains of the deep”), but also covered the dome above (the “waters above the firmament”). In some versions the dome was supported at its rim by a ring of mountains (the “pillars of heaven”). The sun and moon traveled across the sky below the dome, sinking into the sea or through doors in the west, and traveling back east through the underworld to rise again. The stars and planets followed fixed grooves beneath the dome. Rain occurred when windows in the dome (the “windows of heaven”) were opened by the gods.
No matter how one interprets Genesis 1, the central issue that had to be addressed by God was that each element in the above diagram was believed to either be a god or goddess, or to be governed by one. And, of course, it was believed that all owed its existence to one or more chief creator gods. Rather than “nothingness” before creation, the cosmos existed, but was in a state of chaos (formlessness, or tohu wabohu, as defined above); thus, creation amounted to bringing order out of disorder.
So, what are my views?
A Genesis 1 alternative that makes total sense to me now is related to historical observations that the Israelites shared the culture and cosmology of the surrounding peoples. The Genesis account and the Bible as a whole condemns the pagan polytheistic connection, but does nothing to dispel the cosmological misconceptions, which were still believed by most cultures, including Israel’s, well into the Christian era.
The chart below displays relationships recognized by many conservative theologians who hold to a literal, Concordist, interpretation of Genesis 1; however, rather than interpreting the chart as an account of literally how God created the physical cosmos, I think it is better understood as a very abbreviated poetic description of the finished product.
From Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, by Deborah B. Haarsma and Loren D. Haarsma
Understood in that way, it becomes one version of a Creation Poem Interpretation of Genesis 1. As such, it is essentially a polemic (a statement argumentatively refuting an opinion or doctrine held by others) against the creation myths of pagan cultures who credit their false gods, who most certainly did not create or rule the cosmos!
The ANE held no conception of infinite time or eternity. They thought no farther back than the initial chaos (compare Genesis 1:2), out of which arose the creator god, who then began to assemble the cosmos from the chaos. Only Yahweh claimed to be eternal and uncreated, and to create ex nihilo.
Whereas modern man sees existence as material in nature, with tangible substance and physical properties, it wasn’t enough for the ancients that something was visible and occupied space—as stated by John H. Walton in Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, it had to first “come into existence” metaphysically by being “separated out as a distinct entity, given a function, and given a name.”
A key insight that I have gleaned from Walton and others who have professionally studied the ANE is that the ancients viewed the ontological nature of the cosmos, i.e., “the nature of that which exists” in terms of function, whereas moderns view it in terms of substance. In other words, when a Big Bang Creationist like me thinks of God’s handiwork, I see mass and energy, bosons and fermions, stars and planets, rocks and trees, etc. A Young Earth Creationist similarly sees a universe of substance. To the ancients, in contrast, the substance of things is only incidental to their functions.
Consequently, I’m beginning to understand that God’s purpose in Genesis 1 was to ignore the misconceptions of the ANE regarding the physical nature of the cosmos, since that was a triviality to pretty much 100% of the population, and to say, in ways they would understand, “I, Yahweh, brought it into being [verse 1] and gave it function [the rest of Genesis 1].”
In this way of thinking,
Days 1 and 4 were about time, seasons, and the cosmic objects that differentiate them;
Days 2 and 5 were about the waters below and above, and about their denizens; and
Days 3 and 6 were about the land and its fecundity.
What point was God then making?
According to Walton, “The records of events in the ancient world were not given so that the reader could reconstruct the event. They were given so that the reader could understand the significance of the past for the present. In that sense, outcomes were more important than the events themselves.”
The pagan creation myth most familiar to modern scholars today is the Enuma Elish, from the Assyrian Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. I’ll close this post with a comparison of Genesis 1 with this pagan document, which I think clearly illustrates God’s point:
From Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, by Deborah B. Haarsma and Loren D. Haarsma
Bibliography
Haarsma, Deborah B., Loren D. Haarsma, Origens: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design,2011, Grand Rapids: Faith Alive Christian Resources.
Walton, John H., Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., 2018, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.
Between research, and then pushing my aging brain to get things “on paper”, my blog posts generally take a long time to write, and I assume a long time for you to read—sorry. My goal with this one is to just go with what I know (or if you disagree, with what I think I know) and knock out something shorter. With maybe a few slightly off-topic thoughts thrown in. Just my ponderings here…
Mathematical Infinity symbol, Pixabay free image.
Infinity is a concept that most people are familiar with and that I have encountered over and over again during my long life, primarily in three contexts: pure mathematics, physics, and theology. Not so much petroleum engineering, my professional field.
Infinity is a useful concept—essential, in some respects—but it is not a real thing!
Defining the Infinite
Infinity is the concept of the unimaginably and immeasurably
It’s what you get when you disobey your grade school math teacher and divide by zero. It’s so big that when you double it, it’s still infinity. If you double it infinitely many times, it’s still just plain old infinity: ∞
God and Infinity
Theologians like to apply the term infinite to God. All of His attributes are said to be infinite in scope. Well, that may be, but the Bible doesn’t actually make that claim. Infinity was not a known concept in ancient times. If God had claimed it, nobody would have understood it anyway. The most you’re going to read in ancient literature is “a whole big bunch!”
Enormity only gets stated in idiomatic terms. For example, many English translations say that the “army from the east” in Rev. 9:16 will be exactly 200 million strong. The actual Greek says literally “twice ten thousand times ten thousand”, which is way bigger than the record 12 million that the US fielded in 1945, and way, way bigger than the next biggest human army in history. There is no question in my mind that John was speaking merely of a very large army. See also below.
That is not to say that God has no infinite attributes. I’m simply pointing out that, given the Bible’s silence, it’s a philosophical question, not theological.
God’s Size
In Implications of God’s Omnipresence and Eternity in Space-Time, I discussed God’s omnipresence in terms of His spanning, encompassing, infusing, and in fact subsuming all of everything that is—space, the universe, in other words, all matter and energy that exists. The 93 billion lightyears estimate I mentioned for the diameter of the universe is probably a minimum.
Some astronomers still throw around the term infinite for the actual size of the universe. That discussion goes beyond my pay grade. 93 billion lightyears is enough of a living space for me. That’s 550 quadrillion miles, or about 3 million trips to the sun and back. So, God is at least that big! If the universe is infinite, then God is more infinite… Huh?! That doesn’t mean anything quantitative.
God’s Age
In the same previous post, I explained that God’s age, as does His size, spans, encompasses, infuses and subsumes the age of the universe.
Some scientists postulate an infinitely old multiverse; that is, a master universe that grows, “buds off” like a hydra or a nematode, and the “baby universes” each have their own, random sets of physical laws. This theory has very tenuous scientific support and was proposed mainly to explain the mind-boggling (to unbelievers) Anthropic Principle, the unavoidable observation that our universe has a huge set of physical characteristics, many of which are independently necessary to support life in any way that we can envision. The idea is that if the multiverse is infinitely old, then it has spawned an infinite number of buds, and with infinite tries it is statistically likely that at least one of those is anthropically friendly. Hence, they have no need for the God hypothesis.
(Incidentally, they would never admit to this, if they even made the connection, but physicists have a theory that might account for a “god” popping into existence out of nothing. It’s a theoretical consequence of random quantum mechanical fluctuations over an infinite period of time. This is what is called a Boltzmann Brain, and no, I don’t believe that accounts for God! I’m just pointing out that, as much as I love science, it does have its inconsistencies.)
The Spirit Beings I discussed in Gods and Demons are immortal and everlasting, which means that they will survive forever if God lets them, but they have not always existed because God created them to manage the cosmos. Eternality is not the same as everlastingness. Scripture says that God alone is eternal—but what does that mean?
The assumption made by most theologians is that God has existed from the infinite past. There’s that pesky, undefinable infinity again. I don’t deny it, but I can’t comprehend it. There are some respected conservative theologians (don’t ask me who, I think I remember some of them, but I’m taking a vacation from research for this post, and I don’t want to slander anyone if I’m wrong) who acknowledge that God’s existence may define the term, “eternal.” That would be to say that His existence did have a beginning, and that beginning marked the beginning of eternity.
I neither believe nor disbelieve that. Once again, it is philosophy, not theology.
Daniel 7
[9] I beheld till the thrones were cast down [set in place], and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. [10] A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.
[13] I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of man [Daniel’s conception of the coming Messiah] came with the clouds of heaven and came to [approached] the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him.
[22] Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom. —Daniel 7:9–10,13,22 (KJV) the annotations and emphases are mine
Daniel 7 is perhaps the most pivotal chapter in all of prophecy, because it explains so much that we read elsewhere in Scripture.
My emphasis here, though, is on the cast of characters. The stage is a meeting in heaven of God and His Divine Council. Those in attendance are,
The Ancient of Days, also called here the most High. The three instances in Daniel 7 are the only occurrences of the term, “the Ancient of Days”, in the Bible.
The term “son of man” appears many times in Scripture. At a minimum, it simply means a malehuman being. It is frequently used in the prophetic books to emphasize that the prophet is merely a human, delivering God’s divine words. Here, though, Daniel has added something important (see Son of Man, Son of God):
A human being is ushered into the presence of God in heaven. But the phrase, “with the clouds of heaven” is something that appears frequently in Ugaritic and Babylonian literature to signal the movements of Ba’al. The use of a polemic here is Daniel’s (or rather, the dream’s) way of saying that this particular Son of Man is divine!
Second Temple Era Jewish scholars, the Pharisees and their scribes, were divided on whether Daniel was actually referring to a divine Messiah or something else, but without question, when Jesus quoted this verse in Matthew 26:64 and applied it to Himself, the high priest and Sanhedrin sitting in Judgement of Him took it the only way possible, as an explicit claim not only that He was Messiah, but that He was divine.
[63] Yeshua remained silent. The cohen hagadol [high priest] said to him, “I put you under oath! By the living God, tell us if you are the Mashiach, the Son of God!” [64] Yeshua said to him, “The words are your own. But I tell you that one day you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of HaG’vurah [Lit., ‘the Power’, a euphemism for Yahweh] and coming on the clouds of heaven.” [65] At this, the cohen hagadol tore his robes. “Blasphemy!” he said. “Why do we still need witnesses? You heard him blaspheme! [66] What is your verdict?” “Guilty,” they answered. “He deserves death!” —Matthew 26:63–66 (CJB) the emphasized text here is the quotation
There were also many, many of the Heavenly Host on stage. The “thousand thousands” in verse 10 are members of the Divine Council, while the “ten thousand times then thousand” are additional “angelic” witnesses. Here are two more examples of the idiomatic expression mentioned above. The Council members are the “they” of verse 13, ushering Jesus to God’s throne.
The term “saints” that occurs twice in verse 22 is קַדִּישׁ (qaddiysh, pronounced “kad-DEESH”). It means “holy”, “holy one”, or “holy ones”, and it applies both to redeemed humans and to loyal angels. That “judgement was given to the saints” can’t mean that they pronounce judgement, because that is Jesus’ job, specifically. Instead, it has to mean that they administer judgement, which is borne out in the statement that they also “possessed the kingdom.”
(Forgive me, but I’m going to throw in another rabbit trail here. My interpretation regarding “judgement” in verse 22 is an illustration of something that really bugs me: traditional, verses thoughtful, exegesis. I’ve personally read a number of commentaries on Daniel 7 over the years, and as far as I can recall, every single one of them has assumed that pronouncing judgement was in view, leading them to further assume that verse 22 is applying the name “Ancient of Days” to Jesus, rather than to Yahweh. Because we all know that it is Jesus who will pronounce judgement in the eschatological future.
Why? In no particular order, it is because (a) too many commentators lean too heavily on earlier works and forget to think for themselves; (b) too many Christian commentators overemphasize Jesus and relegate Yahweh to the “stale writings” of the Old Testament; (c) too few Christian commentators care enough about the ancient Hebrew and Near East cultural background to provide more that standard “Sunday School” answers to harder interpretive questions; and (d) simple careless thinking.
I’m not a theologian. I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer, and skeptical of anything I haven’t personally evaluated.)
Is God Ancient, or Just Old?
So, this brings me, ponderously to be sure, to the crux of my ponderings. Which may seem anticlimactic to most of you.
Is God merely old, or is He ancient?
Those are relative terms, of course. Age is a property of “stuff” and stuff didn’t exist until God created it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in effect, says that everything ages. But aging, and time itself, are properties of the universe. Isaac Newton notwithstanding, God does not age, because He is not bound by the universe He created.
As most of you know by now, I’m an “Old Earth Creationist.” In my view, God defined the physical laws, and then by His word, He spoke the universe into existence, in all of its building blocks and the forces that drive them. At one point in time and space, about 13.7 billion years ago. He decreed it, and He continues to supervise the orderly processes of birth, growth and maturation. Those processes are ongoing; God does not have to repeat them every week.
I have a different interpretation of the “six days” than those of Young Earth Creationists. To my senses, creation itself tells me that it is way more than 6,000 years old. Given that God doesn’t actually age, I would term Him truly “ancient” based on His resume. In my view, regardless of how long He has existed in currently understood earth-years, His “experience” is some 2.3 million times more impressive than a mere 6,000 years!
“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.” –Dr. David L. Cooper (1886-1965), founder of The Biblical Research Society
The above quote is known by many expositors as “The Golden Rule of Biblical Interpretation.” BibleTruths.org states that, “This has often been shortened to ‘When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense, lest it result in nonsense.’” An implication of this rule, which I think is inescapable, is that not every word of Scripture is meant to be understood literally. That is troubling to many, because in careless or untrained hands it opens the door to subjectivism and arbitrary conclusions. Yet almost all the great conservative Bible commentators practice a hermeneutic (a set of formal principles for Biblical interpretation) that allows for non-literal text, including parables, figures of speech, anthropomorphism, poetic exaggeration, and a host of other confusing factors. Not to mention translational difficulties. Understanding the “genre” (from the Latin genus), or “literary type” of a Biblical passage is one obvious prerequisite for understanding how literally one should interpret it.
Suggesting that some passages should probably not be understood in a literal sense does not subtract from the central truth that “all Scripture is God-breathed.” It is axiomatic to me that the Bible is inerrant in its original language and the original manuscripts. Yet some folks read my opinions, especially respecting emotional themes like creation, and make snide comments like, “So you believe it’s inerrant except when it isn’t!”
I don’t think there are any substantive problems with corruption of our Scriptures over the millennia. There are a few problems with translation, but none that are impossible to unravel with sufficient attention to the linguistic and cultural background of the humans who penned the words, and those who the words are written to.
What I consider to be the biggest factor of all that contributes to doctrinal confusion and infighting in the Church is that some misinterpretations are enshrined in a nearly impenetrable wall of tradition.
In the remainder of this post, I am going to discuss three books in the Tanach, or Old Testament that I believe contain a mixture of literal and metaphorical text. Some of my readers will disagree with me about Job. Most will agree with me about Ezekiel, at least in general terms. Probably only a few will agree with me about Genesis.
The genres of Job
The book of Job is classified as “reflective wisdom literature” overall, but within the book, scholars recognize two, more specific, genres: Chapters 1, 2, and verses 7–16 of the final chapter, 42, are narrative, while the rest of the book is poetic.
Per Zuck, a Biblical narrative is a “story told for the purpose of conveying a message through people and their problems and situations.” The story is typically selective and illustrative, meaning that it doesn’t necessarily quote conversations verbatim or events in chronological order, and only substantive elements that contribute to the author’s illustration are included. This is why, for example, the narrative content of the different Gospels differs somewhat from book to book when describing the same event. The separate human authors, under the same inspiration, often used different words to stress different aspects. Matthew and Luke report two Gadarene demoniacs, for instance, while Mark mentions only one, and John omits the incident entirely. Why only one in Mark? Because only one of them obeyed Jesus by telling his countrymen about the miracle of his exorcism and preparing the way for Jesus’ return to the region later in the book. The second man was inconsequential to the lesson Mark wished to teach.
Literate readers of our time have hopefully been taught a rigid set of literary rules for grammar and punctuation, but trying to hold ancient writers to the same standards is an anachronism. Thus, we must not be offended when quotations are loose, numbers are approximate, and chronology is fluid. In no ways do these things detract from the authority of Scripture.
When reading the narrative portions at the beginning and end of Job, we can be sure that there is no error in the substance of the story. What the words convey are substantially true, and the lesson they convey is unambiguous.
Leaving the narrative portions, the bulk of Job is poetic. Hebrew poetry has a very recognizable style of its own that some people find hard to follow. Rhyme and meter in the Hebrew originals cannot be transferred intact to English translations, but there is usually recognizable structure. One common element that we frequently see is two or more lines that state the same thing, but in different words. This rephrasing is called parallelism.
Biblical poetry is less exact than Biblical narrative, because the language of poetry is more flowery and sometimes exaggerated or hyperbolic. The narrative within the poem is much less important than the lesson taught by the poem. In my opinion it is dangerous to base dogma on poetic Scripture. Take, for example:
13 to him who split apart the Sea of Suf, for his grace continues forever; 14 and made Isra’el cross right through it, for his grace continues forever; 15 but swept Pharaoh and his army into the Sea of Suf, for his grace continues forever; —Psalm 136:13–15 CJB
Psalm 136 is an antiphonal song, during which a cantor might have sung or chanted the first line of each verse and a choir of Levites the second. Its intent was to praise Almighty God, and any details included here that were not recorded in the Torah writings could conceivably be embellishment. Exodus does not state that Pharaoh drowned in the Sea (The Reed, or Red Sea), and my analysis (see Historic Anchors for Israel in Egypt) indicates that he did not. Furthermore, “swept Pharaoh and his army into the Sea” clearly contradicts the Exodus account: The Egyptian army followed the Israelites into the sea and the sea swept across them.
In the case of Job’s poetry, the important lessons have to do with God, His power, and His relationship to His creation. The conversations between the actors here (between Job and his wife and friends, or even the conversations between Job and God) were immaterial aside from their message and need not have been quoted exactly as literally spoken. These conversations may not have even taken place at all in reality, but the lessons they teach paint an unambiguous picture of God and His nature.
I view Job as primarily a parable.
The genres of Ezekiel
Ezekiel is probably my favorite book in the Bible. It is a great illustration of the “prophetic” literary genre, and it may be the best example in Scripture of narrative and poetic symbolism.
What is prophecy? I think it is a message about the past, present, or future that is supernaturally delivered by God to His people through the agency of one or more of His people who are commissioned and empowered by Him to act as His intermediary. I don’t think that there are any prophets today, though there will be again as the present age comes to a final end. There were no prophets after Micah until John the Baptizer. There have been none since the death of the Biblical apostles. Some Bible teachers will claim that today’s pastors and evangelists are prophets, by definition, but I don’t believe that the common leading of the Holy Spirit, which is often hard to distinguish from personal volition, counts. For one to feel like he is led by the spirit is nice, but not provable. Fallen humans should not revel in such feelings.
Ezekiel’s prophecies were mostly imparted to him by means of visions, and mostly passed on either through acting out skits (object lessons) or verbally. When verbal, and as recorded in Scripture, some were in narrative form, and some were poetic.
Ezekiel’s vision of God and heaven at the beginning of the book represent his impressions of whatever he actually saw. Efforts to interpret what he described in meaningful visual terms are fruitless. What I think we are supposed to see is that God is holy, majestic, and humanly beyond accurate description.
In chapters 4–32, Ezekiel presents a series of skits and sermons that call out the sins of Israel and other nations of the day and pronounce condemnation and judgement for those sins. Though he uses a mixture of plain language and symbolism, the unity of the message is clear.
Beginning with Chapter 33 we start seeing the beginnings of future restoration, culminating in the defeat of Gog and Magog in Chapters 38 and 39 (see my post, The Coming World War: Gog and Magog).
Finally, chapters 40–48 forecast events and objects in the Messianic age. Some of this material regards the return of God’s sh’kinah “presence” to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Previously, in chapters 10 and 11, Ezekiel described the departure of the sh’kinah from Solomon’s Temple immediately prior to its destruction by Nebuchadrezzar in 586 BC. The return of sh’kinah will be specifically to the Holy of Holies in the new Millennial Temple, which will be built on a radically different landscape at the same geographic location. I discuss my own exegesis (interpretation and analysis) of both the departure and return in the question-and-answer section near the end of my post, Opening the Golden Gate. That post also summarizes the history of the Temple in its different phases of construction. Contrary to what is believed by most Christians, both lay and ordained, it was the Father, not Jesus the Son, who will enter the Temple—and not through the Eastern Gate, but over it. The genre of both passages is prophetic narrative, and entirely symbolic, though with important theological meaning and at a location which is certainly literal. In theological terms, God in His immanence may have abandoned the Temple and the people of Israel, but in transcendence, He has always been with them.
the genres of Genesis
The five “Books of Moses“, often called Torah (Hebrew, not for “law”, but rather for “teachings”), or sometimes Chumash (my own default, Heb. “five”) or Pentateuch (Greek “five vessels, or containers”) are attributed by conservative scholars to Moses; a view that I share. They include to some extent, all genres of Hebrew literature.
The water world of Gen. 1:2. “The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Genesis, in particular, is largely narrative in style, as you might guess. It also includes a small amount of poetry. I suggest that all of it, from beginning to end, is also prophetic in nature. Israel has always, since the Exodus from Egypt, considered Moses to be the greatest of the prophets. But I don’t recall ever hearing it suggested explicitly that his knowledge of preexilic history was prophetically derived. Certainly, it was! Recall that I implied above that the prophets, through supernatural means, saw events from their past, present and future, through the eyes of God. In a very real sense, that is what “inspiration by the Holy Spirit” really is.
In Genesis 1:1, Moses declared that, in the beginning (Reꜥshit, “first in time, order or rank”), God created (bara, to create ex nihilo, out of nothing whatsoever, which only God can do) the heavens (shamayim, plural, encompassing the air around us, the atmosphere above us, and the vastness of space) and the earth. The phrase “heavens and earth” in Scripture is a figure of speech called a “merism“, in which the totality of something is implied by substitution of two contrasting or opposite parts.
A more complete description of the genre of this one verse is “polemic prophetic narrative”. Every ancient civilization had a pantheon of pagan “gods”, and with each of those came a “creation myth.” In Genesis 1:1, the one true God said, “I did it—not them! Period!”
Theologically, that is really all we need to know about creation. God had no obligation to tell us exactly how he did it, or in what order, and if He had done so, nobody in the ancient world could have possibly understood it. Sure, I’m curious, but God said it, and I believe it!
To me, the “Plain sense” of Genesis 1:1 makes perfect “common sense” in a book about God: He created the entire universe, which is everything that exists other than Himself, and He had the sovereign right and ability to do it however He chose to.
The plain sense of Genesis 1:3–31 does not make common sense to me, if indeed it describes creation at all. To me, it is strongly reminiscent of visions recorded by a number of prophets, including John. The age of man on earth starts with a vision and ends with a vision! For my perspective on the most probably interpretations of this passage, see The Language of Creation and Genesis 1:1–5, Day 1.
The following photo of the substructure of the Lincoln Memorial was posted on January 16, 2023, by an Admin on the Facebook page, Biblical Creation:
Fig. 1: The substructure of the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As posted by Biblical Creation.
Here is the text they posted with it:
Anyone who has ever visited a cave has heard the evolutionist claim that stalactites and stalagmites growing in the cave take, on the average, a full century to grow only one inch and grow to be 40 feet or so only after several thousand years. Or so evolutionists once thought. For those who believe this along with millions of cave visitors each year, hundreds of thousands of years of Earth’s history begin to become a reality before their eyes. But the question is, does it really take a century to grow one inch of stalactite?
When the Lincoln Memorial was built during the 1930s, the engineers sank steel cylinders into the bedrock to anchor the monument. The base of the memorial is set high above ground, leaving a cavernous basement beneath the floor. Rainwater seeping through the marble floor has formed stalactites up to five feet long on the basement ceiling! This growth is an inch per year, not per century! The Earth is not millions of years old or even hundreds of thousands of years. We know from Biblical history and geneaologies [sic] that God created the Earth just thousands of years ago. Biblical truth always trumps man’s scientific theories.
As an old earth creationist, I believe that Genesis 1:1 happened much earlier than 4004 BC, but that God Almighty did, literally, through His awesome and limitless power, create the universe in its entirety. But, according to these people, whether I believe in evolution or not (and I don’t!) I am an “evolutionist”.
According to the above, evolutionists evidently no longer believe that it takes thousands of years, on average, for a stalactite to form, because the Lincoln Memorial proves otherwise. But what does the picture actually show?
To begin with, most of the Memorial, including all of the structure seen here, is concrete. The statue of Lincoln and the surfaces in the chamber surrounding it are in fact marble. Marble is calcium carbonate rock, just like caves with speleothems—stalactites and stalagmites. But the caves and the speleothems are native limestone. Marble is limestone that has been modified (metamorphosed) by the temperatures and pressures caused by thick overburden sediments. Both are water soluble, but the solubility is measurable, and yes, it normally takes a long time. Fig. 2, below, is a photo that I took of a marble and limestone structure that has been standing out in the open for around 2400 years. It has been damaged by human wear and tear, by earthquakes, and even by a 17th Century Venetian bomb, but for the most part, rainwater has had minimal effect on the stone itself.
At any rate, seepage between quarried and assembled blocks of marble or limestone can’t in any way be compared to seepage through the pores of native limestone! I can show you buildups of calcium carbonate in the water pipes in my house, too, but that has no bearing on the age of the earth. As usual with young earth creationists, there is no actual scientific analysis presented to back up the claims associated with their photo. My assumption is that the so-called “stalactites” are leeched salt, not calcite at all!
Atheists who attempt to use theology they don’t understand to disprove the Bible are fools. Christian apologists who try to use scientific principles or findings they don’t understand to shame science are also fools, and this “gotcha” post is very foolish.
As a devout Christian engineer retired from a geological field, I have a foot in both camps. I agree that Biblical truth always trumps scientific theory, but when there is a real conflict between the two, one must at least consider the possibility that traditional interpretations of Scripture might be flawed. It has happened before.
Over the last several months, I have adopted a new favorite author. His name is John C. Lennox. Among other things, he is a Cambridge-educated Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and he has written a number of books on subjects that have interested me for many years.
Author, Educator, Mathematician and Philosopher, John C Lennox. BBC Photo.
Most of his opinions on the intersection of theology and science seem to match my own very closely. In particular, a point from his book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, particularly resonates with me.
Conservative Christian scholars have mostly agreed that God miraculously created the universe, that humans descended from a real Adam and Eve, that the Genesis Flood was real, and that science does not trump Scripture!
I agree with all that!
But not all of those are “Young Earth” Creationists, and not all believe the theory, stated nowhere in Scripture, that the universe’s appearance of vast age is due to the Genesis Flood. Now, unfortunately, according to Professor Lennox (and my own observation), you are no longer free to reject that view.
Today, if you say you are not specifically a “young earth” creationist, then you will automatically be viewed by most of your Christian peers as a denier of Scriptural inerrancy and an “Evolutionist“.
Henry M. Morris
A large percentage of conservative Christianity, including major influencers like John MacArthur Jr, who I greatly admire, accept Henry Morris’ flood theory more or less uncritically.
Book: The Genesis Flood
The so-called “flood theory” was popularized by Morris in 1961 in a book that he co-authored with theologian John C. Whitcomb Jr, titled The Genesis Flood. I recall first reading the book in the late 70’s or early 80’s. It was formatted into two sections, one being a theological treatment by Whitcomb, and the other a mechanistic approach by Morris, laying out his theory that the apparent age of the earth was caused by rapid erosion and redeposition of silt due to earth-rending, catastrophic flooding, accompanied by massive earthquakes and tsunami surges. After reading Whitcomb’s exposition on the Biblical evidence for a worldwide flood, I was an enthusiastic fan of the book. That enthusiasm faded when I read Morris’ section. I found his grasp of fundamental geology and physics to be highly flawed, and his argumentative style (e.g., “any fool can plainly see…”) to be arrogant and insulting.
1976 edition of The Genesis Flood
The believability of The Genesis Flood was greatly enhanced by a Foreword (not included in the latest edition) written by an eminent geologist, John C. McCampell, PhD, of the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Unfortunately, book Forewords don’t always get read with the same concentration as the body. Dr. McCampbell did notendorse the theory! What he endorsed was Morris’ Christian worldview, fairness and independent thinking! The appliable paragraph read:
"From the [Foreword] writer's viewpoint, as a professional geologist, these explanations and contentions are difficult to accept. For the present at least, although quite ready to recognize the inadequacies of Lyellian uniformitarianism, I would prefer to hope that some other means of harmonization of religion and geology, which retains the essential structure of modern historical geology, could be found."
Morris’ Qualifications
Morris billed himself as a “hydrologist“. To me, the term “hydrology” implies much more than what Morris apparently did in his professional life. The US Geological Survey discusses the field broadly here. Wiktionary provides a more succinct definition, which I think works well:
Hydrology: Noun
1. The science of the properties, distribution, and effects of water on a planet's surface, in the soil and underlying rocks, and in the atmosphere.
2. The properties, distribution, and flows of water in a specific locale; the hydrological characteristics of a particular place or region.
But let’s examine Dr. Morris’ qualifications: (this section updated on 1/10/2024)
In a 2006 Washington Post obituary, quoted by Wikipedia, Morris was hailed as the “father of modern creation science”, and his book as the “founding document of the creationist movement.” Yet Morris himself had only a dim understanding of the principles he invoked in the book.
His early education was at Rice University, where he earned a BS in Civil Engineering. Undergraduate CE courses focus primarily on basic physics and chemistry, math, engineering economics and design, structural analysis, strength of materials, soil mechanics, environmental issues, engineering computations, and fluid mechanics.
Leaving Rice with his BSCE degree, Morris took a three-year educational gap during which he was employed as a “hydraulic engineer”, apparently in the Rio Grande Valley monitoring sand wash in the border waters. With his rudimentary background, his job would have consisted mainly in recording flood levels and monitoring bank erosion. As far as I can determine, that is the extent of his practical hydrological experience.
After his stint “in the field”, Morris returned to Rice for a few years as, apparently, a graduate teaching assistant in civil engineering. He then moved on to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a master’s degree in hydraulics and a PhD in hydraulic engineering (a sub-field of civil engineering, where the focus is on dams, manufactured waterways, and static forces from groundwater on structural foundations).
The remainder of his career, until he departed to focus on creationism, was spent in academia, as a teacher of civil engineering and applied science. Speaking for myself, after earning an MS in Petroleum Engineering, I enraged my supervising professor by refusing to stay for a doctorate. My reason was that engineering PhDs are geared towards academic careers, not towards real-world experience and productivity. And, frankly, the real world pays way more than academia.
Morris’ career certainly did not qualify him in any way as an expert on the issues he addressed in The Genesis Flood. His theories defy the realities of geological science, and his frequent references to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) and uniformitarianism demonstrated a poor understanding of both concepts.
My own background
I must now establish my own credentials for entering into this critique of Young Earth Creationism in general, and the Flood Theory in particular.
My undergraduate studies at the University of Texas were in math and physics. My intention was to do my postgraduate studies in astrophysics, but after a 2-year Naval tour, practical considerations induced me to accept a graduate fellowship in Petroleum Engineering at Texas, instead.
Part of the apparatus for my Rock Mechanics thesis, 1975
For many years after college, my professional career was as a petroleum engineer. I started as a field production engineer for a major integrated oil corporation in Oklahoma, absorbing the hands-on, nuts and bolts of equipment and procedure in a very large working oil field. With proficiency came the desire to be more than a small cog in a big, cumbersome, money machine, so I left Big Oil to spend most of my career in more responsible positions with smaller “independent oil and gas companies”.
Typical well log suite, downloaded from USGS
Though I have worked in all phases of the industry (except for refineries) my main specialty was reservoir engineering. I had some of the same civil engineering training as Morris (dams, weirs and channels), but most of my education and years of professional experience were more geological in scope. I dealt with almost anything relating to sedimentary rocks and stratigraphy: where the constituent particles originated; how they were weathered, transported by erosion, deposited, cemented, chemically modified, saturated and disrupted by viscous fluid flow within their pore space or fractures; and how they were subsequently modified by folding, fracturing, compressing, uplifting, and sometimes being exposed at the surface or under the sea, and beginning the cycle all over again. I collected and analyzed cores, drill cuttings, fluid samples, pressure profiles, and electrical resistivity and radiation data. From all that, I had to make reasonable estimates of how much, if any, and what types of hydrocarbons were deep underground, who owned the mineral rights in the drainage area, whether it could be profitably retrieved, by what means and how fast, and ultimately, how much profit was to be expected. I was answerable to my employers, clients, government agencies, royalty owners, and/or financial lenders. Sometimes I worked closely with geologists and legal folks, but mostly I worked for small companies and had to do pretty much all of the geology myself.
Alternate theories
Here I will discuss alternate Christian theories to account for the apparent vast age of the universe.
I will have more to say on Morris, the Genesis Flood, and my own views on creation (both the science and the theology) in future posts. Some I wrote years ago, but I plan to rework and repost them. The rest of this post will be a discussion of the Conservative traditions that current “creation culture” now considers to be unacceptable.
In his book, No Final Conflict, Francis Schaeffer lists several areas where, in his judgment, there is room for disagreement among Christians who believe in Creationism and the total truthfulness of Scripture:
1. There is a possibility that God created a “grown-up” universe.
2. There is a possibility of a break between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 or between 1:2 and 1:3.
3. There is a possibility of a long day in Genesis 1.
4. There is a possibility that the flood affected the geological data.
5. The use of the word “kinds” in Genesis 1 may be quite broad.
6. There is a possibility of the death of animals before the fall.
7. Where the Hebrew word bārāʾ is not used, there is the possibility of sequence from previously existing things.
Millard Erickson’sChristian Theology (the text used at Calvary Bible College in Belton, MO when I attended classes there) lists the following Conservative theories, which mostly fit into the scope of Schaeffer’s comments, above:
The gap theory holds that there was an original, quite complete creation of the earth perhaps billions of years ago (the creation mentioned in Gen. 1:1). Some sort of catastrophe occurred, however, so that the creation became empty and unformed (1:2). God then re-created the earth a few thousand years ago in a period of six days, populating it with all the species. This creation is described in Genesis 1:3–27. The apparent age of the earth and the fossil records showing development over long periods of time are to be attributed to the first creation. The catastrophe is often linked to the fall of Satan (Lucifer). Creation then lay in ruins for a long period of time before God rehabilitated or restored it.
The flood theory views the earth as only a few thousand years old. At the time of Noah, the earth was covered by a tremendous flood, with huge waves with a velocity of a thousand miles an hour. These waves picked up various forms of life; the mud in which these forms were eventually deposited was solidified into rock under the tremendous pressure of the waves. The various rock strata represent various waves of the flood. These unusual forces accomplished in a short period what geologists believe would ordinarily require three billion years to accomplish.
The ideal-time theory says that God created the world in a six-day period a relatively short time ago, but that he made it as if it were billions of years old. This is a genuinely novel and ingenious view. Adam, of course, did not begin his life as a newborn baby. At any point in his life he must have had an apparent (or ideal) age many years older than his actual age (i.e., the number of years since his creation). The ideal-time theory extends this principle. If God created trees, rather than merely tree seeds, they presumably had rings indicating an ideal age rather than their real age. Thus, each element of creation must have begun somewhere in the life cycle.
The age-day theory is based upon the fact that the Hebrew word יוֹם (yom), while it most frequently means a twenty-four-hour period, is not limited to that meaning. It can also mean epochs or long periods of time, and that is how it should be understood in this context. This view holds that God created in a series of acts over long periods of time. The geological and fossil records correspond to the days of his creative acts.
The pictorial-day (or literary-framework) theory regards the days of creation as more a matter of logical structuring than of chronological order. The author arranged the material in a logical grouping that took the form of six periods. While there may be some chronological dimension to the ordering, it is to be thought of as primarily logical. The account is arranged in two groups of three—days one through three and days four through six. Parallels can be seen between the first and fourth, the second and fifth, and the third and sixth days of creation.
The revelatory-day theory. The days were not successive days on which God did the creation, but days on which the story of creation was revealed. So the truth of the account took place in six twenty-four-hour periods, but the actual creation may have taken much longer than that.
Erickson himself favors the ideal-time theory, as you might guess from the wording of paragraph 3 above. He states that it is “in many ways irrefutable both scientifically and exegetically but presents the theological problem that it makes God an apparent deceiver.” I would agree that any theory that does not incorporate an assumption of vast actual age would have to include this form of apparent age in order to account for function via the known physical laws. In fact, I would compare it to a movie started in the middle. Virtually everything about the universe appears very much to be aged, and in fact would have to do so. I am more concerned with the suggestion of deception than Erickson is, in view of the following, which tells me I should be able to trust my senses:
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. —Romans 1:20 ESV
Grudem’s Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem, lists more or less the same group of theories, and goes into much more detail on all questions of creation.
Grudem sums up his opinion as follows: “My strong encouragement to the entire Christian community is that both old earth and young earth viewpoints should be acceptable for leaders in evangelical churches and evangelical parachurch organizations.”
Ryrie’s Basic Theology, Charles Ryrie, presents a subset of the above, but without specific names. He is far more concerned about the creation of Man, specifically, than the Universe in general.
Ryrie is somewhat non-committal regarding the Universe but does seem to favor a young earth. He is staunchly against biological evolution.
Some combination of the pictorial-day and revelatory-day theories seem to be favored by another contrarian, John Walton. I like Walton very much and think that he is on track.
Like many Christians of my age, I grew up with a Schofield Reference Bible, and I liked Schofield’s favorite, the gap theory for many years. I no longer hold that view. Based on extensive reading on Ancient Near East History and Culture, and with a better grasp of Biblical poetry, I now believe…
In a recent post, The Hijacking of Creationism, I discussed the currently obligatory conservative Christian view of why the earth appears to be billions of years old when traditional interpretations of Genesis 1 say it is only about 6,000 years old. I expressed my misgivings about that explanation, which proposes that all or certainly most of the appearance of age is due to damage to the earth’s crust caused by torrential rains and upheavals associated with the Genesis Flood. I also expressed doubts about the qualifications of Henry Morris, popularizer of the Flood Theory.
I do believe in the historicity of the Genesis Flood itself, but I don’t believe that the best explanation of how God brought this judgement about (see Fountains of the Deep, an earlier post) would have caused the level of devastation that Flood Theory requires.
As recapitulation of my own technical and professional qualifications: I am not a geologist, but I am well-trained in relevant aspects of geology. In a long career as a petroleum engineer, I worked extensively with and/or in place of geologists.
There are several sub-fields of petroleum engineering, and I have worked most of them. For most of my tenure with both large and small companies, both as an employee and as a consultant, I served as a petroleum reservoir engineer. As such I have had to be intimately familiar with all aspects of stratigraphy (rock layering), including rock and fluid properties, strata deposition mechanisms and deformations, fluid saturations and flow mechanisms, and, for diagnostic purposes, subsurface electrical and radioactivity profiles. As a well-site drilling engineer, I have examined rock cores and bit cuttings, electrical logs, pressure and flow tests, and more, from the surface to more than a mile deep. As a production engineer, I have observed how both productive and non-productive rock strata behave under a wide variety of external disturbances. In short, I probably know more about rock layers and how they behave than most geologists in non-petroleum fields.
One way to solve the age problem is to simply say, “What’s the problem? God simply spoke everything into existence exactly the way we would have seen it in 4004 BC!” Now, I don’t doubt for an instant that Almighty God is capable of just such a mighty act but just because He can, does that mean that He did? Observation suggests that He did not. To borrow a phrase from 1 Cor. 14:33, God is not the author of confusion, so why would His creation be so complex and appear so tremendously old, if it is not? Just to fool scientists and throw people off the track? I don’t think so!
Several years ago, before the advent of smartphones, I set out to make the 22-minute drive from my home to Belton, Missouri, where I was taking a semester of Theology at a Bible College. The topic of the day was to be Creation, and I knew that my professor was a proponent of Flood Theory. On the way I decided to pull out my microcassette recorder and list as many geological phenomena as I could think of, before I got there, that I know cannot be explained by the flood. I’ve since lost the list, but I recall most of what was on it. Here are some of the key items (in no particular order), with my reasoning added:
“Clastics” are the small, sometimes microscopic, rock fragments formed by “weathering” of larger fragments or massive rock formations. “Erosion” is the process by which clastics are subsequently moved from place to place and deposited in broad areas by the force of moving water, wind, glaciation, volcanic action, or simple gravity. When these clastic “sediments” become fused together over long periods of time by heat, pressure or chemical action, they become the sedimentary rock strata that we see today. My focus here is on the fragments themselves, not the strata.
Weathering of solid, non-sedimentary rocks like granite is generally not due primarily to frictional erosive flow in stream beds as most people think, but rather is caused by expansion/contraction cycles. Perhaps the most important of such processes, often called “frost wedging“, occurs when water enters small cracks and pores in the rock, freezes, expands, and wedges the openings larger. Over many alternate cycles of freezing and thawing, the two sides of the wedged rock can completely separate. Plant growth in these opening can accelerate the wedging. Another very common process that weathers rock is “exfoliation“, which occurs as the surface of a rock heats and cools more rapidly than the interior, causing layers near the surface to flake off.
The so-called “Split Rock of Horeb” is an archaeological fraud, but it illustrates both frost wedging and exfoliation. The large split and the rocks at its base are examples of wedging, and both the Split Rock itself and the foreground rocks show extensive exfoliation. From Google Earth.
Eventually, weathered rock fragments can become small enough to be transported by erosion. As they tumble along, they will be further broken up as they knock into other fragments, a process called “saltation“. Roiling water from the Genesis Flood could have redistributed loose fragments—soil, dirt, pebbles, and even larger rock—and further broken and shaped some of these fragments, but it could not, in a span of only 40 days, have caused any significant erosion of solid rock, even if heavily laden with abrasive silt. Nor could the Flood account for the rounding and blunting that we typically see in sand grains and many other clastics. The Flood, as cataclysmic as it was, simply did not last long enough or provide the temperature swings or friction surfaces needed to account for the clastic structure we see.
Can I prove this? No, but it is my professionalopinion, and Scripture has nothing to say on the process. Scientific studies could be done to prove the feasibility (or not!), but I haven’t seen any such research. The relevant discipline to conduct such studies is called “rock mechanics“, and in fact rock mechanics was the focus of my own master’s thesis.
Sedimentary rock strata sometimes extend laterally for long distances—often hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles which, strangely, Flood Theory enthusiasts seem to regard as proof of their point. In general, the strata tend to be mostly homogeneous, with few random impurities indicating uneven mixing with other rock types during deposition. Furthermore, the boundaries between layers tend to be crisp and well-defined. A sandstone, for example, does not normally grade into a shale or a limestone.
These characteristics are the opposite of what one would expect of sediments transported by a violent flood. During the rain, and afterwards as the water receded, any large or dense rocks transported would quickly have sunk to the bottom, followed by smaller and less dense rocks, and finally silt. The final result would be a single, deep, turbidity layer, grading from heavy, dense rock at the bottom, to lighter clastics at the top. Sorting would be by size and weight, not by rock type.
Limestone is formed from the skeletal material of sea life. A critter dies and sinks to the bottom. Its soft tissues decay, and what remains calcifies. Over time, enough of this material accumulates to form beds that fuse into massive rock strata. In a Flood scenario, we should expect to see calcified remains more or less distributed throughout the single, thick stratum discussed above. Of course, we do see some distribution of calcified fossil remains in all rock types, but additionally we see massive continuous beds of relatively pure limestone interbedded with sandstones and shales and other rock types. I simply don’t see how this can be accounted for without repeated flooding over long intervals of time. Almighty God could have simply spoken it into being in this configuration, or He could have directed the Flood waters and upheavals in such a way as to “stack it” to His own specifications, but why? Only to fool us into discounting our own senses? If I could see anything in Scripture to make me think this way, I would accept it. But I simply don’t!
Let’s say that the cataclysmic geologic activity associated with such a flood caused mountains to cyclically rise and recede in a very short time span and caused rock and debris to wash into the low areas, burying forests and animal life forms. If the up-thrust rock was composed differently from place to place, couldn’t this alternating rise and fall account for the rock strata that we observe? No! Such a violent scenario would cause mixing of the materials, not sorting and stratification, particularly since most of the rock strata are composed of very fine-grained clastics that are themselves a product of weathering and subsequent erosion over long periods of time.
Geologists have mapped the “normal sequence” of rock strata—the so-called “geologic column“—at many locations throughout the world. At any particular location, it is not at all uncommon to find that various members of the normal column are missing, since stratum thicknesses vary naturally from place to place, all the way down to zero; but the overall sequence is nevertheless still normally recognizable. It is also not terribly uncommon to find regions where the sequence is exactly reversed; in other words where we find the apparent age of the rocks decreasing with depth. This is evident, for example, in some of the rocks exposed by the Grand Canyon. Genesis Flood theorists are fond of chuckling at the irony they see in this. “Haha, geologists, the joke’s on you! Not only is the sequence wrong, but it is exactly opposite from what you expected!” In reality, this is easy to explain. Tectonic forces cause deformation and bending of entire sequences of strata. In nature we find them tilted to all angles, including completely flipped over. This is the same thing that happens when you use your fingers to push the left and right edges of a newspaper towards each other. The difference is that solid rock is more or less rigid, unlike newsprint. Such deformations over the course of days or even years or decades would cause the rock to crumble and the strata to disintegrate. Over geologic time, however, “solid” rock tends to undergo “plastic” deformation. In geologic (not meteorological) time, it can flow like a viscous fluid—in fact, exactly like a glacier.
An unconformity in the region of the Chimborazo volcano, Ecuador. The lower strata were deposited horizontally, uplifted to the right, and then after a period of erosion, the upper strata were laid horizontally across the exposed edge. Subsequent uplifting was to the left. From GeologyIn.com.
A related effect that we frequently see over geologic time is that strata get “tilted” to some angle by those same tectonic forces, then the tilting action stops and weathering/erosion cuts horizontally across exposed edges of the strata. Flowing water initially brings debris down from the highlands and cuts river channels in those transported debris fields, but then over time there is a levelling effect, forming the broad, flat plains between mountain ranges and the coastal peneplains. Still later, deposition may form new strata in horizontal beds lying across the eroded edges of the older rock. The interface between the canted strata and the horizontal strata is called a “discontinuity” or “unconformity“. “Crossbedding” usually refers to unconformities in aeolian sands (see below).
Crossbedded aeolian sand deposits at Antelope Canyon, near Page, Arizona. From imgix.net.
Not all rock strata are deposited by water. Sometimes wind blowing over long periods of time can deposit clastic materials and form rock strata. These “aeolian” deposits have a very distinctive structure that is readily recognizable to geologists. Fossilized desert sand dunes are a subset of this group. I see no possible way that the Genesis Flood could account for these.
Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite National Park. Water spilling from a hanging valley into the glacial valley that cut across it.
Still other features are formed only by glaciers flowing slowly and plastically downhill. Flowing water cuts V-shaped valleys. Glaciers scoop out large and obvious U-shaped valleys, like using a giant spade. “Hanging valleys” are formed when one glacier melts away, leaving behind its characteristic U-shaped valley, and many thousands of years later a new glacier flows by at an angle to the first.
As glaciers flow, the debris that they scoop out of the canyons strings out to the side like snowbanks formed by plows after a storm. The debris itself is called “till” and it is tumbled and polished into a form that is easily recognizable. The so-called Split Rock of Horeb, in the first figure above, is a “glacial erratic” (a large, out of context rock pushed ahead of a glacier) sitting on a till deposited by a glacier during the last ice age, in what is now northwest Saudi Arabia. The ridges of till that I have described are called “lateral moraines.” The Genesis Flood could not in any way account for the effects of glaciation. Glacial ice, like rock strata, would crumble if it were deformed and forced to try and flow over a short time span.
Salt, gypsum and a number of other deposits are laid down as a result of evaporation over long periods of time. Water simply cannot hold enough of these materials to form, in a short time span, the deep beds of such “evaporites” often found.
I don’t think that God set out to destroy or remake the entire planet with the Flood! His purpose was to show fallen mankind after the Flood that He would not tolerate their evil ways forever. He saved Noah and his family. He saved animal species that could not swim. He did not destroy plant species or swimming animals, because they could survive the limited time span of the Flood. There was no reason to break up land masses, nor was there a mechanism for doing so, because “the fountains of the deep“, I believe, were the volcanic vents along the mid-oceanic ridges, and the rains were spawned by out-venting from those. So, far from being smashed by raging torrents and mudslides, the wicked were destroyed by rising waters, like in a huge bathtub. Similarly, the waters receded by means of suction into tectonic plate subduction zones, on a smaller scale, a proven and well-understood process.
Another important question not answered by the Flood Theory is, how would the Flood account for the apparent (and in my opinion, demonstrable) 13.7-billion-year age of the universe?
Most scientists, certainly, and probably most theologians agree that “theology is about God”, and “science is about purely natural and self-sustaining processes.” As someone who has been passionately interested in both theology and science from an early age, my view is that there is an unavoidable overlap. Both disciplines, in a very real sense, share the same goal—uncovering truth about the universe around us—and both disciplines come from the same source—the God who created and maintains the universe.
you can’t fully understand the universe without understanding the Designer who built it and instituted the natural laws that govern its existence, and you can’t fully understand God without understanding the environment He created for His creatures.
I am contending here that science is worth listening to and not simply dismissing as an enemy of faith. Most of my readers are intelligent Christian Believers but are neither scientists nor theologians. To those, I pose the question:
Can we only believe what our eyes show us if it conforms to what we have been taught? Can we not even consider that there are “mysteries” (Paul’s term) that can only be understood with the passage of time? We even have a theological term for that: “progressive revelation.”
Romans 1:19-20 (ESV) 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them [the ungodly and unrighteous], because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.
If God has revealed Himself in nature to the ungodly, then who are we as believers to say that there is no benefit to us in that same revelation? I live by the principle that God gave me “eyes to see and ears to hear”. If my senses seem to conflict with what I have been taught to believe, then I must question both my senses and my beliefs. That doesn’t happen often, because I’ve had pretty good teachers over the decades. But not everything in the Bible is crystal clear. Most trained pastors and theologians subscribe to a particular “hermeneutic“, or system of principles for exegesis, i.e., interpretation of Scripture. See, for example, the book, Basic Bible Interpretation, by Roy B. Zuck.
I am a Biblical “literalist”, but that doesn’t mean I take every last word as literal. Does anyone believe that Jesus’ parables were literally true stories? A parable, by definition, is a made-up story designed to teach a principle. Did Peter see a real sheet containing real animals? I don’t think so, it was a vision, not reality, and was meant to teach him a lesson about people, not about food. Is “three days and three nights” exactly 72 hours? No, that’s a well-attested Hebrew figure of speech which Biblical Jews would have understood meant part of one day, all of a second, and part of a third—which includes only two nights, by the way. The “evil” or “single” eye of Matthew 6:22, is a figure of speech, an idiom, about stinginess. Did Jesus promise me a mansion in Heaven? No that’s both a translation issue (“mansion” vs. “dwelling place”) and a misapplication of Hebrew wedding imagery, which Jesus’ hearers would have immediately recognized as such and not understood as a real estate promise (see “Jesus and Hebrew Wedding Imagery“). Will the meek inherit the earth? No, that’s a quote of Psalm 37:11 where David was clearly speaking poetically of the prophesied return of Israel (the meek) to the Promised Land. Are there helicopters in Revelation? Maybe so, maybe no, but everyone agrees the wording there could be symbolic.
On the other hand, did Jesus convert water into wine, and did He resurrect from the dead? Emphatically, yes! Science can’t demonstrate the possibility of either, but neither can they be disproved, and the facts are fundamental to my belief system. The same with Adam and Eve, the Genesis Flood, the Sea of Suf (Red/Reed Sea) crossing, manna from heaven, and numerous other phenomena that some folks can’t believe.
On yet another hand, was the Ark a ship, as some would have you believe is unarguable fact? Not in my opinion (see “Ships, Boats, Floats and Arks“), but the story itself is true, nevertheless. Did the Genesis flood change the entire structure of the earth’s crust? Not in my opinion (see “Fountains of the Deep“). There is no scriptural support for this simplistic theory, and there are better explanations for the apparent age of the earth. In my professional opinion, there are a number of geological phenomena, that simply could not have been caused by either a local flood or a general, worldwide flood (see Geology a Flood Cannot Explain). Nor could a flood account for the appearance of age in the extraterrestrial cosmos!
In my view nothing in the Bible is in any way flawed—ever—but the Bible is written to convey facts about God Himself, and about God’s Will as expressed through Theology.
Information the Bible offers about human or natural history, or about scientific principles, is only incidental to the goal of explaining and glorifying God and His Will, and in my opinion is not intended to be exhaustive or fully explained. Furthermore, the human instruments who penned scripture, and the ancient audience for which it was initially penned, were historically and scientifically naïve and would have had absolutely no perspective from which to correctly receive sophisticated explanations about the universe around them (see Genesis 1:1–5, Day 1).
Sometimes science presents us with observations that are very compelling but seemingly out of sync with our assumptions based on traditional interpretations of scripture. For example, the following KJV references are all from poetic scriptures (see how literary genre influences proper interpretation, in The Implication of Genre in Job, Ezekiel and Genesis) praising God for His power and greatness and for the stability and security of the planet He created for us:
For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. —Psalm 33:9
the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved. —Psalm 93:1c
the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: —Psalm 96:10b
Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed [ESV: “moved”] for ever. —Psalm 104:5
the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved. —1 Chronicles 16:30b
and, behold, all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest. —Zechariah 1:11
These verses “prove beyond any shadow of doubt” that the earth is totally immobile, and the center around which the universe rotates! But no, thanks to progressive revelation, we now interpret those poetic scriptures figuratively, in ways that conform to observation. At some point in the course of using our God-given senses and intelligence, it may occasionally become necessary to thus reexamine certain scriptures to see if there is something that we may have missed, or a conclusion we reached in error because in the past “it seemed to make more sense” than any alternative view. Certainly, I’m not talking about giving up fundamental faith issues, but I am suggesting that we should be more astute about recognizing what is fundamental and what is merely tradition. To my thinking, scripture is clear that God is the Creator. That is a fundamental of my faith, but the brevity of the Genesis 1 account and its wording in the Hebrew makes me much less confident in the traditional interpretations.
I similarly question whether Genesis 2 is a recapitulation of Day 6 in Genesis 1, or a separate creation event. What is fundamental to me is that Adam and Eve were real people, created directly by God, and placed into a real paradise where they really sinned (see Exploring the Garden of Eden). Noah, too, was a real person and all subsequent humans are descended from him. Without these fundamentals, my whole concept of soteriology is flawed, and my faith is in vain.
The dual advents of Jesus were a mystery to all Believers until Jesus died, and His followers had to reexamine ancient scriptures and develop new interpretations of passages that were not as clear and final as had been thought previously.
I seriously doubt key claims of theories of biological evolution, for reasons that I may go into in a future post.
At the same time, I reject “Young Earth” hypotheses about the way God created the non-organic universe. I believe that Earth is some 4.54 billion years old (give or take a half million), and the universe nearly 13.8 billion. I’ll leave it to future posts to explain how I reconcile this with the “Genesis account”, which I refuse to explain away as mere symbolism. To reiterate, I believe in a literal, worldwide Genesis Flood, but I reject the theory that it accounts for the present geology of the earth. Not just because “scientists say so”, but because I personally understand the scientific principles involved and how they apply. And because God gave me eyes to see!
Please dismiss the idea that “the theory of evolution” has anything to do with the development of the universe. “Evolution”, as I use the term, is about biological processes and “natural selection”, neither of which have anything whatsoever to do with star formation or the origin of the Solar system. If the formation of a star from interstellar gas and dust is “evolution”, then I guess the formation of a sinkhole after a water main break must also be called evolution.
Similarities between Science and Theology
Both disciplines deal in theory. Christians are fond of saying that, “Evolution is just a theory, not an established fact.” Not a “Law.” When I was a kid, the “Scientific Method” recognized three discrete levels of understanding: hypothesis, theory, and law. Many people brought up in that era see the word “theory” and assume that this is something unproven and tentative. That is no longer the case, linguistically. Reality has blurred the boundaries between theory and law. Many things that were once considered “law” are now recognized to have conditions, or limits. “Newton’s Laws”, for example, are now accepted as useful approximations under certain conditions, but under others, they have to be replaced by Relativistic principles, and even Relativity now sometimes must give way to Quantum Mechanics. So, even though biological evolution is still called a “theory”, most biologists are totally convinced of its truth, or at least that it is a valid working principle. Insisting that it is “theory” and not “fact” is, in this era, an empty argument. In the same way, theological principles must be considered theoretical up to a point, because we aren’t God! We simply cannot have a perfect understanding of scripture.
Both disciplines have an infallible basis. What?! Theology is at heart based on the Bible, which we believe to be inerrant and infallible. That is axiomatic to our beliefs. Most sciences, too—not so much biology, but certainly cosmology (the study of how the universe developed from the time of the “Big Bang”)—have a mathematical foundation, and math is an “exact science.” Math is the inerrant “scripture” of science, and it, too, was authored by God. It originated with God, it is absolute, and much of it is very well understood by human mathematicians.
Both disciplines have elements that are subject to interpretation. Some branches of math, like Probability and Statistics, can be erroneously interpreted and wrong conclusions drawn; and proven valid equations can sometimes be applied incorrectly to observation. But the same can be said about scripture. Sometimes scripture can be misinterpreted or misapplied. Again, we are not God!
The Back of My Mind 