The early chapters of Genesis and evolution
by Peter Barnes
Photo www.sxc.hu
No section of Scripture has come under more sustained and vehement attack than Genesis 1–11, that part of Scripture which deals with
Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the tower of Babel. ‘Genesis’ means
‘origin’. In these chapters we have the origins of the world, of life,
of mankind, of marriage, and of the entry of sin into a world that God had declared
to be ‘very good’. To dismantle Genesis is to dismantle the whole Christian
view of the origins.
Since Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, however,
public opinion has been fed, and been all too ready to believe, that the hypothesis
of evolution has disproved the book of Genesis. Sir Julian Huxley has said: ‘We
all accept the fact of evolution. … The evolution of life is no longer a theory.
It is a fact. It is the basis of all our thinking.’1 Richard Dawkins is quite serious, and says that
anyone who rejects evolution is ‘ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked—but
I’d rather not consider that)’.2
Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and some kind of palaeontologist, has waxed
eloquent: ‘Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines
must follow.’3 At
Princeton University, Ashley Montagu has asserted: ‘The attack on evolution,
the most thoroughly authenticated fact in the whole history of science, is an attack
on science itself.’4
F.J.A. Hort, British New Testament Greek scholar, considered that Darwin’s
book was ‘unanswerable’.5
One could multiply quotations along this line, but it is all a little strange because
Darwin himself admitted in 1856 to Asa Gray ‘the many huge difficulties on
this view’.6
Image Wikipedia.org
The Church has been intimidated, and gone onto the back foot, not only about Genesis
but about the whole Bible. Douglas Kelly7
has followed Henry Morris in saying that there are at least 200 quotations or allusions
to Genesis in the New Testament,8
and over 100 references to Genesis 1–11 in the New Testament.9 The two Testaments fit together, and an attack
on Genesis logically implies an attack on what is built on Genesis. Those who do
not believe Moses and the prophets will not be convinced even if someone rises from
the dead (Luke 16:31). Jesus’ challenge to His opponents was:
‘If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But since
you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?’
(John 5:46–47) A rejection of the words of Moses logically
leads to a rejection of Jesus who accepted the words of Moses.
The creation tells us that there is a Creator (Ps. 19:1–3; Rom. 1:20). Those who do not believe that there is one
Creator of all the world need to hear that as part of hearing the Gospel (see Acts 17:24, 30–31). One who believes that we all got
here by some fluke—a big bang ages ago, and hey presto, we are on the way—will
not make much sense of the claims of Christ. How can one believe in the One who
rose from the dead (a new creation e.g. John 20–21) unless one also believes that this One
also made the world (the old creation e.g. John 1:3)? The God of the Bible is the God of nature. True
science cannot contradict true theology. Sir Francis Bacon rightly spoke of God’s
‘two books’—Scripture and nature—which, coming from the
same author, must be in agreement with one another.
One who believes that we all got here by some fluke—a big bang ages ago, and hey presto, we are on the way—will not make much sense of the claims of Christ.
Various Views of Creation
In the last 150 years the Church has seen a plethora of notions about the creation.
The Gap Theory has been popular with some Christians, from the time of Thomas Chalmers,
who died in 1847. It was popularised by the notes in the Scofield Bible, and was
widely accepted in fundamentalist circles. According to the Gap Theory, Genesis 1:2 should be translated as, ‘The earth became
without form and void’ i.e. there was a creation, a collapse, and then a re-creation.
This leaves room for an old earth, and for a fossil record reaching back millions
of years, but there is something desperate about this exegesis.
When evolution was becoming more acceptable to the general population, even conservative
theologians such as B. B. Warfield and James Orr came to accept theistic evolution
as compatible with biblical Christianity. In more recent times, Meredith Kline and
Henri Blocher have viewed the first two chapters of Genesis as more poetry than
strict science. Meanwhile, Bernard Ramm, James Montgomery Boice, and Davis Young
have embraced what is called progressive creation.
The literary genre of Genesis 1–2
Photo www.sxc.hu
The Bible speaks of the four corners of the earth (Rev. 7:1) and also speaks of the sun rising and setting
(Eccles. 1:5). If these descriptions are taken literally,
any kind of science is set over and against the Bible. This is a warning that the
Bible contains many literary genres, and is not designed to be always taken literally.
For example, when Isaiah says that the mountains and the hills shall break forth
into singing before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands (Isa. 55:12), he is not writing a scientific treatise. The
ancient Hebrews had a developed concept of poetry—and God Himself is more
than willing to use poetry as a vehicle for divine truth.
This raises the issue of the literary genre of the early chapters of Genesis. Do
they belong with the scientific treatises or with poetry? Sandy Grant considers
that the early chapters of Genesis might best be called ‘figurative history’—‘that
is, history which has artistic figurative elements which do not necessarily need
to be taken literally.’10
He compares it to the parable of the tenants in Matthew 21.11
Derek Burke is another one who claims that Genesis 1 is not intended to be understood as science.12
The distinguished evangelical Old Testament scholar, Gordon Wenham, also tries to
avoid a Bible-versus-science debate, and warns against those who would interpret
Genesis 1-2 ‘over-literalistically’. He adds
that ‘at best, all language about God is analogical.’13 Henri Blocher’s approach is somewhat similar,
although, despite his detailed exegesis, it remains not altogether obvious why Adam
is a literal man but the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
and the snake are not to be taken literally.14
The Six Days
There have been many attempts to explain the six days of Genesis 1. In the early Church, Origen and Augustine are
often cited as two who did not believe in a literal six day creation. Origen was
inclined to a much longer period, but Augustine seems to have been bewildered why
God took so long. The great African father commented: ‘What kind of days these
are is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, to say nothing of describing
them.’15 He thought
that God probably created the world in an instant.
P.J. Wiseman tried to popularise the view that God took six days to reveal
what happened at the creation. On this view, Genesis 1 is not the record of creation but the record of
the revelation of creation.16
The Gap Theory tried to make room for millions of years, but it still considered
that the days of Genesis 1 were literal days. The millions of years were
fitted in between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.
More popular now is the view that the days were not necessarily of 24 hours’
duration. This was accepted by evangelical stalwarts such as Hugh Miller and Charles
Hodge in the 19th century, and by Edward Young and Francis Schaeffer in the 20th.
John Murray thought that the days were not necessarily six successive days.
In Genesis 2:4 ‘the day’ (Hebrew ‘yom’)
denotes a time period that is not 24 hours, and presumably not many believers are
committed to the view that ‘the Day of Judgment’ is necessarily something
of 24 hour duration. Also, the sun is only created on the fourth day in Genesis 1, so, it is sometimes said, the time frame for
the first three days at least is not a day as we would measure it by the earth’s
rotation relative to the sun. There are also appeals to the Psalmist’s comment
that, in the common paraphrase, a thousand years are as a day in God’s sight
(Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8). More recently, Hugh Ross has emerged as
a more decided proponent of the view that the six days are not literal.
… if God wanted us to understand the creation week as a literal week, He could hardly have made the point any clearer.
The most natural reading of Genesis 1, however, would seem to be that the days are literal
and successive. The fourth commandment declares that we are to remember the Sabbath
day, ‘for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and
all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the
Sabbath day and hallowed it’ (Exodus 20:11). The rhythm of man’s working week is
based on the creation week.
Furthermore, it is difficult to explain away the recurring expression ‘the
evening and the morning’ in Genesis 1:5,8, 13, 19, 23, 31. So emphatic is this that
it is hard to escape the conclusion that if God wanted us to understand the creation
week as a literal week, He could hardly have made the point any clearer. It is somewhat
mystifying to attach much meaning to an evening and morning of an era extending
for millions of years.
The theological argument is also compelling. According to the Bible, there was no
death until there was sin. The creation is cursed only after Adam sinned (cf. Genesis 3; Romans 5:12–21; 8:19–25). This implies that
all the fossils of dead animals must date from after Adam’s fall. If there
was blood and violence in the creation before Adam sinned, the theological structure
of the biblical message would appear to suffer considerable dislocation.
Photo www.morgueFile.com
This would mean that conventional dating methods have provided the wrong answers.
Radiometric dating works with a number of assumptions, namely, a constant half-life,
an isolated system, and known boundary conditions. There is thus an assumption of
uniformitarianism (constancy of processes and rates through time). Because of the
Flood, these conditions are not met, and this would play havoc with dating methods.
For example, the Flood would have completely disrupted the earth’s carbon
balance, which means the radiocarbon content of the atmosphere has been not in equilibrium
since that time. By ignoring this effect the world would then seem to be older than
it is.
It was not for nothing that the liberal scholar, Marcus Dods, stated that if the
days of Genesis 1 are not literal 24-hour days, then the interpretation
of the Bible is ‘hopeless’.17
‘According to its Kind’
We find this phrase in verses Genesis 11, 12, 21, 24, 25. According to the hypothesis
of evolution, reproduction can lead to strange results. We started out with a single-celled
creature, and millions of years later this has become a fish, then a reptile, then
a bird, then a mammal, then a monkey, and finally human beings belonging to the
United Nations. Genesis 1, however, implies that there is a built-in stability.
For example, there will be big horses (e.g. the Clydesdale) and small horses (the
Shetland pony), but horses will only beget horses.
There is an easy way to check this—look at the fossil record. If Darwinian
evolution is correct, there should be transition animals everywhere as one type
evolves into another. If Genesis is correct, one would expect to find no transition
animals (this is not to say that Genesis’ ‘kind’ is identical
to the modern term ‘species’, but that there is a locking-in mechanism).
What do we find in the fossil record? Darwin himself was unable to point to any
single instance of a definite graded evolutionary sequence of organisms in the paleontological
record. In fact, he confessed that ‘Nature may almost be said to have guarded
against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms.’18 As Duane Gish has shown,
the missing links between species are still missing—and missing virtually
everywhere.19
Photo www.sxc.hu
Stephen Jay Gould (who was an ardent evolutionist—indeed a Marxist—and
Professor of Geology at Harvard University) wrote of the fossil record and transition
animals: ‘If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small,
peripheral isolates—rather than by slow change in large, central populations—then
what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of
speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from
the ancestral range.’20
Gould was passionately committed to the hypothesis of evolution, but he acknowledged
that there was little evidence for slow evolutionary change: ‘The fossil record
does not support it; mass extinction and abrupt origination reign.’21 Michael Denton is no creationist
(as yet), but he calls evolution ‘a theory in crisis’, and writes of
‘the virtual complete absence of intermediate and ancestral forms from the
fossil record’.22
In short, the fossil record supports Genesis 1, not Darwinian evolution. The missing links are
missing everywhere.
Eden was a real place.
Genesis speaks of Eden as a real place, with four rivers—the Pishon, Gihon,
Hiddekel (or Tigris) and the Euphrates (Gen. 2:8–14). Of the four names mentioned in Genesis 2, two are connected with rivers today—the
Tigris and the Euphrates. Because of these names scholars have speculated on two
main possibilities regarding the location of Eden: either where the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers meet and form a delta at the head of the Persian Gulf, or where they rise
in the upland plateau of what is now eastern Turkey.23 However, the Flood rearranged things quite drastically
and these rivers in the Middle East are underlain by thousands of metres of Flood-deposited
sediment. It’s likely the rivers were named after their pre-Flood counterparts.
So, although Eden was clearly a real place within literal history, it is no longer
identifiable today. But Eden was a real place and a beautiful place.
Conclusion
Photo Austral International
In the year 2000 my wife and I went into the Sydney Art Gallery to see an exhibition
of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were a multitude of advertisements for features on
the creation myths of various cultures, including the aboriginal creation myths
(such as the Rainbow Serpent stories) and the Genesis creation myth. The obvious
problem is that Genesis 1–11 does not present itself primarily as
myth or poetry. There are genealogies in chapters 5 and 10, and these are sober
straightforward accounts—unlike the wild genealogical accounts to be found
in Assyrian documents. Genesis is not given to us as a poetic expression of truth
dressed up in allegories and symbols. There is poetry in the Bible, but this is
not poetry.
The attempt to reconcile Genesis and evolution almost invariably leads to compromise
on the part of Christians. Back in 1964, the Old Testament scholar, R.L. Harris,
wrote: ‘I am appalled at the freedom with which our Christian scientists are
toying with the Biblical texts.’24
Interestingly enough, C.S. Lewis was one Christian who became more disenchanted
with the whole hypothesis of evolution. On 9 December 1944 he wrote to his friend
Captain Bernard Acworth (an ardent anti-evolutionist): ‘I can’t have
made my position clear. I am not either attacking or defending Evolution. I believe
that Christianity can still be believed, even if Evolution is true.’ By 1951
that tone was changing, and he wrote to the same Captain Acworth: ‘What inclines
me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical
lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your
arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.’25
The fact that God is the Creator establishes His Lordship over the world. It establishes
His Lordship over you and me, and His claims on our lives. It is because He is Creator
that He has the right to judge. That is why you and I are answerable to Him. He
is the one to whom the Scripture testifies and to whom all creation testifies.
Acknowledgement
This article first appeared in Contending Earnestly for the Faith, Vol.
13:3, Issue 41, September 2007.
Related articles
Further reading
Recommended Resources
References
- New York Times, November 26, 1959. Return
to Text.
- Cited in Andy McIntosh, Genesis for Today, Surrey: Day One,
1997, p.18. Return to Text.
- Cited in James Montgomery Boice, Genesis, vol.1, Michigan:
Zondervan, 1982, p.48. Return to Text.
- Cited in Marvin L. Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A Creationist
Assessment of the Human Fossils, Michigan: Baker, 1992, p.206. Return
to Text.
- Cf. John Rendle-Short, Green Eye of the Storm, Edinburgh:
Banner of Truth, 1998, p.124. Return to Text.
- C. Darwin, Life and Letters, edited by Sir Francis Darwin,
1898, p.437. Return to Text.
- Jordan Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theology
Seminary, in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. Return to Text.
- Douglas Kelly, Creation and Change, Fearn: Mentor, 1997, p.43.
Return to Text.
- Henry Morris, The Genesis Record, Welwyn: Evangelical Press,
1977, pp.21, 677–682. Return to Text.
- Sandy Grant, ‘Reading Genesis’, The Briefing,
October 2006, issue 337, pp.10, 12. Return to Text.
- Sandy Grant, ‘Reading Genesis’, The Briefing,
October 2006, issue 337, pp.10–11. Return to Text.
- Derek Burke (ed.), Creation and Evolution, Leicester: IVP,
1985, p.168. Return to Text.
- Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Waco: Word, 1987, pp.39–40.
Return to Text.
- Henri Blocher, In the Beginning, Downer’s Grove: IVP,
1984, pp.124, 155. Return to Text.
- Augustine, City of God, XI, 6. Return
to Text.
- P. J. Wiseman, Clues to Creation in Genesis, London: Marshall,
Morgan & Scott, 1977. Return to Text.
- Cited in Douglas Kelly, Creation and Change, Fearn: Mentor,
1997, p.50. Return to Text.
- C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
reprinted 1985, pp. 301–2. Return to Text.
- Cf. D. Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Say No! California: Creation-Life
Publishers, 1980. Return to Text.
- S. J. Gould, Ever Since Darwin, Victoria: Penguin, 1982,
pp.61–62. Return to Text.
- S. J. Gould, Ever Since Darwin, Victoria: Penguin, 1982,
p.271. Return to Text.
- Cf. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Bethesda:
Adler & Adler, 1985. Return to Text.
- Cf. E. Lucas, Can We Believe Genesis Today? Leicester: IVP,
2001, pp.130–131. Return to Text.
- Cited in Ronald F. Youngblood (ed.), The Genesis Debate,
Michigan: Baker, 1990, p.79. Return to Text.
- C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters,
1944–1960’, http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1996/PSCF3-96Ferngren.html.
Return to Text.
Published: 13 November 2007(GMT+10)
| Long before this site existed, many millions searched on the word “creation”. When they do that now they will get to know this site exists and read the evidence that God is Creator. Help reach millions.  | | |
|
