He concluded that God created instantaneously, but with the capacity to develop , much like a seed has the capacity to develop into a mature tree. So are the days of Genesis 1 meant to be understood as regular, hour days? Yes and no. The seven-day week is meant to be understood as a regular human work week.
But it does not automatically follow that Genesis 1 is revealing scientific information about the chronology of natural history. Join us to receive the latest articles, podcasts, videos, and more, and help us show how science and faith work hand in hand.
We believe Genesis is a true account that, like other ancient narratives, uses vivid imagery to describe past events. It is silent on the scientific questions we might wish it to answer. Christian doctrine is broadly compatible with scientific accounts of our origins. Clues to the original intended meaning can be found in the style of language, the genre of literature, the original audience, and the historical and cultural context.
A fresh look at the genre of the creation story provides more context of Genesis 1, and what its contents meant for the early users of the Pentateuch. Wrestling with the doctrine of creation? Found among the ruins was a Babylonian creation story referred to today as Enuma Elish. How people viewed Genesis would never be the same again.
The divergences between the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 suggest that these texts are not teaching science; for then we would need to ask which account is scientifically true. Discussing interpretation with biblical scholar John Walton and exploring the answers his work offers. Introduction Did the author of Genesis 1 intend to communicate that God created everything in six hour days, or are the days meant to be understood in some other way?
Contrasting Views of Genesis 1 Most Christians today interpret the first creation account in the Bible, Genesis , in one of three ways: According to the calendar day view , Genesis 1 is a straightforward historical narrative, in the modern journalistic sense.
This conclusion, combined with a summation of years given in biblical genealogies, lead most advocates of this view to believe that God created the material universe in one ordinary week between six and ten thousand years ago. Those who hold this view are known as young-earth creationists. The days of Genesis 1 may be millions of years long and even overlap with one another. Advocates of this view tend to accept the scientific evidence for the great age of the universe; they are called old-earth or progressive creationists.
Literary views prioritize the literary features, theological themes, and cultural context of the creation account. Conclusion So are the days of Genesis 1 meant to be understood as regular, hour days? What is BioLogos? Subscribe Now What is BioLogos? Common Question. Is Genesis real history? There are lots of good sequences — lines of fossils with little difference between adjacent forms, from the amphibians to the mammals for example, or in more detail the evolution of the horse from Eohippus on five toes to the modern horse on one toe.
Moreover, in refutation of Creationism, we do not find fossils out of order as you might expect after a flood. For all that Creationists sometimes claim otherwise, humans are never found down with the dinosaurs. Those brutes of old expired long before we appeared on the scene and the fossil record confirms this. Fifth, Creationists argue that physics disproves evolution. The second law of thermodynamics claims that things always run down — entropy increases, to use the technical language.
Energy gets used and converted eventually into heat, and cannot be of further service. But organisms clearly keep going and seem to defy the law. This would be impossible simply given evolution. The second law rules out the blind evolution meaning change without direct divine guidance of organisms from the initial simple blobs up to the complex higher organisms like humans.
There must therefore have been a non-natural, miraculous intervention to produce functioning life. To which argument the response of evolutionists is that the second law does indeed say that things are running down, but it does not deny that isolated pockets of the universe might reverse the trend for a short while by using energy from elsewhere.
And this is what happens on planet Earth. We use the energy from the sun to keep evolving for a while. Eventually the sun will go out and life will become extinct.
The second law will win eventually, but not just yet. Sixth, and let us make this the final Creationist objection, it is said that humans simply cannot be explained by blind law that is, unguided law , especially not by blind evolutionary laws.
They must have been created. To which the response is that it is mere arbitrary supposition to believe that humans are that exceptional. In fact, today the fossil record for humans is strong — we evolved over the past four million years from small creatures of half our height, who had small brains and who walked upright but not as well as we. There is lots of fossil proof of these beings known as Australopithecus afarensis. Perhaps it is true that we humans are special, in that as Christians claim we uniquely have immortal souls, but this is a religious claim.
It is not a claim of science, and hence evolution should not be faulted for not explaining souls. There is of course a lot more to be found out about human evolution, but this is the nature of science.
No branch of science has all of the answers. The real question is whether the branch of science keeps the answers coming in, and evolutionists claim that this is certainly true of their branch of science.
Before moving on historically, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider aspects of Creationism, in what one might term the cultural context. First, as a populist movement, driven as much by social factors — a sense of alienation from the modern world — one would expect to find that cultural changes in society would be reflected in Creationist beliefs. This is indeed so. Take, above all, the question of racial issues and relationships. In the middle of the nineteenth century in the South, biblical literalism was very popular because it was thought to justify slavery Noll Even though one can read the Christian message as being strongly against slavery — the Sermon on the Mount hardly recommends making people into the property of others — the Bible elsewhere seems to endorse slavery.
Remember, when the escaped slave came to Saint Paul, the apostle told him to return to his master and to obey him. Remnants of this kind of thinking persisted in Creationist circles well into the twentieth century.
Price, for instance, was quite convinced that blacks are degenerate whites. By the time of Genesis Flood , however, the civil rights movement was in full flower, and Whitcomb and Morris trod very carefully. They explained in detail that the Bible gives no justification for treating blacks as inferior. The story of the son and grandson of Noah being banished to a dark-skinned future was not part of their reading of the Holy Scriptures.
Literalism may be the unvarnished word of God, but literalism is as open to interpretation as scholarly readings of Plato or Aristotle. Second, as noted above, both for internal and external reasons, Creationists realized that they needed to tread carefully in outright opposition to evolution of all kinds.
We find in fact then that although Creationists were and are adamantly opposed to unified common descent and to the idea of natural change being adequate for all the forms we see today, from early on they were accepting huge amounts of what can only truly be called evolution!
This said, Creationists were convinced that this change occurs much more rapidly than most conventional evolutionists would allow. Macroevolution is what makes reptiles reptiles, and mammals mammals. This cannot be a natural process but required miracles during the days of Creation. Third, and perhaps most significant of all, never think that Creationism is purely an epistemological matter — a matter of facts and their understanding. Moral claims have always been absolutely fundamental.
Nearly all Creationists in the Christian camp are what is known theologically as premillennialists, believing that Jesus will come soon and reign over the world before the Last Judgement. They are opposed to postmillennialists who think that Jesus will come later, and amillennialists who are inclined to think that perhaps we are already living in a Jesus-dominated era. Postmillennialists put a premium on our getting things ready for Jesus — hence, we should engage in social action and the like.
Premillennialists think there is nothing we ourselves can do to better the world, so we had best get ourselves and others in a state ready for Jesus. This means individual behavior and conversion of others.
For premillennialists therefore, and this includes almost all Creationists, the great moral drives are to things like family sanctity which today encompasses anti-abortion , sexual orthodoxy especially anti-homosexuality , biblically sanctioned punishments very pro-capital punishment , strong support for Israel because of claims in Revelation about the Jews returning to Israel before End Times , and so forth.
It is absolutely vital to see how this moral agenda is an integral part of American Creationism, as much as Floods and Arks. Ruse discusses these matters in much detail. Genesis Flood enjoyed massive popularity among the faithful, and led to a thriving Creation Science Movement, where Morris particularly and his coworkers and believers — notably Duane T. Particularly effective was their challenging of evolutionists to debate, where they would employ every rhetorical trick in the book, reducing the scientists to fury and impotence, with bold statements provocatively made most often by Gish about the supposed nature of the universe Gilkey ; Ruse ed.
This all culminated eventually in a court case in Arkansas. By the end of the s, Creationists were passing around draft bills, intended for state legislatures, that would allow — insist on — the teaching of Creationism in state-supported public schools. In the biology classes of such schools, that is. By this time it was realized that, thanks to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment to the Constitution that which prohibits the establishment of state religion , it was not possible to exclude the teaching of evolution from such schools.
The trick was to get Creationism — something that prima facie rides straight through the separation of church and state — into such schools. The idea of Creation Science is to do this. The claim is that, although the science parallels Genesis, as a matter of scientific fact, it stands alone as good science. In , these drafts found a taker in Arkansas, where such a bill was passed and signed into law — as it happens, by a legislature and governor that thought little of what they were doing until the consequences were drawn to their attention.
William Clinton was governor from to , and again from to his winning of the presidency, in The law was passed during the interregnum. The theologian Langdon Gilkey, the geneticist Francisco Ayala, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and as the philosophical representative Michael Ruse appeared as expert witnesses, arguing that Creationism has no place in state supported biology classes.
Hardly surprisingly, evolution won. The judge ruled firmly that Creation Science is not science, it is religion, and as such has no place in public classrooms. In this whole matter was decided decisively in the same way, by the Supreme Court, in a similar case involving Louisiana.
See Ruse ed. Of course, in real life nothing is ever that simple, and Arkansas was certainly not the end of matters. One of the key issues in the trial was less theological or scientific, but philosophical. Paradoxically, the ACLU had significant doubts about using a philosophical witness and only decided at the last minute to bring Michael Ruse to the stand. The Creationists had started to refer to the ideas of the eminent, Austrian-born, British-residing philosopher Karl Popper As is well known, Popper claimed that for something to be genuinely scientific it has to be falsifiable.
By this, Popper meant that genuine science puts itself up to check against the real world. If the predictions of the science hold true, then it lives to fight another day. If the predictions fail, then the science must be rejected — or at least revised. The Creationists seized on this and argued that they had the best authority to reject evolution, or at least to judge it no more of a science than Creationism. To his credit, Popper revised his thinking on Darwinian evolutionary theory and grew to see and admit that it was a genuine scientific theory; see Popper Part of the testimony in Arkansas was designed to refute this argument, and it was shown that in fact evolution does indeed make falsifiable claims.
As we have already seen, natural selection is no tautology. If one could show that organisms did not exhibit differential reproduction — to take the example given above, that all proto-humans had the same number of offspring — then selection theory would certainly be false.
Likewise, if one could show that human and dinosaur remains truly did occur in the same time strata of the fossil record, one would have powerful proof against the thinking of modern evolutionists. This argument succeeded in court — the judge accepted that evolutionary thinking is falsifiable. Conversely, he accepted that Creation Science is never truly open to check. On-the-spot, ad hoc hypotheses proliferate as soon as any of its claims are challenged.
It is not falsifiable and hence not genuine science. They argued that in fact there is no hard and fast rule for distinguishing science from other forms of human activity, and that hence in this sense the Creationists might have a point Ruse ed. Not that people like Laudan were themselves Creationists. They thought Creationism false. Their objection was rather to trying to find some way of making evolution and not Creationism into a genuine science.
Defenders of the anti-Creationism strategy taken in Arkansas argued, with reason and law, that the United States Constitution does not bar the teaching of false science. It bars the teaching of non-science, especially non-science which is religion by another name. Hence, if the objections of people like Laudan were taken seriously, the Creationists might have a case to make for the balanced treatment of evolution and Creationism.
Popperian falsifiability may be a somewhat rough and ready way of separating science and religion, but it is good enough for the job at hand, and in law that is what counts. Evolutionists were successful in court. As we shall see, the task of leadership then got passed to younger people, especially the biochemist Michael Behe and the philosopher-mathematician William Dembski.
For better or for worse, one sees the heavy hand of Thomas Kuhn here, and his claim in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the change from one paradigm to another is akin to a political revolution, not ultimately fueled by logic but more by extra-scientific factors, like emotions and simple preferences. In the Arkansas trial, Kuhn was as oft mentioned by the prosecutors as was Popper. The former is the scientific stance of trying to explain by laws and by refusing to introduce miracles.
A methodological naturalist would insist on explaining all phenomena, however strange, in natural terms. Elijah setting fire to the water-drenched sacrifice, for instance, would be explained in terms of lightning striking or some such thing.
The latter is the philosophical stance that insists that there is nothing beyond the natural — no God, no supernatural, no nothing. According to naturalism, what is ultimately real is nature, which consists of the fundamental particles that make up what we call matter and energy, together with the natural laws that govern how those particles behave.
Johnson thinks of himself as a theistic realist, and hence as such in opposition to metaphysical realism. Hence, the evolutionist is the methodological realist, is the metaphysical realist, is the opponent of the theistic realist — and as far as Johnson is concerned, the genuine theistic realist is one who takes a pretty literalistic reading of the Bible.
So ultimately, it is all less a matter of science and more a matter of attitudes and philosophy. Evolution and Creationism are different world pictures, and it is conceptually, socially, pedagogically, and with good luck in the future legally wrong to treat them differently.
Theistic Realism is the only genuine form of Christianity. But does any of this really follow? The evolutionist would claim not. Metaphysical naturalism, having been defined as something which precludes theism, has been set up as a philosophy with a religion-like status. It necessarily perpetuates the conflict between religion and science. But as Johnson himself notes, many people think that they can be methodological naturalists and theists.
Methodological naturalism is not a religion equivalent. Is this possible, at least in a consistent way with intellectual integrity? To sort out this debate, let us agree to what is surely the case that if you are a methodological naturalist, today you are going to accept evolution and conversely to think that evolution supports your cause. Today, methodological naturalism and evolution are a package deal. Take one, and you take the other.
Reject one, and you reject the other. You cannot accept Genesis literally and evolution. That is a fact. In other words, there can be no accommodation between Creationism and evolution. However, what if you think that theologically speaking there is much to be said for a nice shade of grey?
What if you think that much of the Bible, although true, should be interpreted in a metaphorical manner? What if you think you can be an evolutionist, and yet take in the essential heart of the Bible? What price consistency and methodological naturalism then?
It speaks of the world as a meaningful creation of God however caused and of a foreground drama which takes place within this world. And clearly at once we are plunged into the first of the big problems, namely that of miracles — those of Jesus himself the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Cana , his return to life on the third day, and especially if you are a Catholic such ongoing miracles as transubstantiation and those associated, in response to prayer, with the intervention of saints.
There are a number of options here for the would-be methodological naturalist. You might simply say that such miracles occurred, that they did involve violations of law, but that they are outside your science. They are simply exceptions to the rule. End of argument. A little abrupt, but not flatly inconsistent with calling yourself a theist.
You say normally God works through law but, for our salvation, miracles outside law were necessary. Or you might say that miracles occur but that they are compatible with science, or at least not incompatible.
Jesus was in a trance and the cure for cancer after the prayers to Saint Bernadette was according to rare, unknown, but genuine laws. This position is less abrupt, although you might worry whether this strategy is truly Christian, in letter or in spirit. It seems a little bit of a cheat to say that the Jesus taken down from the cross was truly not dead, and the marriage at Cana starts to sound like outright fraud. Of course, you can start stripping away at more and more miracles, downgrading them to regular occurrences blown up and magnified by the Apostles, but in the end this rather defeats the whole purpose.
The third option is simply to refuse to get into the battle at all. Miracles are just not the sorts of things which conflict with or confirm natural laws. Traditional Christians have always argued this in some respects. Take the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The turning of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is simply not something open to empirical check. You cannot disconfirm religion or prove science by doing an analysis of the host.
Likewise even with the resurrection of Jesus. After the Crucifixion, his mortal body was irrelevant. The point was that the disciples felt Jesus in their hearts, and were thus emboldened to go forth and preach the gospel. Does one simply go to Lourdes in hope of a lucky lottery ticket to health or for the comfort that one knows one will get, even if there is no physical cure?
In the words of the philosophers, it is a category mistake to put miracles and laws in the same set. Hume , is the starting place for these discussions. Although somewhat dated, Flew and MacIntyre is still invaluable. Paradoxically, both of these then-atheist authors came to see the light and returned to the Christianity of their childhoods! What has Johnson to say to all of this? What Johnson does say is more in the way of sneer or dismissal than argument. At this point, the evolutionist will probably throw up his or her hands in despair.
In actual fact, many significant theologians of our age think that, with respect to miracles, science and religion have no conflict Barth ; Gilkey They would add that faith without difficulty and opposition is not true faith, either. Such thinkers, often conservative theologically, are inspired by Martin Buber to find God in the center of personal relationships, I-Thou, rather in science, I-It. For them there is something degrading in the thought of Jesus as a miracle man, a sort of fugitive from the Ed Sullivan Show.
What happened with the five thousand? Some hokey-pokey over a few loaves and fishes? What they deny, here or elsewhere, is the need to search for exception to law. There are those who call themselves theists, who think that one can be a methodological naturalist, where today this would imply evolution Ruse Johnson has not argued against them.
Let us move on now from the more philosophical sorts of issues. Building on the more critical approach of Johnson, who is taken to have cleared the foundations as it were, there is a group of people who are trying to offer an alternative to evolution. These are people who think that a full understanding of the organic world demands the invocation of some force beyond nature, a force which is purposeful or at least purpose creating.
For the moment, continue to defer questions about the relationship between Intelligent Design Theory and more traditional forms of Creationism. There are two parts to this approach: an empirical and a philosophical. Let us take them in turn, beginning with he who has most fully articulated the empirical case for a designer, the already-mentioned, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe.
Now turn to the world of biology, and in particular turn to the micro-world of the cell and of mechanisms that we find at that level. Take bacteria which use a flagellum, driven by a kind of rotary motor, to move around. Every part is incredibly complex, and so are the various parts, combined.
Near the surface of the cell, just as needed is a thickening, so that the filament can be connected to the rotor drive.
All, way too complex to have come into being in a gradual fashion. Only a one-step process will do, and this one-step process must involve some sort of designing cause.
Behe is careful not to identify this designer with the Christian God, but the implication is that it is a force from without the normal course of nature. Irreducible complexity spells design. Irreducible complexity is supposedly something which could not have come through unbroken law meaning law that has no special divine guidance , and especially not through the agency of natural selection.
Critics claim that Behe shows a misunderstanding of the very nature and workings of natural selection. No one is denying that in natural processes there may well be parts which, if removed, would lead at once to the non-functioning of the systems in which they occur. The point however is not whether the parts now in place could not be removed without collapse, but whether they could have been put in place by natural selection. Consider an arched bridge, made from cut stone, without cement, held in place only by the force of the stones against each other.
If you tried to build the bridge from scratch, upwards and then inwards, you would fail — the stones would keep falling to the ground, as indeed the whole bridge now would collapse were you to remove the center keystone or any surrounding it.
Rather, what you must do is first build a supporting structure possibly an earthen embankment , on which you will lay the stones of the bridge, until they are all in place. At which point you can remove the structure for it is no longer needed, and in fact is in the way. Likewise, one can imagine a biochemical sequential process with several stages, on the parts of which other processes piggyback as it were.
Then the hitherto non-sequential parasitic processes link up and start functioning independently, the original sequence finally being removed by natural selection as redundant or inconveniently draining of resources. Of course, this is all pretend. But Darwinian evolutionists have hardly ignored the matter of complex processes.
Indeed, it is discussed in detail by Darwin in the Origin , where he refers to that most puzzling of all adaptations, the eye.
This process, which occurs in the cell parts known as mitochondria, involves the production of ATP adenosine triphosphate : a complex molecule which is energy rich and which is degraded by the body as needed say in muscle action into another less rich molecule ADP adenosine diphosphate.
The Krebs cycle remakes ATP from other energy sources — an adult human male needs to make nearly Kg a day — and by any measure, the cycle is enormously involved and intricate. For a start, nearly a dozen enzymes substances which facilitate chemical processes are required, as one sub-process leads on to another. Yet the cycle did not come out of nowhere.
It was cobbled together out of other cellular processes which do other things. Each one of the bits and pieces of the cycle exists for other purposes and has been coopted for the new end. Readers who want to dig more deeply into some of the technical issues should start with the entry on fitness.
What these workers do not offer is a Behe-type answer. First, they brush away a false lead. Could it be that we have something like the evolution of the mammalian eye, where primitive existent eyes in other organisms suggest that selection can and does work on proto models as it were , refining features which have the same function if not as efficient as more sophisticated models?
Probably not, for there is no evidence of anything like this. But then we are put on a more promising track. Rounding off the response to Behe, let us note that, if his arguments are well-taken, then in respects we are into a bigger set of problems than otherwise! His position seems simply not viable given what we know of the nature of mutation and the stability of biological systems over time.
When exactly is the intelligent designer supposed to strike and to do its work? This is not a satisfactory response. We cannot ignore the history of the genes from the point between their origin when they would not have been needed and today when they are in full use. Today more Christians, who hold to a literal reading of Genesis, that God created the world in six days, are called Creationists. As early as the 4th century, St. Augustine, one of the most influential theologians in Christian history, suggested that the six-day structure of creation in Genesis presents a logical framework rather that the exact passage of time.
He maintained that interpreting the creation story is difficult and that Christians should be willing to change their minds if new information were to emerge.
Many Christians stand in this tradition and are able to accommodate new scientific discoveries in their thinking. For them the Bible is there to explain who the creator is and why God created the world, not a scientific explanation of how the world was created. Many of the major Christians denominations would hold this view.
Below Modimo are Badimo , ancestral spirits who are venerated, worshipped and invoked through sacrifices, prayers and appropriate behaviour. Below Badimo are the spirits of royal ancestors, followed by living royalty, village elders, and then parents, in that order of reverence.
Islam is unequivocal that all creation originates from the will, intention and doing of Allah, the Almighty. There are differing views in Islam as to the how and in what order the creation happened.
Whence it all came, and how creation happened? Creation beliefs around the world are complex and varied. Hinduism The creation belief central to Hinduism is the idea that Brahman the Ultimate Divine Reality has three functions symbolised by the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva , who together are known as the Trimurti.
Judaism Jewish understandings of creation are based on the Genesis account and reflect different views of that account.
Khalakhali San People did not always live on the surface of the Earth. Christianity Like Jews, Christians base their understandings of the creation on the Genesis account. Verily your Lord Allah has created the heavens and the earth in six days.
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