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A Scientific Commentary on Genesis 7:11

Rolf Bouma — Tue, 05 Feb 13 08:00:43 -0800

Genesis 7:11: In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

Series: It's an Old World After All

Joy Walters — Tue, 06 Nov 12 07:00:44 -0800

In our last Videocast, we explored some of the ways scientists have been able to determine the age of hominid fossils. Today, in our sixth BioLogos videocast, we extend the question to the age of the Earth. The first section, featured today, explains four methods scientists have used to determine that age: tree ring, lake varve, radiometric, and seafloor spread dating.

The script was written by biology student Joy Walters, with help from BioLogos president Darrel Falk.

Series: Genesis Through Ancient Eyes

John Walton — Thu, 18 Oct 12 08:00:48 -0700

In the first segment of his talk, “Genesis Through Ancient Eyes”, Dr. John Walton discusses the authority of Scripture and how we should both honor and understand the text. According to Walton, we must remember that Scripture is “for us”, but that it was not written “to us”. He briefly highlights the ancient cosmology of both Egypt and Isreal and implores us to see the text of the Bible the way the Ancient Israelites would have seen it.

How Do We Know the Earth is Old? (Infographic)

Sun, 15 Jul 12 04:59:59 -0700

(Click image for full resolution)

The Questions Update: The Age of the Earth

Sat, 14 Jul 12 05:02:55 -0700

How are the ages of the Earth and universe calculated?

In a Nutshell

Many independent measurements have established that the Earth and the universe are billions of years old. Geologists have found annual layers in glaciers that can be counted back 740,000 years. Using the known rate of change in radio-active elements (radiometric dating), some Earth rocks have been shown to be billions of years old, while the oldest solar system rocks are dated at 4.6 billion years. Astronomers use the distance to galaxies and the speed of light to calculate that the light has been traveling for billions of years. The expansion of the universe gives an age for the universe as a whole: 13.7 billion years old.

In Detail

Introduction

Astronomers and geologists have determined that the universe and Earth are billions of years old. This conclusion is not based on just one measurement or one calculation, but on many types of evidence. Here we will describe just two types of evidence for an old Earth and two types of evidence for an old universe; more types can be found under Further Reading. These methods are largely independent of each other, based on separate observations and arguments, yet all point to a history much longer than 10,000 years. As Christians, we believe that God created the world and that the world declares his glory, so we can’t ignore what nature is telling us about its history.

Age of the Earth from seasonal rings and layers

If you’ve ever seen a horizontal slice of a tree trunk, you’ve seen how a tree forms a new growth ring each year. In years of drought, the tree grows less quickly so the ring is narrower; in good growing seasons the ring is thicker. A tree’s age can be found by simply counting its rings. By comparing the pattern of thick and thin rings to weather records, scientists can verify that the method is accurate. This method can even be used on dead trees that fell in a forest long ago. For example, the last 200 rings in the dead tree might match up with 200 rings early in the life of the living tree, so the two trees together can count back many years. In this way, multiple trees can be used to build a master chronology for a forested region. European oak trees have been used to build a 12,000-year chronology.¹

The annual ice layers in glaciers provide a similar method that goes back much further in history. Each year, snowfall varies throughout the seasons and an annual layer is formed. Like the tree rings, this method can be verified by comparison to historical records for weather, as well as to records of volcanic eruptions around the globe that left thin dust layers on the glaciers. Scientists have drilled ice cores deep into glaciers and found ice that is 123,000 years old in Greenland² and 740,000 years old in Antarctica.³ These annual layers go back much farther than the 10,000 years advocated by the young earth creationists. The Earth must be at least 740,000 years old.

How can an old Earth be reconciled with Genesis? See Scripture Interpretation

Age of the Earth and solar system from radiometric dating

In your high school science classroom, you may have seen a large poster of the periodic table hanging on the wall. The periodic table shows the types of atoms that make up the world around us. An element in the periodic table can come in different flavors called isotopes. Some isotopes are unstable, and over time these isotopes “decay” into isotopes of other elements. For example, Potassium-40 is unstable and decays into Argon-40. As time passes, a rock will have more and more Argon-40 and less and less Potassium-40. Radiometric dating is possible because this decay occurs at a known rate, called the “half-life” of the radioactive element. The half-life is the time that it takes for half the radioactive sample to change from one element into the other.

Some isotopes have short half-lives of minutes or years, but Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Radiometric dating requires that one understand the initial ratio of the two elements in a given sample by some means. In this case, Argon-40 is a gas that easily bubbles out and escapes when it is produced in molten rock. Once the rock hardens, however, all the Argon-40 is trapped in the sample, giving us an accurate record of how much Potassium-40 has decayed since that time. So, if we find a rock with equal parts Potassium-40 and Argon-40, we know that half the Potassium-40 has decayed into Argon-40, and that the rock hardened 1.3 billion years ago.⁴

It’s hard to find rocks on the surface of the Earth that have not been altered over time. Most old rocks have been eroded by wind and water or submerged by continental plates. The oldest reliably dated rock formation is in Greenland, where several different isotopes were used to find an age of 3.6 billion years.⁵ Scientists also recently dated zircon grains (which resist erosion) in Western Australia to 4.4 billion years old.⁶ To find older rocks that haven’t been eroded, we need to look beyond Earth. Meteorites are rocks from the solar system that have fallen to Earth recently and haven’t suffered much erosion. Their pristine interiors give an age that dates back to their formation at the beginning of the solar system. Nearly all meteorites have the same radiometric age, 4.56 billion years old.⁷ Thus, the solar system, including the Earth, is about 4,560,000,000 years old.

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ANSWER HERE.

Notes

Davis A. Young, ”How Old Is It? How Do We Know? A Review of Dating Methods – Part One: Relative Dating, Absolute Dating, and Non-radiometric Dating” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 58 No 4 (2006), p. 264. (PDF)
Roger C. Weins, "Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective", The American Scientific Affiliation (2002). See also North Greenland Ice Core Project Members, “High-resolution Record of Northern Hemisphere Climate Extending into the Last Interglacial Period,” Nature 431 (2004): 147–151, which reports ages back to 123,000 years. (web article)
EPICA Community Members, “Eight Glacial Cycles from an Antarctic Ice Core,” Nature 429 (2004): 623–628.
Young earth creationists reject radiometric dating methods, including claims that decay rates are not constant. For a critical review, see Randall Isaac “Assessing the RATE Project”, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol 59, no 2, June 2007, p.143-146. (PDF)
See Wiens and references therein. (web article)
Wilde et al. “Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the earth 4.4 Gyr ago,” Nature (2001) 409, 175-178.
See Davis A Young, ”How Old Is It? How Do We Know? A Review of Dating Methods—Part Two: Radiometric Dating: Mineral, Isochron and Concordia Methods” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 59, No 1 (2007) and references therein (PDF)

Revealing God's Nature

Brian McLaren — Wed, 18 Jan 12 06:48:09 -0800

Today's video features pastor Brian McLaren and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Brian McLaren discusses the value of considering Scripture in light of the cultures that surrounded them. The Biblical writers were aware of the myths of the power nations that surrounded them, but flipped their stories on their heads to reveal truth about God. The myths of cultures like Babylon declared that the world was built on a foundation of violence and humans meant to be slaves to the gods and their leaders, but the Bible tells that the world comes from goodness and that humans are made for more than servitude but to truly know God.

"Centered": The Language of Science and Faith

Karl Giberson — Fri, 18 Nov 11 05:56:02 -0800

In a recent interview with the Sirius XM radio show Centered, Karl Giberson, co-author of BioLogos' The Language of Science and Faith, sat down with host Don Belanus to discuss the book and the interplay between science and faith. Among the topics they cover are what constitute the "genuine questions" of science and faith mentioned in the title and whether the age of the earth should be a top priority for pastors to discuss with their congregations.

Seeing the Flood Story Through an Ancient Israelite Lens

Pete Shaw — Sat, 12 Nov 11 04:00:15 -0800

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon features Pete Shaw, who is the senior pastor of Crosswalk Community Church in Napa California. The full sermon can be downloaded here. Finally, if you know a sermon or podcast related to science and faith that has especially spoken to you, please let us know.

The early chapters of Genesis appear to pose scientific problems that challenge our literal, post-Enlightenment lens through which we often read the Word of God. (See this post for a commentary on how this situation came about.) This leads many people to believe that the descriptions in these texts are meant to reveal more than raw scientific fact. Pete Shaw of Crosswalk Community Church highlights the story of Noah and the Ark to explore the possible reasons for adopting a non-literal understanding of this ancient narrative. Shaw first summarizes the story of Upnashatim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a famous Sumerian flood story that the young and old in Abraham’s day would have known well. Upon comparison, these two accounts—the Genesis flood and the Gilgamesh flood—are incredibly similar. Furthermore, Shaw exposes the various practical problems that arise if one takes every word of the Noah story to be a precise truth. For example, he wonders how Noah could have fed and maintained every living land creature in a small boat for ten months. He also explains how a primitive understanding of the universe is heavily reflected in this text. In light of these points, he concludes that whether or not this story is portraying actual historical events, it is presenting rich truths about God, and that should be the focus of the believer.

Transcript

“The first eleven chapters of Genesis are what scholars call pre-history. In other words, they can’t really date what was going on very well in those first elven chapters. After that, twelfth chapter on, it is a lot easier to date, and the stories have a different feel, a different structure… but those first eleven have caused a lot of debate over the years. In fact, the next slide is going to kind of give you the line of where I am going to take you today. You might not be aware of this, but there is a Noah controversy. You and I, when we hear the story of a great flood, the first thing that comes to our mind—when we think of the whopper of all whoppers—we think of Noah and the Ark, but if we lived in Abraham’s time or especially before, the name Noah probably would not have come up. In fact, if we grew up with Abraham, the story we would have most likely known about was the story—I am going to butcher this name—of Utnapishtim.

You are familiar with Utnapishtim aren’t you? And you are familiar with the god Enlil. I am sure you are familiar with Enlil. And you would have been very aware of a storybook that was read by children and adults alike called the Epic of Gilgamesh. And in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have the story of Utnapishtim and the god Enlil. And just so that you would know about that story a little bit, knowing that that would have been the predominant story that you would have understood anytime you thought about a flood, this is how the story went down. So, this god Enlil was the god of thunder and rain and all that and he was not a happy camper (kind of temperamental) as thunder gods can be. And for no clear reason, except to mess around with some of the other gods in his discontent, he made the decision that he was going to wipe out the earth with a great flood. And one of the other gods, a goddess in fact, did not like that this was going to happen and thought that it was unfair, unjust, and so she sent a message to Utnapishtim that this flood was going to come at the hand and the wrath of Enlil. And so Utnapishtim got to work, and he built a vessel (a strange vessel), a cube, but he used some of the similar materials that we saw in the Ark, and he made this massive structure (if in fact you do the math, it is probably at least twice, if not much larger, than the actual Ark) this massive cube that he made hoping that it would float, and he got it done on time.

The rain didn’t come down for forty days, it came down just for seven, but it flooded everything out, and the only survivor was Utnapishtim. And when Enlil came around and saw that some human beings had survived, he was very upset because he intended to wipe out everybody to show his wrath and his anger to the world and to show that he was upset to all the gods in heaven. Well, Utnapishtim obviously saved his own life, the life of his family, the life of his personal animals because those are the animals that he saved—not the rest of the animals of the world. And he took some carpenters along because he didn’t know how to build stuff and once you are starting over you have got to build stuff, and so he brought some carpenters along. In honor of his faithfulness (in light of this word from the goddess) he was given divinity. And so, he became a god, he became one of the gods, he got to reside in heaven, if you will, because of his faithfulness…interesting story.

If you grew up in Sumer, which is present day Iraq, and you grew up with Abraham in what is present day Baghdad that would have been the story that you would have known very, very well. It is because that story exists and other cultures have their own flood stories as well that some scholars look at the story of Noah and the Ark, and they think, ‘well, gee, how should we really interpret this thing? You know, our Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment perspective says it is in black and white, and if it says that is what happened, then that is exactly what happened. There is no way around it.’ Well, what if the first people who shared this story with each other and what if the early writers of this word, what if when they approached the Bible, they didn’t approach it the way we do? What if they didn’t approach the Bible, the Word of God, as a literal, this is exactly how it happened book that our post- Enlightenment eyes are framed to do? How would that change us? And also, some of the things that some of the challengers of this story are bringing out are some of the issues with the story like ok is this really a big enough boat to handle all of the creatures of creation…can they really, really fit?

Some have really tried to make a case that there weren’t as many animals back then as there are now because they got together and hooked up, and now, we have all kinds of varieties and that kind of thing. And so that is kind of there, but you are talking ten months of time! How do you feed all the animals of the world? How do you store all the food? Did they eat fish, because the fish didn’t die? The fish lived on just fine. How do you do that? And what about—it is kind of unpleasant—but all the excrement? What are you going to do with all that ‘bleep?’ Are you going to throw it out the eighteen inch window at the top? Did they have a conveyor belt system? How did it work? And so they look at that and think, ‘I am just not sure about that.’ Would you really take that literally? Is that how we should take it? Is that how they took it around their campfires and around their dinner tables? Did they think about it that way?

And there are other issues too that academics look at, and they challenge somewhat. Like they know that forty days and forty nights is a proverbial statement in Jewish culture. It was like saying (and you see it in many accounts in the Bible), forty days and forty nights was saying a long time, but it probably was not meant to be taken literally. It is just a long time. It is how they thought about things. Then, there is the issue of the rain itself, and how it all came down. Now, the New Living Translation and most modern translations, just simply talk about it as--there is the sky and the rain came down from the sky and you are good to go. But there is another word that is used. If you go to the New King James Bible, for instance, and they talk about the firmament—that the rain came down from the firmament. And so, when we think about firmament, we think, ‘well they are talking about sky or they are talking about the starry host and all that stuff,’ but if we go back to the original word, which the New American Standard version got right (it is one of the most academic and precise versions that is out there), both in the creation story and in the Noah account, they use a different word for sky: they use the word dome.

Now, I am going to butcher this a little bit, but broad stroke version is that the way the ancient people saw the world was that we kind of lived in this bubble, you know sort of like a snow globe, and there was water--not all inside, but outside, surrounding us. There was water below and there was water above, and above us was this massive dome called the firmament or called the sky. And then when it rained it was because God was opening up the floodgates of heaven. That is how they thought back then. They didn’t know any better. And so, kind of what these questions are asking us now is how we make sense of this and do we have to believe like they did in order to believe the story. How many of you believe that the sun revolves around the earth? None! Nobody does. Do you get mad at, do any of you hold a grudge against the earliest people in the Bible, actually, all the people in the Bible, do you hold them accountable and are you angry at them that they believed with everything in them that the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way around?... no, of course not. Do you get angry at them because they believed we lived in a dome and that God opened up the gates of heaven and there you go? No, you don’t hold it against them because you understand that it is the best that they could do given their time.

But we live in the age of Doppler radar, right? We know within minutes, you know, when rain is going to hit Napa and when it is going to move on to Valeo, and so on and so forth. I mean it is that precise, and we know when it is coming hundreds of miles off shore and we can look thousands of miles because of satellite stuff and our ability to understand temperatures and all that. We know how the whole thing is brewing. We know that hurricanes are lining up one after the other in hurricane season because we have cameras up there that are seeing them start to form, and we can gauge temperature in the water and so forth—we do not live back then. So, it would be inappropriate for us to become primitive in the sense of looking at the world the same way they did in that kind of a literalness because we know different, you know what I mean? We know different. And so really the bottom line is that the literalness of the story really isn’t the most important thing to begin with anyway.”

A few editorial reflective thoughts by Darrel Falk: The sermon continues, of course, and you can download it at the above link. What is "the most important thing" to which Pastor Shaw refers as the audio clip draws to a close? Regardless of whether you think it is historical or not, what is the message that God wants to communicate to us through this story? Consider reading Genesis 9 right now. What are the parallels in this "recreation"account to the original creation account? What does God want us to see in making those parallels? What about the rainbow? What does it symbolize for you? Can you sense God's love for all of creation (not just humankind) as this story draws to a close? Why does the story of Noah himself, however, not have a happier ending? Have we seen the theme of nakedness and the need to cover up nakedness in an earlier scriptural passage? Why do you think the story of Noah draws us back to this point (nakedness and shame), just like the story Adam and Eve does? What brought on shame for them? What brings on shame for us? Do you see that God is wanting us to think deeply about this story and its meaning? What is another example of the need to cover up? (Hint: think Moses.) What difference does the coming of Jesus make to all of this? (Hint: see II Corinthians 3:12-18.) Do you see the rainbow?

Navigating the Crises

Brian McLaren — Wed, 21 Sep 11 09:11:52 -0700

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, author and pastor Brian McLaren discusses the idea of surrogate arguments, in which a debate over one thing is really a means for arguing something completely different. According to McClaren, the argument over the age of the earth is one such example, in which an apparent scientific debate is actually a discussion over the nature of religious authority and how previous generations have understood how we should interpret the Bible. Such debates can lead to two crises: one of confidence and one of ethics. While some have the confidence to differ with the views of the generation that raised them in the faith, McLaren points out that some are not able to overcome the ethical challenge of differing with grace and love. When this happens, he notes, the end result is damage to the Church and a retrenching of the views of the older generation. Managing the crises well requires courage of convictions while also respecting tradition and maintaining a gracious spirit. Anything less, is not only unwise, it is also unfaithful.

God's Use of Time

Matthew Blackston — Fri, 19 Aug 11 05:00:43 -0700

I can still recall the first time I encountered a man performing as a living statue. His costume, body paint, and utter stillness made him very convincing. I also recall the eerie feeling I experienced upon first seeing him move. Ordinary statues are, of course, static, but if you hang around a living statue long enough you’re bound to see it move, if only to blink its eyes. I find that when many Christians think about the way God created our universe, our planet, and the forms of life that dwell on it, they often bring a static expectation similar to what we bring to an ordinary statue. It’s as if we assume the physical realm were merely a rigid three-dimensional sculpture, immovable with time.

But since time exists, change and development are possible. The sciences have acquired the tools to “look back” in time and explore our universe’s rich history, so we know that the universe and the life in it do indeed evolve. Through these observations in the natural realm, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that God typically prefers to do His work gradually rather than instantaneously. In what follows, I’d like to briefly explore some of the ways that our universe has been and is evolving over long periods of time and attempt to show that the concept of a God who makes use of long timescales ought to be familiar to us from the story of redemption in scripture. And like observing a living statue, by staring long enough (in this case millions and billions of years) we are able to see a world that is moving and changing, which hopefully deepens our appreciation for the wonder of God’s dynamic creative acts.

God’s use of time in the physical realm

The sense of enjoyment that comes from studying the dynamically evolving universe that God has created is similar to that of a gardener when he or she watches a seed grow into a mature plant. And when considering the history of the cosmos, the analogy of a seed in a garden is an apt one, with each branch of science reinforcing and corroborating the story that is told.

From physics we learn that all the matter and energy that now exists in our universe originated in a hot, dense state (something akin to a primordial seed) which burst forth and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Myriads of stars have gone through the process of forming, burning, and dying, with many exploding in what's called a supernova. These long stellar life cycles have been going on for billions of years and are responsible for "cooking up" and dispersing all the atomic elements necessary for forming planets like Earth and creatures like us.

Once our planet formed, we know from geology and its theory of plate tectonics that the earth's crust has been in a constant (but very slow) process of moving and changing, shifting even the continents around over many millions of years and forming majestic mountains, islands, and other geological features. The picture becomes even more fascinating when biology enters the landscape, describing how life has slowly developed, also over many millions of years, beginning from the simplest of organisms and progressing all the way to beings like us, of such complexity that we are able to reflect on and enjoy the entire display.

But how do we know all this, since our short lives don’t allow us to see these long drawn out processes in action? I see these same sciences as a great gift from God that allow us to explore beyond the bounds of our own time. For instance, when astrophysicists look up into the night sky, they see light that has taken millions or even billions of years to reach us, meaning that they are literally looking at what our universe looked like in the distant past. Geologists look back in time by studying layers of rock, sediment, or ice. They have even found evidence that the earth's magnetic field has flipped many times over the course of the Earth's history so that even the direction our trusty compasses point isn’t constant! Biologists have the fossil record and genetics as a means of exploring the rich and fascinating history of life, teaching us about the ancestors of modern humans as well as exotic creatures such as dinosaurs. All around us the physical world is shifting, changing, and unfolding in an extraordinary way, teaching us that God, the ultimate Gardener, is pleased to watch his creation grow and mature gradually.

God's use of time in redemption up to Jesus

A good number of Christians find the idea of God using long maturation times in creation threatening to their understanding of scripture. But what we learn about God from scripture is not inconsistent with a God who works over long timescales. We see this if we look at the grand meta-narrative of the entire Bible, of which I’ll cover a few highlights to demonstrate my point.

After humans made a mess of their intended role in the created order, God desired to restore it and put it right. And like what we learn from the sciences about the evolution of the universe, He decided to take his time about it. God began his redeeming work with a promise to use Abraham's family to be a blessing to the entire world (Gen. 12:1). This was a promise that was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus nearly two millennia later. Now if God had been in a hurry, he might simply have allowed Sarah to conceive by the Holy Spirit and bring forth Jesus directly. But instead, he decided to take the scenic route, working through Abraham’s seed, including Jacob, Moses, David, and others until the time was right for Jesus.

As time went on and God’s people developed into a nation, David rose to the throne and God made another promise -- that of perpetual kingship to David’s line (2 Sam 7:13). This was another opportune time for Jesus to be born, take the throne, and fulfill the promise. But again we find God taking his time, allowing the kingdom to be divided and eventually conquered, and God’s people sent into a long exile, until the time was right for Jesus, nearly a millennium after David.

God's use of time in redemption after Jesus

The Christian faith holds that in the “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) God sent Jesus as the individual in whom all the promises of God ultimately converged. Just as God's physical creation developed slowly and eventually brought forth our earth and life and humanity, so God's purposes slowly unfold and culminate in Jesus, the descendant of Abraham and David who becomes the blessing to the world.

But here again is another case that demonstrates the point I’m attempting to make. Even the blessing that Jesus comes to announce and inaugurate develops slowly and dynamically – God, the Gardener, continues to slowly cultivate. Jesus himself teaches us to expect this to be the case in parables about the kingdom such as that of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32). Thus, the world isn’t automatically cured of its ills after Jesus’ resurrection. Both then and now, evil, sin, and injustice still exist and there is much that remains to be redeemed. The church is called to continue living in this meta-narrative until we reach the second climax: when Jesus reappears and ushers in the fullness of the new heavens and new earth.

A similar point can be made about God’s redemptive work in the lives of individual Christians as well. God forms each of his children over time through our relationships, our experiences, the trials we encounter, and the service we render. “I am the vine, you are the branches”, says Jesus in John 15:5. God is “growing us” as individuals and as every Christian knows from experience, the maturing process often seems very long indeed.

In conclusion, this brief survey has shown a consistent picture of how God works in his creation. In the cosmos, in the evolution of life, in the redemption of the world, and in the redemption of individuals, God sees fit to use long timescales for accomplishing his purposes. Moreover, with the similarities between what we learn of God from nature and from scripture, Christians needn’t react defensively to what science tells us about the history of the cosmos. Instead, we can indulge in the opportunity to marvel at the ever continuing work of God the Gardener, both in His dynamic creation and His dynamic acts of redemption.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ToniVC.

Series: From the Dust

Ryan Pettey — Wed, 06 Jul 11 05:00:10 -0700

Last week we debuted the first clip from the documentary “From the Dust”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith.

To help foster such dialogue, we are including several discussion questions with each clip from the film. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to watch this video with your friends, your church, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward. We have more discussion questions that go with this transcript and we'd be happy to send them to you to foster further conversation within your church or small group setting.

Editor's Note: The full documentary is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can order the film here, and learn more about the project here.

"The Book of Genesis" Transcript

Dr. Alister McGrath: “The Christian church has always wrestled with the interpretation of Scripture, realizing both how important it is and also sometimes how difficult it is to get it right. Certainly, the opening chapters of Genesis have been a topic of much debate throughout Christian history.”

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The Bible is very important to me, but it is very important to recognize that the Bible is not a book. The Bible is a library. It has all sorts of different kinds of writing in it—It has histories, it has stories, it has poetry, it has prose. When we read Genesis one, we have to figure out, what am I reading? Am I reading a divinely dictated textbook to save me the trouble of doing science, or am I reading something, in fact, more interesting and profound than that?”

Dr. John Walton: “We have to approach Genesis 1 for what it is. It is an ancient document. It is not a document that was written to us—we believe the Bible was written for us like it is for everyone of all times and places because it is God’s Word—but it was not written to us. It was not written in our language. It was not written with our culture in mind or our culture in view.”

Dr. Alister McGrath: “It is not about the authority of Scripture, it is about the interpretation of Scripture. What method of interpretation do I use in the case of each individual passage?”

Dr. Karen Strand Winslow: “Biblical scholars urge people to take a literal, plain reading of the text…but I think in the controversy between theology and science, literal is often used to mean scientific, as if it is scientific, and that is a whole different story.”

Dr. John Walton: “We are inclined by our culture to think of the creation narrative as an account of material origins because we think about the world in material terms. For us, that is kind of what is important about origins. People come to Scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with science and so, they want to either read science out of the Bible or they want to read science into the Bible. That is not the way to do it because inevitably you end up making the text say things that it never meant to the ancient audience.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “We are importing meaning into the text; we are bringing our own presuppositions and assumptions into a text and reading it in light of that as if it were in the text. Now, there is a sense in which we all inevitably do that, but there is also a sense in which we need to be aware when the times that we do that are damaging to the reading of the text.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “When I was a kid and the film industry was still relatively new, it was possible to depict people from two centuries ago as modern Americans dressed up in togas. As the film industry has gotten more sophisticated, they have gotten better and better at creating human figures that actually look and behave and think as they probably would have in the past. So, we Bible readers ought to be equally sophisticated and recognize that someone who was writing three thousand years ago, which is very hard to imagine, that these people must have been very different from us, with very different concerns. They certainly had very different understandings about how material things worked.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “One of the benefits of understanding the historical circumstances of the Bible is that we are reminded of how incredibly old this literature is. Let’s understand it in view of what we could even remotely expect of the Biblical writers to say.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “We can understand what our own creation stories are saying better, if we know what the creation myths were that were known at the times that those stories were written—for instance, to realize that a lot of the Genesis stories were written as a counter measure against the other cultures’ creation stories. That throws an immense amount of light on what parts of the story we are supposed to be paying attention to.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Gilgamesh epic, for example, has a flood narrative and so forth, and so it wants to reflect creatively and theologically in light of those creation myths; it is going to be something recognizable.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “Genesis one shares theological vocabulary with the other stories—it just sort of takes things and turns it on its head.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “If one creation myth talks about the earth being created as a result of the battle between gods, we know to look in our creation stories to say, ‘wait a minute! Is violence intrinsic to the very creation of the universe?’ We find very clearly written that no, it is not.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “It’s Israel’s declaration that Yahweh is worthy of worship. It is a potent and counter-intuitive theological statement in the ancient world where people say, ‘That is totally different from anything we have ever seen.’”

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The stories of the ancient world were not so concerned with minute, literal accuracy as we are today. People wrote not to give you sort of a factual, journalistic account of what is going on, but to tell you the significance of what was happening.”

Dr. Ard Louis: “And so what we see is that there are these really interesting structures in the Genesis text, which suggest that it is not describing the creation process as this is the order in which it happened. Rather, it is taking that story and emphasizing theological points. It talks about days; there was morning, there was evening—but the sun and the moon are not created until the fourth day. So why, for example, did the writer of Genesis put the sun and the moon on the fourth day? It is a very strange thing to do, and it is not as if it is only moderns who realize ‘Oh dear! Something is wrong.’ People at any time of history would have realized that that was an unusual way of writing down a journalistic account. And, of course, the reason most likely is that people of that day worshipped the sun and the moon, and the Israelites were always being drawn away that way, and the people around them were doing that. And so, what the writer was saying is, ‘no, I am going to demote these things to the fourth day. They are not the first thing to be created; they are something to be created somewhat later.’”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “This is simply the sort of language that people use to refer to concrete events, but to invest those events with their theological significance.”

Dr. John Walton: “We are well aware that people have to translate the language for us. We forget that people have to translate the culture for us, and therefore, if we want to get the best benefit from the communication, we need to try to enter their world, hear it as the audience would have heard it, as the author would have meant it, and to read it in those terms.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “There is a distinction which is there in Scripture between heaven and earth. But the thing about heaven and earth is that they are supposed to overlap, and have an interesting, interlocking, interplay with one another. They are never supposed to be far apart.”

Dr. John Walton: “In the ancient world, they didn’t have a line between supernatural and natural. God was in everything. You couldn’t talk about God intervening because you can’t intervene in something you are doing—and to them, God was doing it all. That kind of functional aspect was very important to them.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “In Genesis, God makes heavens and earth, and it appears that humans are in the world, but God is around as well because the heavens and earth have not split apart.”

Dr. John Walton: “The temple and the cosmos were all blended into one. If we used a modern metaphor it would almost be like the temple was the oval office. It is kind of where all the business is done, where all the work is run. It is the hub of activity and control, and when Deity took up his rest in the temple, it wasn’t for leisure or relaxation…it was to settle down to the work now that everything is set up and ready to go.”

Bishop N. T. Wright: “Telling a story about somebody who constructs something in six days, it is a temple story. It is about God making a place for himself to dwell…and this is heaven and earth. What you do with that is, the last thing is you put an image of this God into the temple. Suddenly, instead of Genesis one being about ‘were there six days or were there five or were there seven or were there twenty-four hours…,’ it is actually about when the good Creator God made the world, he made heaven and earth as the space in which he himself was going to dwell and put in humans into that construct as a way of both reflecting his own love into the world and drawing out the praise and glory from the world, back to himself. That is the literal meaning of Genesis. To flatten that out into, ‘this is simply telling us that the world was made in six days’ is almost perversely to avoid the real thrust of the narrative.”

Michael Ramsden: “If this is an inspired book, if this really is, you know, something where God is revealed and can speak through it, it shouldn’t surprise us that we find multiple layers of depth.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “Genesis is one of those books like a Shakespeare play or like a Beethoven symphony or something where you can describe what it sort of literally says. Here is a Beethoven symphony; here are the notes, ‘Duh, duh, duh, duh.’ Then, you think, ‘well, that doesn’t actually catch what is going on in this’, and you want to use bigger language about the opening of Beethoven’s first symphony. This is an amazing statement about the power of empire and the fate of man…and goodness knows what! You still have got to play the notes. This world was made to be God’s abode, God’s home, God’s dwelling place. He shared it with us, and now he wants to rescue it and redeem it. We have to read Genesis for all it is worth. To say, either history or myth is a way of saying, ‘I am not going to study this text for what it is worth. I am just going to flatten it out so that it conforms to the cultural questions that my culture today is telling me to ask…and I think that is a form of actually being unfaithful to the text itself.”

Dr. John Walton: “The account in Genesis one is not intended to be an account of material origins. If that is so, then the Bible has no narrative of material origins, and if that is so, we don’t have to defend the Bible’s narrative of material origins against a scientific narrative because the Bible does not offer one. We can let the text be what it is and take it for what it is. That is the most literal reading that you could have.”

Series: Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible

Brian Godawa — Mon, 30 May 11 08:00:55 -0700

This is the first in a six-part series based on Brian Godawa’s scholarly paper “Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible”, which can be read in its entirety here.

Throughout history, all civilizations and peoples have operated under the assumption of a cosmography or picture of the universe. Cosmography is a technical term that means a theory that describes and maps the main features of the heavens and the earth. A Cosmography or “cosmic geography” can be a complex picture of the universe that includes elements like astronomy, geology, and geography; and those elements can include theological implications as well. We are most familiar with the historical change that science went through from a Ptolemaic cosmography of the earth at the center of the universe (geocentrism) to a Copernican cosmography of the sun at the center of a galaxy (heliocentrism).

Some mythologies maintained that the earth was a flat disc on the back of a giant turtle; animistic cultures believe that spirits inhabit natural objects and cause them to behave in certain ways; modern westerners believe in a space-time continuum where everything is relative to its frame of reference in relation to the speed of light. Ancients tended to believe that the gods caused the weather; moderns tend to believe that impersonal physical processes cause weather. All these different beliefs are elements of a cosmography or picture of what the universe is really like and how it operates. Even though “pre-scientific” cultures like the Hebrews did not have the same notions of science that we moderns have, they still observed the world around them and made interpretations as to the structure and operations of the universe. The Bible also contains a cosmography or picture of the universe that its stories inhabit.

I have said this before, and I will say it again: I am not a scientist, I am a professional storyteller, and so my interest in Biblical cosmography comes from my study of imagery, metaphor, and story. But a picture of the cosmos certainly has a bearing on scientific notions of the way the universe is and operates. Imagination and science are not completely unconnected. I am also a Christian who believes that the Bible is the Word of God. But does this mean that the Bible will have a cosmography that agrees with modern western science? I used to believe it did. I used to believe that if the Bible was scientifically errant in anyway, then it could not be the Word of God, since God would never communicate false information to us. That would make God a liar, or so I thought.

This led to the corollary that whatever modern science has proven would have to be in accord with the Bible’s own revelation. This is called “scientific concordism.” So, if we now know that the earth is a sphere and that the universe is expanding, then Scripture would not contradict that truth. What’s more, I might even be able to find a verse that would have that truth hidden it: Behold, I thought I found it: “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…who stretches out the heavens like a curtain” (Isa. 40:22). In this scientific concordist paradigm, the Bible contains veiled scientific truths before their time in a gnostic hiddenness that is uncovered by initiates into such mysteries.

Unfortunately, this paradigm would lead to much cognitive dissonance for me as I tortured the text to fit whatever scientific theory I was trying to support at the time. First, I accepted Genesis as literally explaining material creation chronology and relegated evolutionary scientists to dishonest manipulators of facts.¹ Then I tried to find dinosaurs in the Bible by interpreting the Leviathan or Behemoth as references to ichthyosaurs and sauropods.² Then I tried to make six literal days and young chronology of Creation in Genesis square symbolically with the seriously old age of the earth.³ Then I tried to creatively reconcile the billions of years of the Big Bang with 24-hour earth-bound solar days though gravity-warped space-time.⁴

I also thought that the best interpretation of the Bible was the “plain reading” of the text. That is, any interpretation that would turn the meaning into unwarranted figurative, symbolic, allegorical or metaphorical language would be disingenuous hermeneutics. I didn’t mean obvious figurative and allegorical language like parables of talking brambles and trees (Jud. 9:7-15) or clearly poetic expressions of singing mountains and clapping trees (Isa. 55:12). I meant that when the Bible talked about the physical order and events in heaven and earth it would mean just what it said since the Creator of the cosmos would know best what was actually happening.

But something started to seriously challenge these assumptions. First, as I studied the ancient Hebrew culture and its surrounding Near Eastern background, I began to see how very different a “plain reading” of a text was to them than a “plain reading” was to me.⁵ The ancient Hebrew mind was steeped in different symbols, ideas, and language than I was. If I read a phrase like “sun, moon and stars,” my western cultural understanding, which is deeply affected by a post-Galileo, post-Enlightened, materialist science would tend to read such references in terms of the physical bodies of matter, gas, and gravity spread out over vast light years of space-time. When ancient Israelites used that phrase, they would have pictures in their minds of markers and signs (Gen. 1:14), and more personal objects like pagan gods (Deut. 4:19), heavenly beings (1 Kg. 22:19), symbolic influential leaders (Gen. 37:9), or the fall of governing powers (Isa. 13:10).⁶

An ancient Jew hearing the words leviathan and sea conjured up notions of a disordered world without Yahweh’s rule, and Yahweh’s covenant creation out of chaos.⁷ Whereas for me, hearing those words makes me think of a monster fish swimming in the ocean – or maybe Moby Dick, a symbol of man’s hubris – but primarily the physical material being of those objects. It is easier to see now that my plain reading of the text through my modern western worldview could completely miss the plain meaning that the Scripture would have to an ancient Israelite. My so-called act of “plain reading” was ironically an imposition of my own cultural bias onto the text removed by thousands of years, thousands of miles, and thousands of cultural motifs.⁸ We must seek the “plain reading” of the ancient authors and their audience, and in this way we can be “diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

Something else had always haunted me like a nagging pebble in the shoe of my mind, and that was the Galileo affair. We’ll look more at this in my next post.

Notes

1. I never believed they were all lying, but many were certainly blinded by their worldview bias. I still believe that some scientists do in fact lie, cheat, and manipulate facts and studies just as in every other discipline because they are human like everyone else and can be just as driven by political and personal agenda as everyone else. A good book that documents this is Betrayers Of The Truth: Fraud And Deceit In The Halls Of Science By Nicholas Wade William Broad (Ebury Press, 1983); Michael Fumento is a science journalist who reports on current scientific fraud and its widespread economic and political effects at www.fumento.com.
2. Scientific Creationism by Henry M. Morris (Master Books, 1974, 1985) is an example of this viewpoint.
3. Creation and Time: A Biblical and Scientific Perspective on the Creation-Date Controversy by Hugh Ross (NavPress, 1994) is an example of this viewpoint.
4. Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery Of Harmony Between Modern Science And The Bible by Gerald Schroeder (Bantam, 1990) is an example of this viewpoint.
5. The seminal book that opened the door for me to a better understanding of this ANE cultural context of the Bible was John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006).
6. “The worship of the host of heaven [was] often set in parallelism to the worship of foreign gods (Deut 17:3; 2 Kgs 17:16; 21:3; 23:4–5; Jer 19:13; Zeph 1:4–5).” K. van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter Willem van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible DDD, 2nd extensively rev. ed., 429 (Leiden; Boston; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), 429.
7. Brian Godawa, “Biblical Creation and Storytelling: Cosmogony, Combat and Covenant,” The BioLogos Foundation.
8. Othmar Keel’s The Symbolism of the Biblical World (Eisenbrauns) is an encyclopedia of imagery and motifs that Israel shared with her ANE neighbors that are quite alien to our thinking.

Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution

Denis Lamoureux — Mon, 25 Apr 11 18:35:05 -0700

Professor Denis Lamoureux presents the theory of evolutionary creation, which claims that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created the universe and life through an ordained, sustained, and design-reflecting evolutionary process. The view of origins, says Lamoureux, fully embraces both the religious beliefs of biblical Christianity and the scientific theories of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution.

The Biblical Creation in its Ancient Near Eastern Context

Joseph Lam — Mon, 25 Apr 11 18:33:35 -0700

"As a Christian and a biblical scholar, I care both about Scripture as truth and about the ongoing scholarly conversation regarding the composition of the Hebrew Scriptures. And so, when I was asked to speak on the story of creation in Genesis 1, I welcomed the opportunity to give my thoughts on the interaction between this text and its ancient Near Eastern context."

Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible

Brian Godawa — Mon, 25 Apr 11 17:55:57 -0700

Brian Godawa looks at several aspects of ancient cosmography (descriptions of the universe) that also appear in the Bible, and what these aspects of the text mean for our understanding of Scripture.

Biblical Creation and Storytelling: Cosmogony, Combat and Covenant

Brian Godawa — Mon, 25 Apr 11 17:53:38 -0700

The literary conventions employed in Genesis chapter 1 mark it out, not as a scientific document describing material origins, but as a theological polemic against surrounding ancient Near Eastern pagan religions. Creation language here and elsewhere in Scripture is not about establishing scientific origins of material substance and structure but about covenantal establishment and worldview.

When Appearances Are Deceiving

Rev. Scott Hoezee — Thu, 03 Feb 11 11:32:56 -0800

“That just doesn’t sound right.”

At one time or another, we have all had this reaction to something someone said to us. Usually what we indicate by saying this is that we sense intuitively that something is amiss in what was just communicated to us but we cannot at the moment lay our finger on just what that “something” is.

Ever since I was a kid, that was my gut reaction to those well-meaning people in my church and school who told me that despite what many in the sciences were saying, the earth and the entire universe were actually of relatively recent manufacture (say, on the order of 10,000 years of age or so). Yes, there are rocks on the earth that test out to be millions of years old but you must understand: all of those things popped into existence in one fell swoop already bearing the marks of a certain age. God created the universe in motion with the appearance of age. It looks old but it isn’t. Already on his first night in Eden, Adam was able to see stars that we can now measure to be so far away that their light would take millions of years to get here. But because God created things already in motion, that light hit Adam’s eyeballs immediately even though the universe was a scant six days old.

That never sounded right to me, but one could conceive of it. Doing such a thing would hardly be beyond an almighty God’s abilities. God could snap his fingers and create any state of being he wanted. Still, something about the whole “appearance of age” scheme nettled. After all, what God could do cannot trump what a loving and true God would do.

My “Ah-Ha” moment that confirmed my intuition that something was wrong here came a few years ago when my colleague, Deborah Haarsma, gave a guest lecture in a theology and science course I was teaching. At one point Deb said to the class that we must remember that the light that streams to us from stars and galaxies and nebulae is not just generic light—these streams of light tell a story. They represent cosmic history. All of that light is the collective memory of the cosmos. It tells us about when stars were born. It tells us about when stars matured. It tells us about when stars died (and the stages they went through en route to their deaths). Light tells a story. It tells the story of the universe.

As a preacher, I have spent years training myself to think analogically. Those of us who preach for a living (and those of us who teach for a living) know that one of our main tasks is to take complicated doctrines, theories, or concepts and try to make them plainer and easier to understand by way of analogy. We are constantly saying, “Think of this idea this way . . . “ or “I know this portion of theology sounds difficult to grasp but what if you realize that it is actually a little like this . . .”

Deb’s helpful comment that beams of light tell the universe’s story finally helped me come up with the analogy that made me hit on the “something” that was wrong with this whole scheme. Ever since then, here is what I have told people in order to convey to them what I believe is wrong with the appearance of age argument.

Saying the universe was created in motion is sort of like this: imagine you are like me, a guy who will turn 47 years of age in March of 2011. As a 47-year-old person, I have almost five decades of memories. I can remember my brother being born when I was four years old. I can remember my mother walking me to kindergarten, my family moving to a new area when I was half-way through second grade, graduating from high school, traveling to Europe for the first time, meeting my wife, and the births of my two children. This memory stream, this history of my life that appears to me in my mind, is clear and vivid and undeniable. There is nothing inside of me or in the ways I retrieve these images to tell me they are anything other than iron-clad truth. This is what has happened to me along the way. This is my story. I’ve even got pictures and videos of all those times. I have other people who were there then, too, and who confirm my memories by sharing their own.

So how would I feel if someone—based on some piece of insight they thought they had allegedly received from the Bible or some other source—told me that in reality Scott Hoezee (and everything else for that matter) had been created in motion starting at my 45th year of life in 2009? Yes, everything about me—every DNA test available, every bone scan or memory scan or any other way by which the medical establishment could determine a person’s chronological age—all of it could confirm my 47 years but . . . my actual life would be but 2 years. So what about all those memories that stream to me from 42 years ago when I started kindergarten or from 19 years ago when my first child was born? What about the pictures, the videos, the others who remember it all, too? Well, they look and sound true but strictly speaking are not. None of those things happened (not in the way the last two years’ worth of stuff happened anyway). Installing those memories (of things that never truly took place) were necessary to make Scott’s appearance of age appear authentic but all of them (all 45 years’ worth of stuff) popped into existence at the same moment Scott did a scant two years ago. The events of the last two years are as real as they appear to me. The stuff from the previous 45 years . . . not so much.

If someone told me that it was God who did this all, I would conclude that God is cruel. That sense of cruelty would only be reinforced in case it were also true that within the human sphere of things, there would be absolutely no way I could know about the falsity of all those memories because in the proper exercise of my mental faculties and in the proper use of medical technologies by which my age could be verified, there would be no earthly reason to doubt the veracity of those memories or of the full 47 years they represent.

I would feel deceived.

The history of the universe—when stars were born, when they died, and other events that come to us in the streams of light that beam toward our planet every day—may seem far less personal than the birth of my first child or my remembering when Mom took me to kindergarten. But if all that cosmic information and history are not true—and if there is no way within the normal exercise of our human abilities to measure things to know any better—then why would God build up a story of the universe’s past life in case none of it (save for the last 10,000 years) ever actually took place but was made only to look as though it took place?

I would not like God to do that to me and the story of my life as I apprehend it. But I don’t like this concept any better when it applies to life beyond myself, either. That just doesn’t sound right.

And it isn’t.

On the Creation Account

Tremper Longman — Fri, 06 Aug 10 09:00:25 -0700

To understand and apply Genesis 1 correctly, we have to consider issues of genre and intention. Too often these chapters are read as if they present a purely straightforward (read literal) historical and even scientific account of cosmic and human origins. They are thus then read as a polemic against modern scientific ideas, particularly Darwinism.

In my opinion, if one reads Genesis 1-2 closely and with knowledge of contemporary ancient Near Eastern texts, it is impossible to believe that the original author wanted his audience to read the text literally. Let me explain by giving a couple examples.

First think of the days of Genesis. “Day” typically means a twenty-four hour period. When it means something like “period of time,” it occurs in a formula like “day of the Lord.” In addition, each of the six creation days are described as having an “evening and a morning.” Those who want to read the creation days as literally 24 hour days will often point to these facts as indicating that we are dealing with a real day, not a period of time. That seems very reasonable until we note that the sun, moon, and stars aren’t created until the fourth day. But to have a literal “day” there has to be a sun, moon, and stars! These heavenly bodies define what a literal day is. Attempts to argue that God manipulated the light and the darkness of day one in a 24 hour period are a far-fetched and strange. These are not literal days, but a figurative way to present the fact that God ordered creation. The first three days are realms that are filled by the second three days, so the light/darkness realm of day one are inhabited by the sun, moon, and stars of day four. The sky/sea realm of day two are filled by the birds and fish of day five, and the land of day three is filled by the animals and humans of day six.

Second, we must remember that a fundamental principle of biblical interpretation is to read a text in the light of its original context. The first audience simply was not interested in how the creation came into existence, but who brought it into existence and why. Again, Genesis 1-2 was not written against Darwin, but against rival ancient Near Eastern claims. The Enuma Elish of Babylon attributed creation to Marduk and the Canaanite version pointed to Baal. Both of these ancient creation myths saw creation as a result of divine conflict between creator gods and deities that represented the chaotic waters which they defeated and controlled. In contrast, the Bible identifies Yahweh as the creator and since there are no rival gods there is no conflict either. God created the “earth as a formless void,” a watery mass and created the habitable world from it. The watery mass was not there from the beginning.

In a word, Genesis 1 proclaims that God ordered creation. It is not concerned with how God did it. To use Genesis 1 to reconstruct the process of creation is a misuse of the text.

Series: The Biblical Premise of Uniformitarianism

Stephen O. Moshier, Gregory Bennett — Sat, 19 Jun 10 07:59:04 -0700

Students of geology learn in their first semester that uniformitarianism is the guiding principle by which geologists interpret Earth’s history. The premise, as formulated by James Hutton in the late 18th century and argued persuasively by Charles Lyell in the middle 19th century, is that geological processes we observe today can be used to explain ancient geological materials and structures. For example, today we see the rock basalt forming by volcanic activity. Since we find basalt layers exposed in Shenandoah National Park, we presume that lavas oozed onto an ancient seafloor sometime in the distant past before the Blue Ridge Mountains formed.

Young-Earth Creationists/Flood Geologists reject the geological principle of uniformitarian on the grounds that (1) it is inherently unbiblical, (2) it was developed to refute biblical catastrophism, and (3) it does not fulfill its promise to help us correctly interpret Earth’s history. These concerns are repeated in Young-Earth creationist literature and even from the pulpits of many churches. Recently in his internet blog, distinguished American pastor John MacArthur (well known for his popular radio ministry) portrayed geological uniformitarianism as a dangerous dogma (here and here).

I respect Dr. MacArthur’s commitment to the authority of Scripture and his passion for the gospel message, but as a professional geologist and Christ-follower I found so many errors in his analysis that I feel they must be exposed in a similar forum. In a recent BioLogos Forum blog, Karl Giberson lamented the all-to-common situation in which “uninformed lay people presume to challenge the scientific community.” Pastors should not be expected to know all the nuances of a concept like geological uniformitarianism, nor the details of landforms and strata in some state park in Georgia (we will get to that). However, pastors should be cautious and responsible if they challenge the consensus of an established scientific discipline in the name of advancing the gospel.

Faulty assumptions, old definitions

Dr. MacArthur defined uniformitarianism as “the theory that natural and geological phenomena are for the most part the results of forces that have operated continuously, with uniformity, and without interruption, over billions and billions of years,” and that the “forces at work in nature are essentially fixed and constant.” There are elements of this description in nearly every textbook or dictionary definition of the term. I like the definition in the Glossary of Geology by Bates and Jackson: “The fundamental principle or doctrine that geologic processes and natural laws now operating to modify the earth’s crust have acted in the same regular manner and with essentially the same intensity throughout geologic time, and that past geologic events can be explained by phenomena and forces observable today....the doctrine does not imply that all change is at a uniform rate, and does not exclude minor local catastrophes.”

The example Dr. MacArthur gives to illustrate this principle is not how geologists apply it in their interpretations of Earth history. He writes, “The uniformitarian sees sedimentary rock strata...and assumes that the sediments that formed them resulted from the natural, slow settling of particles in water over several million years.” Geologists can point to very few natural environments of deposition where this kind of slow settling of particles actually occurs – the deep sea and large lakes come to mind. There certainly are some ancient rocks with textural properties that compare with deep sea and lake deposits. But, many more ancient strata compare perfectly with deposits of modern rivers, deltas, reefs and tidal flats (to name a few among many examples) that form by episodic accumulation of sediments in short periods of time (from seconds to centuries), separated by longer periods of non-deposition or erosion (from months to millennia and even longer).

Paradigm shift: uniformitarianism includes catastrophes

Dr. MacArthur mentions that fossils have a better chance of being preserved if they are buried suddenly (if not catastrophically), and uniformitarian geologists would agree! That’s because modern geologists don’t even subscribe to 19th century uniformitarianism. A paradigm shift occurred in the middle 20th century replacing uniformitarianism with actualism, an addendum to the principle allowing that extreme natural forces have acted in Earth’s history. For our purposes, we will use the term uniformitarianism as it is used by geologists today, not the 19th century definition. Uniformitarianism includes catastrophic events such as thousands of earthquakes from plate tectonics and various meteorite impacts (see footnote ii). As with all science, our understanding of processes has changed from the 19th century to the 21st century.

One of the turning points involved a unique landform called the channeled scablands in eastern Washington State that seemed to defy conventional explanations. Geologist J. Harlan Bretz proposed that they were formed by catastrophic floods of swift, deep water escaping from glacial lakes at the end of the last ice age.¹ The geological community eventually accepted his ideas, but it took over 30 years and some mind stretching to think about such forces as being normal or natural. Bretz was not motivated by biblical flood geology, but by following the evidence where it led him.²

An old earth is not unbiblical

Dr. MacArthur claims that geologists have to keep increasing the age of the earth to make time for all the catastrophes evident in the rock record. That comment ignores the historical development of the geologic time scale as eventually quantified by the middle of the twentieth century. Geologists have known that the earth is in the range of 4.5 billion years old since the 1950s.

Our understanding of Earth history was advanced by thousands of geologists since Hutton and Lyell laboring over the details the earth’s crust and considering each stratum in the context of the planet as a whole. They abandoned the ideas of a very recent creation and global deluge of geological significance because those ideas were not supported by the geological data.

Many of the early geologists knew the implications of the emerging picture for the biblical accounts of origins and they looked to Bible scholars of their time for help. Modern evangelicals know those Bible scholars who accepted the new geology and showed that it was not inconsistent with the meaning of Scripture. Men like B. B. Warfield, James Orr and George Fredrick Wright; men who also contributed to the origins of the fundamentalist movement. Just as respected evangelical biblical scholars of our generation find an ancient creation no threat to biblical faith, such as Alister McGrath, C. John Collins, Bruce Waltke, Wayne Grudem, John Walton and Walter Kaiser.

Dr. MacArthur’s blogs conclude with the geological example of Providence Canyons in southwest Georgia to show the ineptness of uniformitarianism. Poor farming practices in the last century in this upland plateau resulted in severe erosion of the natural drainage system, cutting numerous gullies up to 130 feet deep. If Georgia’s Little Grand Canyon could form in only decades, why couldn’t receding water from Noah’s flood carve Arizona’s Big Grand Canyon? That both canyons were carved by water is about the extent of the comparison! A detailed look at the strata eroded in Providence Canyons provides further evidence that actualistic assumptions work.³

Uniformitarianism reflects God’s unchanging nature

Finally, do we really want to condemn uniformitarianism, or its offspring actualism, as an unbiblical premise? Dr. MacArthur quotes scriptures that ring of the catastrophist actions of God in nature. However, there are also scriptures that speak of the unchanging nature of God and...well, nature. Ecclesiastes 1 comes to mind with its poetic refrains: “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever....All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.....What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.”

In Part 2 and Part 3, Gregory Bennett will explore how the concept of uniformitarianism as used by geologists is necessary for our full understanding of God’s relationship to nature. He will also explore how uniformitarian principles are used by every biblical interpreter including use within one of the core tenants of Christian doctrine, God’s providence.

References:

Bates, R. L., and Jackson, J. A. Glossary of Geology, American Geological Institute 1987.

Donovan, A. D., and Reinhardt, J., Providence Canyons: the Grand Canyon of southwest Georgia. Geological Society of America Centennial Field Guide –Southeastern Section, 1986.p. 359-362.

Giberson, Karl, "Would you like fries with that theory?". May 10, 2010.

MacArthur, John, Uniformitarianim, Part 1. May 7, 2010.

MacArthur, John, Uniformitarianim, Part 2. May 10, 2010.

Notes

1. This event occurred about 11,500 years ago during a period of rapid global warming over a 200 to 400 year period of time, according to evidence from ice cores in Greenland and lake and cave sediments across the Northern Hemisphere.
2. In addition, geologists find evidence of major catastrophic events such as meteorite impacts. One example is the Chicxulub crater buried below the surface on the Yucutan Peninsula of Mexico, resulting from a meteorite impact about 65 million years ago and approximately coinciding with the dinosaur extinction. It was discovered during seismic exploration for oil. The crater is over 100 miles in diameter, and left telltale ash about 1,000 miles away in the sediments offshore Florida, and over 6,000 miles away in Italy and Denmark.
3. Once the protection of surface vegetation was removed, streams easily cut through the poorly consolidated sand deposits of the Upper Cretaceous Providence Formation to create the numerous large gullies at Providence Canyons. Those sand deposits compare with sands that are deposited today in near-shore marine conditions (like off the coast of Georgia today). The deposits feature cross-bedded layers formed by migrating sand bars with burrow tubes and traces from animals that lived on and below the sea floor (Donovan and Reinhardt, 1986). This is no flood deposit where animals were suddenly buried in a catastrophic event, but a record of episodic sedimentation in an ancient sea where marine critters ate, reproduced and died under normal marine conditions; modern uniformitarianism exemplified!

Evidences for Evolution, Part 1: An Ancient Earth

David Kerk, Falk, Darrel — Mon, 31 May 10 08:00:43 -0700

A literalistic view of Genesis causes many evangelicals to believe that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. Christian children and young people frequently grow up being told that the earth is young and that evolution is a lie. The most popular science/religion web-site by far according to Alexa ratings is “Answers in Genesis”, and its museum, dedicated to a young earth perspective has attracted over 1 million visitors since its opening two years ago. Since evangelicals, we believe, are correct about so many other all-important issues, how can we be so certain that so many are so wrong about this one? Consider sending this link to a young earth friend or pastor. Some think that the science behind this matter can’t be trusted. Nothing could be further than the truth.

The beauty of the scientific process is its inherent scepticism. (See "What Scientists Do" by Steven Benner). If there is only one way of reaching a conclusion, the scientific process requires the scientist to remain highly sceptical. The only conclusions in science which are widely accepted are those which are supported by multiple, reinforcing lines of evidence – “all roads must lead to Rome”. If there is even one scientific trajectory that seems to clearly lead off to Peoria instead of Rome (to use a recent analogy of Francisco Ayala), the scientific process demands that the scientist find out why. The scientist who does not retain an attitude of scepticism when there is only a single line of evidence, and particularly one who ignores other, conflicting lines of evidence, is on a stubborn trajectory of his own—a trajectory to failure. If the only reason for following the directions which “lead away from Rome” is a particular view of Scripture, then it is important to consider the possibility of human error. Biblical hermeneutics, after all, is a human enterprise just as science itself is. For example, John MacArthur in his current series on Genesis is human and is interpreting Genesis in his way just like the rest of us. He, wonderful pastor and shepherd that he is, interprets Scripture too. There is good reason to be quite certain that the interpretation he subscribes to is mistaken.

As Christians, we are called to follow Jesus. In so doing, Jesus said we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind—not just our heart and soul. Indeed if we close our mind, we are actually disobeying what Jesus said was the greatest commandment of all. So let’s not be shy about using those minds. Are there multiple independent ways of keeping track of time since the creation of the earth? If so, do each of those ways point to the same conclusion?

The best known method of calculating the age of material on earth depends on the well-established fact that certain elements in the earth’s crust are unstable and decay at a fixed rate that can be measured. (For an introduction to this topic see this BioLogos FAQ.) This instability functions sort of like a set of clocks that have been ticking through the eons of time. Indeed there are many types of unstable elements; there are many ticking clocks. Each of the various clocks tick at a different rate. The rate of each can be calibrated, and, with an amazing degree of consistency, all “clocks” point back to the same starting point: an ancient earth with rocks that are hundreds of millions and even billions of years old. This “ticking clock” technique is known as radiometric dating.^1,2

There are other totally independent ways of estimating the age of material on earth. To appreciate how these work, perhaps we should start with shorter spans of time, which for human beings are much more readily comprehensible. Some of the fondest boyhood memories of one of us (DK) come from visits to the majestic California redwood forests. He especially remembers an exhibit of a section from a giant tree which showed the pattern of growth rings within it. It turns out that these rings accumulate in response to seasonal differences in rainfall and temperature, which in turn produces differences in growth rate. Fastened within this huge slab of wood was a series of tags, proceeding from the surface inward, demonstrating the dates of major historical events: the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock; Columbus’ discovery of the New World; the Norman conquest of England, and so forth. It was possible to see in the yearly growth rings a history of what seemed then to be the very distant past!³

Growth layering processes are not restricted to trees. Many species of marine invertebrates accumulate calcium carbonate from their watery environment and incorporate it into some form of shell. Examples would be clams and corals. In fact, for these species, the variation in shell deposition occurs on a both a daily and a yearly basis, so an even finer counting of time periods is possible.⁴

Just as it is possible to count the rings in trees and correlate their age to known historical events in the past, it is also possible to count the banding patterns preserved in the fossils of marine organisms, and use this as a method to estimate their ages. Let’s see how it works.

Astronomical data, developed and analyzed over the past couple of centuries, has revealed that the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing down. This is due to the friction created daily by the moving tides on the earth’s surface, produced by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. Furthermore, as the earth slows down slightly, some rotational energy is transferred to the moon, which alters its orbit slightly (its orbit is moving slowly away from the earth). The data leading to these conclusions range from analysis of ancient solar eclipses (whose dating allows the precise position of the earth, sun and moon to be determined) to bouncing laser beams off mirrors placed on the surface of the moon by the Apollo astronauts. For our purposes, what will be important is the slowing of the earth’s rotation. This predicts that the length of each day has been slowly increasing since the formation of the earth/moon system. The average increase in the day length is estimated at 2.3 milliseconds (.0023 seconds) per century.^5,6 Hence as we examine events in the past, day length was shorter, by an amount that can be calculated. Ten thousand years ago, a day would have been .23 seconds shorter than it is today. If direct experimental estimates of day length can be obtained, they allow an estimate of the age of the material.

One way that such experimental estimates of day length can be obtained is through the periodic growth rings deposited in the shells of marine invertebrate organisms. Take for example a clam living in an intertidal environment. If the tide is in and the shell is open, it can readily absorb oxygen from water, use aerobic metabolism, and incorporate calcium carbonate into its shells. When the tide is out and the shells are closed, however, little oxygen can be absorbed, anaerobic metabolism is used, shell decalcification occurs, and organic rich material accumulates in the shell. This alternating pattern of shell deposition occurs on a daily basis, and is clearly visible in both shells from living and fossil clam species by microscopic examination. Furthermore, shells contain an identifiable mark resulting from the first freezing day of winter, and from the first really hot day of summer. Hence a yearly growth interval can be readily determined.⁷

When such data are analyzed for a number of fossil species, it is clear that the number of days these organisms experienced each year was higher than today. Given that, we have another clock - a totally independent way of measuring the age of certain fossils. So how well do clocks based upon radiometric dating agree with those based on measuring rings in certain sea shells?

As already mentioned, organisms living 10,000 years ago would have experienced shorter days, but they would only have been shorter by 0.2 seconds. Organisms living 1 million years ago would have experienced a day length that was 20 seconds shorter. If the earth really is very, very old, organisms living 465 million years ago, for example, would have experienced approximately 416 days per year, each day being about 21 hours long.⁷ Amazingly, shelled fossils in formations dated by radiometric clocks to be about 465 million years old show, by their banding patterns, that the days really were three hours shorter. In fact the two sets of clocks agree within 1 percent!

Another way such estimates of ancient day length can be derived is to look at the periodic patterns formed in fine silts in ancient river estuaries. The daily tides produce shifts in the mud, leaving a fine layering pattern, which is recorded in rock as these sediments transform into materials such as sandstone (such deposits are called “rhythmites”). Other shifts in the mud are produced over longer time intervals, including seasonal and yearly shifts. By counting the number of daily depositional layers per year, in a similar fashion to work with marine organism shells cited above, an estimate of ancient day length can be derived. One advantage of the rhythmite analysis method is that it can be applied to more ancient materials, in eras of the earth’s history when organisms suitable for shell analysis were scarce or non-existent. For example, radiometric analysis of certain rock formations in South Australia dated them at 620 million years of age. On this basis one would predict that the day/night cycles should have been about 20 hours long in these formations. Actual measurements of day length from the preserved mud banding patterns, although off from the expected by ten percent (estimated day length is 22 hours) is again consistent with the formation being hundreds of millions of years old just as the radiometric dating has predicted.⁸

In conclusion, there is data derived from three independent sources: the decay of radioisotopes, the growth patterns recorded in fossilized shells of marine organisms, and rocks containing tidal depositional material from river estuaries, which all agree on an ancient age for the earth. Furthermore, by a totally independent method it is also possible to measure the age of the universe as a whole and again it is billions, not thousands of years.

All of the roads in God’s book of Nature “lead to Rome” (i.e an ancient earth) - it is only mistaken human interpretation of Scripture that causes some of our precious brothers and sisters in Christ to end up in Peoria.

The next blog in this series can be found here.

Editor's Note: Dr. Kerk offers a further discussion of the age of the earth in the comment section of this post, beginning here. Dr. Kerk has also included the following graph:

References

1: Elementary principles of radiometric dating are discussed by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, R. 2009. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press, New York Pgs. 91-98.

2: Wiens, R.C. 2002. Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective. This is a more detailed but still highly readable account of radiometric dating, written by a well-qualified physicist who is also a professing Christian. It can be obtained from the web site of the American Scientific Affiliation: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html

3: Tree ring dating (“dendrochronology”) is discussed by Dawkins, pgs. 88-91.

4: Dating using coral skeletal deposition is discussed by Jerry Coyne: Coyne, J.A. 2009. Why Evolution is True. Viking Penguin, New York. Pgs. 24-25.

5: “Tidal Acceleration”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration

6: Stephenson, F.R. 2003. Historical Eclipses and Earth’s Rotation. Astronomy and Geophysics 44:2.22-2.27.

7: Zhenyu, Z., Yaoqi Z., Guosheng J. 2007. The periodic growth increments of biological shells and the orbital parameters of Earth-Moon system. Environmental Geology 51: 1271–1277.

8: Williams, G.E. 2000. Geological constraints on the Precambrian history of Earth's rotation and the Moon's orbit. Reviews of Geophysics 38(1):37-59.