Genesis 1 and the Debate Over Creationism

Sometimes you find yourself at an event and you wonder, “How did I get an invitation here?” This happened to me several years ago at an elaborate dinner party in Gloucester, Massachusetts in a home built over an old quarry. The host, an eccentric economist with a taste for 17th century antiques and obelisks, had gathered the most eclectic group of people. In the course of the evening, I fell into conversation with a young man from the Midwest who was working in New York City. Discovering I was a minister, he began, unprompted, to tell me his faith story. This often happens to clergy, and I rather enjoy it. Intrigued by the outlines of his faith, I asked him what aspect excited him the most. “The creation debate,” he replied. “I know all the arguments.” “Arguments?” I inquired. “Yes! I can argue with anyone about why evolution is wrong and the biblical account right.” I have to confess that I was a bit taken aback. This was the first person I had met who did not believe in evolution, and combined with the setting, I felt like I had been transported to another world.

In eastern Massachusetts, where I grew up, there was not the slightest emphasis given to Intelligent Design. Fundamentalist Christianity had fought the Creationism battle in the 19th century and lost. William Jennings Bryan’s humiliation at the Scopes Trial in 1925 nailed the coffin shut on that question. In high school drama class, we acted out portions of Inherit the Wind, the play based on that famous trial. There was no question in my church about taking Genesis 1 as a literal description of creation. In fact, I never read or heard arguments for the historicity of Genesis 1 until that dinner party in Gloucester.

Now, I am not a scientist and am not qualified to judge the science behind Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection or Intelligent Design. I do know that within the field of evolutionary biology, at least at major research universities, the theory of Intelligent Design is not taken seriously. But frankly, I am more intrigued by those who look to Genesis 1 as a literal description of the beginning of the universe.

The cosmology described in Genesis 1 reflects a fairly conventional ancient understanding of the universe. The earth is not only the center, but the sum total of relevant matter in the cosmos. Other planets, solar systems, and galaxies are, at best, afterthoughts. The sun, described as a great light, is not the source of light that gives us daytime. Perhaps most problematically, there is a hard shell, inaccurately translated as “expanse” in the New International Version, that separates the waters above from the waters below. The water above the shell explains why the sky is blue and why rain fall from the heavens. None of these views are surprising from the perspective of the ancient world, but all of them are easily refuted by modern science. After all, we have shot rockets through the supposedly hard shell that makes the sky, and we did not find an ocean of water up there.

Contemporary apologists who try to reconcile science and Genesis 1 are obsessed with justifying the biblical age of the universe. They explain that the Hebrew word for day, yom, does not necessarily mean twenty-four hours. Creation over six “days” could have happened over billions of years, they claim, and not have any contradiction with the text. Moreover, as Douglas Groothuis, a recent apologist explains, “the amount of time following the six days of creation cannot be dated through the use of biblical genealogies because these genealogies are not meant to be detailed chronologies.” In other words, we should take the Bible literally, but not that literally.

In my mind, the debate over the historical accuracy of Genesis 1 is not actually about Genesis 1. The point of contention is whether the entire Bible is the inerrant word of God. If it is, then Genesis 1 must be historically accurate, regardless of the mental gymnastics it takes to prove it. Arguing over Genesis 1 is pointless because if someone concedes the absurdity of taking the account as history, then a major tenet of evangelical Christianity falls apart.

Much can be said about the difficulties of biblical inerrancy, and there are far bigger issues with it than a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. The danger with arguing over the historicity of the Genesis creation account is that we can lose sight of its important theological significance for Jews and Christians: that God is the creative force behind the universe and that all of creation is fundamentally good. That night in Gloucester my interlocutor and I could at least agree on that.