implies that some creative acts were instantaneous: “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”18 Some commands imply a process of unspecified duration: “‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so.” 19 Other commands initiated a creative progression: “‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds . . . .’ And it was so.” 20 The creative processes appear to require different amounts of time even though each creative event is bounded as taking a “day,” which differs from the typical use of “day” to refer to a twenty-four-hour period. Words such as day, evening, and morning are still used today in broad, non-precise ways. For example, in proposing to spend the day at the beach people do not plan on arriving at midnight and staying twenty-four hours.
A non-literal interpretation of the word “day” as used in Genesis overcomes analogous problems stemming from belief in a literal twenty-four-hour day, problems such as God’s work schedule. For example, if God created light instantaneously, what did he do for the rest of the day? Each creative event ends with “And there was evening and there was morning—the xth day.” Understanding this phrase as closing each creative event, rather than a literal description, alleviates the problem of a first “day” before the creation of sun and moon on “day” four. A poetic reading of each creative act views each day as bounding the creative periods, some short while others perhaps requiring eons.
Throughout the first half of the Bible the word “day” (yom) is loosely used in a variety of ways. Usually meaning a “day” of the week, the word can also mean “time,” a specific “period” or “era” or a season. A natural interpretation is to view the Genesis days as metaphors for geological ages. Each Genesis day broadly correlates with a time for each creative event whether requiring millions of years or milliseconds. Reading each of the Genesis days as periods of differing creative events overcomes difficulties with a literal interpretation while preserving the intent of the chapter; God created the world.
The description of creation in Genesis 1 ends with humanity. In Genesis 2 the focus of the story is on the first man, Adam, and his companion, Eve. There are no additional depictions of “creative days,” but rather events happening to humans with time being expressed in terms of a human life. Before the creation of mankind, Genesis is told from the perspective of God. After the creation of mankind, Genesis is told from the perspective of people. A reasonable interpretation of this difference is that time is described from God’s perspective during days of creation and from man’s perspective after creation. Einstein demonstrated that perspective means everything when considering time. The early Hebrews lived in step with the ebb and flow of the seasons, planting and harvesting according to weather rather than a set calendar. These people were less concerned with how long God worked each day and more focused on understanding God’s rule and role as ultimate creator.
Genesis 1 provides a clear declaration of God as the ultimate creator. As one of the grandest poems ever written, the meaning has been grasped by diverse cultures over thousands of years. Readers of Genesis predisposed to belief in God find the poem to ring true, squarely revealing God’s role despite the old-fashioned style. For others, Genesis may seem irrelevant; the Big Bang providing a better description of the universe’s beginning. The challenge in reading any creation story, biblical or scientific, lies in understanding the explanations of how and why.
Pre-biotic Evolution
Carl Sagan grandly paraphrases the opening lines of Genesis with an alternative creation story: “The universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be.”21 While religion focuses on a creator who is “outside” the universe, science’s answers are from within the universe. Science’s creation stories rest on a wealth of internally consistent scientific data from a diverse array of different disciplines. From astronomy to zoology, the scientific disciplines are linked through a consistent multi-billion-year development of a primeval world into an intricate web of life. In contrast to the biblical focus on who creates, the scientific creation story provides details of how the universe was created and how long the process took.
Radioactive dating provides a reliable method for determining the age of the earth. The method relies on the presence of several heavy elements with “extra” neutrons within the atomic core. These neutrons are the nuclear glue holding the positively charged protons together. Sometimes the repulsion between protons in the nucleus of particularly large atoms causes the atom to split into two new elements having just slightly less overall mass than the parent atom. The mass difference is emitted as energy—the radioactive decay implicit in Einstein’s famous E=mc2. The main isotopes for geologically timing this process are uranium, lead, potassium, and argon. At the dawn of the earth a newly formed rock would contain uranium and lead in a specific ratio that subsequently changes because of the lead that is later produced through the radioactive decay of uranium to lead. Precisely monitoring the decay of uranium into lead over short time periods provides a rate that allows the uranium-to-lead ratio to be used to date when the rock was first formed. The process is akin to knowing how far a car goes on exactly one gallon of gas and using the mileage to estimate how far the car could go on a trip with a full tank of gas.
Radioactive dating is a method that affords the age of the earth with a remarkable degree of internal consistency. Scanning the periodic table of elements identifies many radioactive nuclei which decay at different rates. Of the thirty-four radioactive nuclei only twenty-three are found in detectable amounts in nature. This is consistent with the decay of all the short-lived nuclei since the earth’s formation. A few short-lived nuclei are produced by cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere, providing a continual production by a natural process. If these latter nuclei are eliminated from the list of persistent nuclei, then every nucleus with a half-life of less than eighty million years is missing. The earth must therefore be at least eighty million years old for the short-lived nuclei to decay out of existence. Using the radioactive dating technique with long-lived nuclei leads to the remarkable conclusion that planet earth formed about four billion years ago.
Fossils, glaciation, and the slow process of biological change hint at an ancient earth. Some religious groups believe that the earth was made in a week and is only a few thousand years old. Trying to harmonize these two beliefs is challenging. For example, if the universe were only 10,000 to 100,000 years old then what is the origin of the light from stars appearing to be billions of light years away? Did God make all the photons from the star to the earth sometime during his week’s work so that the star just seems to be billions of light years away? The scenario makes God out to be deceptive. The faithful and true character of God described in the Bible is more consistent with stars being billions of light years away from the earth.
The Water of Life
Life from non-living precursors is difficult to understand. How did life emerge from star dust and expand into every nook and cranny of earth? A series of events has been proposed to explain how the atmosphere of the early earth caused such gases as hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and nitrogen to trigger a series of condensations resulting in ever larger molecules. During the Hadean era, 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago, the earth was pummeled by asteroids in a series of violent collisions. Each impact released energy to the earth’s surface, destroying even the most basic prebiotic molecules. Although these asteroids were primarily destructive, they’re speculated to have brought significant quantities of ice to the developing planet. More than any other molecule, water, perhaps brought to earth as ice, is critical for life.
Water is a marvelous substance with unique properties that make water essential for life. Water has one of the highest measures of surface tension, which allows droplets to cling to leaves and enables plants to draw water up from the roots. Water’s melting, boiling,
