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In the 17th century, the conflict between science and faith revolved around the movement of the heavenly bodies; today people of faith are fighting with science over the opposing ideas of creation and evolution. Some of the main areas of disagreement are presented in the table below.
More generally, some, perhaps most, interpretations of the theory of evolution argue that life, including man, occurred by chance. Christians, on the other hand, believe that the universe and everything in it was designed and planned by God. How can Christian beliefs and scientific findings be reconciled? My own belief is that it is foolish for Christians to argue about the science. On the other hand, I take it as a matter of faith that God created the universe as part of a purposeful plan. As we saw in our last post, the way out of this conflict is to interpret scripture less literally. As we have seen, reinterpreting some scriptures led Christians to accept the data that show that the earth revolves around the sun. Can an honest reinterpretation of the Genesis text allow Christians to come to terms with evolution as well?
In A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture Carol Hill, a Christian geologist, has written a very interesting book that examines these questions from the point of view of both a scientist and a conservative Christian. She offers an approach to interpreting Genesis that makes it compatible with scientific discoveries. The “worldview approach” to Scripture is a method of interpreting the biblical text by trying to get inside the heads of the ancient authors of the text. This is a methodology for understanding different cultures with different worldviews. As an example, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) has written, “Semites (Arabs) had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colors, or rather of black and white…they were a dogmatic people despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns…They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.” It really doesn’t matter if Lawrence’s views were correct; what is important is recognizing that different cultures have different ways of seeing the world, and, as we shall see, writing about it. Thus, the Eskimos have fifty words for snow, and the ancient Hebrews paid close attention to the symbolic meanings of specific numbers. For an elaboration of the significance of certain numbers see Biblical Numerology.
So what was the worldview of the Genesis writers? First, it was obviously pre-scientific. They believed the sun moved and the earth stood still. They believed the earth was flat. They believed that there was a solid dome of heaven which stretched from horizon to horizon. Above the dome (firmament) were the “waters,” storehouses of rain, wind, snow and hail. From time to time, the windows in the dome opened and the waters fell onto the earth. This cosmology (which was very similar to that of the Mesopotamians) is presented in the picture below.
IHow does the Worldview approach help us interpret Genesis 1? Look at Genesis 1:6-8: And God said, “Let there be a vault (Hebrew “raquia”) between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.” This makes complete sense from the point of view of Near Eastern cosmology but no sense to us today. If the “Big Bang” theory of creation was revealed to them, they would have no place to put it, no means of understanding it. Thus the revelation they were given was in keeping with their understanding of the world. We know that there is no vault nor firmament, no solid dome. Ancient writers described the world as they understood it. God did not reveal to those writers that their cosmology was seriously flawed.
Are the other words of Genesis 1 meant to be understood literally? Is a “day” (yom in Hebrew) a 24-hour day? Even, if we take the view that “day” stands for an unspecified period of time, an “age,” does the sequence of creation in Genesis 1 make sense? Was light created before the sun, moon and the stars? One of the critical ideas of a “worldview framework” is understanding that figurative language, parallelism and harmony were important elements of Hebrew writing. Thus, one way of thinking about Genesis 1 is to emphasize the parallelism. This idea of a literary but not a literal description the design of Genesis 1 is laid out in the following table.
Genesis 1 is not a scientific description of how the world was created. The text is better understood as poetry. God takes darkness and creates light; he forms the earth out of nothing; he brings order to the waters, creating oceans and seas; he populates all the realms of his creation (sky, waters and earth) with heavenly bodies and all manner of living things; he blesses the living things and tells them to fill the earth; and last he creates humanity. The details of Genesis 1 are not meant to be a literal record of how creation happened. Genesis was not written to teach cosmology, astronomy or geology; it was written to proclaim the truth that God Almighty created the universe and everything in it, and that, He, and He alone is to be praised and worshiped. It was written in contrast to the creation stories of the other ancient peoples of the Near East, such as the Mesopotamians, who were polytheistic and whose creation stories involved violence and monsters. Genesis 1 is a great hymn to the Creator God who created our world in love for his eternal purposes.
Our next post will deal with the problems raised by the theory of evolution.
