Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science

by John C. Lennox

It would be a pity if, in a desire (rightly) to treat the Bible as more than a book, we ended up treating it as less than a book by not permitting it the range and use of language, order, and figures of speech that are (or ought to be) familiar to us from our ordinary experience of conversation and reading.

Rather than scientific language, the Bible often uses what is called phenomenological language — the language of appearance. It describes what anyone can see.

Augustine was well acquainted with it in his own day.10 What he has to say is worth quoting at some length in order to capture its spirit: Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens … and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn … If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

The take-home message from Augustine is, rather, that, if my views on something not fundamental to the gospel, on which equally convinced Christians disagree, attract ridicule and therefore disincline my hearers to listen to anything I have to say about the Christian message, then I should be prepared to entertain the possibility that it might be my interpretation that is at fault.

It is Scripture that has the final authority, not our understanding of it.

Scripture has the primary authority. Experience and science have helped decide between the possible interpretations that Scripture allows.

The Galileo incident teaches us that we should be humble enough to distinguish between what the Bible says and our interpretations of it. The biblical text might just be more sophisticated than we first imagined, and we might therefore be in danger of using it to support ideas that it never intended to teach.

The opposite danger is to ignore science. This, as Augustine warned, brings the gospel into disrepute.

We might also note that biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of fewer than four thousand words, whereas in English roughly two hundred thousand words are in current use.

This implies that “the beginning” of Genesis 1:1 did not necessarily take place on day 1 as is frequently assumed. The initial creation took place before day 1, but Genesis does not tell us how long before. This means that the question of the age of the earth (and of the universe) is a separate question from the interpretation of the days, a point that is frequently overlooked. In other words, quite apart from any scientific considerations, the text of Genesis 1:1, in separating the beginning from day 1, leaves the age of the universe indeterminate.

It would therefore be logically possible to believe that the days of Genesis are twenty-four-hour days (of one earth week) and to believe that the universe is very ancient. I repeat: this has nothing to do with science. Rather, it has to do with what the text actually says. There is a danger of understanding the text as saying less than it does, but also a danger of trying to make it say more.

No major doctrine of Scripture is affected by whether one believes that the days are analogical days or that each day is a long period of time inaugurated by God speaking, or whether one believes that each of the days is a normal day in which God spoke, followed by a long period of putting into effect the information contained in what God said on that particular day.

We have seen how the change from a fixed-earth to a moving-earth interpretation of Scripture came about as a result of gradually increasing scientific evidence that the earth was in motion. The parallel evidence regarding the antiquity of the universe is more recent, coming to us first from the disciplines of geology and most recently from advances in astronomy and cosmology.

It is simply false to suggest, as some do, that the only alternative to young-earth creationism is to accept the Darwinian model.

The honest and admirable admission of prominent young-earth creationists that “recent creationists should humbly agree that their view is, at the moment, implausible on purely scientific grounds.

The Biblical worldview begins with God; the atheist worldview begins with the universe.

The problem is that, in a world where achievement and merit count for so much, we human beings find it difficult to understand and accept that God’s forgiveness and peace cannot be earned by our work, effort, or merit, but must be received as a free gift.

What, therefore, should our attitude be to others who do not agree with us, whatever view we hold? Surely the old adage has got it more or less right: “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”