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

by John C. Lennox

the Reformers adopted an approach described by the Oxford English Dictionary in its definition of literal: “that sense or interpretation (of a text) which is obtained by taking its words in their natural or customary meaning, and applying the ordinary rules of grammar; opposed to mystical, allegorical, etc.,” and “hence, by extension, … the primary sense of a word, or … the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage, as distinguished from any metaphorical or merely suggested meaning.”

The crucial thing about Christianity’s fundamental doctrines is that they are first and foremost to be understood in their natural, primary sense.

The cross of Christ is not primarily a metaphor. It involved an actual death. The resurrection is notprimarily an allegory. It was a physical event: a “standing up again”2 of a body that had died.

when we are dealing with a text that was produced in a culture distant from our own both in time and in geography, what we think the natural meaning is may not have been the natural meaning ...

there can be more than one natural reading of a word or phrase.

We all understand what a person means when they say, “The car was flying down the road.” The car and the road are very literal, but “flying” is a metaphor. However, we also are well aware that the metaphor “flying” stands for something very real that could be expressed more literally as “driving fast.” Just because a sentence contains a metaphor, it doesn’t mean that it is not referring to something real.

take Jesus’ statement, “I am the door” (John 10:9). It is clearly not meant to be understood in the primary, literal sense of a door made of wood. It is meant metaphorically. But notice again that the metaphor stands for something real: Jesus is a real doorway into an actual, and therefore very literal, experience of salvation and eternal life.

it is impossible, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, to speak of things beyond our immediate senses without using metaphor.

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.

Firstly, the claim that science and religion are completely separate often conceals another belief: that science deals with reality, and religion with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and God. The impression that science deals with truth and religion deals with fantasy is very widespread. No one who is convinced of the truth, inspiration, and authority of Scripture could agree with that.

But there is another snag with Gould’s view. We cannot keep science and Scripture completely separate, for the simple reason that the Bible talks about some of the things that science talks about. And they are very important things—like the origin of the universe and of life. They are also foundational both to science and to philosophy.

saying Scripture has scientific implications does not mean that the Bible is a scientific treatise from which we can deduce Newton’s Laws, Einstein’s equations, or the chemical structure of common salt.

We can surely also agree that the Bible is not written in advanced contemporary scientific language. This circumstance should not cause us any surprise or difficulty, but rather gratitude and relief. Suppose, for instance, that God had intended to explain the origin of the universe and life to us in detailed scientific language. Science is constantly changing, developing, standing in need of correction, although (we trust) becoming more and more accurate. If the biblical explanation were at the level, say, of twenty-second-century science, it would likely be unintelligible to everyone, including scientists today.

This could scarcely have been God’s intention. He wished his meaning to be accessible to all.8 Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Genesis is that it is accessible to, and has a message for, everyone, whether or not they are scientifically literate.

Augustine (354–430) had already had the same thought a thousand years before Calvin: “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said that I send to you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and the moon, for he wanted to make Christians and not mathematicians.”

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

Saying that the sun “rises” does not commit the Bible, or a scientist for that matter, to any particular model of the solar system.

occurs today, as the present author has cause to know. 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.

It is a sad spectacle, and one that brings discredit on the Christian message, when those who profess to believe that message belie their profession by fighting among themselves or caricaturing others, rather than engaging in respectful discussion through which all sides might just learn something.

We know now that the earth does not rest on literal foundations or pillars made of stone, concrete, or steel. We can therefore see that the words “foundations” and “pillars” are used in a metaphorical sense. However, it needs to be emphasised once more that the metaphors stand for realities. God the Creator has built certain very real stabilities into the planetary system that will guarantee its existence so long as is necessary to fulfil his purposes.

The earth does not have to be at the centre of the physical universe in order to be a centre of God’s attention.

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

The earlier Christian interpretation of Scripture in terms of a fixed earth did not attract the ridicule of nonbelievers, since fixed earth was the dominant view in society as a whole at the time.

However, once it became generally evident and accepted that the earth did move, and that the Scriptures could be interpreted consistently with that fact without compromising their integrity or authority, thereafter to maintain that Scripture insisted that the earth was fixed in the sky would leave one open to justifiable ridicule, and would bring Scripture into disrepute.

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.

Another lesson in a different direction, but one not often drawn, is that it was Galileo (who believed in the Bible) who was advancing a better scientific understanding of the universe. He was doing so, as we have seen, not only against the obscurantism of some churchmen, but (and first of all) against the resistance (and obscurantism) of the secular philosophers of his time, who, like the churchmen, were convinced disciples of Aristotle.

Lack of belief in God is no more a guarantee of scientific orthodoxy than is belief in God.

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

After all, it was God who put the universe there, and it would be very strange if we had no interest in it.

It is important to take on board right away that both the young-earth and the ancient-earth creationist views go back a long way. Neither of them is a recent invention.

The word creationist, however, has changed its meaning over time. Originally it meant simply someone who believed in a creator, without any implication for how or when the creating was done; nowadays, creationist is usually taken to mean “young-earth creationist.”

fact Augustine (like Philo above) held that God had created everything in a moment, and that the days represented a logical sequence to explain it to us.

These men were not armchair theorists. Some of them were tortured or martyred for their faith: among them Justin Martyr (as his name implies), Irenaeus, and Origen. Nor, obviously, were they influenced by contemporary science, such as geology and evolutionary biology.

it is important to add that the understanding of the days of Genesis as twenty-four-hour days seems to have been the dominant view for many centuries.

One of the major tensions in the discussion of the early chapters of Genesis is between those who think that the author intended the book to be read as history and those who regard the author’s intention as the conveying of timeless truths through figurative, theological language.

Genesis is, of course, a text that comes to us from a time and culture very different from our own. It is from the ancient Near East, so we cannot simply read it as if it were a contemporary Western document written to address contemporary Western concerns.

God used human authors who wrote in terms of their own culture and surroundings as they conveyed God’s Word to the world. Jesus told parables about farming, building, and fishing, not about factories, aviation, and jungle exploration. And yet his parables are accessible to anyone in any age.

is used in the Bible only with God as subject. (3) Human rest is not the same as God’s rest. God does not get tired as we do — he “neither slumbers nor sleeps” (Ps. 121:4).

Augustine’s suggestion, that God sanctified the seventh day by making it an epoch that extends onward into eternity, makes good sense;

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.

God’s week happened once; ours is repeated. God’s creative activity is very different from ours; God does not need rest as we do; and so on.

the making of human beings is the pinnacle of God’s creation activity, and it has deep significance for our understanding of what we and our fellow men and women are.

Of all creation, only humans are made in God’s image.

However, we never read in Scripture that the heavens bear the image of God. Only humans do.

Therefore Genesis affirms that (human) life has a chemical base, but Genesis denies the reductionist addendum of the materialist— that life is nothing but chemistry.

in saying that God made man of the dust of the ground, Genesis seems to be going out of its way to imply a direct special creation act, rather than suggesting that humans arose, either by natural processes or by God’s special activity, out of preexisting hominids or, indeed, Neolithic farmers.

It is interesting that the first lesson Adam was taught, according to the Bible, is that he was fundamentally different from all other creatures.

for Genesis 1 and 2 are not talking about God revealing himself to humans that already existed, but rather explaining how those human beings came to exist in the first place. The text is not describing the calling of existing human beings into fellowship with God, but stating how God physically created human beings from the dust of the earth in order to have fellowship with him.

the Genesis narrative makes it evident that Adam and Eve did not need to be called into fellowship with God at the beginning: they were in fellowship with God from the start. It was their sin that broke the fellowship.