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

by John C. Lennox

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 a metaphor. It involved an actual death. The resurrection is not a metaphor. It was a physical event: a “standing up again”5 of a body that had died. However, we know from the Gospels that people listening to Jesus sometimes took him literally when he was speaking metaphorically (in John 6:51, for instance).

it is impossible, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, to speak of things beyond our immediate senses without using metaphor.6 Scientists, therefore, use metaphor all the time.

Whatever else the creation narrative is, it is an account of the creation of the physical universe.

Remember, according to Genesis, it was God himself who told the first humans to name the animals; he was not going to do it for them (Genesis 2:19–20). That is important, because naming things is the very essence of science (we call it taxonomy). Indeed, naming things is an essential part of all intellectual disciplines. So we might say that it was God who started science off!

Rather than scientific language, the Bible often uses what is called phenomenological language, the language of appearances.

The Bible, though not a scientific text, precisely because it is God’s revealed Word, has truth to tell us about the same kind of objective reality that science discusses, in particular about the nature and origin of the cosmos and of human beings. We therefore must try to understand that truth. But it has more than that to say at another level, for instance, truth about the meaning of the universe, which science does not and cannot provide. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “The meaning of the system lies outside the system.”

We would also accept that we should be prepared to distinguish between what Scripture actually says and what we think it means. It is Scripture that has the final authority, not our understanding of it.

The opposite danger is to ignore science, and maybe even common sense. This, as Augustine warned, brings the gospel into disrepute. It is also an obscurantist attitude that finds no support in Scripture.

If, therefore, we can learn things about God as Creator from the visible universe, it is surely incumbent upon us to use our God-given minds to think about what these things are, and thus to relate God’s general revelation in nature to his special revelation in his Word, so that we can rejoice in both. After all, it was God who put the universe there, and it would be very strange if we had no interest in it.

Thus Philo thought that creation was the act of a moment, and that the Genesis record had more to do with principles of order and arrangement than chronological order.

Maimonides, in the introduction to his famous work The Guide for the Perplexed, modestly said: “Now, on the one hand, the subject of creation is very important, but on the other hand, our ability to understand these concepts is very limited. Therefore, God described these profound concepts, which His Divine wisdom found necessary to communicate to us, using allegories, metaphors and imagery . .

Basil also believed that vegetation was created before the sun in order to show that it was not dependent on sunlight, and so the sun should not be worshipped!

One of the most important statements here from the perspective of philosophical theology is that God did not create “in time” but “with time.” That is, according to Augustine, time itself is part of creation, so that the question about what God was doing before creation is meaningless. Also, God created ex nihilo – out of nothing. Augustine’s final comment here is both honest and humble in that it reminds us there is much in this narrative we don’t understand. Yet if we accept that Scripture is the word of God, we should believe it and keep trying to understand it, realizing all the time that we might get it wrong.

Hans Boersma points out that “the medieval tradition often distinguished four different levels of interpretation . . . Littera gesta docet, quid credes allegoria, moralis quid agas, quot tendas anagogia. In English, one could render the rhyme somewhat freely as follows: The letter shows us what God and our fathers did; the allegory shows us where our faith is hid; the moral meaning gives us the rule of daily life; the anagogy26 shows us where we end our strife.”27

A further variation of view 3 is known as the cosmic temple view.

There were several stages in reaching the goal, each of them seen by God to be good because each of them had fulfilled the purpose God determined for it.

Thoughtful readers familiar with the writings of Moses would therefore clearly understand the following: (1) Genesis 1 portrays God as a creative craftsman going about his week of work, taking rest each night from evening to morning and then having a day of rest at the end. (2) Yet God’s work of creation was vastly different from human work. We do not do the things that God does. Indeed, the Hebrew word for create (bara) is used in the Bible mostly with God as subject.43 (3) Human rest is not the same as God’s rest. God does not get tired, as we do – he “neither slumbers nor sleeps” (see Psalm 121:4). (4) God’s creation week was never repeated, whereas ours is. Thus there were points of contact between God’s creation week and the readers’ workweek that they could readily understand, yet there were also differences.

If, for instance, we ask how long God rested from his work of creation, as distinct from his work of upholding the universe, then Augustine’s suggestion – that God sanctified the seventh day by making it an epoch that extends onward into eternity – makes good sense and is one that is followed by many commentators. Thus the seventh day is different from the first six,45 which are days of creative activity. The sequence of days comes to an end, and God rests from creation activity; and he is still resting up to this present day.

Yet, as Old Testament scholar David Gooding has pointed out to me (unpublished), although the Hebrew definite article is not used with the first five days, it is used for days six and seven. A better translation, therefore, would be “day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, the sixth day, the seventh day”; or, “a first day, a second day, a third day, a fourth day, a fifth day, the sixth day, the seventh day.”48

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.

Therefore, the fact of what happens in each day – God speaks – is much more important than each day’s length. That core message is important for our culture: God, the Word, is primary; matter, energy, the universe, and life are derivative.

More importantly still, since it is word-based, the universe has meaning.

you do not get from the inorganic to the organic without “And God said.”

The wording of the second part of day 3 is interesting: “And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth’ ” (Genesis 1:11). This could imply that God starts life going and allows its potential to develop from there. Think of all the variations on the theme “dog” that have developed, or been bred, originally, probably, from wolves. They did not each require a special “And God said.” Also, Paul points out in Acts 17:26 that all the many races, colours, and kinds of humans have arisen by development from the first humans. The point of the repetition of “And God said” in day 3 is to underline that life did not come from nonlife simply by processes of development. Life required not only pre-existent matter but also a special creative word of God.

In day 6 a similar thing happens. The first “And God said” leads to the creation of animals, and the second to the creation of human beings. However, there is no suggestion that human b...

Furthermore, the supernatural acts of Jesus the incarnate Word of God recorded in the New Testament were mainly instantaneous: water is turned into wine without the normal long process; bread and fish are multiplied in an instant. Could not this be intended to show us how the Creator creates?

That could mean the sequence of the days is not chronological or, perhaps, not completely chronological. The main thrust of the text would then be that God is involved in all aspects of creation – which, of course, must be the central message of the passage in any interpretation.

Kass points out that the sun is the common feature of all these incongruities. The significance of this in an ancient Near Eastern culture, where the sun was widely worshipped, is obvious. It has often been noted that when the sun is eventually introduced in day 4, it is pointedly not a god but simply a luminary.

Kass then draws attention to the parallel between the first three and second three days (the framework view we noted earlier), making the observation that none of the creatures on the first three days can move, whereas in the second three days the mobile creatures are arranged in an order of increasing freedom of movement – from the heavenly bodies that are confined to fixed orbits to living things that can move more freely up to humans who can set trajectories for themselves.

The main principles at work in the creation are place, separation, motion, and life, but especially separation and motion.”73 He points out that the language gives strong support to the idea of separation, with “divide” or “separate” occurring five times explicitly and ten times implicitly in the phrase “after its kind.” God divides the light from the darkness; the heavenly lights divide day from night; the firmament or vault of heaven divides the waters above from those below, whereas the creatures without external intervention maintain the distinctiveness of their species by reproducing after their kinds. This is creation/organization by separation, which fittingly proceeds through creation by speech, since the use of words implies the recognition of distinctions.

Copernicus, Rheticus, and Kepler were not claiming that the Bible taught the motion of the earth, but that the motion of the earth was consistent with the Bible’s teaching. We found that interpreting the foundations and pillars of the earth in terms of the stability of the earth is not a compromise position, but a perfectly reasonable understanding of the text that does not undermine the authority of Scripture, even though this interpretation relies on (new) scientific knowledge.

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

Genesis does not deny what chemistry tells us – that all life has a material substrate of common elements. In Genesis 1:11 this fact is implied for vegetation and animals: “Let the earth sprout vegetation”; and also in 1:24: “Let the earth bring forth living creatures.” In Genesis 2:7 it is explicitly said of humans: “The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” 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.

according to Genesis, you cross neither the gulf between nonlife and life nor the gulf between animals and human beings by unguided natural processes. God has to speak his creative word in both instances. Without God speaking there is an unbridgeable discontinuity. The image of God in man was not produced as a result of blind matter fumbling its unguided way through myriad different permutations. Genesis thus challenges atheism’s fundamental assertion that human life appeared without the activity of God’s mind, so that there is nothing special about human beings.

The difference between animals and humans is further underscored by the fact that God assigned to humans the responsibility of stewardship “over” the animals (Genesis 1:26). Finally, that difference is also the focus in Genesis 2:18–24, where the way in which the narrative is structured shows that the naming of the animals is to be read in the context of finding a helper for Adam. The lesson is that no helper was found fit for (or corresponding to) Adam among the many animal species then existing – therefore, including, be it noted, whatever nonhuman hominids may or may not have existed at the time. It is more than interesting that, according to the Bible, the first lesson Adam was taught was that he was fundamentally different from all other creatures.

Moreover, 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 that fellowship.

Furthermore, in one of the curious ironies of evolutionary theory, biologist Alexander argues that human evolution has stopped.16 Might not the true situation be that it never got started in the first place – that human beings were a direct creation of God?17

What science can tell about human beings, though, is what it can tell us about the universe – namely, that they also had a beginning.

To eat from any tree, indeed, to do anything at all, from whatever motive, that is contrary to the will and word of our Creator and the Ruler of this world is itself lawlessness. It is a frame of mind that asserts the creature’s will against the Creator’s, that pushes the Creator aside and makes central to everything the pursuit of one’s own egotistical interests and interpretation of life. That is, in principle, what “sin” is. The second-century writer Theophilus of Antioch (AD 115–181) said: “It was not the tree, as some think, but the disobedience which had the death in it.”21

In other words, Genesis is saying there was already an alien enemy in the earth, a being that, apparently, had the capacity to disobey God, had actually done so, and was now encouraging the first humans to follow suit.

The serpent first subtly questions the prohibition: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1). Eve answers, rather inaccurately, by saying that God has forbidden even touching the tree, let alone eating of it. The serpent then responds with outright denial: “You will not surely die.” To this it adds, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:4–5). The serpent contrives, by a devious manipulation of half-truth and appeal to her interest in food, her aesthetic sense, and her desire for insight and fulfilment – all originally God-given – to drive a wedge between her and her Creator.

Knowledge of good and evil obtained in this way is not the kind of knowledge one wants. For instead of finding life, they begin to experience death, as God had said they would.

Human life, as we learn from Genesis 2, has many aspects; its lowest level is physical life, to which we must add those other things that make life life – aesthetics, food, work, human relationships, and a moral relationship with God. Human death, then, will involve the unweaving of all of this. It will first mean the death of fellowship with God, and the first result of this death is a pathetic attempt to hide from God in the garden. The deadly rupture of fellowship with God will then lead inexorably to all the other levels of death – aesthetic death, death of human relationships, and so on, until we reach the lowest level of death, which turns our bodies back to molecules of dust.

That is, the promise here is not simply that God will triumph – that was never in doubt. It is that humanity will triumph in Jesus Christ.

Whatever the meaning of the details, the timeless implications are clear – disaster occurred through rejection of the word of God.

Without God’s creative word, there is nothing to fund and shape human creativity.”

With this all too brief sketch we turn to look more closely at what the apostle Paul says about the entry of sin into the world – and what he does not say. He says that death spread to all human beings as a result of Adam’s sin; he does not say that death spread to all living things (Romans 5:12).

Humans are moral beings, and human death is the ultimate wages of moral transgression. We do not think of plants and animals in terms of moral categories. We do not accuse the lion of sinning when it kills an antelope or even a human being.

In a similar way, the view that animal death did not exist before humans sinned would make the existence of predators problematic.

Once more we need to observe exactly what is being said. Paul speaks of decay and corruption. Think of what happens to flowers. Daffodils can get disease. However, daffodils, whether diseased or not, die down in the early summer. Only the bulbs are left, which then grow again the following year. Is that process of dying down the same thing as disease? Surely not. This is part of the cycle of nature. Is it a good thing, part of the original creation, or is it a result of sin? Similarly, salmon can become diseased. But that is not the same thing as salmon dying after they have spawned. Once more, this strange phenomenon is part of the cycle of nature. Again, is this a good thing, or is it a result of sin? Is it therefore possible that corruption, disease, and human death may well be a consequence of sin, but that plant and animal death, as part of the cycle of nature, are not?