This is the fifth post in a series I’m writing about science and Christianity.  The others so far were:

1. How Can A Christian Write Science Fiction?
2. The Age of the Stars
3. The Age of the Rocks
4. Random Chance vs. Design

Perhaps the most difficult barrier to a Christian accepting the evidence for evolution and the age of the universe is Genesis 1.  For many, rejecting the science is not a matter of lack of education or ignorance; it’s that they hold the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God.  If I have a certain, divinely-delivered piece of evidence that says the Earth is young, then whatever scientific model I come up with has to take that evidence into account, doesn’t it?

I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, and yet I accept the theory of evolution.  Perhaps in another post I will explain why I find the evidence in support of evolution so compelling, but in this post, I want to explain why I no longer feel that the Bible binds me to the young Earth model.  This will not be an attempt to twist the words of Genesis and force them into the mold of current scientific understanding.  Such attempts invariably do violence to the text, and never fit the science very well anyway.  They are based on the assumption that, although Moses could have known nothing about modern science, God inserted scientific truth without his awareness.

Could God have done this?  Certainly.  Moses tells us about events to which he was not a witness (the lives of Adam, Noah, etc.).  This information could have been passed down by word of mouth, or perhaps God simply told him, but either way, we trust God to preserve truth in what Moses wrote.  So God could have put scientific truth in Moses’s mind and pen.  For that matter, he could have dropped scrolls from heaven in every language, past and future, but that’s not how God chose to communicate.  Instead, he chose to express truth in the culture and literature of the time.

God wrote the Bible in the words of real people, using their language, writing style, and literary genre.  Although the main truths of the Bible are comprehensible in any language or time, studying the literature and culture of those times can help us avoid the assumptions of our own culture (which are easy to hold without even recognizing them as assumptions).  When we look at the literature of the ancient Near East (Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Israelite), we see a generally consistent picture of what people thought the world looked like, which the picture to the right demonstrates (although the picture also includes some Israelite-specific concepts).  Moses, and everyone else of his time, thought the world was a single piece of land, surrounded by water to the sides and below; that the sky was a hard dome that included the sun, moon, and stars; that there was water above this dome that the dome generally kept out (which was where rain came from).  They didn’t know that the sun was a star, or that the stars were much farther away than the moon, or that the moon was much farther away than the birds flying by.  And God does not correct them.

In fact, Genesis seems quite consistent with this view of the universe.  Consider Genesis 1:6-8: “And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate the water from water.’  So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it.  And it was so.  And God called the expanse ‘sky’.”  The word “expanse” has variably been translated “canopy” or “firmament”, but it refers to the dome of sky that keeps the water above us from coming down on top of us.  In fact, from an ancient point of view, this second day is talking primarily about weather, since controlling the rain was the purpose of the sky-dome.  God could have said, through Moses, that he created the atmosphere and the water cycle and the Coriolis effect, but he didn’t.  He expressed himself according to the physical understanding of the time.

Does this mean the Bible is false?  Does it teach us that God created something–the hard dome of the sky–that in fact does not exist?  Not at all.  Remember, God was communicating in the context of this ancient culture.  The Bible is not claiming that the world is physically built this way; it is making no scientific claims at all.  Our obsession with material origins–how physical things made of atoms or photons got to be the way they are–is part of our scientific culture.  It’s something we bring to the text, not something that is there already.  For us, what is really important is how physical objects were made, but for the ancients, what was important was their purpose–the roles and functions and organization of the world.  In day 2, God used an ancient physical model to communicate to his people that he created the weather, the cycles of rain and sun that ordered their world and were so important for the production of food.  It was a function of the world, not the physical thing itself.

With this is mind, let’s go back and look at the first day, the creation of light.  As 21st century readers, we know that light is a thing.  Even if we have no scientific background, we think of light as something that travels, that has a speed, that is made up of particles or waves.  We know it can be used to power machines through solar energy.  But Moses would not have thought of light as a physical entity.  Light wasn’t a bundle of energy; it was a period of time.  Light and darkness were simply times of day.  Consider Genesis 3-5: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.  God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light ‘day,’ and he the darkness he called “night.”  And there was evening, and there was morning–the first day.”  We can see that God was speaking through an ancient concept of the world.  Instead of describing the creation of photons, these verses are describing the creation the function of time, the cycles of day and night that ordered their world and lives.

Throughout Genesis 1, we see God speaking not in terms of the creation of physical objects, but the separation of things to create order.  The world is at first formless and without order.  Then God separates the day from the night to establish the order of time.  He separates the sky from the land to keep back the rain and establish the order of weather patterns.  He separates the sea from the land to establish terrestrial order and allow food to grow.  Yes, God is the physical creator of everything in the universe from nothing, and this is acknowledged throughout the Bible, but these passages do not tell us how or when that occurred.  They don’t talk about physical origins.  They tell instead about God bringing order and assigning functions to his creation . . . right up to the last day, when he gives humanity its function to fill the earth and have dominion over it, continuing God’s work of bringing order to creation.

So, the Bible does not constrain our science.  In fact, the pursuit of science to understand the world is one greatly in keeping with a Christian worldview, as I hope to demonstrate in a future post.  We are free to study and understand the ancientness of stars, rocks, and body plans without conflict with God’s revelation, because God was not giving a scientific revelation in Genesis.  He used Moses’s ancient language, culture, and physical model of the universe to communicate his role as the creator of all the order and function of the universe around us, and to give us our role under him, delegated as his image bearers to bring order out of chaos.

Which brings us to the last significant theological hurdle we have to face to understand evolutionary science in the light of the Bible.  What about the evolution of man?