In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day. Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it wasgood. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day. Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind: cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth, each according to its kind”; and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food”; and it was so. Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. (Genesis 1:1–2:1)
As we read Genesis 1, we are immediately struck by the fact that this is a different account to the account of modern science. Let me give you a list of the differences.
The order in Genesis is heavens and earth without light but with water, followed by light, atmosphere, land, then land plants and trees and then sun, moon and stars. That gets you to day 4.
The order in evolutionary cosmology is light first, followed by stars then water, then our sun, then the Earth, then dry land, then oceans, and then life in the oceans.
In the Genesis account, animal life begins on day five with fish and sea mammals and reptiles, followed by birds and other flying creatures – mammalian and reptilian. Day 6 brings land mammals, reptiles and insects, and at the end of the day one man from dust. In the evolutionary scientific account, the first life, even before plant life, is single-celled organisms in the oceans, which develop into fish. After this come plant and tree life, followed by land reptiles, then aquatic reptiles and flying reptiles, then land mammals (from land reptiles), then birds (from land reptiles), then bats and whales, and then a population of ape-like mammals eventually evolved into humans.
Of course, not only is the order different, but the time is clearly very different. As we’ll see, the Genesis account , when taken plainly and literally refers to six 24-hour days. Combining that with the genealogies of chapter 5 and 10, and allowing for very few minor gaps of time, gives us a creation date in the recent past, somewhere between 6 and 10 thousand years ago. The evolutionary dates are quite different. The universe is supposed to have begun 13.7 billion years ago, our sun came into existence 4.6 billion years ago, the earth 4.5 billion years ago. Life appeared 3.7 billion years ago, dinosaurs appeared 250 million years ago, mammals 210 million years ago. The first human ancestors, ape-like creatures named homo habilis, appeared about 2 million years ago. Modern humans, homo sapiens emerged about 300 000 years ago.
Now not only are the chronologies and time frames radically different, but even more significantly, is the place of death in either account. The Genesis account places life and perfection before the entrance of death. Death enters because of man’s sin. In the evolutionary account, death is there from the very beginning, and death is actually the mechanism that enables evolution. When organisms evolve and they have a survival advantage, then nature blindly preserves that evolutionary change in the organism’s descendants. But if they don’t get the advantage, or even randomly evolve a disadvantage, then nature culls them out by death. They do not survive, so they have no descendants, so their evolutionary change is prevented from spreading by death. And thus death and survival leads to the survival of the fittest, better and better creatures, more and more advanced, improving through death and survival.
In the Genesis account, the first man is created directly on day 6, is a fully formed and rational human with soul and spirit and made in God’s image. In the evolutionary account, groups of human-like creatures evolved in Africa from between 2 million years ago and the 300 000 years ago and eventually became more and more rational.
Now to anyone who compares these two accounts, it’s obvious that they are radically different. So what should we do about that? How should we respond?
Let me outline how people respond. The fall into two groups – those who try to harmonise science and the Bible, and those who don’t.
One group of people seeks no harmony at all. You could call these the non-concordists. They decide that there is no reconciling of what science says with what the Bible says, and they decide in advance that what science says must be factually correct as far as the natural order goes. Therefore, they say, Genesis 1 is doing something different. Here are three kinds of non-concordists.
1) One type of person in this group says that Genesis is a fable, a story concocted like any other creation myth that has no basis in reality. Usually atheists, agnostics and unbelievers take this approach.
2) Another type says that Genesis 1 through 3 is a kind of allegory, like Pilgrim’s Progress. It uses figures to tell a deeper story about God, man, man’s rebellion and man’s condition. But it is not meant to tell us anything about the origin of the physical universe.
3) A third type of non-concordist decides that Genesis 1 is a kind of poem with a clear poetic, literary structure. The days are not actual days; they are literary devices. The first three days are the forming of creation, the last three days are the filling of creation.
Another group of people could be called concordists. They seek to find agreement between science and the Bible. Here are some of their approaches.
1) Day-Age Theory, or Progressive Creationism. Some people say that God created everything in six successive stages. Each day represents a long period of time, maybe billions of years. In this time, God progressively created, using evolution, but guiding it, moving it along. This is sometimes called the They reject the evolutionary account of where life came from and where creation came from, but they do accept that the creation is very old, and that God used evolutionary changes and plant and animal death to move things along.
2) The Gap Theory. Some people say that God created the original heavens and earth, but then there was a long gap of time between verse 1 and 2, perhaps millions or billions of years. Some place the Fall of Satan in that gap. Some would say the rest of the Genesis account refers to a more recent creation of the biosphere, or perhaps of the promised land.
3) 24-hour theory. This theory says that the creation account did take place in six, 24-hour days. The way they harmonise this with science is to say that other scientific evidence points to a young earth, and a more recent creation.
So how should we sort through all these positions? Should we choose the non-concordist approach, or the concordist approach? Harmonise Scripture with nature, or not? Are they doing totally different things, one dealing with the soul and the spirit of man, and the other is dealing with hard material facts. Or do they overlap?
Psalm 19 gives us some of the answer.
The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language Where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth,And their words to the end of the world. In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, And rejoices like a strong man to run its race. Its rising is from one end of heaven, And its circuit to the other end; And there is nothing hidden from its heat. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. (Psalm 19:1–9)
What do we notice about the first 6 verses? They are dealing with nature, creation, what we call general revelation. What do we notice about verses 7 through 9? They are dealing with Scripture, the Bible, special revelation. But notice they exist seamlessly in the same psalm. No conflict between them.
And notice that they both reveal God. Creation reveals God, and Scripture reveals God. And in some ways, they will explain each other. Nature is going to give us all kinds of pictures and analogies that the Bible will use. And the Bible will in turn help us understand what we are looking at in nature.
Put simply, we can and must harmonise, as best we can, the account in Genesis with what we know and can see in the natural world.
1) Science is a legitimate source of knowledge, but it is not the only or final source of knowledge. Science is that kind of knowledge that comes from observing the world, either with our five senses, or with machines, devices and instruments that do the observations. Science takes these observations, comes up with theories to explain them, and then comes up with experiments to test the theories. That’s science. It is what we call empirical knowledge. But science is not the only source of knowledge, or even the best or most reliable form of knowledge. People who teach that science is the only way to know reality are not believers in science. They are actually believers in something we call scientism. Scientism is a philosophy, a religion, which says all truth is found in scientific observation. All you can know and need to know can be found through the scientific method, including morality, beauty, logic, human relationships, the origin of the universe and the meaning of life. To think that science can answer those questions is no longer a scientist working in a laboratory, it is a believer in scientism. People who hold to this end up believing in naturalism: that the natural order is all there is: no supernatural, no God, no spirit, no afterlife.
Scientism is a false philosophy because there are several other sources of knowledge. Other sources of knowledge include reason or logic, authority, tradition, and intuition. What we know about the world is built up by experiencing the world, reasoning about the world, inheriting ideas from tradition, learning from authorities, and simply intuiting some things to be true.
Now the knowledge of the Bible is a form of authority. It is knowledge that comes to us from the highest authority. It is also knowledge that comes to us from the only One who was present to observe creation. He tells us what we could not otherwise know. He tells us what no one else was there to observe. We receive His Word on faith, because we have been born into His family and know that we can trust His Word.
Because God’s Word is a form of knowledge known as authority, it is there to give us all we need for life and godliness. It is not a work of logic, not a maths textbook, nor is it a work of empirical scientific observations. It is not meant to be. But when it does speak about logic or creation, we can expect it to speak truly and faithfully, because God does not breathe out error. God’s Word is not the only source of knowledge, but it is the only final test of truth.
2) Science also has presuppositions. Scientists have plenty of things they assume when they begin their observations. They don’t test those assumptions; they build them in to the experiment. They assume the laws of physics are the same everyday. They assume their findings from yesterday were not altered by a mischievous elf. And very importantly, many scientists assume that everything in the physical universe has a cause within the physical universe. That’s known as naturalism. To see how that works, imagine some ants who are scientist-ants. These ant scientists who are working on the problem of what we know to be human-fingerprints. They have found these large ridge-like patterns, following these strange shapes. They are trying to explain the origin of these fingerprints. But the one problem is this: these ant-scientists do not believe in the existence of man. Now picture the theories they will develop to explain what we know are human fingerprints, while excluding the actual cause. Their presuppositions will not allow them to include what is the true explanation.
Many scientists have presuppositions like this. Even in the face of what appears to be exquisite design, they will not allow a Creator God to be one of the possible explanations. He will re-interpret the data from the world to fit his presuppositions.
Science, like theology, also involves interpretation. You may have heard someone say about something you believe in the Bible, “Well, that’s just your interpretation!” But you probably have never heard someone say that to a scientist! The reason for that is that people think science goes straight from observations to truth, with no interpretations in between. But in fact, science involves all kinds of interpretation that the scientist must do. Just like a Bible interpreter must know the rules of language and know the context, and the history, and the genre, so the scientist must know what he is looking for, he must decide what data he is going to exclude and why, he must be aware of why he is interested in one set of facts, and not in another. Why does this count and not something else? Why is he even interested in solving this problem? Why does he exclude certain solutions or certain hypotheses? This is presuppositions and interpretation.
This is where 1 Corinthians comes in. When man rebels against God, his wisdom becomes foolishness.
Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Corinthians 1:25)
But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; (1 Corinthians 1:27)
Now to be fair, this works in reverse for a believer in God’s Word. Our presupposition is simple: God doesn’t lie. What He says is the case must be the case, and when the science seems to contradict what the Word says, we will place our trust first in authority, then only in scientific observation.
3) Science develops and experiences both progress and regress.
What we call science is not some settled, final body of knowledge. It is growing and changing. For example, for centuries, science held what was called the Ptolemaic view that the Earth was in the centre, the sun and moon and planets revolved around it. And in the Ptolemaic view, astronomers were able to accurately predict eclipses, planetary conjunctions. Years later, Copernicus more accurately showed the sun to be at the centre of the solar system, and now the whole model changed from Ptolemaic to Copernican. Both models worked, but one seemed to be more accurate and explained more. Science goes through these changes. In fact, the words paradigm shift were coined by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, where he explained how science changes its whole model. That happened when physics went to Newtonian and then Quantum combined with Newtonian.
Now right now, there are models that are used to explain the universe: the Big Bang, String Theory, and more recently, the multiverse theory. Evolutionary biology seeks to explain life on earth. And they do explain certain features of the universe, just like the Ptolemaic model of the solar system was able to do. But this does not mean that the current scientific model the final truth, the settled and last word. Many scientists dissent from these models and say we need better ones or different ones.
On the other hand, God’s Word is not undergoing progress and regress. It is settled, and what God says will not change.
So is the Bible anti-science? On the contrary. We would not have modern science as it is in the West without the Christian worldview. Actually, biblical creationism gives you science, because it teaches several things that other religions did not teach, or did not teach together. The Bible teaches that nature is real, that nature has value, that nature is not God, that nature has order, that nature is subservient to man’s investigation, and that nature has purpose.
What then would be an obedient Christian science? What kind of science should Christians be interested in?
Christian science would submit all its findings to the final authority, which is God’s Word. Science can happily tell us about the facts of nature, but if its presuppositions or interpretations contradict what God’s Word says, we will treat it with scepticism. We don’t have to accept its conclusion, if its starting premise was a lie. If what it presupposed about the cosmos is wrong, it may get some things right, but we don’t have to trust it. We want science to look at the world through the grid of God’s Word. Study the universe, in the finest details, but make your assumptions those of the Creator.
Christian science would stick to what it can do. It can observe, make hypotheses, and test them. It can gather facts about the natural world and try to interpret them. But science cannot observe the beginning, because we weren’t there. Science cannot answer the ultimate questions, of why we are here, where we came from, where we are going, what makes us human. These are not empirical questions; they are religious and philosophical questions. and we do not expect science to answer them.
Christian science would humbly admit that it is still in process. Scientists are humans, and humans need to eat. Therefore scientists are not in the habit of saying and doing things that could jeopardise their careers and make them lose their jobs. So scientists do not say things like “This is our latest theory, it is full of problems, and does not explain many things about what we are observing.” That’s not how you get tenure at a university, or a research grant. If you want those things, you speak as if you are on the very edge of solving the mystery of the universe, and that it is not still learning and fumbling and making mistakes. But Christians should know that science is honest when it says, “this is the latest model we have, but it almost certainly not the final one, because there are still so many unsolved problems.”
The contrasting science is not neutral. It is a rebel science.
4 For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, 5 casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, 6 and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled. (2 Corinthians 10:4–6)
The kind of science that excludes God is exalted against God. It won’t get everything wrong, but it will get the main things wrong. That kind of science is to be challenged where it challenges God. And the first, and main place where we will do it, is Genesis 1:1.