A Ramble about Creation

I don't think I've ever written a ramble directly about this subject. I know I've alluded to it, but I don't think I've directly talked about it. If I have, please forgive the redundancy. I just started mulling it over again in my mind after reading an article in Scientific American online, and then reading some of the responses in the article from other well meaning Christians.

The book of Genesis says that God created the world in six days. Modern science says that the universe, the planet, and all life on it took billions of years to form. This is “the” classic argument between those of us who believe the Holy Scriptures, and those of us who read and keep up with modern scientific study, theories, and advances in understanding. There's a lot of good research and evidence that indicates that modern science has a more correct view of the time-line involved, and yet the Bible is the inspired word of God, and whether or not we accept the doctrine of “sola scriptura” (the doctrine which teaches that Sacred Scripture alone is sufficient for doctrine and teaching [to which I do not ascribe]) there are few professing Christians who will declare the Bible to be somehow wrong (myself included).

Thus began the great war of words between Bible believing Christians and sincere scientists (“the Bible says this!” and “but the data says this!”). The great conflict between general and special revelation. The question then becomes, if both means of revelation are given by God, how can they contradict each other?

I remember reading in one book by a Dr. Hugh Ross (it was either “The Fingerprint of God” or “The Creator and the Cosmos”), an astrophysicist who is also a professing Christian, that the order of the six days of creation reads like watching the formation of the earth and evolutionary history from the viewpoint of someone standing on the earth. There are many who have taken a similar standpoint putting forth ideas such as each “day” of creation as actually being an “evolutionary age” of time.

I would like to go back and expand on Dr. Ross' observation and suggest that what Genesis is describing is not six literal 24 hour days of “creation”, but it is describing six literal 12 hour periods of revelation about creation. Genesis itself gives us the clue to this as it describes, literally, “there is evening and there is morning, day one, … day two, … day three, etc.” Moses is describing being shown something for twelve hours at a time, and then given twelve hours to process what he has seen and sleep before the next round.

Here is my opinion. Moses was on the mountain for forty days according to Exodus. During those forty days, God took six days to reveal millions of years of His creative acts. Being God, He showed it to Moses, from Moses' viewpoint on the ground, in a kind of “fast forward”, as much as his human mind could assimilate and process at a time, and then it all amalgamated in his mind as it attempted to absorb and retain all of it, and he then wrote down the gist of what he could remember. The point of the book of the first chapter of Genesis then becomes not how God created the world, but that He created the world.

How is it that we have gotten to the point that a Christian's personal faith and relationship with God is so fragile that it depends on a specific, yet scientifically problematic, interpretation of Holy Scripture? How is it that we have gotten to the point that entire theologies of salvation are dependent on a specific translation or understanding of a particular word in Hebrew or Greek?

How would some Christians react to the information that, most likely, the Old Testament was not originally written in the oldest language we have copies in, namely a 6th century Babylonian dialect of Hebrew? The Torah, the first five books, were written in approximately the fifteenth century before Christ, concurrent with the lifetime of Moses. Hebrew did not exist as a language prior to the time of King David, approximately 1000 B.C.

Hebrew as we know it is a descendant of a dialect of Canaanite, much like Spanish is a descendant of Latin, and was likely adopted after the conquest of Canaan and the subsequent (forbidden) intermingling between the Israeli and Canaanite peoples described in the book of Judges. The descendants of Jacob and his twelve sons were in Egypt for four hundred years, and there is no record of the Egyptian Pharoahs seeking to suppress their language or culture, even while they were ordering the death of the firstborn. Furthermore there is a consistent pattern of the Israeli, and later Jewish people, of adopting the language of the people of the land in which they are living. So that we have a dialect of German such as Yiddish, a dialect of Spanish such as Ladino, prior to this in the time of Christ, the Jewish people predominantly spoke either Greek, or Aramaic. Hebrew itself was such a dead language among most of the people by the time of Ezra, at the end of the Babylonian captivity, that Ezra had to translate the Scriptures for the masses. Hebrew only really existed among the Rabbis much as Latin only really continued and still continues among the Roman Catholic clergy and religious. This was the reason for the translation of the Scriptures into the Aramaic targums, and then later the translation from the Hebrew into the Greek Septuagint, which was the Bible most familiar to the Jewish people of the first centuries both B.C. and A.D.

This in mind, there is good circumstantial evidence that the original words of Moses were likely written in Egyptian, or some Israeli variant of it which was later translated into Hebrew, probably during or after the time of King David, and there is good internal evidence within the Scriptures that they were later appended and added to in both Hebrew and Aramaic (and then later in Greek, although most Protestants will likely argue this point).

I believe that God inspired the original words. I also believe that God was perfectly capable of inspiring each well meaning editor, redactor, and translator until we have the Scriptures we have today. I believe that the important message that God intended to be passed down from generation to generation continues to be passed down. That He created the heavens and the earth. That He did it all by Himself with no one to assist Him. That He did it in the way he wanted, and in the time (which means nothing to Him) He chose to do it.

I find it fascinating that there is good archaeological evidence that the beginnings of civilization arose between six and seven thousand years ago near Tabriz, Iran and southern Georgia, the best location I have ever heard for the geographical site of the Biblical garden of Eden (believe it or not, it matches perfectly with the Biblical description of where Eden was located). I find it just as fascinating that human beings most likely started wearing clothes about 150,000 years ago (roughly when the body louse evolved). I also find it fascinating that Neanderthals actually died out between thirty and fifty thousand years ago and were not genetically related or descended from modern Homo Sapiens.

I think God told us what he considered important in the Holy Scriptures. I also think there's a lot He didn't say; whole Chapters of Human history which He refused to elaborate on because He didn't think it necessary for His purposes to tell us. Chapters, some of them quite dark, which we get small glimmers of through archaeological and paleontological research. Some of which chapters are likely better left buried in the past from what I have read. This doesn't make Him a liar under any circumstances, but it does make Him far more prudent than ourselves in what he chooses to reveal directly.

The important realization of our human history which Genesis tells us, is that somewhere in our distant past, our ancestors screwed up royally and passed down a disorder which keeps us from knowing God without His direct intervention. The next important realization is the constant direct intervention by God in our history so that we would come to know Him in spite of our disorder.

If we are continuously fighting about how much time (a concept which is meaningful only to human beings) God took to create the world, were are limiting God and missing the real message of Holy Scripture, that God wants to help us and has been working without a break to do so, through this meaningless distraction. This divisiveness can only be described as the very definition of heresy.