Rationality vs. Myth Genesis and Geophysics Come and see what God has done, how awesome his works in man’s behalf!—Psalm 66:5, NIV Richard Doctor Science’s first halting steps toward understanding planetary processes owe a 3,700-year-old debt to the inspired author of Genesis. When we contrast Genesis with creation accounts from other cultures, it is apparent that the Bible’s world view differs in a striking way. The biblical account is rational. The nurturing of this rational thought coupled to experimental investigation—"the scientific method" —has been a dynamo for progress, yet its biblical foundations are generally ignored. By way of contrast, in the Sumerian creation myths of Abraham’s homeland we are thrust into the world of symbolism and psychological archetypes. We meet counsels, thrones, four winds, then seven winds, four horses, judgment storms, seals, enchained demigods, and most importantly, Tiamut, a demonic woman judged to destruction. It is Tiamut’s severed body that becomes heaven, earth, and ocean. There are weapons, but no trumpets. This is a groping toward meaning in the cosmos as experienced through symbolism and imagination, rather than through rational reflection linked to empirical learning. Our current understanding of the creation of time and space opposes another ancient, non-biblical belief which holds that time and space always existed as unorganized "chaos" finally brought into order by God: "All Nature was all Chaos, the rounded body of all things in one."1 This non-biblical thought of "chaos" still dominates much of our common thinking about creation and creates considerable mischief. In contrast the Bible presents a view of a Creator who stands outside of nature, who creates nature itself. To aid our understanding the creative process is divided into six great periods called "days." This is an unusual departure for generally the Bible is not authored to serve as a text on science. Its grand theme is directed toward answering the questions of the soul such as "Why are we here?" The question of "why" is a distinctly different question from a second query fundamentally in the province of science: "How did we get here?" Albert Einstein, whose genius opened up the relativistic universe, offered this thought-provoking reflection on the "how" of God’s hand in creation: "The Lord is subtle, but he is not malicious." We should seek the hand of a Creator we can trust to harmonize the testimony of the stars in the heavens and the rocks beneath our feet. At the same time it is distressing to hear it said that God created the heavenly bodies our telescopes view with the appearance of being ancient as a test of our faith in the Bible, while supposedly the creation we view is not ancient at all. Surely presenting one appearance of reality while doing something else is not what any of us would do to our children when they seek to learn something. Such reasoning is inconsistent with the clear principles laid down by Jesus (Matthew 7:8-12). We stand in an age where details of solar fusion reactions and neutrino production are being experimentally compared against theory. How different is our day from the world-view o fthe nineteenth century when the sun was thought to be young because the amount of coal required to give off the observed energy would soon burn it out! Does this increase of knowledge change our view of the world? It absolutely should. Yet how easy is the path that maintains a willing ignorance of challenges to dogma while wrapping itself in the respectable mantle of religious conviction! While all should be respectful of the sincerity and faith of those who embrace Genesis in its simplicity and dismiss as irrelevant any need for corroboration, we also should be respectful of those in the scientific community whose lives, wrapped-up in the inexhaustible intellectual challenge of discovering scientific truth, experience religion only through its hostility. Properly understood, Christianity holds to a narrow course that understands and reconciles estrangement. Remembering the Sabbath Direct Scriptural support for the Sabbath system is sometimes presented as proof that the creative days were literal 24-hour periods (Genesis 2:1-3; Exodus 20:11). When the observance of the Sabbath is introduced, Israel is told that the blessings of rest and refreshment on the Sabbath day had precedents in God’s design. However, the true Sabbath of God is perpetual (Hebrews 4:3-11). For God a "day" constitutes a period of time in which a work is accomplished. It is not limited to a 24-hour day. For this reason the Scriptures elsewhere specifically refer to a 40-year "day of temptation" (Psalm 95:8-10) using the same Hebrew word yom translated "day" in Genesis. Peter, writing much later in Greek, refers to a 1,000-year "day" (2 Peter 3:8). Establishing and managing the cycles by which life, air, land, and oceans interact to sustain each other may well be one of the most complicated and challenging acts of creation. Each "day" of this process had its own special adversities. The seemingly insignificant and often unclear start—at least from the testimony of the geological record—is followed by a triumphant finish. Most appropriately, these are designated "evening" and "morning." This creative week with its Sabbath system serves as an appropriate memorial and celebration of God’s great work, though we recognize that great epochs of time much longer than 24-hours constitute these "days."2 Before the First Day "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). The period before the "beginning" of Genesis 1:1 is unmeasurable. Although it is difficult for us to comprehend, time as we know it did not exist. However, God was active. He carried out his only direct creation bringing into existence his only-begotten son, the "Word," elsewhere called "Wisdom" (John 1:1; Proverbs 8:12-31). "In the beginning [of our physical universe], God created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1:1; Job 38:7) In collaboration with this "master-builder" God’s plans for creation were framed. The creative work began with the basics: time, space, energy, and matter. The "standard model" is how physicists speak of the great event that created time and space. Less correctly, the name "Big Bang" still persists. The "standard model" starts with an elegant set of equations on a blank sheet of paper and correctly predicts:
So carefully tuned are the constants of physics that even small deviations in their values would fill the cosmos with space, time, energy, and matter, but certainly prohibit life as we know it.3 At the same time it is unwise to conclude that life might not appear in some other strange and wonderful form; it simply would not be composed of atoms or molecules! Observations of the universe’s most distant reaches by the Hubble space telescope suggest an age of the universe of over 13 billion years. Independently, our radio telescopes can serve as sensitive thermometers to measure temperatures from the frigid and faint echoes of creation. These measurements are consistent with the universe having an age near 14.6 billion years. From yet a third line of independent observations, efforts to explain the order in the subatomic world and the observed ratio of matter to light in the universe lead yet other scientists also to conclude that the age of the universe is 14.6 billion years. In harmony with these observations, we would do well to conclude that this is because the universe is in fact 14.6 billion years old. In time the matter coalesced into short-lived stars distinctly unlike our long-burning sun. These stars had an important role to play as the factories that formed the remaining 92 elements heavier than lithium. Around five billion years ago the gases and ashes created in the super-novae deaths of these early stars hurled across space where under the influence of gravity they again clumped together forming our own sun and earth. The proto-earth, composed largely of asteroid-type material rich in water, cooled. It was at this juncture that a statistically rare and critically important event to make earth habitable took place. A planetoid approximately the size of Mars crashed into the earth; our moon was formed from the material that splashed off. Subsequently the violence of the early solar system quieted and asteroid impacts became rare rather than everyday occurrences. Moon rocks, undisturbed until scooped up by the Apollo astronauts, testify of this cataclysm. "A giant impact such as that which formed the moon would have completely blown off any [early] atmosphere and ocean."4 A new ocean was needed. About the cooling of the earth for a second time, distinguished geophysicist Professor James C.G. Walker of Yale University writes: "We conclude that nearly all the atmosphere (and the ocean) has been released from the solid earth."5 This is consistent with the words of Job: "Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth as if it had issued out of the womb?" (Job 38:8-11) Without inspiration, how did this marvelous detail of geophysics get transmitted to us? With the presence of a sea, the earth "without form and void" was now ready for active creation. The First Day "And the earth was without form and void"—Genesis 1:1. Let us now consider the first creative day. Because Scripture makes no direct demand regarding the length of these time periods, the consensus chronology developed by the geophysics community may well be correct. "Let us not contend for more than scripture demands," is the wise pastoral counsel of Brother Russell regarding the creative process.6 "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). All the geophysical evidence concurs with Genesis that life began in the oceans and was not dependent on light through the pioneering efforts of Archaebacteria and other "chemoautotrophs" that feed directly off chemicals.7 The evidence lies in rocks older than the continents themselves discolored by chemical compounds that are produced only in the presence of life. The most dramatic examples from this era include the economically important iron ore deposits of the world including the Mesabi range of Minnesota formed by the action of these bacteria. Without inspiration, how did this marvelous detail, namely, that life could exist without light, get transmitted to us? "And God said, Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3). The sun had long existed, but until now the "swaddling bands" (Job 38:9) of thick clouds shrouded the ocean surface. These "swaddling bands" are predicted in studies of the earth’s early atmosphere. As the Archeabacteria continued their monumental work of clearing and forming the atmosphere, soon follows evidence for plants, simple sea-dwelling algae. The earth occupies a uniquely favored position around the sun. If its orbit were as little as4% closer to the sun, the oceans never would have condensed and its climate would have moved toward the inhospitable hothouse of Venus. Were the earth as little as 1% further from the sun, earth would become an eternally frozen ice-house like Mars and the outer planets. During the first day the still young sun with70% of its current luminosity was rapidly increasing its output while the earth’s atmosphere—still swaddled with clouds and heavy with greenhouse gases—was slowly being changed by the metabolism of bacteria and algae to become more transparent. One of the greatest crises for life on earth was its narrow escape from a runaway greenhouse that would have boiled off the oceans. By design, life appeared just when it was needed to prevent this catastrophe. A popular report on the studies of Dr. Michael Hart of NASA identifying this issue dubbed it "a lucky fluke."8 The Second Day "And God said, Let there be a sky."—Genesis 1:6-8 Now there was a crisis for the Archaebacteria. The atmosphere steadily accumulated oxygen, a highly reactive waste product of photosynthesis deadly to these pioneers. They found themselves choking on the wastes from the ever-prolific algae. Eventually free oxygen made life near the ocean surface impossible for these bacteria. Their essential work in the divine program now finished, they retired from a place of prominence to deep ocean volcanic vents in communities that still constitute nearly half the living matter on earth. "Let the sky be a means of dividing between waters and waters." Atmospheric changes now cleared the heavy clouds and fog which had enshrouded the earth. With amazing accuracy, the Bible account calls attention to this marked change that was not clearly accounted for by scientists until elucidated by intensive studies of earth’s ancient atmosphere during the 1970s. Once again, anticipating science by over three thousand years, the Bible and current scientific study harmonize. The Third Day "And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry ground appear."—Genesis 1:9 Continent building by plate tectonics, the slow movement of large rock masses, can be traced in the geological record as far back as the first creative day.9 However, early tectonics does not exhibit the current well-established cycles of continent subduction and renewal. Here, Scripture marks the first appearance of all the land locked in a "supercontinent" whose plates continue to the present day as our familiar continents, with familar tectonics. With the combination of land and plant life came the first appearance of our current soil cycles. These cycles, so critical to life, hold and then release essential elements, yet prior to this period soils are characterized by "their rarity and by the difficulty of identifying paleosols [ancient soils] with certainty."10 Sediments weathered from the continents now formed fossils to preserve an amazing record of the explosion of new life forms called the "Cambrian period." In the nineteenth century the Cambrian was improperly thought to be the beginning of life. Today extensive and well-preserved fossil-bearing ocean muds such as the pre-Cambrian Burgess shales of Canada show this to be incorrect. "Let the earth bring forth tender shoots." The Bible account speaks of the first plant colonization on the land specifically called "tender grass" or "shoots" because of their appearance. Paleobotanists call these early land plants "cooksonia" and they do indeed look like "tender grass." Despite their appearance they are not our present day grasses. (Modern grasses prosper as a consequence of a photosynthesis cycle especially adapted to our current low levels of carbon dioxide.) Soon followed the great forests that have left the world its most extensive coal beds. These plants did not bear the familiar fruits we find at the grocery stores today. Scripture describes the rich and unfamiliar plant life of the coal forests as "herbs" and plants "whose seeds are in themselves," a description appropriate to now-extinct seed-ferns that once dominated the land. Once again, anticipating science, the biblical account accurately points to the beginning of our current continental activity and the appearance of free-standing plants. The Fourth Day "And God said, let there be lights . . . to divide the day from the night."—Genesis 1:14 The "heavens and the earth" of Genesis 1:1 including the sun and moon were in existence and influencing life on earth long before they became visible to surface observers. Possibly there was still some partial obscuring of their light by residual clouds much thinner than the "swaddling band" clouds that cleared at the start of the second day. If this is true, concurrence from geophysical modeling may require at least another decade of cloud physics studies because this is one of the most challenging areas to correctly predict. Yet why the focus on the sun and moon? Our sun appears to be an average star. However, to be capable of having a planet suited to life as we know it, scientists currently believe that the sun could be no more than 17% smaller or 10% larger. In addition, our sun occupies a favored position near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy in an orbit that isolates it from the high intensity radiation and cataclysmic deaths of nearby stars when they turn into supernovas. Not long ago astrophysicist Carl Sagan estimated that there were many thousands of planets in our galaxy capable of sustaining life. More sober estimates have drastically reduced that number. Today Professor Ben Zuckerman at UCLA suggests that the earth is unique in our entire galaxy.11 Most remarkable is the unusually large moon the earth holds in orbit. All the other planets in the solar system have systems of moons which are trivial in weight compared to their mother planet. Not so for the earth, and this leads to a significant consequence. The energy of our earth-moon system has very strongly influenced the magnetic field of the earth making it one hundred times larger than it should be. This magnetism wraps the earth in an invisible shield that deflects many of the life-threatening particles streaming from the sun. The importance of the earth-sun-moon interaction does not end here. This interaction is one of the major forces driving the rapid exchange of mantle material and the gases trapped in the interior of the earth—usually to the benefit of life. The Permian period of the fourth day is an exception. An elegant study just published by Marianne Greff-Lefftz at the Paris Institute of Global Physics directly links "core oscillations induced by lunar-solar tidal forces" directly to the end of this era. These forces created "a resonance amplification factor of about 10,000 with respect to present values" and drove the extensive volcanism and geological instability that ended the entire Paleozoic, or "old life" era.12 In a short period of time this day witnessed the most extensive extinction event ever suffered by the biosphere. A succinct summary is provided by Rachel Woods at the University of Cambridge who is an authority on ancient reef life: "The causes of the end Permian extinction remain elusive, but they certainly were complex and related to a rapid drop of sea level ..... followed by extensive volcanic eruptions ..... and finally by a rise in sea-level which may have caused anoxic [oxygen-poor] waters to flood newly available shallow marine habitats ..... this profound extinction event resulted in the global loss of between 80% and 95% of all species" [emphasis added].13 These extinctions occurring in an era of unprecedented continental uplift formed the mightiest mountains ever seen on earth. Though there is evidence of annual seasonal growth rings from the time that the first tree-like plants colonized the land on the third day, from this period forward trees that lose their leaves in the fall and show strong seasonal growth patterns become an important part of the ecosystem.14 The earth now exhibited a "structure and dynamics ..... not substantially different from those of the present day, even though all the species were different."15 This new seasonal growth cycle may now have shown a special advantage during this era of seasonal extremes that regularly found ferocious winds sweeping the desert interior and pounding the huge continental landmass of the south with severe winter storms and hurricanes. The sun does indeed "rule the day" and continually powers life on earth while the silent partner in nurturing the life on earth is our highly unusual moon which "rules the night." Incredibly at this juncture the Bible specifically calls out these two powerful forces that were so critical to the course of life on earth. The Fifth Day "And God created great sea-monsters, and every living creature that creepeth . . . and every winged fowl."—Genesis 1:21 Dinosaurs fascinate us as they did the inspired writer of Genesis. In almost everyone’s imagination mentioning them spawns vivid images of these dread-inspiring beasts who once ruled earth. Dinosaurs belong to the fifth creative epoch and the original Hebrew employs awestruck language to describe them: "great monsters," "swarming sea creatures," and "winged creatures." The word "whales" in the Authorized Version is simply incorrect.16 Other changes of consequence were taking place in the cycle of life. Flowers, from which all our fruits come, and modern grasses adapted to new low-levels of carbon dioxide now spread throughout the earth. From these grasses come all our grains. For the first time the earth could grow a food resource capable of meeting the incredibly high energy demands of mammals and birds. With these critically important works accomplished, the world of the dinosaurs abruptly ended from world-wide devastation caused by asteroid impacts. Such catastrophism is so startling that it took the scientific community some time to accept the idea when it was put forward by Nobel-prize-winning scientist Luis Alvarez. The Sixth Day "Let the earth bring forth the living soul after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast." —Genesis 1:24 The fertile work of the first five epochs of creation successfully brought into existence many interwoven life cycles. These cycles now maintained the atmosphere, temperature, and movement of chemicals essential to life. Microorganisms and insects, which generally escape our attention except as nuisances, are integral to these cycles and continue to constitute the bulk of earth’s life. And yet we cannot feel the sense of kinship with these creatures that we do with mammals. It is to the sixth day that the familiar mammals now come to prominence on the earth. "And God said, Let us make man in our image." The earth was now ready for the creation of a life with sufficient intelligence, sentience, and moral capacity to appreciate the Creator. Here the claims of science and the authority of Scripture come into conflict, for the concept of man’s evolution from the lower primates can not be reconciled with the Bible. We rest on the simple statement of Scripture that man was created perfect and sinless by God to exercise a benevolent dominion over the earth. Sadly this bliss was not to endure. The rest of this story is contained in the remaining chapters of the Bible. God’s Footstool Made Glorious--Isaiah 66:1 What is to become of planet earth upon which our Creator God has devoted so much loving effort? The Scriptures are not silent on this question. They speak of a yet future time of restoration, or restitution of "all things" (Acts 3:19-21), when "the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad" (Isaiah 35:1), when the Lord will "make a covenant . . . with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of the heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground . . . and will make them to lie down safely" (Hosea 2:18). Most thrilling is Revelation 21 where the apostle John writes about a new heaven and a new earth—an earth with man restored and under the happy dominion of the kingdom of Christ Jesus and his church. John dwells on a description of this happy state in loving allegorical detail, but we know he is describing the literal planet earth because he tells us, "and there shall be no more curse" (Revelation 22:3). We are further assured of this promise when three verses later we read, "these sayings are faithful and true." Let us not judge our God by his yet unfinished work. God’s testimony of his creation has provided us with a faithful record of all his power on behalf of his creatures. It is a record of progressive creative work culminating in man. Amazingly, this record matches line-for-line with our best understanding of geology. God is the author of both the Bible and the book of nature. We should find delight and wonder as we learn to read more from each of these books. We should greet the developments of scientific understanding with enthusiasm, not with fear, hiding, or ignorance. As always the challenge to the church is to "hold fast to that which is true" in a changing world. May we all grow as God would have us grow. _________________________________ NOTES I appreciate and acknowledge the thoughtful comments on this article by Dr. Thomas Moore, Argonne National Laboratory, who is a geologist currently specializing in paleoclimate studies. 1. Gregory, Horace (translator), Ovid—The Metamorphoses, Mentor, NY, 1958, Book 1 2. Russell, Charles T., Reprints, p. 1731 3. Davies, P.C.W., The Accidental Universe, Cambridge (1982). The treatment of Prof. Davies work is admirably done from a Christian perspective by Ross, H., The Creator and the Cosmos, NavPress, Colorado Springs, 1993 4. Schubert, Gerald, "The Lost Continents," Nature, Vol. 354, 5 Dec. 1991, p. 358 5. Walker, James C.G., Evolution of the Atmosphere, Macmillan, NY, 1977, p. 182 6. Russell, Charles T., The New Creation, p. 35 7. Schlesigner, W., Biogeochemistry [second ed.], Academic Press, 1997, pp. 32-34 8. Hindley, K., "Earth’s Atmosphere—A Lucky Fluke," New Scientist, 8 June 1978, p. 671 9. Zimmer, C., "Ancient Continent Opens Window on the Early Earth," Science, Vol. 286, Number 5448, 17 Dec 1999, pp. 2254-2256 10. Holland, H., The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans, Princeton, 1984, p. 277 11. Achenbach, J., "Life Beyond Earth," National Geographic, Jan. 2000, p. 29 12. Greff-Lefftz, M. and H. Legros, "Core Rotational Dynamics and Geological Events," Science, Vol. 286, 26 November 1999, p. 1707 13. Woods, R., Reef Evolution, Oxford, 1999, p. 99 14. Klein, G. D. (Ed.), Pangea; Paleoclimate, Tectonics, and Sedimentation, During Accretion, Zenith, and Breakup of a Supercontinent, Special Paper 288, Geological Society of America, 1994; p. 154 15. Behrensmeyer, A.K., et al., Terrestrial Ecosystems through Time, University of Chicago, 1992, p. 205 16. Wilson, W., Old Testament Word Studies, MacDonald Publishing, McLean, Virginia, 1991 |