The Creation Controversy Series - Introduction

“In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.”

—Augustine of Hippo, “The Literal Meaning of Genesis,” Vol. 1, Chapter XVIII

 

We are a privileged generation.

In the last one hundred years, we have learned more about the nature of our world and the universe than was known by all previous generations of humanity combined. Ancient astronomers learned to predict eclipses and tracked the movements of the planets with great precision, but for all of this they could only wonder what they were really looking at when they gazed up into the night sky. They could never have imagined distant worlds like Jupiter and Saturn as they’ve been revealed so clearly to us through the sensitive cameras of space probes like Cassini and the Voyagers. Even the sun and the moon, as nearby and prominent as they are, were mysterious and little understood well into the modern era. Today, the average person has access to more information at their fingertips than the most learned and privileged scholars of ages past, and not just where astronomy is concerned. Science has literally revolutionized every field of human endeavor.

As the scientific era got underway and knowledge increased, startling new pictures of the world began to emerge, and old ideas began to fall by the wayside. One such notion that fell by the wayside fairly early in this process was geocentrism: the belief that earth lies stationary at the heart of our solar system, if not at the center of the universe, while the heavens are in motion around it. Now, from the point of view of one looking up from the surface of the earth, it really does seem as if the sun, the moon, and the stars circle our world, while the ground upon which we stand does not appear to move at all. The sun appears to “rise” in the east and “set” in the west, hence the terms “sunrise” and “sunset”—terms we still use today in spite of the fact that we know that the sun does not actually move through our sky.

The geocentric model seemed so manifestly apparent that it lingered as the prevailing astronomical theory of the solar system until the 1600s. Competing theories provoked resistance, including resistance from some ecclesiastical authorities who felt that the Bible itself upheld the notion that the earth was stationary while the heavens revolved about it.[1] These authorities appealed to passages such as Psalm 93:1, which tells us that “the world is firmly established, it will not be moved.” Citing this passage, John Calvin comments as follows:

 

The heavens revolve daily, and, immense as is their fabric, and inconceivable the rapidity of their revolutions, we experience no concussion – no disturbance in the harmony of their motion. The sun, though varying its course every diurnal revolution, returns annually to the same point. The planets, in all their wanderings, maintain their respective positions. How could the earth hang suspended in the air were it not upheld by God’s hand? By what means could it maintain itself unmoved, while the heavens above are in constant rapid motion, did not its Divine Maker fix and establish it?[2]

In one of the most famous of his “table talk” sessions, Martin Luther referenced Joshua 10:12 in the face of changing scientific opinions, noting that “Joshua gave orders for the sun to stand still, not the earth.”[3] In his commentary on Genesis, Luther writes that the stars are “likely…round bodies like the sun, little globes fixed to the firmament.”[4] As to the sun itself, Luther remarked that it was “the first great movable body.”[5] These comments illustrate that Luther shared the popular belief of his day that the earth was stationary while the heavenly bodies revolved about it.

The Bible even records God himself speaking in terms that appear to affirm geocentrism. An example of this is found in Isaiah 45:6, where the Lord says: “I will gird you, though you have not known Me; that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides Me.” For another example, consider Job 38:4, where God speaks to Job and asks him many probing questions, including: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” To most people’s way of thinking, a foundation is only needed for something that is not intended to move.

Reading through passages such as these, we can perhaps sympathize a bit with those who felt that the observations and theories of men like Galileo and Copernicus directly contradicted divine revelation. Nevertheless, apart from a tiny minority who insist upon hyper-literal interpretations of scripture—namely those in the resurgent flat-earth movement—Christians today understand that man’s discoveries in relation to the positions and movements of the sun, the moon, the earth, and the stars, do not pose a problem for biblical authority. After all, the Bible was written from the limited, earth-bound perspective of its human authors, who perceived the heavens as moving around them; and given that they did perceive things in this manner, it makes perfect sense for God to have spoken to them within the bounds of that conceptual scheme.

We routinely deal with one another on the basis of age, experience, knowledge, and maturity. No teacher worth his salt is going to walk into a kindergarten classroom and start lecturing on quantum theory, just as he wouldn’t walk into a college classroom and ask the students to gather in a circle and sing the Days of the Week song. Different approaches are needed for different audiences. If a class of first-graders tell me “The sun’s gone down,” I don’t subject them to a lecture on cosmology, because they’re not yet mature enough in their understanding to grasp how the sun and the earth relate to one another. So, for the moment, I simply agree. After all, from a child’s limited perspective, the observation is true: the sun really did go down. Just as we routinely tailor presentations with respect to particular audiences today, so God chose to communicate in terms the original audiences of scripture could understand, and we must bear this in mind as we read what the Bible has to say about the natural world.

Writing in his first commentary on the book of Genesis, Augustine of Hippo reflected on this very issue while pondering conceptions of how the sky surrounds the earth and how the matter reflects on scripture. While Augustine said that he did not personally care what the truth of the matter was, he saw a threat to how the scriptures might be perceived if people failed to correctly interpret biblical language:

But because the trustworthiness of the scriptures is here in question, this, as I have reminded readers more than once, has to be defended from those who do not understand the style of the divine utterances, and who assume when they find anything on these matters in our books, or hear them read out from them, that they should not place any confidence in the scriptures, when they foretell or warn or tell them about other useful things. It must be stated very briefly that our authors knew about the shape of the sky whatever may be the truth of the matter. But the Spirit of God who was speaking through them did not wish to teach people about such things which would contribute nothing to their salvation.[6]

 John Calvin also comments on the same principle:

Moses makes two great luminaries; but astronomers prove, by conclusive reasons that the star of Saturn, which on account of its great distance, appears the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in a popular style things which without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them…but because he [Moses] was ordained a teacher as well of the unlearned and rude as of the learned, he could not otherwise fulfill his office than by descending to this grosser method of instruction…

 

Lastly, since the Spirit of God here opens a common school for all, it is not surprising that he should chiefly choose those subjects which would be intelligible to all. If the astronomer inquires respecting the actual dimensions of the stars, he will find the moon to be less than Saturn; but this is something abstruse, for to the sight it appears differently. Moses, therefore, rather adapts his discourse to common usage.[7]

Martin Luther agrees, noting that “Moses wrote for a rude people,” and cautions that scripture must be understood in its own context:

I have therefore thought it especially becoming and necessary to repeat here that admonition which I have frequently given, that we ought constantly to acquaint ourselves with the phraseology of the Holy Spirit. For no one can successfully study any of the human arts unless he first correctly understands the idiom of the language in which its principles are described. For lawyers have their peculiar terms, unknown to the physician and the philosopher. In like manner, the latter have each a phraseology peculiar to themselves with which the professors of other arts have little or no acquaintance… Accordingly we find the Holy Spirit, to use a language and phraseology peculiar to his own divine self…As therefore the philosopher uses his own terms, so the Holy Ghost uses his.[8]

Such understandings are all well and good, but they have not entirely extinguished controversies at the intersection of science and faith within the church. There are still scientific discoveries and theories that believers are struggling to deal with, and that have even pitted them against one another as if they were enemies rather than brethren. I first learned this at an early age.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated with gemstones, colorful rocks, and fossils. There was a rock and gem store just down the road from where we lived in Alexandria, Virginia, and I used to stop in and browse the displays while my mother was shopping at the grocery store a few doors down. On one particular day, I was admiring a trilobite fossil when a middle-aged woman walked up behind me and looked over my shoulder. She asked me what I was looking at, and when I replied, her mouth quirked into a frown and she gave the rock I was holding a disdainful look.

“Those are all fake,” she said with an air of great conviction. “Dinosaur bones and stuff like that. They’re all a deception Satan put in the earth to deceive mankind.”

I was stunned by this unexpected pronouncement, but being a shy child and rather alarmed by the woman’s strange, forceful manner, I meekly said, “Oh,” and moved off to another aisle to look over samples of pyrite in quartz crystal. I distinctly remember my bewilderment at this encounter. Like many boys of that era, I was something of a budding paleontologist. I used to daydream about digging up dinosaur bones in my yard. I had seen actual dinosaur skeletons on field trips to museums in Washington DC, and I had read just about everything in the kid-friendly dinosaur section of our local library. If the whole dinosaur thing was a satanic trick, it sure seemed like he had a lot of very smart people fooled!

My encounter with the “Satan lady” (as I came to think of her) in the rock shop that day was my first personal experience with controversy in science and theology, although I already knew by then that certain controversies over these matters did exist. Most of the science books I had read and films I had seen by that time said that the universe and the earth were billions of years old, whereas the Christians I knew claimed that God had created everything in six literal days only a few thousand years ago. One of my favorite books at that time, Dinosaurs, Those Terrible Lizards, by Duane Gish, claimed that humans and dinosaurs actually lived together at the very beginning of history. I couldn’t imagine how humans had survived in a world dominated by such fearsome creatures, but these same creationists (young-earth creationists, they were called) also claimed that dinosaurs had been harmless vegetarians when they were first created. It was difficult for me to picture a Tyrannosaur harmlessly dining on vegetation, what with those enormous jaws and formidable-looking teeth, but people who studied and taught the Bible said these things very authoritatively and I felt obliged to believe them. After all, the alternative was to call God a liar, and I certainly didn’t want to do that.

As I grew older, the controversy surrounding Genesis left me in something of a love/hate relationship with science. It was difficult for me to understand how scientists could be intelligent enough to build such impressive things such as lasers, computers, artificial organs, and space probes, but couldn’t see the forest for the trees when it came to the age of the earth or evidence for a global flood. “You have to understand that man’s mind has been darkened by sin,” young-earth creationists said in regard to this. “Man rejects the truth of God’s Word in favor of science because he wants evolution to be true. If evolution is true, man can get rid of God and be his own master. This is why they have to have all those billions of years.”

In theory, this explanation made sense to me, at least to a point. Some people certainly were hostile toward religion, after all; there was no denying that. But why should man’s “darkened” mind work well enough to produce a world of beneficial technological wonders, only to abruptly, catastrophically fail where anything that touched on the age of the earth was concerned? Something was off about that reasoning but I wasn’t sure what.

At the same time, I also knew that there were Christians who differed in their opinion of Genesis and related theological issues, and I found this intriguing. British author C.S. Lewis had been open to the idea of life elsewhere in the universe, potentially even intelligent life, whereas the Christians I knew denied the existence of life elsewhere, believing it to be a product of evolutionary thinking.[9] Prominent radio Bible teacher J. Vernon McGee advocated the Gap Theory: the idea that there were long ages of time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, yet he was widely respected. Dr. Hugh Ross, who was not only a Christian but an actual astronomer, embraced what was known as the Day/Age Theory: the idea that the six days of Genesis represented long ages of time rather than literal calendar days. These men and others like them thought that scripture was perfectly reconcilable with science, and they found no difficulty in tolerating a diversity of opinions on the matter.

By contrast, the young-earth teachers and preachers I heard found such differing opinions completely unacceptable. To their way of thinking, alternative views of Genesis denied “the plain meaning” of the text, and those who taught them were actively “compromising” with evolutionists and elevating the authority of man’s word over the authority of God’s Word. “If you can’t trust what God said about creation, how can you trust him about anything else?” they reasoned. “Genesis is perfectly clear, so clear that a child can understand it. Those who find it necessary to ‘interpret’ Genesis are just trying to force evolutionary science on the text.”

“So clear that a child can understand it,” they insisted. Yet, even as a young person who regularly attended church, went to a conservative Christian school, and had learned to read the Bible from a early age, there were things about the Genesis creation account that I didn’t understand at all—in spite of how simple it was supposed to be. Certain aspects of the text seemed to suggest that there was more to it than met the eye. I was hesitant to admit this, though, even to myself, for fear that I might be slipping into compromise or even apostasy. Such is the effect that respected church authorities and their opinions can have, especially on the young.

Yet, esteemed church authorities can be wrong in how they understand what scripture has to say about the natural world, as the debate over geocentrism proved centuries ago. It would have helped me to have known this when I first began to wrestle with the creation controversy, in that I would have been more flexible in my thinking. After all, if Martin Luther and John Calvin had been wrong, who was to say that Duane Gish and Henry Morris couldn’t be wrong as well? On the other hand, however, the modern creation controversy has much more sweeping theological implications connected with it than were connected with the issue of geocentrism.

If the earth really is as old as it appears to be, then the fossil record shows us that animals were living and dying long before man ever came on the scene; and if this is the case, then certain understandings of the relationship between sin and death are affected. This, in turn, brings the Fall of Man into question in various ways. What exactly happened when Adam and Eve sinned? Is the whole of creation under a curse or not? The implications of these questions then ripple out to touch on other matters as well. What are the days of Genesis? Do long ages of time necessitate belief in macroevolution? What did God mean when he referred to the initial creation as “very good”? How do we square the Genesis genealogies with the apparent antiquity of man on earth? How extensive was the flood of Noah and how much did it alter the earth? Are the earth and the universe really quite young but simply “appear” old?

These are not trivial questions. In fact, for some believers, these issues are fundamentally connected with their perception of the character of God and even with the gospel message itself. The purpose of this series will be to address these and other noteworthy issues, with an emphasis on looking for plausible scriptural interpretations. It’s my conviction that this controversy over the days of Genesis and the age of the earth is unnecessarily divisive and subject to sensationalism. Scientific discoveries do not contradict the text of Genesis and pose no threat to either the gospel or the authority of scripture. In fact, science can be a powerful ally of faith.

Having thus provided some background for the reader, it’s my prayer that this series will help facilitate understanding between the young-earth and old-earth camps, particularly for those who are largely unacquainted with alternative views of Genesis apart from what they’ve heard from young-earth teachers and organizations. For me, the transition to an old-earth view began not with scientific considerations but with certain aspects of the biblical text that had never entirely made sense to me. In time, I came to realize that the problems I had lay not with the text itself but with the assumptions of “literalist” interpretations. Without those assumptions, the text of Genesis became more internally coherent for me and more easily reconciled with passages of scripture that touch on related matters, such as sin, death, and the Fall of Man.

In the end, all I can do is to lay out my case in good faith and appeal to those who disagree to set aside their assumptions regarding the motives of their old-earth brethren and the authority we ascribe to scripture, and consider the case on its own merits. One need not necessarily be convinced of a point of view in order to concede that it may, at the very least, be plausible, and, therefore, not subject to charges of heresy or compromise. As believers, we are responsible before the Lord for how treat one another, and, as always, the world is watching.

Next in this series: Part One - Biblical Authority

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[1] The history of religious persecution of Copernicus and his heliocentric theory contains much in the way of exaggeration and even outright myth. In reality, Copernicus had a good relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and actually dedicated his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres to Pope Paul III. It was not until later, during the time of the Counter Reformation, that the actual persecution of Copernican ideas began. For one scholarly source on this issue, see: Mano Singham, “The Copernican Myths,” Physics Today, 60, 12, 48 (2007); doi: 10.1063/1.2825071.

[2] John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Complete), trans. James Anderson (HardPress Publishing, 2019), vol. 4, Psalm 93. Kindle.

[3] Luther’s table talk sayings were recorded by his students and not published until after his death. Contrary to what has been widely claimed, researchers do not find it credible that Luther actually referred to Copernicus as “that fool.” For a scholarly treatment of Luther on this matter, see: Wilhem Norland, “Copernicus and Luther: A Critical Study,” Isis 44, no. 3 (1953): 273-276. www.jstor.org/stable/227094.

[4] Martin Luther, Luther’s Commentary on Genesis: Critical and Devotional Remarks on the Creation, the Sin and the Flood, trans. John Lenker and Henry Cole (e-artnow, 2018), part iv, God’s Work on the Fourth Day, I. v 14a. Kindle.

[5] Ibid., v 14b.

[6] Edmund Hill, tras; John Rotelle, ed. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. (New York: New City Press, 2018), pp. 201-202.

[7] John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (Complete), trans. John King (Forgotten Books, 2011), chapter 1, Genesis 1:1-31. Kindle.

[8] Martin Luther, Luther’s Commentary on Genesis, part iv, God’s Work on the Fourth Day, II.

[9] See Lewis’ essay “Religion and Rocketry” for a sampling of his thoughts here.

Excerpts from St. Augustine, the Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol. 1, translated and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, SJ, Copyright © 1982 by Rev. Johannes Quasten, Rev. Walter Burghardt, SJ, and Thomas Comerford Lawler. Published by Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ. Used with permission. www.paulistpress.com