Some Thoughts on Genesis 1-2 and 21st Century Science

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How then can we look at Genesis 1 and 2 as twenty-first century Christians who live in a highly scientifically saturated and technologically advanced world? (Incidentally, you'll find many more thoughtful answers to questions like this on the Scientists in Congregations website.)

Clearly, the primary concern of these texts is not contemporary scientific questions. Their main intention is to describe the creation of an ordered and habitable home for the people God creates. Thus, many contemporary readers find a constrictive literalism inadequate for understanding these texts. For example, seven twenty-four hour days of creation do not make sense in terms of contemporary cosmological theory. We probably never should have expected otherwise: In 1000 BC, no reader or hearer (since very few read at that time) could understand contemporary quantum cosmology or neo-Darwinian theory. 

Accordingly, theologians commonly speak of God’s accommodation: that the revelation of God accommodates itself to the understanding of human minds. John Calvin, writing at the time of major scientific changes in the sixteenth century, phrased it similarly, “Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons endued with common sense are liable to understand.”

Do these texts fade behind the brilliance of scientific insight? Hardly. They still radiate great power and wisdom as foundational texts for the Christian church, as sparkling insights into ours and God’s nature. One might even view it as an act of providence that these biblical texts, written long before the emergence of modern science, resonate with certain contemporary scientific theories in the texts.

       
First of all, Genesis 1:3—“Let there be light!”—initiates a sequence of events with the sudden emergence of light, similar to the unparalleled outburst of energy in the Big Bang. Indeed light comes first, and reminds me of  the fundamental constant in Einstein’s special relativity theory, the velocity of light. (Einstein emphasized this absolute standard. Wanting to avoid any hint of relativism, he promoted the term, Invariententheorie, “invariance theory.” His attempt to name his theory failed, and “relativity” stuck.) In addition, light was created before our sun, which came billions of years after the initial singularity of the Big Bang.

        
Second, the order of water, vegetation, non-human animals, and then humankind in Genesis 1:6-31 has a broad agreement with the sequence of life’s emergence in evolutionary theory. In addition, the command “Let the earth put forth vegetation” speaks of an indirect creation by God. Science describes a universe of continuity, where God creates humankind indirectly through the processes of nature over time. Put in philosophical terms, God as the First Cause, uses secondary causes to achieve divine purposes. (By the way, if we get primary and secondary causation right, a great number of "conflicts" between faith and science evaporate.)

        
Third and in a similar vein, evolutionary theory does not necessarily change God’s creating us, but simply the means God uses. The declaration of Genesis 2:7, “then the Lord God formed adam from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” depicts with great consonance the creation of man and woman. Once again, extreme literalism will not do: dust does not contain enough carbon nor usually sufficient silicon. The Brown University biologist Ken Miller, who combines a commitment to evolutionary science with his Christian faith, argues against such literalism and for a sensible reading of the texts:

To any biochemist, even an evolutionary biochemist, the notion that human life was formed from the dust of the earth is not only poetic, but scientifically accurate to an astonishing degree. An extreme literalist—of the sort abjured by Augustine—might use Genesis 2:7 to argue that the elemental composition of the human body should match that of ordinary dust. A broader and more sensible reading would tell us simply that the materials of the human body were taken from the earth itself, which of course is true. To understand Genesis, to find the greater truth, I would argue, all one has to do is to apply the more sensible reading throughout.

A sensible or “natural” reading (to use Calvin’s term) is a good rule of thumb. In this case, it leads to striking parallels with contemporary science. 

Nevertheless, one must apply such interpretive parallels with a light touch. We will do well not to bet the farm on any particular scientific theory. As the Oxford philosopher, Janet Martin Soskice has concluded, Darwinian science did not disprove faith. It simply took on the Watchmaker God of the eighteenth century—which incidentally neither Calvin, Augustine, nor Jesus ever presented—and demonstrated its insufficiency as description of God’s character. Soskice writes that

because the theological apologetics of the eighteenth century had been so closely wedded to the science of their time, with its support for the arguments from design, the controversies over evolutionary theory came in the nineteenth century as a powerful blow. Religion’s dearest ally had turned on it. Science, which had been proving the truths of religion only a hundred years before, now proposed naturalistic explanations for the perfections and order of the natural world. The divine clockmaker was redundant.

And so Christians confess faith not in a Great Watchmaker, but in the Lord of grace who created the world out of sheer, superabundant love. The final book of the Bible, Revelation (4:11), expresses this so well:

You are worthy, our Lord and God,    to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,    and by your will they were created    and have their being.

And this is the Creator, it appears, does not think it unworthy that we discover the divine nature, not only through revelation, but through the beauty and order of creation... and thus through science.