Board index ‹ Creation and Evolution

[jimwalton]

It sounds like you're talking about Genesis 1 as to the "detail about how it happened at all". Am I reading you right?

If so, Genesis 1 is not about material creation but about how God ordered the cosmos and world to function. If we read the text in the mindset and worldview of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, we read something different than if we read it with the eyes of the European Enlightenment and our modern Western worldview.

When you look at Gn. 1.3-5 ("Day 1"), you clearly that it's not talking about what physicists call "light" (particle/wave), but rather the separation of light and darkness and the sequence of light and darkness into day and night—which is how the light and dark function: to give us time. God ordered the world to function in time with a repeating sequence of day and night, evening and morning. Genesis 1 is not how the world came about, but how God ordered it to function. In Day 3 the dry land functions to bring forth vegetation for our environmental balance as well as our food supply. In Day 4 the heavenly bodies function to regulate the seasons. In Day 6 humans function to rule the earth and subdue it.

So we're not getting details about how it all happened. Instead, we're getting details of how God ordered the cosmos to function as His temple and as His dwelling place, where He could establish a relationship with the people He created and loves. We're not being told anything about chronology, the age of the earth, dinosaurs, the beginning of humanity, or any of that stuff. That stuff is the realm of science. Instead the Bible is telling us the WHY—something science doesn't and can't tell us.

The origin and evolutionary progress of flora and fauna is not of concern to the biblical writers. Their point is that God created everything (other texts), that God ordered the cosmos and the earth to function as His temple, and then it starts the story of how God revealed Himself through what He created and ordered. The Bible doesn't comment on how much time all of this took or of what processes were used.