In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:1-51
We live in an age in conflict over origins—the origins of morality, of truth, and of our world. The third controversy specifically houses an entire spectrum of beliefs and perspectives. While orthodox Christians believe that God created our world in a literal week, modern scientists promote evolutionary theory. They claim that God isn’t a necessary part of our origin, arguing instead for a natural process of development in which our world came about through a long staircase of improvements.
Many who struggle with these conflicting views try to reconcile them by creating a hybrid view. Organizations such as BioLogos champion theistic evolution. They agree that God created the world, but claim that He did so through the evolutionary process. One of the greatest problems with theistic evolution is the disagreement between the biblical and evolutionary timelines. The biblical account limits creation to a single week, but evolution requires billions of years. Theorists look for a way to fit the necessary years into the biblical account, coming up with many variations, including integration, the gap theory, and the day-age theory.
Of these positions, I want to focus in on the day-age theory. It filters Genesis through 2 Peter 3:18; “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Since God is not limited by time, His creation “days” would not need to be only twenty-four hours. Each day in the creation week is considered to be a great length of time, allowing for the timescale of evolution.
This theory creates two problems, however. First, merely adding years doesn’t reconcile evolution and biblical creation. The entire process of evolution is different than biblical creation, and each view has a number of distinct ideas that don’t mesh no matter what we do.
But the greater problem comes when we look at the words of Genesis 1. The phrase “and there was evening and there was morning, the first day” is repeated in a similar form on each of the following days—a total of six times. In each of these, the word for “day” is yowm. Yowm occurs over 850 times in the Old Testament and nearly always means a literal, twenty-four hour day. It occasionally refers to a longer span of time, in phrases like “the day of the Lord”—but even that could be understood to mean a single day. Beyond that, the divine Author framed each yowm with “evening” and “morning” (as though He expected opposition to the idea of a normal, twenty-four hour day). Yowm clearly indicates that each day of creation was twenty-four hours long, just like any other day. We can all be tempted to bend Scripture to fit our viewpoint when it’s convenient. But rather than reinterpreting Scripture, we must always bow to God’s inerrant, authoritative Word. Each dot and iota has been carefully placed, and even a seemingly insignificant word like yowm can define how we view our origins. Yowm reminds us that, regardless what anyone says, God’s Word must always reign supreme.
- The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2011.
Hello Julian,
In your article you state, “While orthodox Christians believe that God created our world in a literal week….” This statement seems a bit misleading to me. From my understanding, there were many church fathers in Orthodox circles who did not hold to that view.
I’m using “orthodox” here in a general sense, not of the early church specifically or of any Christian denomination which may include “orthodox” in their name. I intended it with the sense of “Christians have historically understood it this way.”
Sorry, my second use of orthodox should not have been capitalized. I agree that many orthodox Christians throughout history understood creation to happen in a six-day week, but there were also many who didn’t. Origen, Clement, Augustine, Dydimus the blind, Athanasius, Isidore of Sivil, Augustine, Bede, W. J. Bryan, J. Gresham Machen, B. B. Warfield, Carl Henry, J. I. Packer, Herman Bavinck, Charles Spurgeon, Billy Graham, and C.S Lewis to name a few. Some of the later ones also accepted the theory of evolution the mechanism by which God brought about diversity on earth. Therefore, I don’t think it is fair to make a dichotomous comparison between orthodox Christian belief about six literal days and evolutionary theory.
Also, many people who “promote evolutionary theory” do not “claim that God isn’t a necessary part of our origin.” I think it would be more fair and accurate to say that some or many who promote evolutionary theory claim God isn’t necessary. It should also be pointed out that the theory of evolution cannot say anything about the existence of God. People, like Richard Dawkins, who make the claim that evolution has disproven God are in error. God’s existence is a metaphysical claim, an area that science by definition can not evaluate.
What we do with Genesis 1-3 is more closely related to what we do with God’s revelation (the Bible) than with God Himself (though it does affect that too). While I think you’re right that evolutionary theory doesn’t say anything about God’s existence, I do think that evolutionary theory largely came about from a post-Enlightenment impulse to find an explanation for the origin of the cosmos that didn’t require God. It doesn’t really solve the problem, though, because you eventually arrive at a “first cause” which must precede the stuff this world is made of.