Genesis is Theology not Science

How to understand the Genesis account of Creation and Fall

I've been at both ends of the Christian spectrum on this. I was brought up as a convinced “6-day creationist” and remained one until I had studied enough science at high school to see that it could not be right. In my earl 20's I was seduced by liberal theology and the mantra that genesis was just a “myth”. 45 years later I can see that both those extremes are wrong, quite wrong.

Genesis has profound teaching about God, humans, gender relations, and the entry of evil into this world and the effects of this which we see today. Its teaching is fundamental to our understanding of these things and of the rest of the Bible. To treat it dismissively, as liberals do, is more than silly, it is wicked.

To lump Genesis in with the ancient creation myths we know about is absurd. The Babylonian “Enuma Elish” for instance is a lurid tale of gods fighting and humans eventually being created as a bit of an afterthought to serve the gods. It has the sky and earth made out of the split-in-half body of one of the gods. It also has a political purpose with the Babylonian city deity Marduk portrayed as the champion of the lesser gods, so legitimising Babylon's claim to hegemony. The Egyptian cosmologies are varied, but have the common themes of gods killing each other, and the sky, earth. Sun and many other elements being themselves gods. Even the famous philosopher Plato's 4^th century BC creation myth has a complicated series of divine beings and is incredibly sexist. Plato said that all souls were created male, but ones who lived bad lives were reincarnated as the animals, while ones that were a little bit bad were reincarnated as women. Ladies, how does that make you feel?

As cosmologies go Genesis is sane plain sensible and sober. Don't try to write it off as “myth”.

“six-day creationism” which claims the universe is only some 6,000 years old is also wrong, but as it has a much larger following it is the more dangerous heresy.

Creationism has arisen because sincere people who claim to take the Bible seriously have failed to carefully read what the Bible actually says – even in English translations. Further they have back projected modern culture into a text written for Bronze Age people. To put it simply they have miss-interpreted the Bible. I'll explain why very briefly.

You can't understand what the Bible says by interpreting it “literally”. I know that sounds a harsh criticism, but it is true. God had the Bible written in real human languages that real people spoke. Hebrew (a tiny bit in Aramaic) for the Old Testament and ancient marketplace Greek for the New. Like modern English these languages were enriched with figures of speech, idiom and metaphor. These all have a definite meaning, but it is not the literal meaning of the words. For instance “out of sight out of mind” does not mean “invisible idiot”. If one believes, as I do, that the Bible is “God breathed” then it is vitally necessary to work out exactly what God intended it to mean.

The next important thing is that whilst the Bible was written for us, it was not written to us.

The Bible was written for the instruction of every generation from the time of the original manuscript to the time Jesus comes again. But the original manuscript was written for the original intended audience. Exceptions of course would be things like the prophesies pointing to Jesus, which had both a partial fulfilment for the original recipients and a second complete fulfilment in Jesus' time. But in all cases the Bible was intended to be intelligible to the first audience. It was written to them. It was written in their language, and it spoke to their culture and world view.

The Bible was also written for us: it has relevance in every age and culture. But we moderns have some work to do to understand it. For a start most of us are not fluent in Hebrew or ancient Greek. We have to rely on some scholars translating it into English. But as someone said, “reading the Bible in a translation is like kissing a bride through a veil”, so we further need the help of scholars writing commentaries to bring out the finer points. But we have to do more. We have to put aside our modern frame of reference. We have to put ourselves back into the thought world of the first recipients.

Take one of Jesus' parables, say “the sower and the seed”. We all know what it means because from childhood we have learned it in its original cultural context. But consider a Sunday School teacher in a rural town telling it to kids who hadn't heard it before.

“Hey Miss, that makes no sense,” cries out one little boy, “when my dad takes the seed drill out to plant a thousand acres of wheat what you said never happens. The GPS and on-board computer shut off the feed when he's on a road, same if there's shallow soil because the computer knows that area didn't produce much last year. And as for weeds, well not on our farm! Hadn’t they heard of 'round-up'.”

You laugh, but we are so used to putting ourselves back into the culture of Jesus' time for his parables that we forget we're even doing it. So much so that in the even more distant time of Moses, we may forget to do it all.

So how do we read the Genesis creation and fall account through the eyes of its first recipients, the Israelites God had just rescued from hundreds of years as slaves in Egypt? That was about 1350 BC. They were technologically primitive: they didn't know how to sharpen, let alone make, iron tools. They were “Bronze Age” people. They were scientifically illiterate compared to us. Religiously they had adopted the Egyptian polytheism. We would expect so after 430 years in Egypt, We know so because when they despaired of Moses' return they made an idol from popular Egyptian religion and worshipped it. We also have it from Moses that he expected that when he said he had been sent by the God of their ancestors they would say; “So what's this god's name then?”

An Ancient Egyptian Apis bull. (source: Wikipedia)

What did these Israelites believe about the universe?

1. That all was watery chaos until the gods defeated chaos, brought order, and made land appear (like the annual Nile floods receding)

2. That the sun was a god, and an important one. The moon and stars were also gods.

3. The earth was a flat disk, and also a god

4. the sky was a goddess who stretched on tip-toes and fingers over the earth, with the stars stuck to her belly (in some tales she ate them each morning).

5. The air was a god that helped hold up the sky and made space between earth and sky

6. The sun-god traversed the underside of the sky-goddess each day and was ferried back through the underworld each night.

7. humans were pretty much irrelevant, at best a sort of afterthought of the gods.

The air god Shu, assisted by other gods, holds up Nut, the sky, as Geb, the earth, lies beneath.
From Wikipedia article: Ancient Egyptian Religion

Now suppose you were God. Without completely frying their brain cells, how much can you correct all these ideas? Which are the most important wrong ideas you would want to correct?

My guess is the polytheism for a start. There is only one God who made everything, and he wants his special people to know that. Then the special place of humans, they were in no way just an afterthought. God would want them to know the love he had for them.

But would God correct their primitive scientific views? I don't think so! Most science would be irrelevant and incomprehensible to the Israelites living as God's chosen people. Imaging God trying to get them to understand this: “thirteen and a half billion years ago …” or “at ten to the minus twenty three of a second after I made the big bang ...” or even “I set the physical constants like the gravitational, electromagnetic and the weak and strong nuclear forces.” God couldn't even say that in ancient Hebrew, and no one then could have understood the concepts! But they could have understood a few tips on blacksmithing and that would have helped them greatly, and certainly God could have told Moses that - but we know God didn't even tell them this simple thing! He was

exclusively interested in spiritual matters.

So with this in mind let's look at Genesis anew.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” That would have blown the minds of the ancients! No birth of the gods, no cosmic battles between gods. Just one eternal God who creates everything.

“the earth was formless and empty and ...” or as one translator put it “the world was topsy-turvy.”

Then described is three days of God's activity changing formlessness to form and order, followed by three days of God's activity filling in the emptiness.

This arrangement of days is set out with such careful and beautiful symmetry that it is crass to interpret the “days” as referring to the material beginnings of the universe, they must be intended to be symbolic.

Fix “formless”	Fix “empty”
1. light gives day/night	4. make sun, moon & stars
2. sky-dome with water above & sea below	5. creatures that fly, and sea creatures
3. separate land from sea	6. land based creatures and humans

God's creative acts are repeatedly stated simply as, “and God said”… ending up … “and it happened just like that”. This is so absolutely different from the Egyptian, Babylonian and Canaanite ideas. It highlights God's awesome power. No effort, no battles, God just says the word and it is.

Day 1: God creates light and uses it to separate day and night. You could say he introduces measurable time.

Day 2: God creates a solid sky-dome with water above it (for rain). You might say he creates a space for weather to happen. Yes, we know now that the sky-dome does not exist – but the Israelites believed it did and likely thought it was a god. It was more important for God to teach them it was not a god, but just something he made than to try to teach them science they had no chance of understanding.

Day 3: God separated sea and land and told the land to produce vegetation. You might say he created fertile land.

Now, with time, weather and food, here is a suitable habitat for animals and humans

Day 4: God puts lights in the sky, and also stars. This was the fulfilment of the separation of day and night on Day 1. The Egyptians believed that Ra the sun god was really important, so God does not even dignify the sun and moon with names. They are just lights he put in the sky, a big one for daytime and a little one for night time. But God also gives them a purpose: firstly to shed light on the earth, which is a universal benefit, and, secondly, to mark seasons for festivals and to mark time: days, months and years. This benefits humans. So where foreign creation ideas had humans providing for the gods, here again we learn that God cares about and provides for humans.

Day 5: God makes creatures to live in the sea and creatures to fly between the earth and the firmament. You could say God fills in the sea and air space which he formed on day 2.

Day 6: God orders the land to produce land creatures – and it happens just like that. Then God creates humans in his own image and likeness so that they may rule over the earth and all its animal inhabitants as God's deputies. God creates humans by hand, not command, and breathes his life into them. He creates them male and female. This says heaps about the sanctity of human life.

Day 7: God ceases his work of creating. The Sabbath is instituted as a rest day for humans (and their work-animals) celebrating God as Creator.

Chapter 2

Here we have a beautiful scene of God being playful with Adam to teach him a lesson about equality of the sexes that we still need today. God says, “it is not good for the man to be alone, I will make an ally to stand beside him”. I know most English translations use the word “helper” but this is unfortunate because in English a helper is a subordinate. But the Hebrew word is only used other than here about God. As a verb it is used for a mighty ally, helping Israel fight off enemies.

God introduces all the animals to Adam, but for Adam no helper who is his equal can be found. Then when God introduces Eve to Adam, he says, “this last one, this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…”. She is definitely his equal.

This section rounds off with a statement which would have been mind-blowing in a society where loyalty to parents was paramount. God says, “therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

Chapter 3

In this chapter, humans disobey God. Worse, they give in to the temptation to try to usurp God's position and make the rules themselves. Evil enters the world.

Chapter 4 and following

In the next chapters human evil manifests as the worst sort of crime – murder - then evil spreads geographically all over the world.

(From the account of Cain's fear that people will kill him if he is driven away after murdering his brother Abel, that he marries, and that he founds a city, there must have been other humans around at the time who were not descendants of Adam and Eve. Perhaps Adam and Eve were the first humans with a spiritual relationship to God and to them the possibility of not dying was offered – but as we are not told we probably shouldn't speculate!)

The point of this is to see that Genesis is really important for what it teaches about humans and God, and how sin entered the world. God overlooked the fact that the ancients had wrong scientific views about the world because he was correcting their wrong religious ideas that there were lots of “gods” and teaching them that he was the one and only, the awesomely powerful, and the wonderfully benevolent, creator God.

For what God intended to teach through Genesis, it is absolutely true and reliable.

But to say Genesis was teaching science is patently wrong.

1. we've just seen that God didn't try to correct their scientific ideas.

2. if we claim Genesis is teaching science, then we make God out to be a liar because we know the earth is not flat. We know the sky is not a solid dome. We know rain does not come from a reservoir of water beyond the sun and stars. And we know that the sun does not travel across the sky and return during the night. But Genesis says all these things.

So modern people are absolutely wrong to set Genesis against science. God didn't care about the Israelites' science so it follows he doesn't care about ours! Genesis is about religion.

We simply must stop trying to “prove” science wrong.

1. We can't succeed. So we are wasting energies that could be spent spreading the Gospel.

2. It doesn't matter to God. So we are stubbornly “doing our own thing”.

3. It prevents people who understand some science from coming to Christ (and Jesus said “if anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble it would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their necks).

4. It makes those who do believe “6-day 6,000 years ago creationism” puffed up thinking they know more than the brilliant scientists who have laboured all their lives exploring how God created the universe, and we know how abhorrent pride is to God.

Surely creationism can only be a delusion spawned and maintained by the devil. I say this as one who was hooked on it, so I'm not judging anyone. But now we need to wake up and throw off this encumbrance.