TRAC Bible Matters ¢ Daniel Lee is a member of Paya Lebar Methodist Church. After working in the public sector and as pastoral staff, he is now completing his final year of the Master of Divinity programme at Trinity Theological College.
DOES THE BIBLE TELL EARTH’S AGE?
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enesis 1 has been interpreted to mean that God created the world in six 24-hour days. Taking Adam to be created in that first week and adding up from all the Old Testament genealogies, Earth would then be only about 6,000 years old. On the other hand, modern science has produced evidence supporting a much older Earth. For instance, cosmological evidence gives Earth an age of billions of years while geological evidence suggests homo sapiens have existed for at least 200,000 years. This has placed Christians in a seemingly intractable dilemma: either believe the Bible, or believe science. A number of ways to reconcile biblical text and scientific data have been offered. One is to stretch the definition of each “day” in Genesis 1 to mean possibly millions and billions of years. But while the Hebrew word for “day” is sometimes used metaphorically to denote a long period of time, in Genesis 1 we are contextually bound by the week of seven “days” to the usual 24-hour definition. Thus, by virtue of sound biblical interpretation, this approach is not satisfactory. Another way is based on an alternative reading “the earth became formless and void”, instead of the usual “the earth was formless and void” (Gen 1:2). This potentially creates a ‘gap’ of any number of years between the initial creation in Genesis 1:1 and a week-long reconstruction in the next
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METHODIST MESSAGE April 2020
verse. But since there is no prior mention of the earth’s condition, “became” is difficult to justify. Supporters of this ‘gap’ theory also appeal to destruction by Satan after he was banished from heaven as the cause for reconstruction of the formless void earth, but these are indirect inferences based on the already-tenuous “became” reading. Thus, this billion-year “gap” is also unsatisfactory for reconciling the Bible’s creation story with science. The above approaches have attempted, unsuccessfully, to work within a literal understanding of the text to reconcile it with scientific data. There is, however, good reason to reexamine if Genesis 1 should be read literally in the first place. Not everything is to be taken literally in the Bible: clearly, Jesus did not command that we literally remove our eyes and hands when we sin (c.f. Matt 5:29–30). There is thus room for metaphor in the Bible. Reading Genesis 1 must already cause the modern mind to wonder if it should be understood literally. For example, how is day and night (created on Day 1) to be demarcated without the sun and moon (Day 4)? How is the sky a solid firmament (Gen 1:6–8, 17)? How was the “earth” created on Day 3 (Gen 1:10) different from the formless and void “earth” (Gen 1:2)? In light of this, it is difficult to justify that Genesis 1 is a scientific document. But if Genesis 1 were non-literal, what is the significance of this metaphor? In the first three days, God separated
