The Grand Coherence, Chapter 10. Genesis

This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-grand-coherence-nathanael-smith/1144411754?ean=2940179288503

No time to read? Listen (AI) instead: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N3bwnZ2V9y7P4vmUlZ5tXtGCGb_m07sZ/view?usp=drivesdk

Some people are attracted to Christianity, but blocked from accepting it by disagreeing with it on one or two issues. These days, I think the likeliest deal breakers are Genesis and sexual ethics. Christianity's central message that God's good creation has fallen, but is being redeemed through Jesus Christ, comes with a rich package of historical and ethical teachings, which must all be more or less accepted for a person to achieve proper membership in the Christian church. Any of them might be a stumbling block to faith, and in various times and places past, people have been alienated from the faith by the doctrine of the Trinity, the abrogation of circumcision and the old Jewish law, the prohibition of polygamy, the teaching that a good God created the world, the faith's refusal to worship ancestors, and many other points. Today, because of the particular beliefs and values that prevail in the contemporary West, I think the commonest reasons to rule out Christianity are the teachings in the book of Genesis about the creation of the world, and the Christian rules of sexual ethics. This chapter deals with Genesis.

The problem is that if you open the Bible and start reading, the first thing you read, in Genesis 1:1-2:4, seems to be an account of the creation of the world that is revealed by modern science to be wildly false. It tells how the world was created by God in six days. The first day, He made light and darkness. The second day, He made a "firmament" to separate "the waters above" from "the waters below," which sounds as if the biblical writers were so ignorant that they thought the sky was a hard dome of some sort. On the third day, dry land and green plants were made, and only then, on the fourth day, does God place "lights in the heavens," which might seem to mean that He created the sun, moon and stars. By this account, plants would have preceded the sun whose light is their food. On the fifth day, birds and fish were made, and on the sixth day, land animals, and human beings. Don't we know that all of this is completely wrong? And if the Bible discredits itself from the first word, where does that leave Christianity?

I dealt briefly in chapter 4 with the Bible, its peculiar significance and authority, and why Christians never quote the Bible in order to contradict it. In general, it's a mistake to oppose faith to reason, and to believe in the Bible on faith against the testimony of reason. If you can't see how something in the Bible could possibly be true, it's probably worse than useless to try to force yourself to believe it over the resistance of your rational mind. You don't understand it, so leave it alone. Many Christians, unfortunately, do believe, based on Genesis 1, that the world was created in six 24-hour days, and while in general, my purpose in this book is to defend Christianity and not to argue with my fellow Christians, in this case, I do need to push back some. The fossil record strongly suggests that the world is far more than six days older than the human race. And the inference of a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago from the gradual expansion of the universe is not only extremely plausible, but also dovetails brilliantly with the Christian doctrine of creation, as we saw in chapter 7. Reason doesn't support the idea that the world was made in six 24-hour days.

And anyway, does Genesis 1 even say that? Let's take a closer look.

I don't know Hebrew myself, but what I've read about it agrees that the Hebrew word for "day," yom, like the English word day, can mean (a) a 24-hour period, (b) the light part of a 24-hour period, or (c) an indefinite period of time. As an example of (c), I could say that “in Julius Caesar’s day, the Roman republic was in crisis,” and no one would think the "day" in question had anything to do with 24 hours or the rising and setting of the sun. At its most basic, day is the opposite of night, and a day is the light period between the rising and setting of the sun. When we say “ten days” to mean ten 24-hour periods, rounded off a bit, that might be metonymy, as some languages say “ten summers” to mean “ten years.” But if I ask “what day is it?” at 10PM, day clearly means date, and in this sense it includes, rather than being opposed to, night. More specifically, a date includes one day and part of two nights, with two consecutive midnights marking its beginning and end. Of course, that’s just a human convention, and culturally specific at that. It’s possible to use “day” to mean a 24-hour period starting at an arbitrary hour rather than midnight. If I give you a document at 4PM and say, “Get this back to me within a day,” you might conclude that I mean for you to return it by 4PM tomorrow. But since that’s not very clear, I would be better advised to say, “Get this back to me within 24 hours.”

In the sentence “in Julius Caesar’s day, the Roman Republic was in crisis,” the clue that “day” means a longer period and not the light period between sunrise and sunset, or 24 hours, is that the conditions and events defining the “day,” namely a man’s lifespan and a political crisis, characteristically occupy more time than that. Similarly, the “days” of Genesis 1 are described by happenings that naturally take a lot of time, from which it ought to be clear that these are not daily intervals of light, or 24-hour periods, but much longer. This is sometimes called the "day-age" interpretation of Genesis 1, and I think it's clearly right simply as the only natural way to read the text of Genesis 1, regardless of anything modern science has to say.

For example, on the third "day," according to Genesis 1, “the earth brought forth vegetation, the plants yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth” (Genesis 1:11). Now, plants take months or years to grow to the point where they can produce seed. For the seed to go on and produce the same kind of plant again requires another full generation. It doesn’t happen in 24 hours.

On the fourth day, God puts “lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night [to mark] signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” (Genesis 1:14). Obviously, it’s impossible for the sun, moon and stars to mark out seasons and years within a 24-hour period.

On the sixth day, God made all the land animals, according to Genesis 1, and then, if we combine the creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2, let Adam meet and name all the animals, and discern that none was a suitable helper for him, before putting him to sleep and making Eve. One problem here is that animals take more than 24 hours to grow up. 

We can, if you like, suppose that God miraculously accelerated the growth of plants and animals so that what normally takes years occurred in one day. But why make such a strange supposition, a supposition not encouraged by the text, when it can be avoided simply by interpreting the word "day" as "period of time?" In any case, a miraculous fast forwarding of nature doesn't help with the fourth day. Presumably God could have made the sun, moon and stars move through the sky faster, but then they wouldn't be marking out seasons, days and years. It takes time to mark time.

The clincher for me is Adam's naming of the animals. It's one thing for God to miraculously fast forward natural processes. It might be so. God is omnipotent, and often inscrutable. But Adam is a human being, so we have a feel for what conduct is plausible. Would a man who was presented with all the animals, one by one, to name them, and see which might be a good companion for him, be in such a hurry that he'd name hundreds or thousands of animals in only part of one 24-hour day? Try to picture him carrying out his job at top speed, as the animals march before him for examination: "Tiger. Still lonely. Next… Raccoon. Still lonely. Next… Eagle. Still lonely. Next…" It's impossible! No human being could behave with such ruthless efficiency in the face of so much animal cuteness and grandeur. He'd stop to dote and pet and play, or to admire and marvel, and to get acquainted, and finally give the animal a name to crown his enjoyment and love. That's the only way he could even remember the names. It would certainly take time to teach the animals their own names, which seems like it might be the point of naming them at a time when Adam had no one to talk to. And his judgments that the animals were not suitable helpers would be worthless if they were arrived at with such unseemly haste. Why should he hurry anyway? He had all the time in the world. 

No, the story of the naming of the animals is spoiled unless Adam takes the time to do it right. No imaginative sympathy with it is possible without acknowledging that it must have taken a lot of time for Adam to get to know all the animals, to the point of giving them names, but also to discern that though he surely loved them, they couldn't cure his loneliness. It's impossible to do justice to the text of Genesis 1-2 without letting the sixth "day" mean a period long enough to allow Adam to get acquainted with the animals properly.

And I think there's a deeper reason why it's unacceptable to suppose that the time-consuming processes in Genesis 1 were magically fast forwarded to fit in 24 hours.

The words “And God saw that it was good” occur five times in Genesis, after the creation of light and darkness, dry land, green plants, lights in the heavens, and fish and birds. After the creation of animals and people, the words change to "And God saw that it was very good," signaling completeness. I don't think it's possible to do justice to those words unless the things made are given time to be themselves. The word "saw" implies a certain separateness of the Creator from His creation, like the separateness of a workman from the worker when he puts down his tools, stops his perfectionist fussing, and looks with satisfaction and admiration on a good thing completed and built to last. God, in His omniscience, could presumably have foreseen that the things He was creating would be good. But that’s not what Genesis 1 says He did. He saw the things He made, really existing, outside Himself, and saw that they were good, in their own autonomous natures. 

We, too, know by experience the goodness of the things that God saw were good in Genesis 1. We admire the stars; our planet with its lands and seas; the greenery of living and growing plants; the heavenly bodies that mark times and seasons; the animals of sea and air; and land animals. And the goodness that we appreciate in the natures of these things is inescapably connected to time, such that they could not be fully and properly appreciated in a day. It is wonderful in plants that they grow so slowly, imperceptibly from moment to moment, and yet accomplish splendid transformations over the course of the seasons of a year. Likewise, to fully enjoy an animal, you want to see both its playful babyhood and also its mature strength. And you want to see the succession of generations, especially mothers nurturing their babies. Likewise, to fully appreciate the drama of land and sea you want to see the tides come in and out, and rain fall, and rivers run to the sea, and foggy days, and storms. For God to properly see the goodness of the things He made, He must have watched them for much more than 24 hours.

The young earth creationists have another card up their sleeve. It's not just the word "day." Another refrain of Genesis 1 is “the evening and the morning,” as in “the evening and the morning were the first day” (Genesis 1:5), repeated after each of the “days?” Don’t they suggest a 24-hour interpretation after all?

Yes and no. But mostly no.

Here it would be especially nice to know Hebrew, but from what I read, the Hebrew word for “morning,” boker, also means “order,” while erev, the Hebrew word for “evening,” also means “mixture” or “confusion.” Later, I'll make use of the interpretive options that gives us. 

For now, consider, first, that a 24-hour period consists not only of evening and morning, but of other times, such as midday, afternoon, and night. Only about one-third of a 24-hour period would normally be characterized as “evening” or “morning.” 

Second, “evening and morning” is oddly backwards. The most basic meaning of a day is the light period between sunrise and sunset. Evening is the end of a day, while morning is its beginning. If a period starts with evening and ends with morning, that period isn’t a day, but rather, a night. 

Third, of all times of day, evening and morning are most visibly and sensually connected with the movements of the sun. Evening is when the sun sets, and darkness gathers. Morning is when the sun rises, and its light fills the sky. We might need a clock to recognize noon and midnight, but evening and morning we can see with our eyes.

But there was no sun on the first three days, according to a literal reading of Genesis. Only on the fourth day did God put the sun in the sky to mark the days. So there cannot have been any evening and morning in the usual sense, characterized by the movements of the sun that define those times of day.

If the biblical text were trying to tell us that the “days” were 24 hours long, saying “the evening and the morning were the first day” would be a very clumsy way to do it. Evening and morning don’t add up to a 24-hour period, they bookend a night, not a day, and they’re associated with movements of the sun that couldn’t have been observed on the first three “days.” No, evening and morning have quite a different meaning here.

I think it's quite deliberate and important that evening and morning are in reverse order, as if the days went backwards, starting in dusky evenings and proceeding to bright mornings, mixture and confusion giving way to light and order. I think this symbolizes something important about natural history. To this I'll return.

If the days of Genesis aren't 24 hours, they must mean something. I think some people regard Genesis 1 as a mere poetic ramble through the beauties of nature, meant to be evocative of the glory of God. Maybe. But the chronology of Genesis 1 seems too deliberate and emphatic to be a mere poetic flourish. It would be nice if Genesis 1, once the days are sensibly interpreted as ages, turned out to fit in with natural history, as it is believed to have happened by modern science. Does it? Actually, I think the fit is surprisingly good.

The concordance starts even before the birth of light. In Genesis 1, before the first day, Genesis says that “God made the heaven and the earth” and “earth was without form and void” and “darkness was upon the face of the deep” and the Spirit of God moved “on the face of the waters.” This “earth,” this “deep,” these “waters” might be as good a description as natural language affords of the stuff of the universe immediately after the Big Bang, which was dark and dense like earth, only much more so, but presumably also formless and fluid, like water. Water also seems to have been a conventional symbol of primordial chaos in the ancient Near East. God made good use of that convention by describing the primordial dark chaotic mass after the Big Bang as "waters."

The first day of creation in Genesis 1, which starts with “Let there be light,” and shows God creating light, called Day, and darkness, called Night, strongly invites interpretation as the Big Bang and the formation of stars. More exactly, “Let there be light” is a good description of the moment, shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe became transparent, and light burst forth through the vast empty spaces, thought to be about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The “night” that follows might be the “Cosmic Dark Ages,” after the Big Bang faded, but before the stars lit up. It culminated in the night sky as we know it, with the day and night separated, albeit not temporally, as in our experience, but spatially, with day near the stars and night in the great spaces between.

The second day, when God separated the “waters”— by an ancient Near Eastern convention symbolizing the formless materials of a primordial chaos— above the “firmament”— the sky— from the “waters” below, might describe the formation of planets in general, and Earth in particular. The “firmament” of the sky is not, as that word might suggest, solid. Yet it is a formidable shield. Earth is blessed with a magnetic field and an ozone layer that protect the surface of the Earth from harmful rays and particles from outer space. It is also a great gulf of separation, since Earth’s field of gravity mostly sweeps the immediate vicinity of Earth clear of matter. And it’s fitting that the text emphasizes the separation of “above” and “below,” for planetary gravitation organizes space locally into up and down. Earth formed, as a molten ball of lava at first, with no dry land, around 4.5 billion years ago. 

The third day of creation in Genesis 1, if we continue developing this concordance of scripture with natural science, would refer to  the formation of liquid water, and the formation of the oceans and of dry land, as well as the emergence of life, defined by self-replication, “producing seed after its kind,” and of photosynthetic or plant life in particular. Both of these events probably occurred between 4 billion and 3 billion years ago.

The fourth day of creation in Genesis 1 is puzzling at first, because it says God placed the sun, moon and stars in the heavens. But clearly, the sun shone long before the green plants appeared. It was the source of the light that plants needed in order to live. Science also thinks that Earth formed out of the solar nebula and was roughly coeval with the sun, not older. As for the stars, there were stars for billions of years before Earth, and we have already assigned them a place on the first day, as the source of the day that God separated from the night. 

But what if the fourth day refers not to the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, but to the time when they became visible from the surface of the Earth, such that they could mark times and seasons and serve as a calendar? I got the idea from this passage in Ward and Kirschvink’s 2016 book A New History of Life: 

It took almost a hundred million years for the invading multicellular plants to change from small marine forms to the world-covering forests that were present by the end of the Devonian period [about 360 million years ago]. In one respect, these plants had a far more significant effect on the land than the long-reigning microbes did, for the multicellular land-plant invasion utterly changed the nature of landforms and soil. It also changed the transparency of the atmosphere, for as more and more plants spread across the land, the restless sand dunes and dust bowls that had been the unceasing landforms of the Earth until that time were transformed. Roots began to hold the grit and dust of the land in place to a far greater extent than did the land-dwelling bacteria, which, as single cells or even thin sheets would have had little strength; as the primitive plants died and rotted in place, thicker and thicker soil began to form, and the ragged, rocky landscape that had always been Earth began to soften. From space the very air itself would have cleared; for the first time the edges of continents and seas, of large lakes and rivers would have become visible from short and great distances alike.

This clearing of the atmosphere when the roots of land plants held down the dust and turned it into soil was just the last stage in a longer transformation. Long before, the oxygenation of the atmosphere began, as oxygen, a byproduct of photosynthesis, accumulated and would have burned off other gases, like methane. The oxygenation of the atmosphere was a precondition for the complexity and size of life growing to the point where it could settle the land. The fit with Genesis 1 is that from Earth’s surface, it probably looked as if the sun, moon and stars were being created for the first time. At any rate, they began to be visible on Earth, as on no other planet in our solar system that has a thick atmosphere, reliably enough to be used for a calendar.

The fifth day of creation in Genesis 1, by this account, would describe the emergence of animal life in the seas, starting in the Cambrian period, 560 million years ago. The text of Genesis 1 would seem to require us to believe that animal life in the air emerged around this time as well. Animal life emerged very quickly. All the animal phyla we know today are thought to have appeared within 10 million years.

The sixth day, the emergence of land animals, started about 470 million years ago if we interpret it as including arthropods, or 360 million years ago if we think the focus is on vertebrates. I suppose God probably doesn’t share our bias for liking vertebrates better than arthropods, so maybe the earlier date is a better reading.

If this is the meaning of the days of creation in Genesis 1, the chronology turns out to be, not a mere poetic flourish, but important and true. The appearance of light, and the separation of day from night, did occur before the formation of planets, which occurred before the formation of Earth's oceans, which occurred before the appearance of photosynthetic life, which occurred before the clearing of the atmosphere and the rendering visible of the sun, moon and stars, which at least began to happen before animal life in the seas, which occurred before animal life on land. But there's more to this scheme than setting things in order of what happened first. The truth is not just chronological but causal. There had to be stars before there could be planets. There had to be planets before seas and life. There had to be photosynthetic life to oxygenate the atmosphere, and oxygen to support animal life in the seas, and animal life in the seas before it could invade the land. God's works on each day are dependent on those of the last, as a necessary, though not sufficient, cause.

Importantly, these days don't end. I think that's why Genesis 1 keeps saying "the evening and the morning." There seems to be a kind of rhythmic progress in natural history, where periods of chaotic change, described by Genesis 1 as erev, evening, repeatedly burst out, then, after a while, settle down into great, orderly equilibria, described by Genesis 1 as boker, morning, that continue indefinitely. The chaotic periods do not disrupt the previous orderings. The night sky goes on, not disrupted, as planets form. The planets go on, not disrupted, as life forms. And so on. Later orderings may occur within earlier orderings, being too small to affect them much, but though smaller, they are if anything even more intricate and impressive. And I think that each of the “days” in Genesis describes just such a phase in the ordering of the universe, with an “evening” of creative chaos followed by a “morning” of beautiful and majestic order. That's why I'm not troubled by the mention of "fruit trees" on the third day of creation. There were no fruit trees in the time when photosynthetic microbes first emerged and began their slow work of cleansing the atmosphere. The fruit trees we know are angiosperms, and as such are a much later development, less than 150 million years ago, long after animals invaded the land. But they are also photosynthetic life, part of the ongoing third day of creation.

The great orderings of the world that Genesis describes are all still with us. And the evening and morning are in reverse order because time was, in a sense, running backwards. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells of a world of increasing entropy, of a slow victory of chaos over order, in which pattern is overtaken by decay. But, in a sense, all of natural history seems to be an exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even if that means no more than that only the exceptional cases where order emerges from chaos are worth talking about. And that’s what Genesis 1 describes.

The bursting forth of the universe in the Big Bang was a time of rapid, violent and chaotic change, up to the time of the formation of the stars. Then a kind of equilibrium set in, familiar to us as the night sky, with its countless stars, each one held together by gravity and burning through its atomic fuel so slowly that the vast majority will last for billions of years, shining with a light that, by the time scales of living creatures, is perfectly steady and imperturbable. The evening and the morning were the first day.

The formation of planets like Earth was a very violent process, with matter from the solar nebula being smashed together by gravity and melting from the heat that from density, plus the energy of those impacts and its own radioactivity, with gases belching up out of the lava seas, and at one point an impact of amazing force ejecting a huge chunk of matter out of the young Earth to settle into orbit and become the moon that we know. But at last, this confusion gave way to a new order, in which a new thing, a planet, locally organizing space into up and down, could persist largely undisturbed for billions of years. The evening and the morning were the second day.

The formation of the planets did not disrupt the stars, because the planets were too small for that. The morning/order of the first day was still there, but now the morning/order of the second day was nested within it.

I find it fascinating that the two refrains of Genesis 1, “And the evening and morning were the nth day” and “And God saw that it was good” are out of sync at this point in the story. There is no “And God saw that it was good” on the second day. But this is said twice on the third day, once after the gathering of the waters into seas so that dry land appeared, and once after the creation of the plants. This seems significant. 

Geologists call the first few hundred million years of Earth’s history the “Hadean” Era, meaning hellish, for Earth was a little like an old-fashioned painting of Hell in those days, all fiery and molten. It was a boker, an order, but it did not yet qualify as good, or maybe God didn’t see fit to describe it that way to us because it isn’t a kind of goodness that we can appreciate. Of course, most of earth is still like that. If you could go straight down a couple of hundred miles you would find the old, molten, "Hadean" Earth still there. That's a little scary if you think about it. 

But how well we can appreciate the good things God made on the third day! We watch with delight the gathering of waters through rain and rivers into seas with their splendid tides and waves. We watch with a different delight the green world of plants, the grasslands and forests and meadows and pine-clad mountainsides and all the rest of it. These are different goods, and separable. The aesthetic feeling of admiring a thunderstorm, or a sleepy blue ocean, even as our feet are firm upon the safe ground, is very different from our love of a garden or a forest, of greenery and growing things. And there was probably a world of rain and seas before life, and a much longer period when rain and seas were great and general and life small and special. So it is fitting that they’re separately praised as good. 

Why, then, are they included in one “day” in Genesis 1? Maybe because their origins were chronologically close, or overlapping, and perhaps causally interconnected too, if life somehow helped Earth retain its initial endowment of water. At any rate, together they comprised an order that lasted for billions of years before multicellular life emerged, and that order still persists today. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And the third day did not disrupt the first day or the second day. Rain and seas and life were too small to alter the Earth spinning on its orbit, much less the stars. The new order was nested within the old.

In the case of the atmosphere and the visible heavens, too, there must have been a long time of flux and chaos, when volcanoes and life and dust storms and the outputs of changing life kept changing the atmosphere and the visible heavens, followed by the stably transparent and oxygenated atmosphere that we know. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And then the flux of the Cambrian explosion gave rise to the relatively stable animal phyla that have persisted ever since: the evening and morning were the fifth day. And so forth. Again and again, each new ordering left the previous orderings in place, though not always because of size. The land animals of the sixth day aren’t too small to affect life in the sea and air, but rather, spatially separate, at least for the most part. The pattern is that each completed ordering of nature persists, and each new ordering depends on and fits into the last.

We are the heirs of all the days at the same time. They are all still with us. It is still the morning of the first day, with light and darkness separated in the great pattern of the night sky, and God still looks upon it and sees that it is good. It is still the morning of the second day, with the matter above the firmament separated from the matter below. It is still the morning of the third day, with water still forever being gathered into seas to leave the land dry, and God still sees that it is good, and the plants go on growing and producing seed after their kind, and God still sees that that is good, too. It is still the morning of the fourth day, when we may look up through the transparent atmosphere at the sun, moon and the stars, and read our calendar from their great dance, and God looks on it and sees that it is good. It is still the morning of the fifth day, and the seas and the air teem with moving creatures, and God sees that it is good. And it is still, quite often, the morning even of the sixth day, in spite of all we have done to mar it by our sins, and men are delighting in all creation, like the images of God they were meant to be, and happily cultivate the earth, and admire the free animals, and tenderly love their tame ones.

The biggest problem with this concordance is the creation of birds on the fifth day. Birds as we know them definitely didn’t appear until hundreds of millions of years after animal life invaded the land. It helps that, as a translator friend of mine assures me, the Hebrew word there really means “flying creature.” The first flying creatures are much earlier than the first birds. But I think paleontologists date them to around 400 million years ago, while animals began invading the land around 500 million years ago. So the chronology is still wrong.

I can't help but wonder if science will, in due course, prove Genesis 1 right on this point, too. Doesn’t it seem likely that (a) flight came first after all, but (b) science misses this, because it isn’t evident in the fossil record, partly because the first flight was done with soft body parts, but especially, because creatures living on land fossilize on land, but flying creatures don’t fossilize in the air? 

Richard Dawkins, in Climbing Mount Improbable, points out that the vast majority of animals fly, because the vast majority of animals are small, and it’s relatively easy for small animals to fly because the ratio of potentially lift-generating surface area to downward-pulling weight is higher. So when animals were smaller, flight was easier. And it would have been advantageous. Any aquatic prey animal might benefit by being able to turn airborne to escape predators. For that purpose, the longer they can stay airborne, and the further they can go, the better. And flight, once learned, offers other advantages, such as faster travel because thin air offers so little friction, and longer visibility for general scouting, or more specifically for finding mates. 

For most sea creatures, moreover, the air is far nearer than the land. Most points at sea are hundreds or thousands of miles from land, but most sea creatures live near the surface, where sunlight feeds microscopic plants for their food, so the air is always easily accessible to explore. And it’s less dangerous, because if a sea creature goes on land but can’t live there or find its way back, it must die, whereas an unsuccessful venture into the air only means falling back into its watery home. Modern birds fly with bony wings that can fossilize, but giant squid fly with soft body parts, shooting themselves out of the water like water rockets, and then twisting their soft, flexible bodies into aerodynamic shapes for gliding. Might the first flight have been like that? 

A charming image wafts through my mind of the Cambrian seas blooming with colorful low-flying creatures at a coordinated mating hour, repeatedly squirting up and gliding over the water and spying or sniffing or singing, as they look for love. And then they either didn't fossilize at all, or didn't fossilize in ways that enable us to recognize their ability to fly, so we don't know about it.

Well, the science is rather fluid, with frequent new discoveries, and I’ve only scratched the surface of textual exegesis of Genesis 1, so we shouldn’t expect too good a fit. But far from being embarrassing, and a reason to disbelieve the Bible, the fit between Genesis 1 and scientific natural history, once we get past the misconception of 24-hour days, strikes me as impressive enough to be a minor reason to believe the Bible is divinely inspired, after all. 

Nonetheless, I'm left wondering why the text exists, and at some level, what it means. What was God trying to accomplish in inspiring Moses (the author of Genesis, humanly speaking, according to tradition) to write it, especially when, given the limited scientific understanding of Moses and his fellow Hebrews, it would inevitably somewhat misleading? 

I have two guesses to offer. First, God provided just enough truth to inoculate the Hebrews and other readers of the Bible against fashionable falsehoods. Genesis 1 rebuts a thousand fanciful, corrupt creation myths. And since humans will believe something about the origins of the world, it was better to supply as much truth as they could handle, as a placeholder for what they would learn in future, than to leave a dangerous blank in the mind on which any fashionable fancies would soon be written.

Second, and more importantly, Genesis 1 settles a question that haunts us all, and that needs to be authoritatively settled because we, in our weakness and confusion, would otherwise endlessly flutter among impressions and doubts: whether nature is good. It is. And ever it has been. At times, we feel this very strongly, when looking up at the stars on a fair evening in June, or seeing a waterfall or a garden or a running horse, or hearing the songs of birds on a spring morning. But we also get bored quickly. How many of us have the strength fixedly and without distraction to admire the stars even for an hour? Reflecting on our own propensity for boredom, we might well doubt whether our own aesthetic impressions of the infinite value of a starry sky or a blossoming orchard have any merit, intense as they seem at moments. Genesis 1 answers with awesome authority: “And God saw that it was good.” Like us in our best moments, God, too, looks on stars and seas and forests and flocks, and admires. 

And here the revelations of science about the age of the earth enter the argument like trumpets to glorify the divine majesty. For how long did God admire the works of His hands? It seems that He was satisfied to behold nothing but the night sky for a billion years or more, before He felt the need to create the planets. He was contented with a lifeless planet of wind and rain and stormy seas for probably a few hundred million years before originating life, and then for a couple of billion years more, He was content to soften the seas with microbes and slowly cleanse the atmosphere, before He felt the need to make the first animals. 

Can we enter the mind of God at this point, and understand His purposes and His state of mind? I think the point of Genesis 1 is that we can, a little, and it’s there to help us. The words “And God saw that it was good” come just at the moments when something has been made which we, at our best, can admire with poetic ecstasy. Light and darkness and the starry sky. The seas and the dry land. Greenery and fruit and flowers and woods and meadows, and everything that drinks the sunlight and grows. And again, the heavens, this time seen from Earth, with sun and moon and the sublime rhythms of the sky. Then seas teeming with fish and skies full of birds, and beasts treading the land. Yes, we know and love it all. An ambitious real estate developer, seeking the key to the preferences of high-end buyers for whom money is no object, might do worse than read Genesis 1. What do we humans like? How do we prosper? Ocean views, gardens, skylights to see the stars, sculptures of animals, maybe an aviary and a fish pond… it’s all there in Genesis 1, all the good works of God, the enjoyment of which is the best life for men. What a world God made for our delight!

This ability of humans, and of them only, to understand and admire the whole material universe, is one of the strangest and most fascinating facts in the material universe, and Genesis 1 highlights it spectacularly by saying that man was made "in the image of God" and that only after this was creation "very good," as opposed to merely "good." Yet if this conclusion elevates human dignity, how much humility is also taught to the human race by Genesis 1. How tiny we are compared to the vast works of God! How infinitely far short we fall even of being the good stewards of nature that we were meant to be! And how inferior the mere caretaker of a thing is, even the worthiest caretaker, compared to the maker of it. That we were made to be the rulers of nature rings true. We must rule over nature, a little, just to survive, and we want to do it for pleasure and fascination and love. But we cannot rule very much of it at all, and even that, badly. We are too weak, and not wise enough, to live up to our born vocation. 

In the past, Christians were of course awestruck by the power of God as revealed in Genesis 1, and the vast size of the universe as modern science reveals it should amplify that wonder. They were occasionally impressed still more by God's speed, making so much in just six days, yet if anything I think the slowness of creation, the vast durations involved, make the story even more awesome and humbling. 

Try to imagine yourself on the early Earth, younger but still hundreds of millions of years old, when there was no life at all, but only rain on the rocks, and tides rolling in and out, and storms, and rivers, and waves, and waterfalls, and towering mountains, some of them volcanic, and wind, and clouds. Set aside for the moment that there was no oxygen so you could not live. Would you like to be there? Would you like to see it? Do you feel a horror of that loneliness and lifelessness? Surely. But don't you also feel a longing for that grandeur, the austere majesty of those barren mountains, or the shimmering beauty of those rippling waters on a calm day? If you could travel back in time for an hour, a day, maybe a week, who would decline the offer? And yet a month would be too long for most, and who could accept such an exile for a year? Why? Is it nature's poverty or ours that sets a limit on our enjoyment? It is our own weakness. God has the strength to enjoy the rocks and waves for hundreds of millions of years. 

And so it is with all the "days." We might yearn to behold the slimy seas or the green lands before animal life for an hour or a day, but God looked on a garden Earth unmolested by any animal for billions of years, continually seeing that it was good, and that is a measure of His superiority to us. We might enjoy seeing the world of fish and flying creatures and nothing else for a day or even a week, but God attended to and admired His fluid-dwelling creatures for a hundred million years, with no need to proceed to the next act in the great drama. Boredom is not the least of the stains of original sin on human nature, but God is quite free of it. Let us marvel! And let us remember that God's world is good. I even suspect that this is why God concealed the vast age of the Earth behind a vague and gentle word like "day." If men long before Christ had been forced to contemplate billions of years, their own extreme comparative transience would have made it impossible to persuade them that they mattered at all. And yet God has now revealed to us our own immortality, and we shall live, as C.S. Lewis said, to remember the stars as an old tale. We had better aspire to much greater capacities for enjoyment, if we are not to become bored.

I beg the reader's indulgence for concluding the chapter in verse. Poetry has a mnemonic effect. It also somehow helps the mind to focus on aesthetic appreciation and wonder. It seems only fitting to turn to poetry when I feel overwhelmed with wonder by the magnificent works of God. So here's Genesis 1, as elucidated by scientific natural history, in verse.

Creation

O God, You made this world for us
What a wondrous gift You've given!
You clove the light from the darkness,
Countless stars bejeweled the heaven.
And you lit the world with splendid day
Then hushed it to the cool of night.
How beauteous is the interplay
Of the darkness with the light.

And You saw Your works, and beheld they were good
And we behold the same
As all creation teaches us
To glorify Your name.

From swirling dust You wrought the Earth
And shielded it with the sky
And You instituted south and north,
East and west, and low and high.
And there bubbled up from the molten ball
Gases that became a misty shroud
And the first rain began to fall
Out of those churning clouds.

The rain filled mighty seas that rolled
Beneath the vaulted sky
On clear days, water mirrored
The castle clouds on high
You made fair and stormy weather
And rain fed into rivers clear
As You gathered the waters together
And made the dry land appear.

And You saw Your works, and beheld they were good
And we behold the same
As all creation teaches us
To glorify Your name.

And then You kindled amidst the sea
A strange phenomenon
Tiny things that drank the light of day
And made seed after their kind
And they filled the sea and o'erspread the land
And some grew into towering trees
That swayed and rustled in the wind
And trembled in the breeze.

And as green plants o'erspread the land
Roots clutched and held the earth
And dimming clouds of windswept sand
Were tamed to fertile dirt
Plants purified the atmosphere,
Revealing sun and moon and stars
Whose perfect dance marked out the year
And made Earth's calendar.

And You saw Your works, and beheld they were good
And we behold the same
As all creation teaches us
To glorify Your name.

Somewhere amidst those slimy seas
You made living things that move
And soon they swam and walked and flew
And burrowed, leaped and dove.
As You formed them into thousands of shapes
They flourished, spread and multiplied
Till fish teemed in the seas and lakes
And birds adorned the skies.

And some beasts came onto the land
And roamed the hills and woods
And You looked on all the works of Your hands:
It was almost very good,
But there was none but You to enjoy it all
So in Your own image You made man
In size, halfway between great and small
With a mind to understand.

And because we are made in the image of God
We can most fitly praise
The works of God are very good
We marvel at Your ways!