Oh God! Is God An Evolutionist? || Part 2

In Part one of this series, we looked at how Atheists and Christians are not talking about the same thing when debating between Darwin and the Bible. Atheists are talking about the human body.  Christians are talking about the life force that is housed in that body.  One side is talking about the whiskey.  The other is talking about the bottle – very different things.

Atheists love to restrict the argument to only the human body because it hides the deficiencies of their own beliefs.  The Life Force inside human beings is therefore ignored and no real answers to life are ever achieved.   That Life Force is what the Bible calls the God-Breathed part of humankind. And it is what the Bible is mostly talking about - 99.83% of it in fact.    

All that being said, Part II is about dumb stuff Christians say when they treat the Bible like a science book.   

From the Bible, I think the facts are clear.

God DID take a long time to create everything.  Science shows it.

And I believe the Bible allows for it and even corroborates it.

So let’s look at those six days mentioned in Genesis.  On the one hand, many Christians (mostly, the Fundamentalist flavor) claim the Bible is talking about a 6-day creation – to them, meaning six twenty-four-hour days. Science indicates a much longer timeline.  Last count, scientists claimed 13.8 Billion Years.   That’s over 5 Trillion 24-hour days.  So, at last count, Science and the Fundamentalists are Five Trillion, Thirty Six Billion, Nine Hundred, Ninety Nine Million, Nine Hundred, Ninety Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred, Ninety Four days apart.  (5,109,999,999,994 days!). Whew.  That’s a long way apart. No wonder there is so much acrimony between the two sides. 

Christians are treated as idiots for their distance from scientific discovery.   Is that true?  Well, yes frankly, if you hold to a viewpoint of six twenty-four-hour days.  Christians are supposed to respect scientific discovery.  It represents the fingerprints of God.

Discovering truth, all truth, is a vivid theme throughout the Scriptures.

And as we discussed in Part 1, the Bible is not a science book. So, defending it on that level is just silly. Now, I know my atheist readers will say “Ah Ha!  We’ve got him!  He finally admitted his mental deficiency.”

I do acknowledge that those Christians are not using the grey matter the Creator gave them.  They are also not reading the Bible correctly.  The Bible doesn’t say six 24-hour days.  People who claim that are misquoting Scripture.

Not so fast. 

I am convinced the Bible leaves room for an extremely long process of creation.  Read accurately, it is plainly signaling creation took some time.   Hear me straight, the Bible, not your science class, is signaling a long process, not simply six 24-hour days. 

To that point, I would provide the following:

1. The word “day” translated in Genesis 1-2 means “a span of time”. As in English, it was most used as a single, 24-hour day.  But it literally just means a span of time. 
   

2. Moses penned Genesis from the oral tradition.  He was no idiot.  Many modernists treat him and everyone who lived before the birth of the cell phone as if they are ignorant idiots.   That is simply not true. And yes, a topic for another Blog. 
   
   Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible around 1400BC. Ancient times.  Not modern at all. Now, he may not have known how to use a cell phone, but he most certainly knew what a 24-hour day was.  For Jews, a day was from sunset of one day to sunset of the next day.  They probably didn’t understand the earth was rotating, or that the earth was orbiting the sun.  But one thing is for certain, Moses knew that a day was the time between two consecutive sunsets – roughly 24 hours.
   
   But Moses doesn’t even mention the sun until Day Four.  It’s not possible to have any 24-hour days without a sun.  Moses knew that.  How could Moses mean 24-hour days without a sun appearing?  He clearly was not referring to 24-hour days, but rather periods of time for which the term “day” was used. 
   

3. This is not foreign to an English-speaking person.  When we use the word “day”, we, like Moses, most commonly mean the 24-hour period between sunsets (or between midnights, in the modern world).  We generally do not mean an undefined span of time.  However, what about this statement?
   
   There was a “day” when people traveled from Point A to Point B on horseback.
   
   Is this a correct statement?  Historically, empirically, scientifically?  Of course.  Is the meaning clear and plain?  Absolutely.  But did I actually say that since the beginning of time there was ONLY ONE 24-hour period of time where people rode horseback?  Of course not.  The meaning is plain, and the word “day” is construed to be a span of time – in the case of horses, that span is about 6000 years.  That’s a pretty long “day”.  So come on.  The Bible is not talking about sunsets to sunsets, clearly. 
   
   

4. Genesis refers to “days” as epics of time.  But in the absolute beginning, it says that God launched everything with four simple words – “Let There Be Light”.  Hmm.  Sounds like a Big Bang to me.     The Big Bang needs a Big Guy, like God, to produce all matter – literally all space and time in the universe.  For a discussion of how atheists lose that scientific argument see my blog entitled: The Faith of Science. Read the full post here.
   
   So God just used four words and literally everything that exists came into being – JUST FOUR WORDS!  That’s pretty fast.  How long does it take to say four words?

So if you believe in an all-powerful God, a God who can simply speak a few words and EVERYTHING came into existence, that would mean He could do everything really, really fast, without effort, simply by the utterance of His mouth.  Science shows the Big Bang happened this way… in an infinitesimally small fraction of time.  The science behind the Big Bang fits the quick utterance of “Let There Be Light”.  The Bible is clearly signaling that the initial creation happened very fast.  So apparently, God talks really, really fast.

Well if it’s true He can talk really, really fast to make all time and space happen, then why was he so sluggish to form everything else?  Was he tired from talking so fast at the Big Bang? Even if you are Fundamentalist flavored, six 24-hour days is not really, really fast.  It’s a really, really long time compared to the Big Bang. 

Science and the Bible actually agree on these differing timespans beautifully.  The Big Bang happened very quickly.  (“Let there be Light”) The rest of creation that followed took time. (Six separate epochs of time).  I think the Bible is making this distinction quite clear.  It is not a science book but it is also not contradicting what we now know about the development of our universe. 

And the Bible made this timeline distinction

3000 YEARS BEFORE SCIENCE FOUND OUT. 

So why are Christians so buggered by all this?  Why the fight over timing?  Seems to me that we all agree on this point and the Bible actually had it right, first.

Conclusion:  If a Christian is going to be true to the Scriptures, you must conclude that God decided to take some time in creating the universe we all see every day.  The Bible and science are not contradictory. In fact the Bible was pointing to it 3000 years before mankind discovered it.  Genesis agrees with the scientific timelines for both the Big Bang and the slow development that brings us to our universe today. 

Next discussion will be more specifically on Evolution and what the Bible might say about that. Please read Part 3 for that.