To Christians: Don't be embarrassed by the Book of Genesis
Software developers sometimes encounter a “bug” in a computer program. Not wanting to spend the effort to try to fix the bug, they will insert some code in the program that at least temporarily circumvents the problem. Such code is called a workaround, and allows the program to function more or less as intended. Hopefully.
I encountered a similar situation when trying to restart my computer. The computer rejected my four-letter password when typed in the normal way. But if I typed the last three letters first, and then positioned the cursor back to type the first letter, the computer was happy to let me in. That’s my workaround.
What does this have to do with the Book of Genesis? Well, about 200 years ago ideas about millions of years of earth history were becoming popular with early geologists. That wasn’t going to “work” if Genesis continued to be interpreted as plain historical narrative, with creation in six days and a worldwide flood. A workaround of Genesis was needed.
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Theologians first tried inserting millions of years between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. That “gap theory” workaround was popular for over a hundred years. Thomas Chalmers popularized it in 1814, and the Scofield Bible of 1909 made it a favorite of conservative Christians for many more years. However, theologians finally recognized its problems. For one thing, there is no mention elsewhere in Scripture of pre-Adamic humans or of a pre-Adamic cataclysm. Nor is the Hebrew construction consistent with any change in time between verse 1 and verse 2.
So the “day age” workaround then became popular. It remains somewhat popular, having been promoted, for example, by Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe. In this case, the required millions or billions of years are inserted into each of the six days of Genesis 1, where the Hebrew word “yom” is used for day. However, the majority of Hebrew scholars realized that in the Old Testament there are only a few times where “yom” can mean a long period. It never means a long period when connected with numerals in a narrative as in Genesis 1. And it would be very strange indeed if the meaning of “yom” changed in the course of two verses from Exodus 20:9 (“Six days you shall labor and do all your work”) to Exodus 20:11 (“For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is them”).
Hence the perceived need for other workarounds where “yom” means a literal 24-hour day. For example, in his book Seven Days that Divide the World, John Lennox of Oxford University inserts millions and millions of years in between each of the literal 24-hour days of God’s creative activity. Genesis 1 indicates, however, that God rested on the seventh day, not in between each of the other six days.
Recent workarounds assert that Genesis 1 is meant to provide the meaning behind creation rather than actual historical details. They claim that its language is figurative, metaphorical and may be similar to creation myths of the ancient near East. For example, Meredith Kline popularized the “framework hypothesis” where the days of Genesis 1 provide a framework for understanding the meaning of Genesis. John Walton proposed a “Cosmic Temple” model to understand Genesis 1. However, other Old Testament scholars such as Todd Beall and Steven Boyd have shown that the Hebrew language used in Genesis 1 is historical narrative, not poetry or other figurative language.
Near the beginning of his recent book In Quest of the Historical Adam, William Lane Craig expresses his hope that Todd Beall is incorrect in claiming that the early part of Genesis is historical narrative. Otherwise, he suggests that Christians are in big trouble because the scientific evidence contradicts such an interpretation. In particular, he claims that “young earth creationism’s scientific claim is wildly implausible.”
So the perceived need for workarounds has proceeded beyond Genesis 1 to the existence of an historical Adam and the nature of the Fall. Hans Madueme of Covenant College considered and dismissed a host of such workarounds in his recent book Defending Sin. As the flaws of each of these are recognized, clever people keep inventing new ones. Further on in Genesis, the common workaround for Noah’s flood is a supposed local flood in Mesopotamia. In that connection, Hugh Ross in a recent debate revealed his way of interpreting the Genesis text: “I believe the Bible teaches a worldwide flood, not a global flood.”
A fatal flaw in all these workarounds is conflict with the statement in Genesis 1:31 that “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” All attempts to put millions and billions of years into Genesis assume that the fossils were formed before Adam. That means God was the originator of the disease, violence, and death seen in the fossil record. And so our Creator God would not be good, nor would His creation be very good.
The Book of Genesis is not some knock-off version of the truth. It needs no workarounds. The voices of those that make them sound much too similar to that of the serpent who questioned Eve: “Has God indeed said…” We need to consider the possibility that mainstream scientists don’t know the truth about origins. As discussed elsewhere, their speculations about origins are based on anti-theistic presuppositions. Those presuppositions guide their interpretations of data left over from Creation. When scientists who are Christians replace those presuppositions, they find interpretations of the same data consistent with the plain reading of Genesis.
John Doane received a bachelor's degree from Yale, a PhD from MIT, and worked in microwave technology for Bell Laboratories, Princeton University and General Atomics. He served on the Board of Directors of Jesus to the Communist World (which later became Voice of the Martyrs). His recent articles have been published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly and The Christian Post.
