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Chapter 9 - Creation In Genesis -
Gradual or Instantaneous?
I submit that the only references to time in connection with creation are those relating to the six days of revelation of the narrative, and that there is no reference whatever to the time occupied by God in creating the universe and all things on it. The significance of the six divisions of the narrative have already been discussed, and we have seen that neither in Old nor in New Testament times were men interested in the speculations as to bow long the heavens and the earth and life had existed; nor did they concern themselves with the precise methods or processes by which God caused things to be. For them it was sufficient that the first narrative of the Bible meant that God was, in the most real sense, the Creator of all things in heaven and earth. On one point all commentators have been in general agreement, that obviously the narrative tells of successive acts, and it is quite clear that all acts of creation were not accomplished all at once. In this sense they were gradual and it is significant that there is no appeal in the Bible to any speed of action on the part of God. In all the references to creation the impression produced is of a considerable period of time. An instance may be seen in Psalm xc, "Thou Lord hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God. . . . For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night ". In Psalm cxlv. 13 we read, " Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generations", or "of old hast Thou laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of Thy hands " (PS. Cii. 25). Here the impression left on the, mind is not that of brevity of time; there is order and succession on a vast scale. There is no suggestion of a crowding into a few hours the great works of creation, and not the slightest implication anywhere that material things were of comparatively recent creation. The references are to eternities in the past. Even subsequent to Biblical times there was very little speculation concerning the age of the universe, or of the time taken for the formation of the earth's crust, or of the length of time man had been on the earth. Until inquiry by scientific methods had been developed, men were not very much concerned with a quest for knowledge in these directions. But Jong before science had awakened questions on these problems, men like Origen in the second, and Augustine in the third century, held that the days of Genesis were not normal twenty-four-hour days, but that creation had extended over long periods of time. On the other hand writers like Milton had adopted the 'instantaneous or sudden' view which he represents in Paradise Lost in this way:
If this does not mean instantaneous creation, then it implies something very nearly approaching it, for the poet is endeavouring to represent the completion of animal creation before nightfall on the sixth day. It is surely significant that there is nothing whatever in Scripture comparable with Milton's description of creatures "Embed and full grown " out of the ground uprose; or of the "tawny lion pawing to get free his hinder parts"; or of "the tiger, as the mole rising the crumbled earth above them threw ". A contemporary of Milton's, Dr. John Lightfoot, a great scholar and Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, wrote that man was created " at nine o'clock in the morning ". This Miltonic idea of 'speed' in creation became current and it was against the poet's conception that the nineteenth century reacted so extravagantly. As frequently happens in such a burst of impetuosity, the pendulum was violently swung out of control in the opposite direction. Even scientists vied with each other in adding hundreds of millions of years to the time they required for the origin and development of the earth and of life on it, including human life. This was taken to such extremes that the process known as 'throwing away the baby with the bath water' took place, men jettisoned not only their fallible human interpretations of what they imagined the first chapter of Genesis to mean, a six days' creation; they went further, some abandoned all real belief in God, substituting 'evolution' as a merely mechanical process in place of a Creator, as though this could be an alternative creative agency. All that was needed, it was said, is a sufficient number of millions of years, and an explanation can be given of the development of the heavens and the formation of the earth, the variety and distribution of plant and animal life including man, all without reference to God. The mental refuge in this attempt to eliminate God as Creator was an unstinted number of millions of years. Given a figure of sufficient magnitude, it was assumed that almost anything could have happened in such a period of time without requiring a First or Continuing Cause. Of course the real scientists were careful to explain that the vast number of millions of years of which they wrote were merely speculations, and their ideas only theories. When however their time periods and theories were disseminated in popular form, they were often believed by the general public to be scientifically ascertained facts. But it has transpired that scientific research, instead of strengthening, has often weakened these theories, and some scientists have made it plain that they retain their antipathy to Genesis, not on scientific grounds, but just because they cannot reconcile their unbelief in the existence of God, or their idea of what the six days mean with their scientific findings. An instance of this may be seen in Professor D. M. S. Watson's statement to a British Association meeting in 1929, that "the theory of evolution is a theory universally accepted, not because it can be proved to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible". Although the reaction against the idea of an instantaneous creation, which had grown up during the medieval ages, reached its climax in the nineteenth century, its gradually diminishing acceptance was in part due to a more scientific understanding of the heavens and the earth. When Galileo explained that the earth moved round the sun and not the sun round the earth, the opposition was due not to any time factor, but to false astronomical assumptions not derivable from the Bible. When Newton published his ideas about gravitation and the movements of the heavenly bodies, the criticism was not on grounds of Scripture, for the believer in a Creator could. then with even greater meaning use the words of the Psalmist and say that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork" and Newton, devout believer as he was, also took this point of view. However, some interpreted his discovery in such a way as to say that "the heavens now declare the glory of the laws of mechanics, and the firmament showeth that they are held together by gravitation". It was this substitution of scientific laws, as though they could take the place of a Creator, which prompted Laplace to say that he could explain the movements of the heavens without reference to God. When Herschel made the nebular hypothesis popular as an explanation of the formation of the earth, it seemed to some that it implied an accidental origin and therefore that it was contrary to Scripture. That theory supposed that the sun while in a gaseous state threw off a section which had protruded from its rim, and that this detached portion, while still travelling at a distance from the sun, condensed over an enormously long period of time, gradually forming into the planet earth. Modern astronomers, however, declare that this -theory is scientifically untenable, but at that time it served its purpose in some minds as an account of the origin of the earth without mentioning God. Meanwhile those engaged in the study of geology wrote of the enormous length of time necessary for the formation of the various layers in the crust of the earth. When Lyell produced his Antiquity of Man, it was the time element which was regarded as a direct challenge to the Genesis narrative. Soon after Darwin published his Origin of Species, insisting on millions of years for the processes of selection and variation, it was this time note again, in addition to its merely mechanistic explanation, which was seized upon as a direct contradiction to the six days of Genesis. Those who maintained that the days in the Genesis record were literal twenty-four-hour periods found their interpretation increasingly difficult to defend, for the current of scientific opinion was flowing strongly against them, but strangely enough it never seen-is to have occurred to them that they should test and verify their assumption that God had confined all His creative actions to a period of less than a week. An instance may be seen in the way Philip Henry Gosse, an eminent zoologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, arid a convinced believer in the integrity of the Genesis narrative, tried to stem the rising tide of criticism, by a book he wrote in 1858 called Omphalos in which he maintained that creation was accomplished in 144 hours. His son, Sir Edmund Gosse, describes its contents as follows: "It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place the world presented, instantly the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed." The popular press of the time said that this book assumed "that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity'', and his friend, the celebrated Charles Kingsley, wrote to Gosse that he could not 91 give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology and believe that God had written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie". It will be seen therefore that the divergence of thought between the Bible and science is almost entirely concerned with the problem of the time occupied by the Creator in His creation. It is true that some scientists have produced a far greater divergence by attempting to account for all things without any Creator at all. But it is this time note, and not any question as to the order in which things appeared, which has created the main conflict, for the order is remarkably accurate. The disagreement is between the fallible interpretation which alleges 'speed' on the part of God in His creation and to the findings of science -which assert that these things occurred over immensely long periods of time. We have already noted that Christian thinkers agreed that the creation of the universe did occupy an immense period of time, but their solution of the days of Genesis was riot convincing. It is significant that just at the time when science was producing its evidence of a slow succession of events-the very year that Dar-win published his Descent of Man - Mr. George Smith issued his Chaldean Genesis in which he explained as much as was at that time known of the literary methods of writing used in the then recently discovered fragments tablets recording the Babylonian story of the creation. Had the literary information which archaeology has brought to light been applied to the problem of the 'days', no scholar would have continued to interpret the first chapter of Genesis other than as a six days' narration or revelation and not as a six days' creation. It would take us too far from our purpose to discuss the philosophic ideas of time in relation to God. The ninetieth Psalm already quoted makes it plain that man's ideas of time can have no place in regard to God's creative work. In the light of the evidence already given that the 'days' refer to the period of revelation and riot of acts of creation, and if we bear in mind that 'a miracle is not necessarily something quick', all difficulties vanish. No one can doubt that God could create instantaneously, that is not the point at issue; the question is, did He so act? Some of the older theologians assumed that He did; if however we discover from the record that this assumption is incorrect, and if accurate scientific research shows that this is not the way He so acted, there cannot be any conflict between His work and His Word, the clash is between our interpretation either of Genesis or of Science. Does Genesis imply that God created instantaneously . or gradually? I submit that the Bible narrative gives clear evidence against the former view. In the first place the record certainly implies that God created things successively in time as well as in order; next the statements ' "Let there be . . . and there was," do not in any way imply an instantaneous completion. Light, for instance, is swift in its movement but it takes nine minutes for the light of the sun travelling at 186,ooo miles a second to reach the earth. When we read, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly ", there is not the slightest suggestion of a time limit, no hint that the teeming abundance was accomplished in a flash, or in other than God's normal way of working. Those who hold that each of the days commenced with an ordinary night got into serious difficulties at the very beginning. When did the darkness of that first night begin seeing that before light was created there had been nothing but darkness? Yet if it is impossible to say when the ordinary night began on this first day, it is not possible to determine the beginning of the first day. When we read, " Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear and it was so", or, "Let the earth bring forth grass and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind", there is not the slightest reason for supposing that it all took place in a few hours; there is no suggestion of a miraculous drying of the earth, so that grass and vegetable life could be full grown within twenty-four hours of the time when the earth had been covered with waters. Fifteen hundred years ago Augustine wrote in his De Genesi ad Litteram, "Let us, therefore, consider the beauty of any tree you like, in respect of its trunk, branches, leaves, fruit; this species did not, of course, suddenly spring up of this character and size, but in that order with which we are familiar. For it rose from the root which the first sprout fixed in the earth, and from this all these formed and distcint parts grew. Further the sprout sprung from seed. " There is very definite evidence that speed was not an element in the creation for instance of the man and woman; both were not created on the same day. In the 27th verse of the first chapter of Genesis, it is said, "Male and female created He them. " Had this verse stood alone it might have been assumed that this creation of the first pair was something done together and quickly. But it is very obvious from the second chapter that a great deal happened between the creation of the man and the creation of the woman. After the account of the creation of man and before the creation of woman, we read that "the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom He had formed, and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow (no suggestion of haste here, but the very reverse) every tree", etc., "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it". It was not until after these events that we read of God saying, "it is not good that man should be alone, I will make an help meet for him". Still another incident is recorded before woman was made for man. "God brought every beast of the field and every fowl of the air" to him "to see what he would call them and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle and to the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found any help meet for him ". So in regard to the creation of man and woman-about which there is more information than concerning the making of the heaven and earth-instead of any statement which would imply a completion in one day, there is definite evidence to the contrary. It is therefore quite obvious from this one instance that the acts and processes narrated on the days had not been completed on ordinary days, so that the twenty-four-hour day creation or recreation is contrary to Scripture. How God made man we are not told, apart from the fact that he was an exceptional creation made in the image and likeness of his Maker. Body and soul were so made that the completed product was in God's image, a person to whom God could talk, and who could talk to God. It is surely significant that nowhere in the Bible is any event dated from the beginning of creation of the earth. Yet some have assumed that 'suddenness' is an essential element of it. Sir William Dawson, the geologist, referring to Psalm civ, which is the poetic version of the first chapter of Genesis, says (Expositor 3rd Series, VOL 3, P. 289), " The work marches on in slow and solemn grandeur without any reference to the days. Again there is not anywhere in the Bible a hint that the work of creation was remarkable as being done in a short time. Some of us have no doubt been taught in childhood that God's power was wonderfully shown in His creating the world in a short space of six days, but there is nothing of this in the Old or the New Testament." Precisely how long ago God created the heavens and the earth we do not know. Astronomers and geologists have made suggestions as to times and methods. Except in the case of man the narrative of Genesis- does not tell us any detail of the process, or state what period of time was involved. Genesis tells us something that scientists cannot; science can know little or nothing about origins; in the very nature of the case they are quite unable to say what happened 'in the beginning'. Genesis however does tell us that God was the Originator and Controller. |