It isn’t area I would normally consider engaging in because I am not a geologist. I take on faith the determinations of science that the Earth is a certain age. I take on faith that radiometric dating or other such methods give reasonable estimates of the earth’s age. I have no reason to doubt that the earth is not 4.5 billion years old, nor any reason to doubt that the universe is three times as old as the Earth itself.
But I know that science is not static. It is made up of theories that get verified based on best evidence available; then they get updated based on better information. Lord Kelvin in the 19th century estimated that the Earth was somewhere between 20 and 400 million years old. Even with that wide range, by today’s estimates he was more than 4 billion years out.
Like most people, I will never verify those figures for myself, just like I will never verify most things that I have to take on faith in life. I trust – to an extent – the scientific process of theory, experimentation, verification, falsification, and I trust the scientific community in all the vast realms that they work in, that their work, their means of testing, review, and confirmation are robust and sound, within the possibilities of human understanding.
Trust
I have to trust in this way. We all do. Otherwise we will live in a world of doubt and distrust. No one can spend their lives learning and proving everything for themselves. We would still be in the Stone Age if science did not build on the learnings of past generations and peers.
Don’t get me wrong – a healthy scepticism is a good thing. It is also vitally important in order for science to function. We need people who doubt, but also who have the knowledge, skills and training, to disprove what was previously considered ‘the best available science at the time’. Charles Darwin doubted Lord Kelvin’s science. Ironically, Darwin’s son, an astronomer, supported Kelvin’s approximations and disagreed with his uncle.
That was only 130 years ago. Think about it. 130 years ago, scientists were closer to the Biblical chronological age of the Earth (6,000 years old), than they were to today’s estimations. The Biblical chronological age comes from the Old Testament, combining the Bible’s genealogical records with the Genesis 1 account of creation. Genesis, it is estimated, was written sometime between – best estimates – 1440 BC and 1290 BC. That is nearly 3,500 years ago.
Most understand the Genesis’ chronology of creation and the Bible’s genealogy to be a narrative”
With that in mind, the authors of the Book should be forgiven for getting their estimates of the age of the Earth so wrong. Lord Kelvin was very wrong 200 years ago. 3,300 years before that, the Bible got its chronology wrong if it is to be taken literally.
Kelvin, however, does not get the same criticism as the authors of Genesis do for some reason, despite having 3,300 more years of learning and science to draw on.
That is, of course, if you consider the Bible to be a literal chronology. Some people do. But most do not. Most understand the Genesis’ chronology of creation and the Bible’s genealogy to be a narrative.
Figurative
Critics claim that Christians say the Bible is the Word of God, and God cannot lie – ergo, the Bible has to be taken literally. If it is taken literally, then it is at odds with science. Therefore, QED, it is a lie. Therefore, QED, it is not the word of God. Therefore, your God cannot exist.
The Genesis creation narrative – the 6 days of creation – and the Biblical genealogy are the two major points of scientific refutation of the Bible being the Word of God. That assumption of course is that whoever wrote Genesis was writing a verbatim transcript of God’s word.
But it isn’t claimed that the Bible is a transcript. Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation says that “Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit”. It is inspired writing.
The Catechism says a bit more: “According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.
We don’t have to take the creation chronology literally. It can be read as allegorical – understanding that what is written has a deeper, further meaning just as a parable may have; or anagogical – viewing the events in terms of their eternal significance.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone 3,500 years ago when farming was in its infancy, people were still in the Bronze Age and almost universally illiterate”
From this perspective, considering Genesis was written 3,500 years ago, long before the authors had any means of knowing or even hinting at the sequence of events that science now proposes about the beginning of time, the formation of the universe, the creation of earth, dinosaurs, evolution of birds, fish and animals to the arrival of humans, it should be a source of wonder that the Biblical sequencing bears some resemblance to what science now considers to be reality.
This isn’t fanciful. Put yourself in the shoes of someone 3,500 years ago when farming was in its infancy, people were still in the Bronze Age and almost universally illiterate: If the Genesis creation narrative is a pure fiction, how did its authors come up with something that is not that far from what science has only recently started putting together at that time in history?
Did they have vivid imaginations that fortuitously ended up in the most famous book in the history of the world which just happened to align reasonably well with what science discovered almost three and a half millennia later?
Are the odds of that type of serendipity less than the odds of there being a Creator?
Overlap
Science says that, first, we have the Big Bang. Genesis says: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth—and the earth was without form or shape.
Then there is some confusion: God said let there be light: but we are not sure what light this means. Then He created the water and the sea. Then there was vegetation. But then the sun and the moon came after to separate the light from the darkness. This sequencing is hard to reconcile and various theories abound that attempt to explain how it aligns with a scientific understanding. Who knows, perhaps the science will evolve to align more closely in future?
The most interesting piece is that long, long, long, before Darwin roamed the earth, Genesis understood that sea creatures and birds came before the “tame animals and crawling things and every kind of wild animal”. Genesis also knew that these all came before the human being, who then held “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals”.
This is pretty much exactly what happened. Life began in the sea. The earliest fossils of life, single-celled bacteria, are found in ancient rocks deposited in the oceans 3.5 billion years ago. By 1.2 billion years ago, the first complex multicellular life had evolved. The oldest evidence of full animal life in the oceans comes from about 635 million years ago.
How did humans 1500 years BC know that they came to be after the fish, the birds and the animals? What was their science? How did an almost illiterate civilisation come to understand the sequence of the universe that pretty much aligns with modern science?
This sequencing, its parallels with a modern scientific understanding, ought to be a source of wonder and a source of questioning”
How the authors come up with this understanding 3,500 years ago, 3,300 years before the study of fossils, before radiometric dating and all the other modern methods we now have for attempting to understand the history of the world, should be a question for science to strive to answer.
For a believer or a non-believer, this sequencing, its parallels with a modern scientific understanding, ought to be a source of wonder and a source of questioning. Rather than a literal interpretation of Genesis being a reason to dismiss the faith, and the Bible, as the Word of God, it ought to drive the question: if God didn’t inspire the authors how were they so far ahead of their time?
From this perspective, the onus ought to be on science to explain Genesis rather than Genesis to explain itself.