Our characters, while sharing much common ground (see Part 1), but having mostly agreed to disagree on Genesis 1:1 (in Part 2), decide now to take on the rest of the Creation narrative.
Usher: I’m afraid we’ll have the least agreement in talking through the rest of the Genesis creation narrative.
Augusta: We’ll see. If I had to summarize our differences so far, it’s that you measure available scientific theories against the heuristic “does this theory fit the text?”. I measure against the heuristic “if this theory were accurate, would God have inspired the text to be written this way?”
U: That’s fair. But I’d add that both these heuristics depend also on how you loosely you receive the text — I attempt to interpret as closely to the literal, written meaning as possible, where you seem comfortable granting more poetic liberty.
A: Yes, I do (I’d add: of course I do), and we don’t need to rehash all this previous discussion. Let’s just get into it.
Usher discusses the 6 days of Creation, from his perspective
Augusta: I led the last time. How about you start us off.
Usher: No problem. My position is very simple: read the Bible, and what it says, is what happened, literally, without need for any further contextual interpretation.
A: Come on! It isn’t so simple.
U: It really can be! When it says “God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation…’ and it was so … And there was evening and there was morning, the third day” — I take this as, God created all of the species of vegetation we have on Earth, in a less-than-24-hour period, from nothing (and created the land in that same period, by the way).
A: I’m just curious, how do you imagine this happening. As in, if you were standing there on the third day, when God gathered the water together to make seas, and spoke vegetation into existence, would you see massive continents rising up over the first couple hours of that day (and the ensuing tsunamis, etc), and then in the remaining 10 or so hours of the day before evening, witness millions of plants of every species either appearing fully grown, or sprouting from seeds (would you see the seeds appear fully formed?) or something else?
U: In short, yes. During the 6 days of Creation, as God created physical things like vegetation and continents, He was also creating the laws of biology, physics, etc which govern them. So it isn’t far-fetched or so smirkingly self-evidently obvious, to me, that we could see continents rising up from the world’s oceans in a few hours span, or plants growing miraculously from seed in a single day.
A: Okay, at least you’re consistent. I don’t deny this has an appealing simplicity, on its face. But it doesn’t feel like a strong, fully-reasoned faith, to me, it feels like a worldview of deus ex machina.
U: Well, we do both believe in supernatural power!
A: Yes, but I’d like to also believe he exerted his power in an integral way, not as a, some kind of magicking. It doesn’t seem elegant to me to just make things appear, outside of process. I don’t want to magic my child into fully-formed adulthood, I want to painstakingly raise him over a period of decades — isn’t this instinct a shadow of God’s desires as Creator? And anyway, how could you have the entire spectrum of animal life appear in the course of 48 hours on this planet, and not wreak catastrophic damage on the plant life, for example.
U: I think it’s interesting that your namesake, St. Augustine, thought it all happened in an instant, not even 6 days.
A: Sure. But his point, if I understand it at all, was to not get lost in the details — an instant, 6 days, a billion years … it’s not clear which value the narrative supports, and it’s not clear whether humans will ever confirm the true value, so best to keep an open mind when the two don’t clearly agree, and reexamine both when they clearly disagree.
U: Oof. Seems to me a wishy-washy stance. So how would you lay out events?
Augusta discusses Creation from her perspective
Augusta: Broadly, here’s how I see a possible correspondence between the Genesis account and our modern understanding of the universe’s and Earth’s chronology. Please forgive both my rookie exegetical remarks and JV scientific background.
Ex nihilo creation (v 1-2). We covered this in more detail previously, and it seems to correspond well with the modern conception of a big bang. (By the way, for the Spirit hovering over the face of the “waters” (Hebrew mayim), I think we have to interpret this as a poetic call-forward to the water formation later in the narrative, not as a cue we had a waterworld before the creation of stars.)
Creation of light (v 3-5). “Let there be light.” This seems to be the first formation of stars and galaxies, which in contemporary understanding happens around 200-500 million years after the big bang. Remarkable, to me, that an account written 3000 years ago highlights the primacy of star formation.
Separation of Earth from Heaven (v 6-8). Here God is separating “waters” with an “expanse” — a classic interpretation is the creation of an enveloping atmosphere around the earth, with the high vapor-heavy atmosphere = Water 1, sky = Expanse, seas = Water 2, which seems sensible. Being a little broader, this could describe what we understand as the collapsing mass of our early solar system forming a protoplanetary disc around the Sun, and eventually planets, as runaway accretion collected dust around the early Sun into larger and larger masses — and in the case of Earth, an atmosphere, unique in the Solar System and worth describing (thus, the verse).
Creation of land and water (v 9-10). This passage describes the formation of land and seas, which follows well from our understanding of the transition of Earth from a sphere of molten rock to a planet with an atmosphere and a surface dominated by large bodies of water. The origin of water on Earth is an open area of research (like all these topics), but the details of the consensus opinion are not relevant here — only that the progression of 1. Earth formation, 2. atmosphere formation, 3. sea and land formation, as outlined in Genesis 6-10, is generally unquestioned.
Creation of vegetation (v 11-13). The remainder of the narrative focuses on the origins of life on Earth. First up, “vegetation,” which I imagine could reference broadly the entire early arc of biodiversity on the planet, from microbes to plant life.
Creation of the stars (incl. the Sun), and the Moon (v 14-19). This passage raises two confusing points: we’ve already seen the creation of some stars (v. 3-5), and it doesn’t make sense to have vegetation (v. 11-13) before a light source. One possibility is that the early formation of the Earth happened in the orbit of a proto-Sun, and this verse is describing the transition of the Sun to its current state (and that the Moon was formed after the beginnings of life) — these aren’t wild ideas, with the Earth forming around 4.5 billion years ago (Ga), its atmosphere around 4.4 Ga, the moon around 4-3.8 Ga, and the earliest microorganisms around the same time. (Another possibility is that we just shouldn’t interpret the sequence so strictly.)
Creation of creatures in the sea and air (v 20-23). We now have our first round of living creatures. It is remarkable that the Bible’s description of animal life originating in the sea accords with modern science’s understanding, with the earliest accepted animal fossils being things like jellyfish and anemones, somewhere around 750-480 million years ago (Ma). “Birds of the air” presents a challenge, since our current conception is that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which puts us millions of years out of sequence. Insects were likely the first flying creatures and would have preceding land colonization, and the original Hebrew could be interpreted as “flying things,” I think, which would make this work. So my conclusion is either, let’s wait and see on the scientific theory, or, let’s not force such a strict chronological sequence onto our interpretation.
Creation of creatures on land (v 24-25). We continue with our second round of creatures, on land. There seems to be a deliberate distinction between “beasts” and “livestock” (i.e. domesticable animals?), but this doesn’t seem to affect our endeavor to find concordance with the scientific theory.
Creation of man — male and female — with dominion (v 26-31). Finally, we have the culmination of creation, creation of mankind, which concords with the emergence of homo sapiens around 300k years ago. We shouldn’t get too hung up on which phase of human development the narrative is referring to — sapiens, habilis, etc. — because it doesn’t matter to the narrative’s purpose and so it leaves it pretty open.
And on the seventh day, He rested.
U: Interesting interpretation. You are taking enormous liberties — I get the feeling with this amount of leeway, you could fit almost any narrative, to any scientific chronology.
A: I disagree. First, no creation myth that I’ve read is as descriptive or detailed (or, therefore, in a way, bold) as the Biblical narrative: Enūma Eliš is mostly gods fighting monsters, the Eridu Genesis is very broad until it cuts to the flood event. Second, when they do get into specifics, they get it decidedly wrong: Voluspá seems to put earth formation before any light sources, the various earth-diver myths have a living creature preceding all earth and life formation.
Addressing agency through control of chance
Usher: Alright, and I’d also like to talk about your implication that creation involved random processes spanning billions of years. This seems anathema to our God as Divine Creator. For example, by propping up concordance with contemporary scientific theory as a goal, are you left advocating for Darwin’s evolution of species?
Augusta: I disagree that random processes playing a role in our lives is anathema to an active, divine Creator God. Isn’t what appears to us random, to God (pre)determined? If God is in control of chance events, he can guide a “random” process toward his vision of creation. And then, something like “natural selection” is not an atheistic conception — the selection is guided, and the environment (the nature) in which it occurs was shaped. In fact, I’d argue it seems likely that all of Creation was effected through a supernatural control of what we call chance events.
U: This sounds like “Intelligent Design”.
A: It’s not, at all. “Intelligent design” is a (pseudo)scientific program of counterarguments to the mechanism of evolution, that argues the necessity of an intelligent, thinking, purposeful agent to explain the complexity we observe in nature and specifically, organisms. It is pseudoscience because it markets itself as science, but posits untestable, metaphysical ideas — and it is insufficient, to my eye, because it argues against evolution (irreducible complexity, etc) but doesn’t offer a satisfactory replacement. It says the complexity of the [whatever] requires an active, intelligent designer — okay, but how. The supernatural designer appeared it from thin air? I’m offering only that the how could very well be evolution (under God’s control, through his control of chance).
U: By accepting atheistic mechanisms like the big bang, or evolution, and having God only play a role in explaining-the-difficult-to-explain aspects of these theories (for example, the complexity of the eye, or the moment before the big bang), you limit him to a God-of-the-gaps.
A: Again, no. First of all, God is present in everything — evolution is not, by definition, an “atheistic mechanism”. Therefore, his role is critical everywhere, but his light will shine brightest where our understanding is the dimmest.
So for example, in ancient times, you thanked God for the rains after the drought, and now we know the rains and drought come as results of meteorological systems that are understood, modeled, in-hand. But God is still present in these phenomena — he still hears our prayers for rain, and his hand still governs the “random” process that brings it. His presence is not as obvious, and so we feel too dignified to prostrate ourselves for deliverance from the uncertainty because we have a mathematical model for it — but he’s just as much in control.
For example, in current times, God provides an answer to “what initiated the Big Bang”, but I expect us to someday have a convincing scientific explanation for this question that involves natural processes. But there God will still be present, just as before, even if we have a physical or mathematical model approximating a description of the medium in which he works.
Second of all, I believe there are fundamental things science can never explain — truly metaphysical, supernatural things. I believe in spirits, the numinous, I believe in souls, I believe in a supernatural connection between two souls called love that transcends chemical explanation. I believe that none of these will — or can — ever be explained by the material, physical and therefore are beyond the realm of science. I make this assertion knowing it is untestable, unfalsifiable, unscientific, and that I can only make it on faith. So in that sense, yes, God is the God of these gaps, the gaps that science can never explain.
U: Well, I agree with your second assertion but not the first. But I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it at that.
A: Why’s that?
U: We haven’t talked about Adam and Eve, the Fall, talking serpents, the Flood, or countless other popular tropes in the “Science vs. Scripture” debates. Treatises have been written on these topics, that we have not fully read. And we’ve been talking quite a while. So anyway, I think we’ve sufficiently outlined our differences and should stop while we’re ahead.
A: On that, I agree!
Our characters go their merry way — if you missed their previous conversation, catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 — thanks for reading and Merry Christmas!