Science and the Biblical Creation Account

The Coherence of the Biblical Creation Account(s)

It is sometimes argued that the Bible contains different creation accounts which contradict one another. The Psalms and the prophets sometimes speak of God establishing order by defeating a mythological chaos monster, Rahab or Leviathan (Job 26:7-13; Ps 74:12-17, 89:10-13; Isa 51:9-10); this resembles creation stories of other ancient Near Eastern cultures, in which a god creates an ordered cosmos by defeating other gods or chaos creatures. Then there is Proverbs 8:22-31, in which God creates through Wisdom. Then there is the creation story of Genesis, in which God creates simply by speaking the world into being. Furthermore, many argue that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are actually two separate, contradictory creation accounts. If the Bible contains various contradictory creation accounts, then what it has to say about God creating the world is incoherent and cannot be trusted.

It is important to note, though, that every biblical text that speaks of God establishing order by defeating a mythological chaos monster occurs in poetry. Pagan myths about gods establishing an ordered cosmos by defeating chaos monsters would have been well-known to the ancient Israelites in their ancient Near Eastern context. The biblical poets rework this mythological language, either to make polemical points about God’s superiority over the gods of other nations, or to speak in figurative terms about God’s actions in history. There is no good reason to interpret these texts as a literal description of how God created the world. 

As for Proverbs’ account of God creating through Wisdom, this does not in any way contradict the creation story of Genesis. It just highlights the role that Wisdom played in God’s creation of the world.

It is possible that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were originally two separate creation accounts which the author of Genesis combined together. However, even if this is the case, it is reasonable to read them as they now stand in the text of Genesis as one coherent creation account. Genesis 2 does not contradict Genesis 1. It complements it by giving more detail about the creation of humanity, spoken of briefly in Genesis 1. Thus, there is no good reason to think that the Bible contradicts itself in its account of God’s creation of the world.

The Coherence of Science and the Biblical Creation Account

Even if the Bible is internally consistent in its account of creation, though, its account of creation is very often criticized as being unscientific. According to scientific theories widely accepted today, the earth is billions of years old, and modern living things are the result of millions of years of gradual evolution. This contradicts what many Christians believe to be the teaching of the Genesis creation story: that God directly created the earth and all living things six thousand years ago or so.

However, as I have argued in this previous theology post, there is actually no good reason to think that this young earth creationist interpretation of the Genesis creation story is the correct one. For ancient Near Eastern people, to “create” did not mean to cause matter to exist where none existed before; rather, it meant to separate something out by giving it a name and assigning it a function.  Genesis 1, then, is not about God causing the matter of the universe to exist ex nihilo; it is about God bringing about order in the cosmos.  Therefore, the six days of the creation story of Genesis 1 tell us nothing about the age of the earth or the universe.^[1]See The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John H. Walton (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009). Thus, there is no contradiction between current scientific theories about the age of the earth and the Genesis creation account. 

It is clear that the ancient Israelites had a prescientific understanding of the structure of the universe that was similar to that of other ancient Near Eastern cultures. They believed that there was a flat earth, that the sky was a hard dome with waters above it, and that there were “windows of heaven” through which water fell when it rained. The Old Testament, including the creation story of Genesis, sometimes uses this language to talk about the world, because that was the only language that was available to talk about it at the time. God spoke to the ancient Israelites in terms they could understand using the phenomenal language of the day, similar to how meteorologists today use the language of “sunrise” and “sunset,” even though they know that it is the earth that is actually moving, not the sun. 

Skeptics claim that the lack of teaching about the physical structure of the solar system in the Genesis creation account provides reason to doubt that it is truly Divine revelation. But God had no interest in teaching the ancient Israelites about the physical structure of the solar system. What He was interested in was telling them about who He is and what kind of people He wanted them to be. Therefore, it is unreasonable to expect the creation account of Genesis to contain teachings about the physical structure of the solar system that have been discovered by modern science. 

The Genesis creation story is nonscientific; it does not contain scientific teachings about the age of the universe or the physical structure of the solar system. However, it is not unscientific; its teachings do not contradict modern scientific theories about the age of the universe or the physical structure of the solar system. There is harmony between the Genesis creation account and the findings of modern science.