God, Science and Genesis 1:1a.

I have found that most of those who call Christians stupid for believing the Bible, know very little about it, and may never even have read it. Either that, or they will take their own interpretation of this or that verse and then slam us for believing that interpretation. Its called setting up a straw man, you know those who are easy to tear down! And I have seen this perpetrated on the very first phrase of the very first verse of the very first book of the Bible. Well I guess it saves having to read it :).

Genesis 1:1(a) says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, .....” An atheistic “sermon” I heard from one of the militant atheists started by interpreting this to be saying that the heavens and the earth were created at the same time. And (the sermon continues) since Science tells us that the earth was formed way after the heavens were formed, way, way after, then whole thing should be thrown out from the very beginning. But surely we need to ask if this reading of the text is correct, if this what was intended to be communicated, if this is the point and focus of what is being said.

If you ask a man wearing yellow tinted glasses what colour a zebra is (assuming he has never seen one before) you are likely to be told 'yellow and black', or if the glasses were red tinted, the observed colours would likely be pink and black. The point I am making is that if we are to understand Scripture correctly there are a number of things we need to take into account. In particular we must be careful that we do not read the text with our 21st Century glasses (which can easily distort what is being said), and with our presuppositions firmly in place (i.e. we all know that God does not exist, right?). There are many many difficulties in understanding and interpreting Scripture. For instance, the distance between us and the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures is enormous in both time and culture. And while this is not the place to go into this in detail we do, we need in the first instance to understand how the early readers would have understood the text. If our interpretation is correct, it would need to have made sense to those to whom it was first written.

So let's come back to our phrase “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, ...” How would this have been understood by the first readers of this phrase? Let me suggest several things, firstly they would understand that there was a beginning, that the heavens and the earth were not always there. It is surely interesting to note that for a long time many Scientists were saying that the cosmos was indeed always there, and at that time such people laughed at the Biblical statement that there was a beginning. These days virtually nobody believes this (various forms of the Big Bang theory hold the day). Secondly this phrase states that there is a being, identified here as “God,” who is outside of space, time and matter, and who created the said space, time and matter out of nothing. As I have said elsewhere, once you admit a beginning, the logical options are very few, in fact there are only two. Either “In the beginning someone or something outside of space time and matter created everything that is out of nothing,” or “In the beginning nothing created everything that is out of nothing.” If we are to be consistent with the Scientific principle of cause and effect, and if there was beginning, then one or the other of these two options has to be true. To me the first option is much more believable (though this is not how I came to believe). And I have to say that it seems to me to be more than a tad ridiculous to laugh at those of us who believe the first view, since the second view can only be held by faith, and that by a faith that is not only without a scrap of empirical evidence to support it, but a faith that contradicts the law of cause and effect!

I want to be clear that at this point of the argument, the logic does not necessarily point to the Judeo Christian God as the only option for the creator. That is an entirely separate argument. Along these lines, it is interesting to me to note the case of the famous (almost life long) atheist Anthony Flew. Flew, though he became a theist towards the end of his life, did not become a Christian. Among other things what lead him to the conclusion that some form of god existed, was the incredible complexity of life. Life is so complex that he could no longer believe that it all happened by chance. He became a theist, but got no further than that!

So to recap, the phrase we are discussing here is saying that there was a beginning, there is a creator and this creator created everything that is out of nothing. In relation to our skeptics interpretation, we can (hypothetically) ask our ancient reader if he understood this to be also saying that the heavens and the earth were created at the same time. But I am not sure it is a valid question to ask him (or her). If you stand at the bottom of a mountain range looking up, the question of whether the peek you see over the the top of the first rise is the same mountain, is in many ways an unfair question. You do not have enough information to answer it. With respect to the skeptics question, I want to say firstly that I don't think it is a question that would have occurred to our first reader. He would have no frame of reference to ask it, and in any case he would not have had enough information from this phrase alone to answer the question. On the other hand the rest of Genesis 1 clearly points to their being stages of the earth's development. And in Genesis 2:4 the entire period that encompassed the stages in Genesis 1 is telescoped into a single period there. So why would it be unreasonable to think that the stages of the creation of the heavens and the earth would not similarly be telescope in Genesis 1:1. What I am saying is that to insist that Genesis 1:1 precludes stages of development is to read a lot more into the text than is really there.

Unfortunately many Christians do similar types of exposition of texts when they want to prove a point that the text may not support. It is called Eisegesis, which is reading into the text (Greek “eis” means “into”), as opposed to exegesis which means "to lead out" of the text. Eisegesis is defined as the process of interpreting a text or portion of text in such a way that it introduces one's own presuppositions, agendas, and/or biases into and onto the text. When people complain to me that “You can make the Bible say anything you want.” I usually answer “Yes, and using exactly the same rules you need to use to do this, I can make the dictionary say the very same thing. And since I realized this, I have stopped using the dictionary” :-). Thank the Lord for spellchecker!

So where am I going with this? What I am saying is that things may not be as black and white as some (on both sides of the divide) would have us believe. Nobody has all the truth, not one of us has arrived. We will not arrive at the truth by calling one another names. When we label one another as stupid or hieratic, we shut down communication. For the Christian we are to be Ambassadors for Christ, we are to be eager to preserve unity, we are to respect all who are made in the image of God and that means everyone. It seems to me that we have a ways to go!