A certain friend of mine, who I respect deeply and look up to, recently told me that as he didn't see why the creation debate was so important. This is something that I believe most people don't think about much, but the literal validity of Genesis one through three is just as important as the literal validity of the Gospels and the rest of the bible. If any part of the bible is not accepted as absolutly true then the entire structure of biblical theology collapses.
If one approaches Genesis one without any preconceived notions about what we should find and reads the text, it could not be said more clearly that God created the earth in six literal days and rested on the seventh. The typical aversion that 'days' in the passage really means ages simply does not hold water because it is impossible to say 'literal day' in Hebrew more clearly than to add 'morning and evening' and a number to the word for 'day'. The examples that are brought up for the word meaning 'age' are interesting on two levels. First and least importantly, they are usually explained in English phraseology. "We say dawn of a new day for mankind, when we mean the begining of a new age", "night had fallen on the era of Rome" etc. What we say and how we say it has no bearing on what and how the Hebrews said things a few thousand years ago. Secondly and far more importantly, of the few examples that are brought from scripture, none contain a number combined with either 'morning' or 'evening'. One must either accept that the Genesis account is true and God created the world in six literal day, or Moses got his facts from the wrong source or used an unfortunate set of words, thus throwing out the whole idea of biblical infallibility all together. You must make your choice.
There are four problems with trying to shove ages into the days of creation.
The sequence does not fit. You have morning and evening, light and darkness before the sun is created. The world does not start off as a sphere of rock and dirt, but is covered by water. You have birds flying before there are any creatures walking on the earth, all direct contradictions to the way many naturalists believe that life originated on earth.
You have imposed on the biblical text something that is clearing contrary to what is presented, thus destroying the infallibility of the scripture, which leaves you open to a world of problems. A common defense is to say that the days referred to are not necessarily earth days. This might be possible, but with the creation of light and its separation from darkness on day one, and the creation of the 'sun, moon, and stars' commonly taken to mean the planets and galaxies other than earth, you are ripping the text apart to make that claim. Additionally, as one wise man once told me, it's a theory, but where is your evidence?
With the infallibility of the bible destroyed, and the days grown into ages, you have several problems. How do you determine when day means day? Context, most people would reply, but the context in Genesis makes it clear that God is speaking of literal days.
The largest problem of all is that the creation account is God's first appearance to man, and it is wrapped up in his identity as ruler of the universe. You cannot change days into ages of evolutionary progression without loosing some part of god, his omnipotence (death and evil became part of creation and he doesn't like it but he can't stop it) or his holiness (evil is there and he put it there). No longer did God create a perfect, deathless, sinless world teeming with life and joy, with work not as a curse, but as a natural and enjoyable part of life and declare it all good. God created a world full of death, the great engine of evolutionary progression, millions of organisms are rotting and fossilizing before your first fish wriggles his way onto land and gets zapped by the finger of God and provided with a breathing system. At the end of the sixth age of your creation story, God looks down upon a planet already full of death and disease, and declares it very good.
There are three ways that you can progress from this and deal with death and suffering in the world. The first is to accept that God did the best he could, but was simply unable to prevent death and suffering from getting into this world. The problem with this approach is that now you have an impotent God who can't really save us. Besides, once you deny God's omnipotence we are no longer talking about the God of the Bible or any kind of biblical principles or theology.
The second way is to deny God's holiness. Nobody wants to do that.
The third way is to me the most infuriating. It attempts to keep both God's holiness and his omnipotence by saying that God fed the evil into the world on purpose and it's all part of a grand plan. That's fine except for two basic, fundamental problems. First, that's in direct contradiction to the bible (Romans 4:12, 8:18-22, Ecclesiastes 2:23). Second, its in direction contradiction to how the world works. The only thing it fits is a theory.
“It is one thing to say that the God of the bible is horrible, causes death and genocide, and use that as your explanation for not believing. That view is wrong simply on the basis of facts and has its own set of problems, but it is far preferable to a view that God is holy and created death and suffering, for while one mistakes the nature of God for evil and calls it evil, the other mistakes the nature of God for evil and calls it good. When you see the young boy struggling not to cry because his puppy died in the middle of the night, tell him that your God sees it as good. When you see the boy weeping because the girl he just married died in childbirth, tell him that her death is not a result of a broken and abnormal world, but a result of your God's perfect universe. When he watches his strong son who just got a scholarship to play football for a top university contract cancer, and slowly die, killed by organisms invisible to the eye, tell him that God delights in those creatures, and created them to kill.
“But” you protest “death is good, it releases us from this world, suffering makes us better people!” Does it indeed. Show me where! It was suffering that drove Adolf Hitler to his madness, it was suffering that drove the German people to accept him, it was suffering that drove the Russian people into Communism. It may be that for some people, some suffering creates better character qualities, but that does not make a rule. Also, it is a mistake to glorify a thing for that which it creates. You stand like the woman who stood on the bus and mentioned here hope that World War II continued for a long time, because it provided a good job for her husband. Hardly had the words left her mouth when another woman stood up and slapped her across the face. “Don't you ever say that again.” She said, “my husband is fighting over there.”
Now your whole world has changed because you based your faith not on the Word of the One who made the universe, but on the world of a man who has been studying a small piece of said universe for a few decades and has declared in his ultimate wisdom that god was wrong and he is right, the world must be billions of years old, far older than the bible claims. Deriding a faith based on things heard and seen he praises his scientific knowledge, based on faith of things unheard and unseen. His dating techniques assume that he knows the starting point is clean of all decayed atoms which he is counting to determine the age of his sample, and he assumes that the decay rate has been the same since the dawn of time. He ignores the fact that the layers in the rock that he counts as an age apiece have fossil trees growing right up through thirty or forty layers, and if he counts the dark and light rings in the arctic ice that he claims represents a year each, he'll find that the P-38 fighter plane we found a few years ago slipped back in time a century or so and crashed in the arctic around the Revolutionary War.
If we cannot trust God about how the world began, how can we trust him about how it will end. And if we cannot trust him at all, the end of the world is the least of our problems.
