Month: February 2006

The Gap Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that the timeline offered to us in Genesis 1 is meant to be taken literally and sequentially but that there are gaps in it.

One version of the theory holds that there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and the creation of light in 1:3. As this is usually articulated, God first created the world and then it fell into a state of disrepair somehow (possibly by the fall of the angels) so that it became "formless and void" and God then set about a cosmic renovation project, which is what the six days record.

Advocates of this view appeal to certain words in the Hebrew of Genesis 1 that maybe could be translated in a way that would allow for this theory (but not require it) and to certain other passages in the Old Testament whose support for this theory is highly contestible.

These are just scraps though, not solid evidence for the theory.

The Gap Interpretation simply does not leap off the page as a plausible interpretation when you read this text. I am not aware of anyone in the ancient world who proposed it, and it has every appearance of being a desperate expedient to square Genesis 1 with the findings of modern science rather than a plausible interpretation of the text in its own right.

(It’s also not clear how well it accomplishes its intended task, since modern science does not view the current world order as having been re-established/created in a period of six days following a cataclysm of some kind. To try to deal with this problem, some have suggested additional gaps between the six days, so that they represent six individual days–scattered throughout billions of years–on which God did things, but this also is in no way suggested by the text.)

We’ve also still got the Fourth Day sun problem. (And we may have the land-animals-before-birds problem if you go for a gap of millions of years between Day Five and Day Six.)

While one could postulate that there was a space of time before God initiated the day/night cycle on Day One without doing unjust violence to the text, positing that there was a prior creation that deteriorated and that Genesis 1 is simply the story of how THIS PHASE of cosmic history got started is NOT a plausible reading.

The reason is that it mistakes the primary function of the Genesis 1 narrative. It’s a creation story, not a re-creation story. If it were meant to be the latter then the author would have needed to signal this fact in some clearer way than he did. On its face, the commonsense interpretation of the chapter is that Genesis 1 tells us the story of how God established THE WORLD, not just this phase of the world’s history.

So, again, the kindest thing I can say about this is that it is an interesting stab at interpretation but that it is so speculative that it is completely without support–or substantial support, at any rate.

The next interpretation of Genesis 1 that I’d like to consider is the Revelatory Day Interpretation. According to this interpretation, the six days of creation are not days through which the world was created. Instead, they are six days through which the creation of the world was revealed to man.

The idea is that God showed Moses (or somebody) a series of visions at a rate of one per day in which he disclosed the mystery of creation. Genesis 1 thus serves as a kind of diary of the visions.

This gets around–or potentially gets around–a number of problems.

The first and most obvious one is that it gets around the evening and morning problem I mentioned in the previous post. The evening and morning hendiadys has its usual meaning: It refers to a 24-hour day.

But it doesn’t get around the Fourth Day sun problem–at least unless you want to say that the visions of the six days zoom around in history rather than telling what God did in chronological order.

(Nor, for those wanting to square all this with modern science, does it get around the land-animals-after-birds problem unless you adopt the "zoom around" theory.)

But these are small matters.

The real problem with the Revelatory Day Interpretation is that there is nothing in the text to suggest it. The text does not have the usual language of biblical prophecy. We don’t have Moses writing "And on the second day God showed me this and on the third day he showed me that." The latter is the kind of language we find elsewhere in the prophets, but it isn’t what we find in Genesis 1.

Worse, the very first day is taken up with the creation of the day/night cycle. That seems to be a peg that roots the interpretation of the six days as being days in which the world is created rather than days in which the creation is revealed.

I mean, if you spend your first day setting up the day/night cycle and then you say "and there was evening and there was morning, one day" then you’ve strongly suggested that the "one day" was the one you were just talking about–in which the day/night cycle was created. If you then slap a parallel formula onto the end of each of the other days then it suggests that they, too, were days in which these things were created, not days in which they were revealed.

At a minimum, it would be EXTRAORDINARILY MISLEADING to the reader to do this.

So the most charitable thing I can say about the Revelatory Day Interpretation is that it is an interesting stab at what the days mean, but it is completely without support and on its face contrary to the text, making it almost as demonstrably false as the Day-Age Interpretation.

The Day-Age Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that each of the six days of creation represents a long, indefinite period of time rather than a 24-hour day. Each day may represent millions or billions of years, allowing the Genesis 1 chronology to be squared with the findings of modern science.

In its favor, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation can point to the fact that, in Hebrew as in English, the word "day" can mean a number of things. It can mean "the daylight hours of the day," "a 24-hour day," or "an undefined period of time."

Sentences like the following three are thus equally possible in both English and Hebrew:

• "He went out during the day, but he came home again at night."
• "We’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
• "Many Christians were put to death in the Emperor Nero’s day."

Strictly focusing on the word "day" (Hebrew, yom, which rhymes with "foam") it is possible that the six days of creation could be read as six long periods of time.

Advocates of the interpretation can even point to the fact that Genesis 2:4 uses the word yom in precisely this sense, speaking of "the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

But there are problems.

First, the Genesis 2:4 reference seems to be part of a different literary unit. We seem to have moved on from the recounting of the week of creation to zoom in on the specific creation of Adam and Eve. This means that the use of the word yom in 2:4 may not shed all that much light on its use in chapter 1. Further, since Genesis 1 depicted the creation of the heavens and the earth as a succession of six yoms (to stick an English plural ending on a Hebrew word; the Hebrew plural would be yomim, pronounced yo-meem) and since 2:4 depicts it as being created in a single yom, that’s at least prima facie evidence that yom is being used in different senses in these passages.

These are small matters, though. Now for some big ones.

The Day-Age Interpretation has a HUGE problem with the fact that the day/night cycle is set up on Day One, while the sun isn’t created until Day Four.

The ancients knew that the fact that the sun is shining is what provides daylight and makes it day, and that the absence of the sun is why the sky is dark at night. This is not something that you need Charles Darwin or even Galileo Galilei to tell you. It’s pretty blog obvious. We know the ancients understood it because some of them–like Origen and Augustine–commented on the fact that the sun was created after the day/night cycle and speculated on what this might mean for the nature of these days.

To get around this problem, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation have tried proposing a number of theories, none of which are plausible readings of the text in Genesis.

For example: There was a mist or cloud or barrier or atmospheric condition of some kind that blocked clear vision of the sun until the fourth age but which let daylight seep through in a diffuse way for the first three ages. Well, that’s not suggested by anything in Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in trouble.

Or: The Day-Ages in Genesis 1 aren’t concurrent. They overlap with each other, so the sun would have been visible from the earth’s surface in earlier ages. (This variant also can get around the problem of how birds and fish get created on Day Five even though land animals aren’t created till Day Six. Modern science suggests that the order was fish > land animals > birds, which doesn’t square with Genesis 1 unless the days overlap.) Again, this is not suggested by ANYTHING in Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in trouble.

But even if the sun-on-Day-Four problem could be solved, there’s another LARGER problem which is completely insoluble as far as I’m concerned.

It’s this: At the end of each day in Genesis 1 the text says a variant on, "And there was evening and there was morning, a second day" (the last bit of the phrase is what changes).

Evening and morning were the two cusps of the 24-hour day in Hebrew time reckoning. The placement of evening first also represents Hebrew time reckoning, since the Hebrew day began at sunset, so evening came before morning. "There was evening and there was morning" is a kind of hendiadys that expresses the whole of the Hebrew day. It’s like saying "day and night" in English–a way of gesturing to the whole of a 24-hour day by naming the two opposing parts of it.

That’s why the phrase is then followed by "one day, "a second day," "a third day," and so on. The evening and morning hendiadys emphasizes the two parts of each of the six days of creation.

Now here’s the problem: The evening and morning hendiadys clearly points us in the direction of a 24-hour day, and the Day-Age Interpretation has an INSURMOUNTABLE problem in that this hendiadys would NEVER have been used to describe a long, indistinct period of time. Long periods of time (especially ones millions or billions of years long) are not divisible in terms of a single evening and a single morning–not by anything other than the interpreter’s fiat, at any rate. This was NOT a part of ancient Hebrew time reckoning, and it would have occurred to NOBODY in the ancient world.

And so I think the Day-Age Interpretation is demonstrably false. It simply is not a credible reading of the text in literary terms.

Yesterday’s post about the Death Star Theory (my name for it) raised a number of questions about the interpretation of Genesis 1 and its famous six days. In a series of posts today, I’ll give some thoughts on that. First, let me tell you what my conclusions will be.

There are a truckload of different interpretations of Genesis 1 that have been offered, and I can’t consider them all today. I can consider more (like Gerald Schroeder’s relativistic interpretation) later on. Here’s a list of the five interpretations I will consider today, ranked in order from what I consider the most plausible to the least plausible, along with notes on how plausible I think them to be:

1. The Framework Interpretation (most plausible from a careful reading of the text)
2. The Ordinary Day Interpretation (most plausible from a casual reading of the text)
3. The Gap Interpretation (almost completely without foundation)
4. The Revelatory Day Interpretation (virtually demonstrably false)
5. The Day-Age Interpretation (demonstrably false)

Please note in how I treat these interpretations that I am coming at them here from a purely literary perspective. The question I’m asking is: "Given what the text says, how likely is it that this is the correct interpretation of the text?"

I’m trying to arrive at the correct interpretation by considering the question of textual interpretation first, not rushing to square the text with the findings of modern science. My interest is in figuring out what the text most likely means taken on its own terms, not trying to harmonize it with modern science.

In this discussion, I’ll only present one significant point of a scientific nature, and it isn’t a point of modern science. It is something that the ancients knew and commented on, making it fair to include in a discussion of what the author of Genesis 1 meant by what he wrote.

(I will also include an additional few notes based on modern science, but these will be in parentheses as they are not part of my main argument. My main concern is just what the text would be read to mean on its own, without considering modern science.)

Having said that, let’s look at these interpretations, starting with the least plausible.

I present the following with some caution.

It comes from Hugh Ross, who is a good guy from what I can tell about the man, and who does significant apologetics work, particularly in developing things like the arguments for God’s existence based on the apparent design of cosmological and local astronomical constants. I’m glad he’s out there, doing that work.

But when Hugh strays into certain areas, he makes mistakes (like all of us). For example, I think that his interpretation of Genesis 1 is demonstrably wrong (he advocates the day-age interpretation of the hexahemeron, and that dog just won’t hunt).

In other cases Hugh advocates things that I don’t consider demonstrably false but that I’d am highly skeptical of.

Put the following into that category. I present it here not because I think it’s true but because I think it’s an interesting (if far-fetched) idea.

His idea is this: The ages of the patriarch are to be taken literally and the consequent dramatic shrinkage in the human life span has a natural cause that science may have unwittingly stumbled across.

Take it away, Hugh!

In my own and others’ writings, the Vela supernova (a massive stellar explosion that occurred early in the human era) has been identified as the possible culprit. It seems this event may be at least partly responsible for the cosmic radiation that keeps people from living longer than 120 years or so. In recent months, however, a new and much more likely suspect has been identified.

First, some background. Deadly, cancer-causing (life-shortening) radiation comes from two main sources: 1) the decay of radioactive materials in Earth’s crust, and 2) massive stellar explosions (supernovae) within the Milky Way Galaxy. Cosmic radiation from supernovae (and their remnants) showers the Earth all the time. Most of that radiation is benign and fairly constant, just electrons and protons moving at less-than-dangerous velocities. But some—such as the electron-stripped atoms of oxygen and iron moving at hyper-fast velocities—can do major damage to living things.

Since 1996 Anatoly Erlykin and Arnold Wolfendale have been studying cosmic radiation’s particle energy spectrum—in particular, the high end (above a quadrillion electron volts per nucleon). They have found two peaks in the spectra, protruding high above the background. These peaks, they say, are the signature of a single, major event—a local, recent supernova blast. In other words, the thousands of supernova remnants scattered throughout the Milky Way Galaxy account for the relatively constant radiation background, but the two peaks tell of a local, recent supernova, the shock waves of which would have increased the velocities of oxygen and iron nuclei, turning them into killer radiation.

Initially, Erlykin and Wolfendale loosely identified this supernova as one closer than 3,000 light years and more recent than 100,000 years ago. These features suggested the Vela supernova (distance = 936 light years; eruption date = 20,000-30,000 years ago) as a prime possibility. With improved data, however, Erlykin and Wolfendale have been able to make a more positive identification. This particular supernova occurred so close to Earth that our solar system likely resides just inside the shell of its remnant. That remnant itself, they point out, occupies a significant portion (up to 40 degrees) of the sky—so vastly spread out that astronomers would have had great difficulty distinguishing it from the background.

GET THE STORY.

While I don’t think it likely that Hugh’s astronomical explanation for the shortening of the Genesis life spans is likely the correct one, it is quite possible that such supernovae are having a depressing effect on the human life span. There really are deadly stars out there in the sky spitting out radiation that will cause cancers in humans that would not otherwise occur. I just don’t think the effect is likely to be as dramatic as Hugh does. There are plenty of other things on Earth to kill you besides cosmic radiation (like germs, for example), and this change (together with the others he mentions) does not strike me as being at all likely to explain the shrinkage of the Genesis life spans.

That’s not to say it’s not interesting to think about, though.