Lecture

Is this third lecture, we continue with a discussion of the subject of the beginnings. The beginning of matter, we spoke of last time and argued that the Big Bang Theory is actually consonant with the statement of the Bible that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Though the Bible does not say how the earth was created, it says that our planet, at least, was formed in the six creative days and the seventh day is the day of rest.

Now the most natural interpretation of these verses, I suppose, is what would be called the Twenty-Four-Hour Day Theory. The only problem with the Twenty-Four-Hour Day Theory is that it means that the world was created just a short time before Adam was created, and then the date of Adam is found by such people, usually from the genealogies going back from Abraham to Noah in Genesis 11 and the genealogy going from Noah on back to Adam in Genesis 5. If these genealogies are complete, then of course we can get the date of Adam. This is the assumption of the Ussher chronology which places the date of Adam at about 4004 BC. The date of creation of Adam would be a little bit less in the Jewish chronology. The Jewish chronology states that today, this year, is the year 5735, so if you take 1974 off of 5735, you have the date of creation, BC, according to the Jewish calendar.

This recent creation of Adam, of course, could be extended back a little bit because the genealogies of the Old Testament are very often not complete and we will say something about that when we come to the discussion of the flood. At least Adam would be created at a reasonable time, some tens of thousands of years back, perhaps; beyond that, it just does not say when Adam was created. If there are gaps in the genealogies, we really have no sure way of knowing how large these gaps were.

But then before Adam, the other items of the creation were made according to this view in just one creative week. The trouble with this view, as I’ve said, is that it runs afoul of most scientific thought today which says that the universe is so very, very old; it’s been expanding from this big bang stage for some nine, ten-billion-years, maybe a little bit more, and that the world itself is perhaps four-billion-years old, according to radioactive measurements, potassium-argon method and the uranium method. The moon is old also, mirrors the sun. The stars are very old according to this view and, obviously then, you cannot have a very recent creation.

Those who hold the Twenty-Four-Hour Day Theory are aware of these things and the view that they espouse would be the view of grown creation. That is to say that the world was created with an appearance of age. I might explain that a little bit. They take the example of trees in the garden of Eden. Suppose there were an oak tree in the garden of Eden. Would it have been created with rings already? Would this oak tree have been created with a solid trunk and no rings when the rings actually are usual for an oak tree? Or would it have been created, say, with one-hundred rings as if it were one-hundred years old? Well it would seem to me, actually, possible to hold that when God created an oak tree in the garden of Eden, He may indeed have created it with rings as if it were one-hundred years old when it actually had been newly formed.

Adam, when he was created, was not a baby. Adam was created full grown. How old Adam was when he was created, we don’t know. But presumably, he was at least an adult and Eve was an adult also, created from his side. So the idea is that the world was created full grown and the distant stars that are traveling so fast away were created in flight and according to this view, the light was created not only at the star, but the light was created in a beam going from the star to the earth and other places at the same time. In short, the light was created with the star. So it would seem as if the star had been going for a long time, but yet actually, it was recently created and it was created with the light already in place. This is the Grown Creation Theory.

There are some philosophical difficulties with this view. I do not know that I can say that this view is not totally impossible; I think the arguments against it are mostly philosophical because you know it could actually be said that the world was created only a day ago, and all of us were created with memory and everything as if we were in our present age when we are only a day old. This seems to be a rather fanciful idea.

I say that it is true that oak trees may well have been created with their rings in place because the oak trees really naturally have rings. However, seems to me that we should say that the mountains, with their sedimentary rocks and fossils in the rocks, were the product of later movements, that God did not create the fossils in the rocks. You do not have to have fossils in order to have rocks. If God had created these fossils as if they were old when they were not, it would seem to be giving a false appearance, as if God were creating these things to be deceptive. That, of course, we would not hold. Those who hold this view, I think they all would hold to the [floodiology] that the fossils are the result of more recent items of geological work like the flood of Noah. But this is the Grown Creation Theory, and it is rather widely held among evangelicals today. We should understand it, though I myself do feel that it is somewhat artificial.

There is another theory that might be mentioned, and that is that between these creative days when God gave these fiats of creation that there was a long period of growth. That God said let the waters be gathered together, and this would be a time when the waters were gathering together. Then He said, let the earth bring forth vegetation, and He made vegetation in the earth and then after a long, long time, the vegetation covered the earth before He began the next creative day. In short, that there would be creative acts with long periods of time between them. This is not stated, but this is a possible interpretation, I suppose, of these verses in Genesis 1.

The view that I would espouse, really, is the Long-Day Creation Theory. According to this view, there were seven periods of time, not seven days, twenty-four hours long. But just as we have in English, a rather broad use of the word day, so we have in the Old Testament, the statement that, in that day, the Lord would bring the Assyrian. In that day would be the day of eschatology of the coming of the Lord. We think of the heyday of Queen Victoria, for instance. When we used the word day it might be twenty-four hours, it might be twelve hours, the time of daylight, or it might be a period. So the Hebrew also uses the word day in many senses and you can get this in any concordance. The plural of the word day is often used simply equivalent to the word year. The word yom in Hebrew does not have only one specific meaning of twenty-four hours.

It is argued, of course, that it doesn’t just naturally have the value of twenty-four hours in Genesis 1 because, if you remember, there were several days before the sun and moon were created. The sun and moon are created in the fourteenth verse, which would be the fourth day. God said let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, and He speaks of the two lights, and God made these two great lights. The greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night. And it says He set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and to divide the day from the light and so on. And these are to be for signs and seasons and days and years. So the marking of time did not begin, that is the astronomical marking of time, did not begin until the fourth day. How then do we argue that the first three days are days of twenty-four hours when there was no sun, at least no sun visible, in the heavens to mark the day and the night.

This is one argument in favor of the Twenty-Four-Hour Day Theory. It does, of course, propose a problem. It poses the problem of how did the plants grow before there was a sun? It does say that there was light on the first day, but that light was not the light of the sun. And how is it that these plants appeared and grew and covered the world in the time before the sun was set in the sky? It may be held that verse 17 of chapter 1 should be translated in a pluperfect sense.

It may be held indeed that when God formed the world, that it was presumably hot first. There would be an atmosphere that would cool, little by little, and as the atmosphere cooled, there would be the water of the world, largely in cloud form. And that would condense in great rains and there would be left a belt of clouds around the world. And that God had indeed made the sun and moon and stars at an early period. But standing on the surface of the earth, you could have seen nothing but clouds. You might have seen some variation of light and darkness as the world rotated, but you could not have established seasons and years and even perhaps clearly days.

And so it could be said that the plants gathered light that filtered through and grew in a warm greenhouse kind of an atmosphere, but that it was only in the fourth day that the light broke through. And so you would say God had made two great lights, I guess you should say the pluperfect would be in verse sixteen, had made two great lights and now, verse seventeen, God did set them in the firmament to give light upon the earth. That is to say now God made them, put them in the sky where people could see, anyone who might be upon the earth, animals and whatnot shortly, could see the sun and moon and that they are on a rotation.

There is another argument in favor of the Long-Day Theory, and it concerns also a question that some have had. The claim is made that you have in the Ten Commandments section, Exodus 20, you have the statement that God established the Sabbath, and He established the Sabbath and made it holy because in His creation, He worked six days and rested on the seventh. Just as He rested on the seventh, so man should rest on the seventh, the Sabbath day.

If the commandment is based on seven days of the week, then the creation would be seven days of the week. It seems to me that that argument fails because the creative days ended with the Sabbath of God that is not 24 hours. It seems quite clear from the book of Hebrews, as God discusses the day of Sabbath rest in which we should go in heavenly rest, it seems clear that God’s rest is forever. God, of course, is active, but God did the creative work in six days, and He has been resting since then from that creative work. It seems clear, from the Bible, that it says that the seventh day is a long, long period after that work of creation was over. If the seventh day, which is typical of the Sabbath day, is not a twenty-four-hour day, then the other six days of work of God need not be twenty-four-hour days; although, they parallel in type, the twenty-four-hour days of the week of work.

So it would seem to me that this seventh day is perhaps the key to the argument that these six days were actual period days and not twenty-four-hour days. If that be true, then we are left with a general picture that Genesis tells of the activity of God in creating. In the most general terms. There was, first of all, a period of creation of matter. That matter agglomerated, we don’t know any of the details. It was formed into what we would call the planet, and in this first day it may well be already that the story turns to the planet, and there it was covered in clouds and light barely suffused through into the new earth that was condensing.

Then, after the heaven and the earth were established, that is the sky because the firmament here is a word that means expanse, it doesn’t at all refer to something hard, in verse six, when God says let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters and the waters above from the waters under, it may be here that it is referring to no more than the sky with the clouds baring water above and the waters of the seas below. I think we ought to give the Hebrews due credit. There are some people who draw a very strange cosmology on the basis of this and other statements in the Bible. They say that the ancient Hebrews thought that the sky was just a little bit above their heads and that it was composed of a kind of a brass dome, hard sky, firmament. And the word, firmament comes from a Latin word which means firm. The claim is that the sky was hard and it had waters above. There were windows in the sky and in the story of the flood, it says that the windows of heaven were opened and the waters poured through these windows and they had the idea that the waters were restrained above the firmament and you open the windows and the water comes through. You close the windows and the rain stops. This is a rather childish view, and the claim is that the Bible presents a very childish view in thinking people cannot hold at all to the cosmology of the Bible. I think I would point out that this is a cosmology that is fastened upon the Bible by misunderstanding of its texts. The Bible does not say that the firmament is hard. Indeed, it says that the birds fly in the face of the firmament of heaven. The firmament simply is a word for the expanse of the sky.

The Hebrews knew where rain comes from. Isaiah, the fifth chapter, it says rain comes from the clouds. Remember when Elijah, on Mount Carmel, was praying for rain. He sent his servant to look over the Mediterranean to see what was coming, and finally the servant came back with word that there was a cloud, a small cloud, like a man’s hand. Good, says Elijah, this means rain. He knew that the clouds bring rain, not from windows in heaven. And by the way, in the ancient houses, windows did not open and shut as they do in our houses. The Hebrews did not have glass windows, of course, and so the windows in heaven are better translated. This I get from Dr. Donald J. Wiseman, at the British museum. The windows of heaven, the statement in the Noah story, is better translated sluice gates, the sluice gates of heaven, not windows at all. It is a figure of speech. Just as water flows in the irrigation ditches, so the water came down. We would say it came down in buckets in the time of the flood.

So this idea of a cosmology, of a limited sky, waters above and waters below, is taking these words much more prosaically than they should be. It says let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and the waters were divided by the sky with the clouds above and the seas below and this would be the early formation of the world. Perhaps not yet entirely as we know it, but world of the seas and land which was soon gathered together in one place and sky above.

So here we have this general statement of the formation and then it speaks of the dry land appearing and the earth bringing forth vegetation. In this sequence then, the world is formed, there is the plant life first, and then the mention of the luminaries appearing in the sky, and then comes the foul and the sea life, the water will bring forth abundantly moving creature and foul that fly above the earth and the open firmament of heaven.

I might point out that in recent days, it has been held that plants must have preceded animals on the earth. It is a very interesting scientific confirmation of the order of Genesis 1. Of course, like much scientific theory, this is not fully established yet. The record of the rocks does not show this. The record of the rocks shows in the earliest layers of the alleged geological column, at least, the Cambrian rocks, we find animals and plants together. Lately, there have been found some traces of plant life in earlier rocks, and so it may be said that if you accept the dating of the rocks, and if you accept the geological column and so on, that there is some evidence that, actually, plants came first.

The evidence, however, is more extensive from a theoretical angle and that is that in the early days, presumably, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere of the world. This is rather natural if the world was actually made from a fiery ball and cooled down. Presumably, all the oxygen would have been associated with metal and it would have, we would say, been burned up. The oxygen with the carbon would have made carbon dioxide. The oxygen with hydrogen would have made water. The oxygen with silicon would have made quartz and silicon dioxide, and so would the other metals. You would have all the carbonates and magnesium oxides and what not that we have in the world today. And there would have been no, what we call, free oxygen. Where did the oxygen come from in the atmosphere? The theory would be that there was a reducing atmosphere. That is, it would be hydrogen, ammonia, methane, things like this. No oxygen. If there had been oxygen there, it would have burned up the methane into carbon dioxide and hydrogen oxide, or water.

And so, according to this view, there would be first a reducing atmosphere. Then elementary plants would have appeared. Now, it would have been said by some, that these elementary plants would have come by accident. This would be the beginning of life. And so, these plants would have come, and by photosynthesis, they would have transformed carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which there would have been plenty. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, would have been transformed by the chlorophyll and photosynthesis into cellulose, carbohydrates, and waste product would have been oxygen. This is the familiar oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle that we observe today. The plants, the grass, the trees today absorb carbon dioxide, give off oxygen. The animals, and of course, our industrial plants also, absorb the oxygen and give off Carbon dioxide. This goes on in a cycle; the cycle is sparked by the chlorophyll and photosynthesis from the sunlight.

And so the Genesis order of the plants first and the animals next fits fine with at least recent scientific theory. Again, this does not prove that this particular scientific theory is right. It only means that the current scientific theory is in line with the bible, and there’s no problem here. Science may change and get some better theory, but if it gets a theory that is a good one, it too would fit the general statements given here in the Bible, the word of God.

Now I suppose we should say a little something about the so-called Gap Theory. Here the idea is that in the six days, life progressed in general form and finally the capstone of creation would be when God made man in verse 26 when He said let us make man in our image. Now according to the Gap Theory, the creation of something was very old. But that creation of something would be between verse one and two. And the claim would be, the earlier edition of the Scofield Bible, by the way, gives details of this Restitution Theory, it’s sometimes called. The theory is that God created the heaven and the earth and that creation involved plant life, animal life, and somewhat human life or angelic life—people/creatures looking like men whether they were angels or not—and that they multiplied upon the earth and we see their fossils and so on, and then all this early life was destroyed by an early judgment. That is what it means in verse two, it is translated, the earth became formless and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. According to this, verse three and following would be a new beginning. A new beginning and mankind and the animals and plants we see around us are a part of that new beginning. The new beginning is recent, but there was an old, old form and so the fossils that we find are pre-adamic creation.

I suppose this is not absolutely impossible; it is not a very natural reading of the Hebrew and yet the Hebrew can be taken that way. I think that I would say that it does not exactly answer the problems of science because, strangely, this pre-adamic creation seems to be awfully much like the adamic creation. If you think of the skulls in the caves of China, the Peking men, these skulls are supposed to be some half million, five hundred thousand years old and yet they belonged to people that remarkably modern had fire and they gathered berries for food and apparently they were cannibals, so the pre-adamic creation was an awful lot like the adamic creation. Also the flint implements that we find, an ancient man. A man of, oh say, three hundred, four hundred thousand years ago and his flint implements. These flint implements developed, and they developed into a time not too long ago. Then, according to the Gap Theory, there would be a complete destruction of all these and then more modern men. But the more modern men, strangely, picked up the flint implements about where the old men left them off. Which doesn’t seem at all logical.

I think the Gap Theory was forged in order to answer certain problems, and I don’t know that it really is so satisfactory in answering those problems, and I believe it is not so common anymore as it used to be. It is not absolutely impossible. I may say that Tolkien has very interesting books, The Lord of the Rings. In this trilogy, which by the way is worth reading rather ponderous three volume work, he pictures the world as it might have been in what he calls Middle-Earth. This would be ages ago when dwarves were real and fairies were real and men were real. It is, of course, high fantasy, but it has some very real spiritual truths too. It is possible, I guess, that there was a Middle-Earth, but the evidence for it, both scientific and biblical seemed exceedingly scarce, and the Gap Theory I mentioned, though I cannot recommend it.

We have then here a picture of the origin of the world as the Bible sees it and the origin of matter. Now we should say something about the origin of life. But the origin of life is a very big subject, and I do not know that we can go into it really at all. There is a man who has written extensively on this from the Christian point of view, Dr Duane Gish. His views are summarized and the bibliography is given in a book that is written by Dr. Russell [Motman] of Dordt College, Bible Science and Religion. A very good book that has chapters on the origin of matter, the origin of life, and so on.

It is assumed by many scientists today that life began naturally, and the key of life, the secret of life, is claimed to be the DNA molecule that has been studied particularly by Watson and Crick not too long ago. Much research, of course, has been done on this. The claim is that it is made of a series of nucleotides made up of proteins, amino acids, and [so on], sugars, and that this molecule happened by accident and when it happened it has the characteristic of splitting into two and each of these two portions then will duplicate itself and it can organize things around it so as to build its own cell and go on. It was easy to say but desperately hard to prove.

I should point out that the DNA molecule is much larger than most ordinary molecules. An ordinary molecule, for instance, of salt, sodium chloride, is just a small molecule—Sodium twenty-three, chlorine I think is about thirty-five. Atomic weight, add those together, some fifty-eight it would be, atomic weight. Now the DNA molecule has an atomic weight of about three million. It is pictured as a spiral coil, somewhat letter like, with sugars along the letter edges, and the rungs made up of these nucleotides. These rungs are made up out of four compounds in varying order. The point is that every one of these rungs can be arranged in different forms. If you can take them, for example, in code A, B, C, D, the A and B can go together and then another A and B go together and then a C and D and then five more Cs and Ds and then a couple of As and Bs, but the possibilities of different types of DNA are almost endless. Indeed, they say the different kinds of DNA are more numerous than all of the atoms in all of the universes of space. And yet only a few of these DNAs might be able to support life. If this be the case, really we should say that the possibilities of making, by accident, a DNA molecule that just fills the bill are one out of ultimate trillions and trillions and trillions. That this happened by accident is almost too much to believe.

More of that in the next lecture.