God Made the World In Six Literal Days

The Christian Worldview #7

Introduction

Should Genesis be understood literally and historically, or did God mean for us to read these stories poetically and figuratively? Or, perhaps more to the point, does it even matter how we choose to look at it?

Either God made the world in a literal six days, or he produced what we see now by natural processes through eons of time. Are there any theological ramifications for what we conclude?

In this piece, I’m going to demonstrate that our conclusion in fact does matter – probably more than you know.

Why a Historical View of Genesis Matters

#1 It Matters Because Genesis Presents Itself In Historical Terms (not poetic ones)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard somebody ignorantly say, “Yeah, but the creation account is just poetry—it was never meant to be understood literally.”

That take fails on two accounts: 1) Genesis is expressly not poetry; 2) Everybody always understood it literally until ten minutes ago.

Here’s a sampling of the first few verses of Genesis 1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Genesis 1:1-5).

This is classic Hebrew narrative prose. It is not Hebrew poetry. Our Old Testament Bibles are full of poetry – and the way you determine poetry is by Hebrew parallelism, a series of statements that contrast good/bad, wise/unwise, reverent/blasphemous, etc. None of the elements of poetry are present in the creation account.

On the contrary, Genesis has everything you’d expect of narrative: 1) Sequential events; 2) Space-time indicators; and 3) absence of parallelism. There is a reason why the world’s leading hebraists unanimously understand the creation account as a narrative.

#2 It Matters Because The Whole Bible Assumes a Real Historical Genesis

⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work... ¹¹ For in six days the Lordmade heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lordblessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:8-11).

You shall labor in six literal days because God labored in six literal days. That’s how the information is being presented. Argue the validity of Scripture if you will. But the Bible is saying, on its own terms, that God made the world in six days.

Jesus himself presented the historical validity of the creation account on more than one occasion: He said, “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” (Mark 10:6).

Notice, three things about this statement: 1) Jesus sees Adam and Eve as real people; 2) he sees them as existing “from the beginning;” and 3) he roots marriage in God’s actual design, thereby literally quoting from Genesis 2.

Elsewhere he said, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4).

The apostle Paul regards the creation similarly. He mentions Adam and Eve many times and builds several doctrines on that historical precedent (some of these shown below). Peter talks about righteous Noah (2 Peter 2:5). The Hebrew writer commends Abel who was more righteous than Cain (Hebrews 11:4). He speaks also of Noah, who reverently constructed the ark in preparation for a worldwide flood (Hebrews 11:7).

The Biblical authors unanimously regard Adam and Eve as historical figures. In fact, I commend to you the genealogy listed in Luke 3:23-38. There Luke traces Jesus’ lineage directly back to “Adam, the son of God.” With whom did Luke believe the human race began?

#3 It Matters Because Many Core Doctrines Rest On a Historical Genesis

Mankind’s unique image and purpose is based on a historical Adam and Eve: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth’” (Genesis 1:26). We don’t have the likeness of a primate. Our unique creational purpose is rooted in a real Adam and Eve, specially created by God, being fashioned by his hand and breathed into by his own mouth.

The crisis of identity so many face today is owed to Darwin, who proposed the despicable theory that man is simply an animal. This is Biblically an untenable and, frankly, reprehensible conclusion.

The Psalmist reflects over God’s creation of man in this way: “You have given [mankind] dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea” (Psalm 8:6-8).

Man was given a special purpose over the creation which accords with his own likeness of the Creator God.

Our unique maleness and femaleness is based in a historical Adam and Eve. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Transgenderism reigns, in part, because naturalists believe that human beings—male and female—are just stuff. There’s nothing essentially unique to our makeup. We emerged from a primordial soup, and we evolved from an originally sexless life form. But the Scriptures say, God made males expressly male as a feature of his design. And vice versa for women.

Marriage is based in a historical Adam and Eve (see Mark 10 and Matthew 19 mentioned above).

Male headship in the home and in the church is based on a historical Adam and Eve (read 1 Corinthians 11; 1 Timothy 2; Ephesians 5).

The family unit is based in a historical Adam and Eve: ^“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:24-25).

Racial harmony is based in a historical Adam and Eve: “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). (Contrast this with what Darwin wrote and what Darwinian evolution suggests about the races!)

Lastly—and most importantly—our theodicy is based in a historical Adam and Eve. A theodicy is one’s defense of God’s goodness, his righteousness, his holiness. The problem of evil is the biggest debated issue in this sphere of theology/philosophy.

And what I’m saying is, we cannot defend God’s goodness while maintaining a theistic evolutionary stance. To be sure, there are many who have adopted theistic evolution, supposing that it presents no substantive theological issues. It is supposed that with enough creativity we can make neo-darwinian theory consist with the Genesis account.

But there is a damning deathblow to that view. Hear what Paul wrote in Romans 5: “Therefore just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned...Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses.”

When does Paul say that death came into the world? And by whom? It came after sin, and it came by Adam. Paul expressly says that death began with Adam—that was the historical starting point.

In Genesis 2, God told Adam, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (2:17).

Sin and the consequence of death are inextricably bound to man’s rebellion. Man brought this curse upon the world. And the entire Bible and the entire scheme of redemption hinges on this fact. Though man was the reason for sin and death, Jesus would come into the world to redeem us from both—and this promise is seen as early as Genesis 3.

Do you realize that if we embrace any kind of evolution, be it theistic evolution, or not, we are admitting that death is a feature of God’s creation – not a curse placed over the top of it because of man’s sin? The whole of Darwinian evolution supposes that death has been happening since the beginning of the universe, 13.7 billion years ago.

If we accept that premise, we must admit that all of that death, all of that disease, all of those volcanic eruptions, all of the animal suffering, all of that blood, all of that pain is included in God’s good design, for after making what he made, he rested and said, “Behold, it is very good!”

The entire Bible—your WHOLE Bible—is the scheme of God’s redemption from man’s sin and the subsequent and consequential death. If we accept the theory of evolution, we must admit, God invented death, not man. And so God is not rescuing man from man’s own rebellion; God is rescuing man from his own twisted design. In redemptive terms, we literally make God a liar. We cannot concede this ground.

God made this world in six days, and he rested on the 7^th. Mankind is God’s unique creation, bearing his image, not an ape’s. Mankind brought death – and God loved us enough to redeem us from our own mess. Death was not God’s good design.  

Answering the Scientific Stopper

Now, let me briefly address one of our biggest hangups. Big Bang cosmology and neo-Darwinian evolution by natural selection are the prevailing theories today. And many Christians suppose that if we deny those theories, we’re being anti-intellectual, burying our heads in the sand, etc. But I do not think this is true.

First of all, our whole faith is built on miracles—things that defy normal processes. Do you believe Jesus rose out of the grave? There’s nothing scientific about that (it cannot be measured in a lab, and it surely won’t be repeated—we do not see it happening today), and that’s what makes it so amazing. That’s why the ancients were so amazed.

So, the question becomes, why not believe that creation, as God said, was a miracle, and not a natural process? “Well,” somebody protests, “that’s different—because all of the discernible data proves a big bang cosmology.”

But does it? What is the foundational assumption of Big Bang cosmology? The foundational assumption is that the universe, and everything in it, including our origins, can be explained naturally.

Proponents of this view and Darwinian evolution built their experiments and their studies on the presupposition that the universe was not created miraculously and that everything must be explained naturally. Those are their presuppositions.

Here’s what I mean: When they look at the stars and see a star that is 300 million lightyears away, they assume that the world is at least 300 million years old. But Genesis 1 says that God gave mankind the light of the stars on day four. And he gave them so man could know signs and seasons and days and years.

Yes, the stars are that far away. But God gave us their light immediately when he made the earth. If a scientist were to look at an oak tree in the garden of eden, which the Scriptures say were present from man’s inception, he could cut the trunk in half and count the rings. But the tree is brand new. And what about Adam? God made him a fully grown man. If you were to look at him, you could not determine his age naturalistically. The typical process does not apply to a miracle. the The Bible says, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3).

What you were not taught in school is that every kind of scientific endeavor hinges on some kind of paradigm. I commend to you Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a widely acclaimed and highly applauded book that demonstrates how scientific revolutions come to pass.

He demonstrates that science has not advanced incrementally with the slow gain of more knowledge. On the contrary, science as we know it has advanced through revolutions that he calls “paradigm shifts.” Darwin’s theory that all of organic life can be traced back to a single celled organism is a paradigm shift. The unproven paradigms provided a platform from which to investigate and do more research.

Big Bang cosmology represents a paradigm shift. And once a paradigm is thoroughly established (broadly accepted), the research field has a base from which it can investigate and conduct experiments to either solidify that paradigm or falsify it. And if you look at the history of science, you will see these paradigm shifts that stick for a while, and in time they are discarded for new theories.

Even right now Darwinian theory is in trouble. As we’ve further understood the complexity of the living cell and especially the marvelous code present in DNA, many scientists admit that Darwin’s theory can’t explain all of this. In time, Darwinian theory will collapse—and so will Big Bang cosmology. And they will replaced in the scientific world with some new theory that supposedly better explains the data.

So my question is this: Will Christians continue to interpret Genesis through whatever the prevailing theory is? If physicists were to shift the paradigm to plasma cosmology or steady-state cosmology (which assume an eternal universe), will Christians jump on board with that?

When the prevailing theory becomes that the universe has always existed, will Christians try to make that jive with the Bible that says “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the Word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3).

Do you realize that the naturalistic framework assumes from the get-go, there is no God, and thus we cannot explain the world in those terms?

Naturalists look into the past, and they assume that they can read it all based on what we see today. But when Mt. St. Helens erupts, and in a matter of a few days major canyons are formed, they don’t think to apply catastrophic possibilities to how the Grand Canyon was formed. They continue to assume a uniformity of processes all the way back into history. This is not only bad logic, it is bad science. When we repeatedly dig up dinosaur bones with soft tissues in them, the evidence is buried because malleable tissues can’t survive for 65 million years. How could they?

We are always trying to make sense of the past by what we see today. And while this works sometimes for some things, God has already revealed to us the past, and it helps us to make so much more sense of the present.

Let me finish with a simple story to drive home my point.

There was once a man who believed that he was dead. So he went to a psychiatrist to help him work through his psychosis. After many sessions and no progress, the psychiatrist asked him, “Do dead men bleed?” And the man responded, “Of course not.” So the psychiatrist grabbed a pin and stuck it into the tip of his patient’s finger. Of course, this immediately produced a drop of blood on his finger tip. Amazed, the patient said, “Doctor, apparently dead men do bleed!”

What’s the point? Your deepest and most foundational presuppositions will often keep you blind to new evidence. This is not something scientists are immune to.