Clash of the Creationists

When you hear the word “creationist” do you think of a person who believes the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago in six 24-hour days? Properly speaking, that person would be a Young Earth Creationist (YEC). There are actually Old Earth Creationists (OEC) who believe the earth was created millions – if not billions – of years ago. OECs can be further sub-divided based on belief in a global flood or whether humans were directly created by God. A handy chart can be found here.

Until 50 years ago, most Bible-believing Christians were OECs. The YEC movement is a fairly recent phenomenon. The father of the movement was a Seventh-Day Adventist named George McCready Price (1870-1963), but it is only since the 1960s that YEC views became the dominant doctrine among evangelicals. (A brief history of how that came to be can be found here.) Many Christians still hold one of the many variations of OEC, but they are nowhere near as vocal or visible as the YEC adherents.

So it’s not at all surprising that creationists of all stripes hold conflicting views on how to interpret the first two chapters of Genesis. In a previous article I discussed how inconsistencies between the two creation accounts in Gen 1 and Gen 2 revealed the work as coming from different authors. Those among the creationists who assert that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible deny this. The YECs assert that the second chapter is simply a more-detailed explanation of what happened on Day 6 of creation week. The OECs hold different opinions on how to interpret Gen 1 and its relation to Gen 2.

The inconsistencies between the two chapters have to do with when plants and animals were created. According to Gen 1, vegetation was created on Day 3 after dry land was made to appear, and the birds of the air and the fishes of the seas were created on Day 5. Yet, when the second creation account begins (Gen 2:5-7), we are told that there were no “plants of the field” (wild plants) or “herb of the field” (cultivated plants) because there had been neither rain (which is all the wild plants need) nor humans to work the earth (what the cultivated plants need).

Why does the second creation account say there are no plants if they were created on Day 3? The YEC explanation is that in Gen 1:11 all grasses and herbs and trees were created except for the “wild plants” and “cultivated grains.” Those types of plants couldn’t exist before the creation of humans because wild plants have thorns (and thorns were a product of God’s curse in Gen 3:18) and cultivated grains require irrigation.

There are problems with this explanation. The plain sense of the text says there were no plants at all, wild or cultivated, in the beginning. And part of the reason for that was YHWH God had not yet sent rain. This itself raises another question because the land was covered with water just three days before and now it is so dry that plants can’t grow? Anyhow, in this barren wasteland, YHWH God plants a garden with fruit trees as an oasis for his newly created human to live. But if, according to Gen 1:11, the earth was covered with green plants and fruit trees since Day 3, why create a garden at all when the human could have simply been moved to a more verdant site?

How do YECs explain the birds? Although Gen 1:20-21 recounts God creating the birds on Day 5, Gen 2:19 says that “YHWH God formed from the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the heaven” as possible companions for Adam. YECs resolve the contradiction by translating “formed” as “had formed”. That is, God had already formed the birds on Day 5 and the land animals earlier on Day 6 but he’s just presenting them now to Adam to be named and considered as possible companions.


"Adam Naming the Animals" by Jan Saenredam (c. 1565-1607)

There’s a bit of special pleading in the assertion that the Hebrew word for “formed” should be interpreted in this instance as “had formed.” Every major translation (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NEB, JPSV, NJB) translates the word as “formed” because the context doesn’t meet the criteria for translating it as “had formed.” Only the NIV translates “had formed” because the translators wanted the second creation story to harmonize with the first.

This quibbling on the obvious meaning of the words or their translations is a typical ploy by biblical literalists. They insist the Bible is inerrant and must be interpreted literally, but when two passages contradict each other, they will read them in such a way that they don’t contradict, even when it requires that you have to ignore the plain meaning of the text, read something into the text that isn’t there, or re-translate the text to mean what they need it to say.

The OECs, on the other hand, don’t have to resort to such contortions. Although asserting Mosaic authorship of all of Genesis, they can allow that Moses is using an analogy of six creation days to teach the theological basis of the Sabbath day rest and, therefore, would not view Gen 1 as a literal account of how creation happened. Interpreting the six days of creation as topical, instead of chronological, they can more easily harmonize the scriptures with the findings of science.

In the final analysis, an OEC interpretation of the meaning and intention of Gen 1-2 may not be all that different from that of a biblical scholar who attributes the chapters to different authors, but it will be wildly different from the YEC interpretation. And the YEC apologists will attack the OEC proponents with the same vigor they would use against a proponent of atheism such as Richard Dawkins. OECs try to reconcile conflicts between scripture and the sciences of astronomy, physics and geology (if maybe not biology), but when confronted with a conflict between the Bible and science, YECs will always choose the Bible and will twist their understanding of science “facts” to fit their biblical interpretation.

If nothing else, OECs prove that it is possible to believe that the scriptures are inspired, yet do not need to be taken literally. Cardinal Baronius – not Galileo – once said, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Allow me to make a slight modification of that: Genesis 1 and 2 teach us why God created, but not how God created. The “how” is answered by science.