Why I am not a young-earth creationist.

Genesis 1.1-5.

From time to time I’m asked whether I believe God created the universe in six days, or whether it and humanity evolved over time. My usual answer is “Yes.” I believe both.

Various Christians insist I can’t believe both. I must believe in one and reject the other. And they’re pretty insistent I gotta beleive in the six-day creation. In a literal six-day creation; God literally spent six 24-hour periods creating the heavens and the earth. ’Cause if I don’t believe this, I’m going to hell.

That’s largely why they asked me about what I believe in the first place: They wanna see whether or not I’m going to hell. If I believe as they do, we’re good. If I don’t, since I’m going to hell they want nothing more to do with me, lest I corrupt them and drag them to hell with me.

Oddly they’re not saying people go to hell for believing in evolution. There are a few extra steps in their procedure.

1. You believe in evolution.
2. Which means you don’t believe the bible’s depiction of a literal six-day creation.
3. Which means you don’t beleive the bible.
4. Which means you don’t believe anything the bible says about Jesus.
5. Which means you don’t believe Jesus can actually save you.
6. Which means he won’t.
7. So you’re going to hell.

There are all kinds of flaws in this logic, beginning with #3: Just because you don’t interpret the Genesis stories literally does not automatically mean you don’t believe the bible. Nor the gospels, nor in Jesus.

Plus it’s not even logically consistent with how Christians come to Jesus. I came to Jesus before I had ever read a bible. Likely so had you. Yeah, the truths about Jesus which we were taught, largely came from the stories in the gospels—but they didn’t have to. The first people Simon Peter preached to in Acts 2 didn’t have a written gospel. Paul wrote his letters before the gospel authors wrote their gospels. Paul did extraordinarily well at sharing Jesus without a New Testament. Because you don’t actually need a bible to share Jesus. You only need the Holy Spirit. You always need the Holy Spirit.

Requiring the bible for salvation, is elevating a book above the Holy Spirit. Yes, it’s inspired by the Spirit. Still mighty useful for explaining salvation, correcting us, and training us in doctrine and righteousness. Still a book though, and claiming it, instead of the Spirit, has the power to save, is still bibliolatry.

And anyone who says a devout follower of Jesus, who just happens to believe in theistic evolution or old-earth creationism, is going to hell for these beliefs, have elevated their young-earth creationist (YEC for short) beliefs above Jesus. That’s idolatry too. Jesus requires us to trust him to be saved; that’s all. And I do. As should you.

My firm belief is God created the universe. Doesn’t matter how. Doesn’t matter if it took him six literal days, or six ages lasting a billion years apiece. Doesn’t matter if we’re descended from lower animals… and frankly, thanks to sin and human depravity, there are no lower animals than us humans. Christ Jesus came to us to fix that, and through his self-sacrifice and the Holy Spirit’s power, humanity can now adopt the mindset of Jesus, the nature of God, and evolve to perfection. (YEC promoters hate when I say that. It’s biblical though.)

So, studying weird YEC pseudoscience for the purpose of debating an evolutionist? Massive waste of time. You won’t convince them you’re anything but a nut, and you won’t grow any more Christ-like. You’ll be another one of those smart-alecks who take pride in winning arguments, but never win any souls… and don’t win as many arguments as they imagine they do.

So if I’m okay with evolution, what’s the point of Genesis’s creation stories? Ah, good question; glad I asked it.

The LORD created everything.

Before Genesis was written, pagans and pagan religions had come up with their own creation myths. If you took a history or anthropology class, you might’ve heard the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Canaanite myths. All myths which needed to be rebuked.

Most pagan religions taught, wrongly, the universe had no beginning and has always existed. Much like scientists presumed before they realized the universe began with a Big Bang.

From this uncreated cosmos, gods somehow spontaneously came into being. Evolved, if you like; climbed out of the primordial ooze and started claiming territory. They fought one another to control the universe. Then they created humans. Sometimes as slaves, to work for them, worship them, and otherwise fulfill their whims. Sometimes accidentally; these weren’t wise gods. “Whoops, made some humans. Well, maybe they can start sacrificing bulls to me.”

In contrast, Genesis begins “at the beginning” with the six days of creation.

Genesis 1.1-5 KWL

1When God first shaped the skies and the land,

2the land was unformed and empty

and dark over the ocean’s surface.

God’s spirit shook the waters’ surface.

3God said, “Be light!”

And light was.

4God saw light, and how good it was.

God distinguished between light and dark.

5God called the light day,

and called the dark night.

It was dusk, then dawn.

Day one.

The skies and the land (KJV “the heaven and the earth”) is the ancient way of saying the cosmos—everything in existence. And unlike the pagan creation stories, God made this cosmos. It didn’t pre-exist. It definitely didn’t make God. Nor did he have to overthrow any gods which came before, nor battle any gods which arose alongside him, nor defeat the ancient serpent so he could wrest control of the cosmos from it. There actually are other gods in the Genesis story, and we’ll get to them. But as far as creation is concerned, there’s only YHWH.

In many pagan creation stories, one god or another is the universe, or a significant thing in it. In Greco-Roman mythology Gæa is the earth; Uranos is the sky. But there’s none of that in Genesis. The land isn’t God; it’s this unformed, empty thing which he had to shape. The ocean isn’t God; his spirit (or the Holy Spirit, if we wanna read him into the story, which isn’t wrong) hovers over its face, affecting it by his very presence, if not his massive power. God is not the universe. He’s distinct from it. And he had plans for it.

Beginning with light. “Be light!” he commands, and the sky lights up. (Before he created the stars, which I’ll get to.) In the pagan myths, the gods didn’t create light. Light pre-existed them, same as the universe. And in fact one of the things we quickly notice about those pagan gods is most of them can’t create. Not like God, who creates something out of absolutely nothing; who can make light without a star. Pagan gods had to make something from pre-existing material. The land, and the stuff on it, had to be made from something. In the Norse myths, the gods made Midgard out of the corpse of a defeated foe. In the Greek myths, the land is the goddess Gæa herself. The gods weren’t powerful enough to create a world; they certainly weren’t powerful enough to create light. YHWH is nowhere near so finite.

Now, here’s where the Genesis story starts butting heads with science. And, for that matter, the sciency-sounding parts of YEC beliefs.

How literally do we interpret this story?

God is spirit. Jn 4.24 Agreed? It’s how Jesus describes him, so we know it’s true. He’s not a physical being. He became a physical being when he became Jesus, but in Genesis that’s not yet happened. True, God’s not limited by time, and if he wanted he could’ve first become human, then stepped backward in time to the creation, and he could’ve been physically floating in space while he created stuff, same as he is on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, making stuff while he’s still in his nightshirt. I don’t think that’d be a reasonable plan though. He’s doing almighty cosmic things, and it makes very little sense to do that from a limited perspective.

I bring this up because Genesis says God “saw light.” Ge 1.4 Light’s a physical thing. But God’s not yet a physical being. So… how’d he see light? A spirit doesn’t have eyeballs, optic nerves, impulses, nor brain. Nor did he even need light; he can create without it. He’d know what he was doing despite space being pitch black. So how’d he see it? Why’d he make it? Who’d he make it for?

I don’t know that the ancients who first told the Genesis story had considered any of these things. Doesn’t matter. They weren’t scientists. Science wasn’t invented till medieval times, way after the bible was complete. They weren’t trying to use physics to describe how God created the cosmos. They were explaining why, which to them was way more important. Which to us, when we’re reading the bible, should be way more important. As for how God did it… well, we can study science.

So why’d God make light? In this story, it’s to make the point he can make light. Other gods can’t. Furthermore, despite having no eyeballs, God prefers light, and knows the difference between light and dark. Pagan gods? Morally ambiguous—light and dark, right and wrong, are entirely based on their own personal preferences. They’re not moral beings. Our God is.

Secondly: If God observes everything at once, how do we get “dusk” and “dawn”? Ge 1.5 These words imply you’re standing on the planet below, watching the sun go down or come up, and God’s not created the stars yet. But in this case the author of Genesis isn’t basing dusk and dawn on God’s perspective, but ours. He had no clue what this looked like from space. He had no clue millennia from his time, astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station would see dawn every 45 minutes; that from God’s point of view there is no dusk nor dawn.

Genesis’s author assumed, as the ancients did, the sky wasn’t illuminated by the sun: It was itself illuminated, and as it rotated round the earth, we’d see the light side, then dark side, every 24 hours. He didn’t understand light refraction; how it’s the sun lighting the sky, not the sky glowing on its own. He didn’t realize the days you can’t see the sun behind the clouds, doesn’t mean the sun’s not at all there. He assumed daylight and sunlight were two different things. It’s not at all how we understand the sky anymore. Not even flat-earth YEC apologists describe it that way. It’s a completely obsolete worldview.

And it doesn’t actually matter, since the why of it is that God created the day. Days didn’t exist before God made ’em.

Hope you’re getting the picture: Genesis isn’t actually trying to describe the physics of the cosmos. It’s describing all this stuff using the ancients’ worldview.
What the ancients believed the universe looks like—which is consistent with a literal interpretation of Genesis. NIV Faithlife Study Bible Not ours! We know the sky’s not literally like that. Nicholas Copernicus pitched the theory of a heliocentric solar system in which the earth rotates; Galileo Galilei confirmed it; Johannes Kepler modified it; Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein described it in greater detail. We’ve sent satellites and space probes and cosmonauts and astronauts to go float around in it. We got ’em up there because we followed the scientific worldview, which all these space travelers daily confirm. There is no light side of the sky. It’s all pitch black, except for the parts the stars illuminate.

So if you’re claiming Genesis must be interpreted literally, you’re also claiming God created a cosmos which we know doesn’t exist and never did. Not even flat-earthers believe all that stuff. Yikes.

Time to take a step back.

Okay. If you’re on the YEC train, you’re likely reacting one of two ways:

1. “Leslie, you’re wrong, you’re absolutely wrong, and your interpretation is of the devil, and I’ll prove it… as soon as I can find some argument that proves it.”
2. “Holy crap, everything I believe is false; now what do I do?”

Either way, what you do is relax. Not everything you believe is false. Just your literalism.

God is still real. He still created the universe. Jesus is still real, and is still gonna get you saved. Adam and Eve are likely real; humanity has a common ancestor somewhere, right?—so let’s call that couple Adam and Eve. Betcha they’re hairier than you imagine.

And Genesis is still true. Seriously. I’m not doing some modernist trick of “Let’s believe two contradictory things at once,” although it’s not as hard to do as you might think. People do this all the time; the same folks who insist “You can’t trust the government” nonetheless trust fire fighters who are employed by the government. (Oh, you thought I was gonna bring up the trinity, right? Well, I still could.)

The creation stories of Genesis are true. But only in the sense they accurately describe God, and his relation to his creation and us humans. They aren’t meant to accurately describe the timeline of creation, nor physics. They’re like Jesus’s parables, or the apocalyptic visions of Revelation: They don’t literally happen that way, but they do accurately explain God.

So I believe God created the universe in six days… in the same way I believe in the good Samaritan, or the details about Satan’s fall. Functionally, it explains God and his original plans for the universe. Take it any further beyond that—like some Christians who claim the people of Jesus’s parables are literal people whose stories Jesus omnisciently knew, and shared with his students—and you’ve gone off the rails, and aren’t accurately describing God anymore.

If you want a little confirmation, look at the fruit of young-earth creationists. See them winning lots of people to Jesus? Not at all. You see them picking fights, causing division, driving science-minded pagans away from Christianity… and driving science-minded Christians away from Jesus too, because they’ve forbidden ’em from believing both bible and science. You see them getting Christians mocked for believing that Noah had tyrannosaurs on his ark. You see them getting elected to office, then cutting funding for biologists who dare to say bacteria and viruses evolve, and in so doing get people killed. They sow death and rage and ignorance. That’s not good fruit!

True, some of ’em might show a little fruit of the Spirit here and there. But once you get ’em started on creationism, all this fruit vanishes. Shouldn’t that tell us everything?