it's the only explanation...? pt 1 - in the beginning

My biochemistry teacher is a hardcore Darwinist/atheist. He doesn't run around like Richard Dawkins trying to convince the world that God doesn't exist, but my professor probably idolizes Dawkins. He's always marvelling at the fact that the remarkable similarity between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome must mean that we share some common ancestor. In the face of all this so-called evidence, how can we still believe in the infallibility of the Bible, the Word of God?

I'm no scientist, but I thought it would be a good mental exercise to try to refute some of the points made by Darwinists, as well as to point out some possible misinterpretations of the Bible. Keep in mind though, that I'm no Biblical scholar either. I can only offer an meagerly educated explanation for what is indeed a rather complicated topic.

Before I dive into this discussion though, I just want to point out that I believe wholeheartedly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible as we know it. I don't support the twisting of God's Word in order to appease people. My blood boils when people say, "Oh, we can't use verses like that because it will offend people." That is absolute nonsense. Jesus Christ died because we are rotten sinners, who deserve hell. That statement is offensive to anyone that does not grasp the love that simultaneously highlights and saves us from our depravity. But anyway, that's a rant for another day.

 The most appropriate place to start is probably from the start.. of the world. Anyone that has taken a general biology course has heard and read that our planet is at least hundreds of millions of years old, if not billions of years old. We have also heard that radio-carbon dating would be subject to error if the atmostphere of the earth were not always as it is now. Even a Darwinist will admit that the atmosphere was not constant since the beginning. However, it would be ignorant for us to say that the changes in our atmosphere could result in an error of thousands of percents. It is futile for us to stand by the argument that the earth is a few thousand years old (if you count up all the generations listed in geneologies and assume a lifespan of approximately 100 years) + 6 days. Am I finally conceding to the claim that the earth is indeed much older than most Christians believe? Yes, but I believe the Bible has left open to itself this possibility.

Let's turn to the familiar, though often poorly studied passage from Genesis 1:

1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.



2. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Our analysis can begin with those first three infamous words "In the beginning." It may be possible, like with so many other phrases in Scripture, the intended meaning was lost in translation. I conducted a little cursory research and discovered that in the original Hebrew "beginning" can refer to a period of time. We like to think of beginnings as single points in time. But if we are to show that the Bible can account for the popularly acknowledged age of the earth, then this assumption must be thrown out the window. So the point here is that we don't know how long that beginning was. It could have been millions or billions of human years.

I won't reproduce the entire passage here because it's far too long, but this next part is a commentary on the six days of creation. One the first day, God separates the light and the darkness. Verse 5 concludes, stating "there was evening and there was morning-- the first day." Note how one this day there is merely a separation of light and dark. The sun, moon, and stars have not yet been created. "The first day," therefore, is not necessarily limited to the 24 hour allotment that we now give to a "day." Rather, a "day" here (and throughout Genesis 1) could be referring, just as the phrase "in the beginning" to a span of time. And if a "day" in verse 5 can refer to a period of time, then there is no reason why in the subsequent verses it should be confined to a 24 hour period, even after the sun and moon have been brought into existence.