http://www.godstruth.org
21

Is The Bible Unscientific?

"But what about the scientific objections to the Bible?" asks the unbeliever. "Surely you must admit that a scientist can't possibly believe everything in the Bible?"
To hear people talk like that, you would think that every scientist was an unbeliever. But this is very far from the truth.
I personally know many well qualified scientists who know the Bible far more intimately than almost any of its detractors. They include two full professors in British universities, and at least a dozen with doctorates awarded for scientific research. Nearly every one of the Bible-reading scientists known to me has come to the conclusion that the whole Bible is true. And there are thousands of other scientists outside my own circle-including some eminent men in their field - who are equally convinced of the truth of the Bible.
Since scientists are divided in their opinions about the Bible, we can afford to look at the matter without prejudice, and form our own opinions. What, then, are the real facts?
First of all, it is important to realise that science and the Bible do not often come into contact. There is no reason why they should. They are concerned with different things.
Science is concerned with the question of how things happen. But the Bible tells us why things happen.
To appreciate the distinction, consider the question of death. Medical science is gradually unlocking Nature's mysteries, and explaining what happens in our organs as we grow old and die. This new knowledge is very valuable. It has enabled doctors to combat death so effectively that the average span of human life has been doubled within a century.
But science can never explain (a) why we die, or (b) the way to live for ever. This is the Bible's job. It tells us:

"The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord."1

In this one verse the Bible explains both (a) why we die-because of sin-and (b) the way to live for ever-by accepting God's gift.
Thus science and the Bible each have their place. Each tells us something we could not learn from the other. Usually their spheres of interest do not overlap.
But sometimes the two do come into contact. Then the question arises: does the Bible conflict with scientific knowledge?
To answer this question we must look carefully at the two main areas where conflict is said to occur. One of these is in the stories of miracles in the Bible. The other is the account of creation in Genesis.
It is essential to do this in a spirit of reasonableness. There are some Christians who take the attitude, "If science contradicts the Bible, so much the worse for science. Who cares?" And there are some scientists whose reaction is the exact opposite: "Of course the Bible is unscientific. It's a load of ancient folklore."
Both these shut-minded attitudes are sadly mistaken. They do no service to Christ, to Science, or to Truth. Neither Bible-believers nor scientists have anything to lose from thoughtfully considering the other side's point of view. They have much to gain from doing so.


Miracles

The general public seems to think that scientists are unusually logical people, with minds as accurate as electronic computers. But those who work among scientists know that this is not true.
We scientists are just as human as anyone else. We make the same foolish mistakes, and we suffer from vanity, impatience and prejudice, just like the rest of mankind.
When a scientist declares that miracles cannot happen, he is not stating a scientific fact. He is merely expressing his own prejudiced opinion. And a thoroughly unscientific opinion it is, too.
Professor Horrobin, a medical scientist who shows no sign of being a Bible-believer, has recently warned his fellow scientists about this. He says:

"The scientist begins with the belief that the universe operates entirely according to law. He begins by believing that unique events which cannot be explained by natural law do not happen. Since by definition, by act of faith, the scientist excludes miracles from the realm of science, he can hardly use science to demonstrate that they cannot occur.
"The non-occurrence of miracles is part of the scientific creed. It is therefore arguing in a circle to say that science demonstrates that miracles do not occur. The premise is the same as the conclusion. - . . I am not saying that true miracles do Occur. All I am showing is that science has not demonstrated that they do not occur, and nor will it ever be able to make such a demonstration."2
Horrobin is unquestionably right. Scientists cannot prove that miracles do not occur. They assume it.
This is not just perverseness on the part of scientists. We have to make this assumption about our experiments, for a very good reason. We should never make any progress unless we did.
Let me illustrate what I mean. Some years ago medical scientists noticed a horrifying increase in the number of deformed babies being born. They could conceivably have said, "This is a miracle. This is a curse from God on our wicked world."
But that would have gone against the basic principle of science:
"Look for the cause." So scientists ruled out the idea of a miracle, and looked for a scientific explanation. They found one. The deformities were being caused by a drug, thalidomide.
It is therefore reasonable, and necessary, for every scientist to say to himself, "I shall assume that miracles are not occurring in my laboratory today."
But some scientists are not content with this. They want to go a big step further. They add, "And I shall also assume that miracles never have occurred, anywhere, and never will." This is not necessary, and not reasonable either. No scientist who has thought the matter out would ever make such an absurd statement.
Science cannot possibly tell us whether the miracles recorded in the Bible occurred or not. All that science can do is to agree with common sense, and admit that the Bible miracles could have occurred.
But is it likely that they really did? To answer that question we must look more closely at the facts.


The Miracles of the Bible

The very first thing a scientist looks for in a new theory is what he calls "internal consistency". In other words, do the various parts of the new theory agree with each other; or does one part contradict another? Before he does anything else, the man who produces a new theory must make sure it is internally consistent.
You would be surprised how many promising new theories fall down because of this. Internal consistency does not prove a theory true. But it does at least give the new theory a chance.
The great thing to remember about the miracle stories of the Bible is this. They are part of an internally consistent picture. In other words, they are what you would expect.
Christianity is an altogether miraculous religion. The existence of an inspired Bible is a miracle. The coming of the Son of God into the world was a miracle. His resurrection was a miracle. Our hope of eternal life, in a world where death is the universal rule, is a miracle. The fact that God hears prayer is a miracle.
Against this background, is it surprising that the Son of God, and some of the prophets and apostles, are reported as working some miracles? Of course not. It would have been much more surprising if they hadn't worked any miracles!
There is another important point in favour of accepting the miracle stories of the Bible. They are all so eminently sensible. None of them occurs without a good reason. They all take place in a seemly way.
Most of the miracles of Jesus were miracles of healing. A few involved the most extreme form of healing-restoring the dead to life. On a few occasions He provided food or drink or money for people who needed it. Twice He rescued His disciples from probable shipwreck.
This leaves only one miracle unaccounted for: the cursing of the barren fig tree. And we saw in the previous chapter that there was an extremely good reason for this.
So every single miracle of Jesus was performed for a purpose. Every one was necessary. He never did anything merely to be able to say, "Look, everybody! See what wonderful things I can do." He was, in fact, tempted to use His power in that way, but refused to do so.3
His miraculous birth from a virgin was equally necessary. He had to have one human parent. Otherwise He would not have been able to share our human feelings. But He can, because through His mother He inherited our weak human nature. Consequently, as the New Testament says,

"We have not a High Priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are-yet without sinning."4

Without one human parent He would never have known what temptation was. But if He had had two human parents He could never have conquered every temptation. And the last three words of the quotation above declare that He did conquer all temptations. He had to have one divine Parent to inherit enough strength to do that.
So the virgin birth is not just a wonder-story tacked on to the Gospels as an afterthought. It was an absolute essential to the life and work of Jesus. Without it He could never have been what He was.
This is equally true of His resurrection from the dead. God's plan of salvation revolves around it. Our assurance of eternal life depends upon it, says Paul.5 And, as we saw in Chapter 7, it provides a powerful argument for belief in the Bible.
All the miracles in the Bible fall into this general pattern. They all have a purpose, even though, in a few cases, the purpose is not obvious at first glance. And they all fit into the overall theme of the Bible, namely, the working out of God's great scheme of redemption for our world.
Bible miracles are on an altogether higher level than the miracles recounted in other ancient books. The book of Tobit, written between 200 and 100 B.C., tells how a demon called Asmodeus slew one after another the seven husbands of a Jewish girl on their wedding nights. But then she married Tobias, and this time the demon was driven off by the smell of burning fish, and so they all lived happily ever after.
If the Bible contained stories like that, we might have something to worry about.


Language We Can Understand

The Bible always recounts miracles in the language of the common man. This again is what you would expect. If God had told us the exact scientific explanation of the miracles we probably should not be able to understand half of them, even today. And earlier generations would not have understood a word of it.
A university lecturer in geography once said to me, "I never like to touch a drop of liquor until the sun goes down." It would have been childish had I replied, "As a geographer, old man, you should know that the sun doesn't go down; the earth goes round."
Yet people make just that sort of objection to a story in the Book of Joshua. Towards the close of a successful battle, night was drawing on. Joshua prayed for the opportunity to complete the mopping-up operations. His prayer was answered. The record says: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed."6
So the objectors rush in with their fatuous comments. "This teaches that the earth is the centre of the universe, and the sun and moon go round it!"
Or, only one degree less absurd: "This would mean that the earth stopped rotating for a time. That would have been like slamming on the brakes in a bus travelling at a thousand miles an hour. The earth's surface would have been wrecked."
If Joshua could have heard these comments, how he would have laughed. "Don't be awkward," he might have said. "I merely intended to convey the idea that God miraculously lengthened the daylight for me. I was not concerned with the astronomy, or the physics, of the situation. My readers understood me perfectly, and I don't see why you shouldn't."
Similar principles apply to a number of other miracle stories. When Jesus went to heaven, He went "up". His rising body disappeared into a cloud.7
This was not intended to teach that the earth is flat, and that God lives just above the clouds. It conveys a simple message which men of all ages have been able to understand. We live on earth; God lives somewhere else, called heaven.
We do not know, and we need not care, just where that is-or even if it has a location within the "space-time continuum" that scientists speak of. When the work of Jesus on earth was done, He went to join His Father. That is all we need to know.
One more comment, before we leave miracles. Always resist the temptation to pooh-pooh something because it sounds unlikely. Scientists are always coming unstuck when they do that.
When I was a small boy my mother told me of balls of fire that would sometimes descend from the sky during thunderstorms. "Thunderbolts", she called them.
At secondary school I was told that this was an old wives' tale. The standard dictionary of the day8 said that thunderbolts of this sort were "imaginary", and that settled it.
But not for long. Nowadays thunderbolts are "in" again. They have a new name, "ball lightning", to make them respectable, and eminent scientists publish papers about them.9
Some people have never been able to accept the idea that God knows everything. "It's an utter impossibility," they have said, "for any Being, no matter how mighty, to store up all the information there ever was, on every subject."
This sort of objection looks pretty feeble, nowadays. There is a chemical in our bodies, called DNA, that stores up information in its molecules. Those blue eyes you inherited from your mother, for example, were passed on from her to you by a molecule of DNA.
A scientist has described how efficiently DNA holds information.

"The information stored in one man's DNA would, if put into books, require a shelf to hold them so long that it would go round the earth ten million times."10

If those shelves were put into a tightly packed library, in book-cases ten shelves high, with gaps only five feet wide between them, the library would fill the whole of Europe and Asia, or nearly half the total land surface of the earth. And that's the amount of information now thought to be stored in your own body.

The Flood

Of all the miracles recorded in the Bible, the biggest by far is the Flood. It is also the one that has provoked the greatest amount of disbelief.
In this particular case the objections are not unreasonable. They deserve careful consideration. If the Biblical Flood ever took place, it ought to have left some traces. Where are they?
In the old days the answer given to this question was, "Everywhere". For many centuries it was thought that the varied surface of the whole earth was just as the Flood had left it. But when men began to study geology, about two centuries ago, problems began to arise. A great deal of evidence was found that showed the structure of the earth's crust has been millions of years forming. The idea of a world-wide flood was gradually abandoned by practically all geologists, for want of evidence.
From time to time some Bible-believer has tried to prove that the foundations of modern geology are quite false, and that the earlier "Flood Theory of Geology" fits the facts better. Price11 tried this in 1923; Morris and Whitcomb12 in 1962.
Even many Bible-believers, who would like to be convinced, have found these arguments unconvincing.13 So it is not surprising that practically all geologists reject the theory of "Flood Geology". Without wishing to dismiss it out of hand, I can only say that it is not an impossible theory but a very unlikely one.
Fortunately there is a much simpler solution to the problem of the Flood. It depends to some extent on a recognition of our old friend, Hebrew idiom.
This affects the issue in two ways. First, as we shall see in Chapter
*3, Hebrew methods of dating were not exact like ours. Because of this we cannot be at all sure when the Flood occurred. It may have been many thousands of years ago.
Secondly, we need to consider the following Biblical statements:

(a)	All countries came to Joseph in Egypt to buy corn.14
(b)	The nations under the whole heaven became afraid of Israel.15
(c)	Ahab looked everywhere for Elijah, missing no nation or kingdom.16
(d)	Nebuchadnezzar ruled wheresoever the children of men dwelt.17
(e)	Cyrus ruled all the kingdoms of the earth.18
(f)	In Paul's day the gospel was preached to every creature under heaven.19

In all six passages the words in italics look like a tremendous overstatement. Obviously they were not intended to be taken literally. We are up against a Hebrew idiom, which can fairly be stated like this:
When the Hebrews spoke of "All the peoples of the earth" (or some such phrase) they often meant it in a limited sense. They meant either "All the peoples with whom we have contact", or "All the peoples with whom God is dealing."
We must take this into account when we read the Genesis record of the Flood. This says that "All the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered."20 Does this necessarily include Ben Nevis and the Himalayas and the Rockies, and all the other mountains that Israel had never heard of? In the light of the sayings (a) to (f) quoted above, the answer seems inescapable: no.
Under this watery covering, "All flesh died that moved upon the earth."21 Did this necessarily include the kangaroos in Australia, and the llamas in South America? To any Hebrew reader the most reasonable answer would again be: no.
This all adds up to one thing. There is nothing in Genesis to prove that the Flood was world-wide. In the idiom of its Hebrew readers, Genesis indicated that the Flood certainly affected all of that part of the world with which God was dealing. It does not tell us whether or not it affected the rest of the earth.
The cradle of human civilisation was the land of Iraq, and especially the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. This is the area where Eden was. This was the country where the Tower of Babel was built. This was Abraham's homeland. This, and the land stretching northward to Ararat,22 must have been the area where the Flood occurred.
It may have occurred in the days when the whole human race (and I am speaking now of "true men", "sons of Adam"-see Chapter 23) lived in that area. If so, the whole human race except Noah and his family would have perished in the Flood. In this case it must have happened a very long time ago, and any direct evidence of it would seem to have been erased by time.
But there is plenty of geological evidence of an indirect nature to support the possibility of a great flood having occurred in those parts. Some very great earth movements have occurred in this area since the end of the last Ice Age-that is, during the past ten or fifteen thousand years. The region is surrounded by four seas, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. If the whole region was once depressed below sea level, great walls of water would have rushed in from all sides. The Genesis Flood might well have happened in this way.
To sum up, we do not know for sure whether the Flood was worldwide or not. Although there are many obstacles to believing in a world-wide Flood, and no real evidence that one ever occurred, the difficulties can be resolved by regarding the Flood as a more local affair. The idiom of the Old Testament strongly supports such an interpretation.
Consequently there is no reason for disbelieving in the Flood, and one overwhelming reason for believing: Jesus Christ believed in it.23


Creation

The Bible starts off with a grand statement: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."24
In the old days men regarded this as an obvious truth. The universe did not come from nowhere. Somebody must have made it. If God did not make it, who did?
But nowadays men are not so simple-minded. They pounce on that word, "somebody". "Why assume it was made by a person?" they ask. "It might just as well have been made by the action of natural forces."
There is one thing wrong with that argument. Scientists have so far failed completely to explain how the universe could have come into being on its own. And even when they try to do so, they still find themselves using the word "creation".
The fly in the atheists' ointment is a scientific law called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that in any system of things, something called "entropy" keeps on increasing. We have found the law to be true for every system we have been able to investigate, from tiny little test-tubes in the laboratory, right up to the world as a whole. There is every reason to suppose that it applies to the solar system, and to the greatest system of all-the universe.
What is this "entropy"? It can only be defined accurately by using the language of mathematics. But it is near enough to say that it means "mixed-upness". It applies particularly to the mixed-upness of the heat in a system.
For example, when you add cold cream to boiling coffee, the cream warms up and the coffee cools down. Very soon you have a cup of "coffee-with-cream", all at the same temperature. Now try and get back your cold cream and boiling coffee. Obviously, you can't. Why not? Because mixed-upness always increases, never decreases.
Think of your house and garden as a self-contained system. In winter you have a nice warm house in an unpleasantly cold garden. Go away for a week, and leave the house to itself. It cools down to the temperature of the garden. The "entropy", mixed-upness, of the system has increased.
As soon as you come home you set to work to put things right. You want to reduce the mixed-upness, and make the house hotter than the garden again. There is only one way you can do this. You could, if you were desperate, burn your furniture and floorboards. But this would not last long. Sooner or later you would have to bring in a source of heat-coal, gas, oil, electricity-from outside. There is nothing you can do inside a closed system to reduce its mixed-upness.
Bringing in heat from outside is fine for you. But it is not so good for the world as a whole. Every time you heat your house you help to increase the mixed-upness of the world. One day all the world's sources of heat-coal, and oil, and natural gas, and uranium for atomic power stations, and any other sources we may yet discover-will all be used up. The earth's mixed-upness will have become complete.
There will then be only one hope for the future. We shall have to bring in heat from outside. This would mean relying on the sun as our only source of heat.
But the sun is losing weight at a tremendous rate. It is millions of tons lighter now than when you started reading this chapter. One day the sun's resources will all be finished. Then the mixed-upness of the solar system will have reached its limit.
After that we might, if we were clever enough, bring in energy from outside the solar system. But this would only increase the mixedupness of the universe as a whole. Eventually the mixed-upness of the whole universe would be complete.
And that would be that.
I have been speaking as if Man were solely responsible for increasing the mixed-upness of the universe. In fact he is only making a very small contribution to Nature's own programme. The universe is increasing its own mixed-upness by natural processes at a fantastic rate, without any help from us.
This means that the universe can be likened to a wrist watch, steadily ticking away. There are, however, two very different theories as to what kind of a wrist watch it is. Some scientists regard it as being like an ordinary wrist watch, that was wound up once and will go on running down until it stops. A second group of scientists think of it as more like a self-winding watch, that will go on ticking away for ever.
But in both theories the scientists cannot quite get away from the need for a Creator. In both theories they still use the word "creation", despite themselves.
The first theory is often called the theory of the "Big Bang Universe". According to this theory there must have been a time, long ago, when the "watch" was first "wound up"; that is, when the universe was at its starting point, as un-mixed-up as it could possibly be. One leading adherent to this theory, Professor A. R. Ubbelohde of London University, shows no sign of wanting to uphold a belief in God. Yet in a book dealing with this topic, he describes the universe's starting point as: "The Heat Birth of the world, in a kind of luminous dawn of creation in time."25
In another part of the same book he discusses whether we might ever be able to reverse the universal tendency towards increasing mixed-upness. By a highly mathematical argument he shows that we cannot, but that it might be done by "intelligent beings not dependent on our ordinary methods."26
Apart from the use of the plural, this reads like an excellent definition of God. "Intelligent beings not dependent on our methods", indeed! How determined to resist the obvious can you get? Why can't the Professor say, "The Creator could do it"?
The other theory of the universe is officially called the "Steady-State Universe" theory. But, in practice, its adherents prefer to use a more descriptive title: "The Continuous-Creation Universe".27
This theory proposes that, to keep the mixed-upness of the universe constant, fresh matter is being created throughout the universe all the time. The amount needed would be vast. The Astronomer Royal estimated it at the equivalent of 50,000 bodies the size of our sun, being created every second.28 Yet the theory does not explain how this matter could be created, or what (or who) is doing the creation.
Which takes more faith? To believe in a theory like this? Or to believe that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"?


A Six-Day Job?

"It's not the actual fact of creation that bothers me," said Larry. "I can accept that easily enough. What I can't swallow is the teaching of Genesis that God did the whole job in six days, just a few thousand years ago."
A great many people will sympathise with Larry. If Genesis really did teach this, then it would be in head-on collision with the facts of science. And by, "facts of science", I mean facts; not just theories, or opinions, but well established facts.
Many of the statements trotted out by scientists about prehistoric events are only opinions. I shall be discussing some of these in the next two chapters, where the origin of life will be considered.
But we cannot treat the facts of geology like this. Many lines of evidence show that the earth is immensely old. Much of this evidence is too technical to discuss here. Some of it is extremely simple.
The earth's crust abounds in fossils. These are pieces of rock bearing traces of plant or animal life. For instance, coal is fossilised vegetation. Although only a small part of the earth's crust has been explored, a million million tons of coal have already been discovered.
That may not sound very much, but it is actually enough to provide half a bucketful for every square yard of the earth's surface. And a far greater quantity of coal must still lie undiscovered. It is obvious that countless generations of plants and animals must have lived and died to produce all the fossils in the earth.
Some Christian writers have disputed this. They have argued that perhaps all these fossils were produced at one time, either at the time of the Flood or of some earlier worldwide disaster. But this is quite impossible. Coal is almost pure carbon, whilst vegetation contains only a small proportion of carbon. Consequently it must have taken something like a ton of vegetation to produce a hundredweight of coal. Even if Noah had lived when the earth was completely covered with dense jungle, there would still not have been nearly enough vegetation in his world to produce all the coal that exists today.
Others have suggested that God created all these fossils just to mislead scientists. This obviously will not do. As one Christian writer has said about this, "God is not the Author of a lie-even a white lie."29
There is a better way to approach the problem. That is, to accept the evidence that the earth is many millions of years old, and then to have another look at Genesis to see what it really does tell us.
We must begin by realising that Genesis was never intended to teach science. It was written in very simple language, to teach some profound truths to all mankind. Those simple words made sense to the Hebrews in the dawn of civilisation. The marvel is that they still make a very favourable impression on many scientists today.
The simplicity of the language is itself remarkable. It is said that the vocabulary of Genesis 1 contains only seventy-six root words, in the original Hebrew.30 Just what is this simple language trying to tell us?
We have already had a number of lessons in not jumping to conclusions. Hebrew is a highly figurative language, full of word-pictures and figures of speech which are not intended to be taken literally. Hebrew idiom is quite different from English idiom.
So there is no simple answer to the question, "What does Genesis 1 teach?" The general picture is quite clear. It teaches that God created the universe and everything in it. But when we try to understand the details, various possibilities arise.
One suggestion is that the chapter describes a re-creation, not the original creation of the earth. It begins with a picture of an earth "without form and void". This expression is used by Jeremiah in a passage where he is talking about a land brought to destruction.31 So, this theory suggests, the earth was teeming with life in earlier geological ages, and then, for some reason, God wiped everything out. Then He restored it to working order, as described in Genesis 1.
There are many variations on this theme. It has fairly recently been advocated by Dr. L. M. Davies, a geologist with high qualifications.32 He argued that the withdrawal of the sun's light brought on a sort of "super ice age", long before the ice ages of recent times. This would have destroyed every living thing, and set the stage for the events described in Genesis I.

When is a Day Not a Day?

There are two major objections to all these "re-creation" theories. First, they depend upon a global disaster so tremendous as to wipe out every vestige of life on earth-and yet so gentle as to have left no record to show geologists that it ever occurred.
Secondly, Genesis 1 does not seem like a re-creation story. It reads like a record of the entire creation as we know it. In the days when scientists were not ashamed to refer to the Bible, one wrote in a leading scientific journal:

"The order in which the flora and fauna are said, by the Mosaic account [the Genesis story, written by Moses] to have appeared upon the earth, corresponds with that which the theory of Evolution requires, and the evidence of geology proves."33

This is broadly, though not precisely, true. We must also explain the appearance of the sun, moon and stars on the "fourth day" of Genesis
-that is, about half way through the work of creation. This can be done fairly simply. It probably means that they became visible at that time, through the thinning mists of the cooling earth's atmosphere.
The order of events in Genesis 1 then becomes remarkably close to the order that a modern geologist would draw up. Many scientists have been deeply impressed by this similarity. It seems far too great to be a mere coincidence. No, it seems almost undeniable that Genesis 1 is a broad picture of the entire geological history of the earth-and a remarkably accurate one, at that.
In that case, what are we going to do about those six days?
In our day and age that should present no problem. (What's that-"our day and age"? Evidently here is one expression where a day is not a day.)
Now consider Genesis 2: 4, which concludes the record of creation with a one-sentence summary:

"These are the generations (the story) of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

So Genesis evidently uses "day" in a figurative sense. The whole process took six days. Yet those six days added up to only one day. If a day always means a day, then this arithmetic becomes impossible. But if a day means "a period", everything makes sense.
Moreover, during the first five-and-a-bit of those six days there were no men or women upon the earth. Those "days", therefore, are unlikely to have been days measured on a human scale. They must surely have been days measured on God's scale-and those are very different from the days we know.
In two places the Bible warns us that God's time scale is far greater than ours. Peter says that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."34
Moses stretches out the time scale still further, when he says that "a thousand years in Thy (God's) sight are . . . as a watch in the night."35
These statements are obviously not meant to be taken as literal scales, like the "one inch to one mile" of an Ordnance Survey map. They are merely warnings, expressed in poetic language, that the eternal God is not bound by the same time scale as ourselves. So one way of solving our problem is to say that the world was created in six "divine days". And those days can be as long as the geologists want to make them.
But there is an even better way of viewing Genesis 1. The "days" may not have been the actual days when God did the work of creation. They could have been the days on which God revealed the story of creation to one of His inspired historians. This idea goes back to a nineteenth-century German, J. H. Kurtz, and has been worked Out in great detail by a modern archaeologist.36
If we view Genesis 1 in this way, practically all the problems disappear. It harmonises with the teaching of the rest of the Bible. It enables every scientist to hold up his head and say, as did the first astronauts ever to approach the moon: "IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH."37
To many a scientist this not only makes sense. It solves a problem that science cannot touch.