Seven Days that Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis & Science

It would be a pity if, in a desire (rightly) to treat the Bible as more than a book, we ended up treating it as less than a book by not permitting it the range and use of language, order, and figures of speech that are (or ought to be) familiar to us from our ordinary experience of conversation and reading.

One of Richard Dawkins’s main God Delusion arguments is that, if God created everything, we would have to ask who created God. But the very asking of this question reveals at once that Dawkins has in mind a created God: “Who created God?” Created gods certainly are a delusion.

Both Genesis and science say that the universe is geared to supporting human life. But Genesis says more. It says that you, as a human being, bear the image of God. The starry heavens show the glory of God, yes; but they are not made in God’s image. You are. That makes you unique. It gives you incalculable value. The galaxies are unimaginably large compared with you. However, you know that they exist, but they don’t know that you exist. You are more significant, therefore, than a galaxy.

God loves an enquiring mind, a fact that has been a great encouragement to me in my study of mathematics and the history and philosophy of science.

If the text means that the sun came into existence on day 4, Origen was asking a very reasonable question: “If the sun is not yet there, how are we to understand the first three days with their ‘evenings and mornings

THE BOOK OF GENESIS is foundational for the rest of the Bible. Its opening chapter does something of incalculable importance: it lays down the basis of a biblical worldview.1 It gives to us humans a metanarrative, a big story into which our lives can be fitted and from which they can derive meaning, purpose, and value. This chapter is devoted to that big story.

Furthermore, if Dawkins’s question is valid, it can be turned back on him. He believes that the universe created him. Therefore, we are justified in asking him: who created your creator?

Here we have the basic ingredients that define human beings as moral beings. God has given them the ability to say “yes” to him by not eating the prohibited tree, and to say “no” to him by eating it. In this way the Bible introduces us to the idea that the humans are moral beings, with all that this implies.

Galileo held that the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the “language of mathematics”7 and that the “human mind is a work of God’s and one of the most excellent.