Reading Science for Reading Genesis Well

You may remember at the beginning of October I started a series, Genesis, Science, and Making Sense of it All. You may not remember that, and that’s ok. This is actually only the second post, and you’ll notice it is yet another stack of books. About half of these I didn’t have when I posted last, and even if I did, that’s too many books to stack in a single picture.

Of these books, and the others, the only one I haven’t read yet is Theistic Evolution. I’m finishing up Reading Genesis Well this week (I read most of it Saturday), which I guess is timely since it releases tomorrow. Several of this stack turned into vacation reading, and believe it or not, less than half the stack are review books.

Actually, that might be believable because you’ll notice the top 3, as well as the one on the bottom, are not theological books. The Ends of The World is about the 5 mass extinctions that have happened in the history of our planet. It suggests a sixth may be underway. Extinction is a deep dive about one of those extinction events, as is T. rex and The Crater of Doom. That book, I read last summer, and it started a new segment in my ongoing journey to understand the history of planet Earth.

Obviously, or maybe not, it is not specifically a book about evolution. It’s not about where the dinosaurs came from, but where they went. It details quite a bit of worldwide evidence for the impact of a giant comet that essentially ended the reign of terror of T. rex and friends. The book is the detective-like tail of how everything was pieced together and confirmed through the methods of science. You’ll never look at the Yucatan peninsula the same way again.

After reading that, I wanted to situate the information into a broader context and that’s why I read The Ends of The World this past summer, and then just recently finished up Extinction, which was thorough but not as exciting. It was also, I’ll be honest, a little over my head as far as the scientific detail. Also, I was skimming a bit and so would need to give it a slower read to make sense of the details. But, I just wanted the big picture for now.

In doing more non-polemical science reading, I made a few realizations. First, if you’re going to reject standard scientific accounts of origins and extinctions, you ought to read the standard accounts themselves, rather than a theologically motivated rejection of them. Because, let’s be honest, for some of these accounts, there are scientific questions yet to be answered. But when there is a refutation of the account from a Christian author, it is not scientifically motivated. An a priori commitment to believing that the earth is young and everything was created in a week is what motivates looking at the scientific data differently.

So then, this raises the question of whether that particular reading of Genesis is the best one available. Before diving into something like Evolution and The Fall, it would be better to read chapters of Old Testament Theology for Christians and Cosmology in Theological Perspective for general ancient Near Eastern and theological context and Reading Genesis Well for some hermeneutical tools to guide you. Chapters in The Christian Doctrine of Humanity and Creation and Doxology can also give some insight into what’s a stake in other readings of Genesis.

Having done all that, you’re in a better position to judge what makes for a good reading of Genesis. Or, you’re at least aware that what is often called a “plain sense” reading of the early chapters of Genesis has not always been the plain sense of young earth creationism. This isn’t to say that you can’t hold that position. But, it is to say that it is not as straight forward as say, someone like Ken Ham, might make it seem.

This leads to the second realization I had in the scientific reading. They are, more often than not, more rigorous and detailed in making the case for what they want the reader to believe is true about the world. In other words, scientists are not just a bunch of atheists out there trying to prove the Bible wrong. In fact, in the books I was reading the Bible is only obliquely referenced. It is not to say it is agenda-less writing. But, the agenda lies outside of polemical concerns about the age of the earth, the truth of Genesis, or something else that is usually on a Christian author’s radar.

I realize I’m making generalizations here. But, I think what I’m realizing is that it is helpful to fill out your understanding of the scientific account by reading books that aren’t necessarily arguing with someone. Maybe a more concrete example would help. Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America is about how the migration into the Americas occurred. It is a fascinating account that as a bonus I was reading in the Bahamas. I say as a bonus because part of the book details how the island I was reading on used to be a mountain top. Florida also featured prominently, and now I know why we have mastodon bones.

But, in reading that book, you’re confronted with the standard scientific accounts of civilization in the early Americas. In those accounts, there were people here between 14,000-15,000 years ago. That obviously conflicts with believing that the earth is only 6,000 years old. But, the author of that book is making his case without reference to that discussion. If one wants to argue the earth is only 6,000 years old, then you now need to have an alternate explanation for the artifacts we’re finding in America. In this situation, the numbers aren’t being inflated by millions of years. Saying the numbers are 10,000 years off is still problematic, and doesn’t actually offer an alternate explanation.

One could go on and ask whether this data from the settling of America conflicts with the early chapters of Genesis. It could, but it all depends on how you read those early chapters. At the very least, it means the flood has to be farther back in human history than a young earth paradigm allows. The Tower of Babel must be farther back as well, thus allowing for the people to migrate across an earth that topographically looked different than it does now. In other words, there’s a lot of moving parts, and I think re-thinking Genesis requires more thinking than most people are willing to do. But, I’m not most people.