[First posted in 2012, with this introduction:
While this is an interesting read, at the risk of being accused of nitpicking, there are two statements in the author’s introduction that have to be clarified.
Image from amazon.com
One is that the Genesis account is from the Christian Bible. Genesis, Bere’shiyt in Hebrew, is from the TORAH, the first section of the Hebrew Scriptures (TNK). If Christianity chose to attach the TNK to its “New Testament,” STILL proper acknowledgement must be made to the original receivers of the YHWH’s revelation, that would be Moses and the Israelites, and the custodians — the Jews today.
Another is that this book is written to convince skeptics/atheists to believe in the Christian faith – – – oh well, backtrack to the literary location of the Creation account. It is in the book of Genesis/Bereshith. In which part of the Christian Bible is the Creation story found? And to whom was given the divine revelation on the beginnings? In the Torah (re-titled by Christianity in Greek as the Pentateuch) in the Hebrew Bible which ends in — no, not the prophetic book of Malachi, but in the book of Chronicles in the original TNK. Confused?
Regardless, this book has insights that are helpful to those trying to reconcile science and —not religion but the claims of the Torah of YHWH in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Downloadable as an ebook from amazon.com; reformatted for posting.—Admin 1.]
Author: John C. Lennox
About the Author: (PhD, DPhil, DSc) Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College, Oxford. He is author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? on the interface between science, philosophy, and theology. He lectures extensively in North America and in Eastern and Western Europe on mathematics, the philosophy of science, and the intellectual defense of Christianity, and he has publicly debated New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
“Dr. Lennox is an apt guide for exploring both the Bible and science. He admirably argues that they both reveal the same Creator and Designer. In this careful and well-documented study, he examines all the pertinent issues concerning the meaning of the Genesis creation account. Every careful reader will come away more knowledgeable, wiser, and better able to defend the truth of the Bible before a skeptical world.”—–Doug Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy, Denver
I N T R O D U C T I O N
BEGINNING AT THE BEGINNING
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
These majestic words introduce the most translated, most printed, and most read book in history. I well remember how profoundly they affected me in Christmas Eve 1968, when, as a student at Cambridge University, I heard them read to the watching world on live television by the crew of Apollo 8 as they orbited the moon. The context was a triumphant achievement of science and technology that caught the imagination of the millions of people who watched it. To celebrate that success the astronauts chose to read a text that needed no added explanation or qualification, even though it was written millennia ago. The biblical announcement of the fact of creation was as timelessly clear as it was magnificently appropriate.
However, as distinct from the fact of creation, when it comes to the timing and means of creation, particularly the interpretation of the famous sequence of days with which the book begins, people over the centuries have found the book of Genesis less easy to understand. Indeed, controversy about this matter is at an all-time high, with the debate about teaching creationism and evolution in schools in the USA, the question of faith schools in the UK, and, perhaps most of all, the popular perception of Christianity as unscientific (or even antiscientific) because of the Genesis account—a perception that is vocally endorsed by the New Atheists.
I once met a brilliant professor of literature from a famous university in a country where it was not easy to discuss the Bible publicly. She was intrigued to learn that I was a scientist who believed the Bible, and she said that she would like to ask me a question she had always wanted to ask by never dared to. She also said, with typically Eastern sensitivity, that she was reluctant to ask me the question in case it offended me: “We were taught at school that the Bible starts with a very silly, unscientific story of how the world was made in seven days. What do you have to say about it as a scientist?”
This book is written for people like her, who have been putting off even considering the Christian faith for this kind of reason. It is also written for the many convinced Christians who are disturbed not only by the controversy but also by the fact that even those who take the Bible seriously do not agree on the interpretation of the creation account.
Some think that the only faithful interpretation of Scripture is the young-earth, literal view of the Genesis days that was made famous by Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656) of the city of Armagh in Northern Ireland—where, incidentally, I lived for the first 18 years of my life. Ussher gave 4004 BC as the date for the origin of the earth. His calculation, based on taking the days of Genesis 1 as 24-hour days of one earth week at the beginning of the universe, is six orders of magnitude away from the current scientific estimate of around 4 billion years.
Others hold that the text can be understood in concord with contemporary science. Such old-earth creationists are again split over the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution as valid, others not.
Finally, yet others argue that the Genesis account is written to communicate timeless theological truth and that attempts to harmonize it with science are misguided. The topic is clearly a potential minefield. Yet I do not think that the situation is hopeless.
For a start, there are many Christians who, like me, are convinced of the inspiration and authority of Scripture and have spent their lives actively engaged in science. We think that, since God is the author both of his Word the Bible and of the universe, there must ultimately be harmony between correct interpretation of the biblical data and correct interpretation of the scientific data. Indeed, it was the conviction that there was a creative intelligence behind the universe and the laws of nature that gave the prime stimulus and momentum to the modern scientific quest to understand nature and its laws in the 16th and 17th centuries. Furthermore, science–far from making God redundant and irrelevant, as atheists often affirm–actually confirms his existence, which is the theme of my book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
This book has 5 chapters and 5 appendices.
- As an introduction to controversy and how we handle it, the 1st chapter discusses the challenge which the scientific theory that the earth was moving in space posed to generally accepted biblical interpretation int he 16th century.
- The 2nd chapter moves on to some principles of biblical interpretation and applies them to that controversy.
- The 3rd is the heart of the book, where we consider the interpretation of the Genesis days.
- The 4th is given over to the biblical account of the origin of human beings, their antiquity, and related theological questions about death.
- Finally, in the 5th chapter we balance our discussion of the creation week by drawing on the New Testament in order to learn what aspects of Genesis 1 creation narrative are emphasized there, and why they are relevant for us today.
C O N T E N T S
- But Does It Move? A Lesson from History
- But Does It Move? A Lesson about Scripture
- But is it old? The Days of Creation
- Human Beings: A Special Creation?
- The Message of Genesis
Appendices
A. A Brief Background to Genesis
B. The Cosmic Temple View
C. The Beginning According to Genesis and Science
D. Two Accounts of Creation?
E. Theistic Evolution and The God of the Gaps
great post, thanks for taking the time to write it