Bible Study: Genesis

Lesson 1: Approaching Genesis 1-11

Science and Genesis One

In the 1920’s the most famous trial in American history, perhaps until the OJ trial, took place. In Dayton, Tennessee John Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution in a public school. His trial was from beginning to end an exercise in public relations. Two of the most famous men in America agreed to be the main attorneys for the trial. The defense enlisted the services of Clarence Darrow; the prosecution hired William J. Bryan. Darrow was the most respected lawyer in the country. Bryan had been the standard bearer for the Democratic Party, three times running for President. In the end after all of the theatrics and media attention, Scopes was convicted. But in reality the trial was a defeat for those who wished to keep evolution out of the public schools. Darrow successfully humiliated Bryan who had agreed to take the stand as an “expert” on the Bible. A literal reading of the Bible was successfully portrayed as a backward, unscientific approach to reality. Science was clearly triumphant. The trial sent conservative ("fundamentalist") Christians into cultural oblivion; a fate they did not escape until late in the twentieth century if at all. The trial also sealed the ascendancy of science as the measure of all truth.

But was the whole matter based on a misunderstanding of what the text of Genesis was intending to communicate? The problem with the fundamentalist is that they approached the text with the same assumptions shared by the modern critics, most importantly, that all true language must be scientific. The modernists recognized the non-scientific quality of Genesis and declared it untrue. The fundamentalists recognized the truthfulness of Genesis and declared it scientific. But both equated truth with scientific use of language. We must guard against a denial of either the truth of Genesis or the artistry of Genesis. Truth need not be contained in strictly scientific descriptions of reality.

It is our position that Genesis intends to communicate critical truths about the nature of reality and of God, but it does not intend to relate a scientific description of how God created the universe. Furthermore, we believe that attempting to find in Genesis scientific descriptions of God's method of creation and timeframe for doing so is not only to misread the text, but to miss out on significant and profound explorations of human nature and the nature of God.

We speak of how Genesis intended to be read, but is it possible to enter into the mind of the author? Certainly not with absolute certainty, but with a high level of probability we believe certain conclusions may be safely arrived at. For one thing we should note that what may be called the dialect of science, that is the way science employs language to describe its observations of the physical world is a fairly recent development in the course of human history. Secondly, we should realize that the concerns of the original audience of Genesis would have been very different from our own. It is likely that they were much less concerned with the mechanisms of biological development than they were with the nature and attributes of the God they worshipped. Thirdly, there are indications in the text itself, hints left by the author that signal to the reader that Genesis 1 is a consciously symbolic work that employs language artistically and not scientifically. Again this is not to impugn the truthfulness of the creation account in Genesis 1 (or for that matter the accounts of Adam and Eve in chapters 2 and 3), but to recognize how Genesis communicates in order to appreciate the truths it does articulate.

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