publications

This is a chapter of the book Intelligent Faith, edited by John MacDonald Smith and John Quenby, O Books, 2009.

Genesis 1 and the presuppositions of science

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to offer a religious argument against six-day creationists and anti-evolutionists. I shall focus on two principles which are essential presuppositions of all science, namely the order and comprehensibility of the universe, and note how they became accepted parts of Europeans’ mental furniture only after millennia of theological debate. Elsewhere in this book Anthony Phillips provides a theological introduction to the beginning of Genesis; I shall examine its first chapter, that jewel in the crown of anti-evolutionist and six-day creationist theory, with the more specific aim of showing how, far from serving their purpose, it played a major role in establishing these science-affirming principles.

I adopt a unified view of knowledge in which science and theology inform each other. This unified view is now controversial. We have inherited a double account of how we came into existence. In one the world is billions of years old and humans evolved out of other primates, while in the other the world is just over six thousand years old and God created all living beings in six days. This double account is a modern development. Before the nineteenth century, when Europeans speculated about the origins of the world and humanity they did so within a unified framework. The information available to them was limited and they put together what there was: the observations of scientists, the speculations of philosophers, biblical texts and church teachings.

Within that older model, when new scientific findings contradicted biblical texts controversy often raged, especially in the twelfth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The main reason why the nineteenth century debates, unlike earlier ones, generated this double account was the rise of positivism. Positivists distinguished between ‘facts’ – known certainties which cannot be refuted – and ‘opinions’ or ‘beliefs’ which can.1 The dominant nineteenth century view was that facts are derived from scientific methods: empirical observation and the generalization of data into laws. A contrasting positivism claimed that the facts are established by divine revelation through the Bible whereas science is mere human theory.2 Since then many anti-evolutionist campaigners have sought scientific evidence to justify their case; their view, however, was originally generated, and continues to be motivated, not by empirical evidence but by a distinctive theory about the authority of the Bible. What makes these two positivist theories irreconcilable is the certainty claims; if my ‘facts’ are irrefutable, anyone who disagrees with me is certainly wrong.

Today scientists are more aware that their rapidly increasing information about the world depends on hypotheses, any one of which may in the future be refuted however unlikely this may seem. Similarly most religious opinion recognizes that the Bible cannot be treated as a collection of certainties about the world. Recently we have witnessed a revival of religious anti-evolutionism, and there remains a lively tradition of atheists denouncing all religion as anti-scientific; but to the twenty-first century ear both these positivisms have an outdated ring to them. The idea that the Bible can refute science seems so old-fashioned as to be bizarre, but so does the claim that science has disproved religious belief.

In the present climate a much more serious threat to science is the non-realism popular among some postmodernists. Their fundamental argument is that all scientific research makes two presuppositions: firstly that the world is ordered, and secondly that the human mind is capable of perceiving and analysing that order. Pointing out that neither of these can be proved by scientific methods, they then argue that scientists, far from describing reality the way it objectively is, are simply finding ways to present chaos as though it were ordered.3

Many people today, including many scientists, dismiss these postmodern challenges on the ground that these presuppositions are common sense, but this reveals a lack of historical awareness: however obvious they may now seem, they were only established after the triumph of one theological tradition over others.4 Thus whereas the older, positivist challenges have discredited all religious belief in the eyes of many supporters of science, in the newer challenges science is in trouble precisely because it has forgotten its theological roots.

Order and comprehensibility

If the world does not function according to ordered regularities, ‘laws of nature’, there is no role for science. It is not self-evident that it does. We observe some regularities, like the alternation between day and night, but also irregularities: weather patterns, for example, are so unpredictable that forecasts are unreliable. Given our experience of life in general, it is possible either to believe that the world is basically chaotic and seek explanations for the regularities, or to believe that the world is basically ordered and seek explanations for the irregularities.

Many ancient and medieval societies opted for the former. To explain the chaotic nature of reality as a whole they described its creation as the result of interactions between conflicting gods with conflicting agendas. Thus the ancient pantheons could begin their accounts of reality with an original chaos and explain specific regularities as the work of specific gods.

Some of the presocratic Greek philosophers proposed the idea of regular, predictable laws of nature. Characteristically laws of nature are described in terms of causal sequences: when x is the case, y happens. The traditional Greek gods, far from offering a basis for such a theory, were as good an example as any of a pantheon producing a chaotic world, but the philosophers did not take them at all seriously. In this sense we may think of their theory as a forerunner of modern secular science after the link with religious doctrines has been severed.

For science to be possible the nature of reality also needs to be comprehensible to the human mind. Paradoxically this means that order needs to be limited. If every event is determined by previous events in an unfailing sequence of cause and effect, then even our thoughts must be determined by prior causes. If so it becomes difficult to see how our beliefs can bear any particular relation to their objects. For example, I believe Paris is the capital of France. If this belief of mine is explained by a sequence of physical causes and effects - chemical processes in my brain – it is difficult to see how my belief can bear any relation to whether or not Paris is indeed the capital of France. If it really is, this would seem pure coincidence. In a world entirely governed by a deterministic sequence of cause and effect we have no way to stand outside those causes to check the nature of reality. Currently this is a major theme of debate among philosophers.5

For science to be possible, therefore, we need to believe that whereas the world around us operates regularly as a cause-and-effect sequence, our own minds are free to think their own thoughts without physical causation. This was indeed the basis upon which early modern science developed; according to Cartesian dualism its scope was restricted to the physical and observable, while acknowledging the existence of a spiritual and unobservable realm outside the remit of science. It was later, with the rise of positivism, that the existence of the spiritual realm was challenged and the human mind was relocated in the determined physical realm.

If human minds are indeed free to think their own thoughts it still does not follow that we are capable of understanding how the world works. On what basis might we expect to have this capacity? Again theological speculation has explored the options over the millennia. Some religious traditions have argued that the mind, or soul, was created by evil gods who intended to keep us ignorant; such for example seems to have been a common theme in ancient Gnostic teaching.6 A modern theory with a similar effect argues that since our minds have evolved to maximize our chances of survival, there is no reason why we should expect them to understand deep truths about the nature of reality.7

These two presuppositions of science, order and comprehensibility, far from being mere common sense have been proposed by some theologies and rejected by others. The theologies which have been most fruitful in proposing them are the ones which developed out of Jewish monotheism. All the books of the Hebrew Scriptures as we have them were probably edited to make them consistent with the principle that the world was designed by a single benevolent being who intended it for the well-being of all creation and got it right. The Bible expresses it most clearly in the first chapters of Genesis and Second Isaiah. These texts offer an emphatically monotheistic account of the relationship between God, the world and humans in which God intends shalom - peace, harmony, well-being and prosperity, for humans, animals and the land.

The Jewish account of order differs from regularity in two respects. Firstly empirical observations establish regularities but not the reasons for them.8 In the Bible, order means that the regularities are intended. On this basis it is possible to speculate about their causes by asking what kinds of intentions the creating mind may have. Secondly, the modern tendency to assume that everything in the space-time universe is governed by laws of nature has the effect of presenting these laws not just as real powers but as supreme powers. Monotheism, by describing the supreme power as an intending mind, can affirm regularities as the creation of that mind but also allow for some processes not to be governed by regularity.

Among early Christians this was best expressed by the fourth century Basil, Bishop of Caesarea. Basil proposed that the laws of nature described by the Greeks had been established by God as part of the process of creating the world. On this basis he understood regularity to be both reliable where it exists, and limited. If it is the same God who created both the physical world and our minds, and furthermore did so in order to let us understand the world well enough for legitimate purposes, then we have grounds for confidence in our ability to understand the world.9

Here then are two essential presuppositions of science: that the world is ordered, and that the human mind can understand that order. The successes of modern science have contributed to their credibility; but precisely because science cannot function without them, it cannot prove them. When good theology triumphed, it made science possible. This was well known to early modern scientists until the middle of the eighteenth century; students of Galileo and Newton, for example, are well aware of the extent to which they drew on theological concepts in the development of their theories.

These theological foundations, however, gradually disappeared from view. From around the middle of the eighteenth century scientific knowledge seemed to many of the European educated classes to be more secure than theological knowledge. A major influence was David Hume, who took for granted that science could establish true knowledge without reference to religious belief, but aired many doubts about the existence of God.10 Since then the theological foundations of science have been largely forgotten, leaving a situation where order and predictability, and therefore science, still work but science itself cannot explain why.11 Postmodern challengers seize on this gap to argue that modern science is built on error.

Interpreting Genesis

With these issues at stake I turn to the first chapter of Genesis. My main purpose is to illustrate the connection between its monotheistic theology and the theory that the world is both ordered and comprehensible. A secondary aim is to undermine the claims of six-day creationists and anti-evolutionists.

Readers who have no training in understanding ancient texts often make modern assumptions about how and why they were written, and therefore misunderstand their meaning. Six-day creationists and anti-evolutionists resist scholarly exegesis, usually by appealing to one of two arguments. One is that the true author of the Bible is God. God, they tell us, somehow intervened in the minds of some humans, causing them to write the books regardless of whether they understood what they were writing, so we need not concern ourselves with their intentions. This is a difficult view to defend; it has no empirical support and biblical scholars have pointed out countless texts where God would appear to have been inconsistent, mistaken or incomprehensible. Even the strictest of biblical literalists usually find it necessary to attribute the final wording and intentionality to human authors.12

A newer argument, based on reader-response theory and popularized by postmodernism, claims that the authoritative meaning of biblical texts within each Christian church is whatever that church interprets it to be, regardless of the authors’ original intentions. Just as we can perceive in Shakespeare’s plays insights which Shakespeare himself did not consciously intend, so also with the Bible. This theory can indeed produce the conclusion that Genesis 1 ‘means’ that there was no evolution, but it only ‘means’ that from the perspective of the churches which decide to make it mean that. Any meaning established in this way has the authority of that church, but cannot claim the authority of the Bible as such. I therefore take the view that whenever we take any biblical text to be authoritative for us, the only meanings we can describe as authoritative-because-they-are-biblical are the meanings the human authors intended to convey.

What they intended to convey is not always easy to establish. When reading texts from a culture very different from our own we need to distinguish what the authors meant to affirm from what they took for granted. We understand literature from our own culture more easily because we take in verbal cues, often without noticing that we are doing so. For example, if I say ‘Paris is the capital of France’ to a group of educated Europeans, they are likely to anticipate a further statement; after all, on its own it is a well-known piece of information, not worth repeating for its own sake. On the other hand if I say ‘Winchester is the capital of France’, hearers are likely to focus on the statement. Am I perhaps about to make some claim about medieval kings? If in two thousand years’ time archaeologists unearth records containing these two statements they may not appreciate how different they are in intent.

Similarly when we read texts from a very different culture, unless we are steeped in its language and thought forms we are likely to miss the verbal cues, and we may not distinguish successfully between what is being taken for granted and what is being positively affirmed. The idea of treating Genesis 1 as a set of factual statements about how the world was created was an early nineteenth century development. At this time Europeans and Americans were increasingly interested in science and history and interpreted biblical texts accordingly. They did not have other ancient near eastern texts available to them for purposes of comparison. Later in the century they did, but by that time the tradition of rejecting science in the name of the Bible had been established.

Historical background

Today a great many ancient near eastern texts are available to us, and although scholars debate details the main outline with respect to Genesis 1 is clear. Genesis 1:1-2:4a was written, probably in the later sixth or some time in the fifth century BC, by anonymous authors known as ‘the Priestly source’ or ‘P’, adapting earlier material to provide a theologically motivated prologue to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. They are probably responsible for the present form of the Pentateuch and in Genesis 1 as elsewhere they used but adapted pre-existent material.

When Judaea was defeated by the Babylonians in the early sixth century, usual practice would have been to abandon worship of their god – who had failed to protect them - and transfer allegiance to Marduk, the god of the Babylonians. The Judaeans would have been assimilated into Babylonian culture, and no doubt some were. About fifty years later Cyrus the Persian, who had a policy of allowing exiles to return home, marched against Babylon. The author of Isaiah 40-55 looked forward to his victory and interpreted it as part of a plan by Israel’s god. Normally gods of small nations were not considered able to influence the faraway events of greater powers, but the prophet identified Israel’s god with the supreme God of the whole world, ramming the point home by mocking Babylon’s gods as mere pieces of wood. Afterwards P listed the laws applying to the Jewish community, prefixing them with Genesis 1 and the histories describing Israel’s role in the divine scheme of things.

The closest literary parallel to Genesis 1 is the Enuma Elish, a creation epic recited at the New Year festival at Babylon. This text has been available to scholars since the end of the nineteenth century and has often been called ‘the Babylonian Genesis’. It is the older of the two, so it will have been the Enuma Elish which influenced Genesis, not the other way round. By comparing them scholars explored which elements of Genesis 1 were borrowed and which were original to P. As more literature has come to light the position has become more complex; some common features were shared throughout the ancient near east, and P may have borrowed from other sources as well. Nevertheless this Babylonian text remains the closest parallel and is likely to have been well known by P’s circle since they had been exiled to Babylon.

Ancient creation myths served a purpose which is often misunderstood today. They generally seem to have arisen not from pure speculation but from issues of security. We do the same today. For example, anxiety about global warming motivates societies to bring together their best insights in science, politics, economics, technology and ethics in order to explore how to respond. In the same way the ancients responded to floods, plagues and military defeat by reviewing their theories about what caused these events and what they should do about them. What makes it difficult for us to notice the similarities is that their theories focused on the nature of the gods and their proposed solutions usually involved cultic actions like sacrifices. Nevertheless the point was, then as now, to account for the nature of reality as they experienced it in order to establish what could and should be done about the threats they faced. Once these questions had been answered the explanations were often used for other purposes, like pure speculation about the nature of the world or justifying the prevailing moral norms and cultic practices.13

The creator God

The authors of Genesis 1 thus presented their theory about how God has designed humans to live, situating it at the beginning of the Pentateuch to form a prologue to the history of Israel and the lists of laws in later books. They borrowed details of the creation story from the traditions available to them. They affirmed some, took some for granted and rejected others. In addition they seem to have produced new ideas of their own. In order to appreciate their message we need to distinguish what they took for granted from what they were positively affirming.

Genesis 1 is neither narrative nor poetry. It has hymn-like qualities, especially short sentences and repetitions like the choruses of hymns, but the Hebrew is not sufficiently regular for the present text to have been a hymn. It is most likely that P adapted a hymn for the purpose, and this suggests that the irregularities indicate changes P made. The main repetitions are:

God said (i.e. decreed the creation of something) 7 times

God made  5 times

God named 5 times

God saw that the thing created was good 7 times

It was evening and it was morning, the [next] day  6 times.

Listing these repetitions is enough to draw attention to the distinctive character of this text by comparison with other ancient near eastern creation narratives. It is a ringing endorsement of monotheism. The Enuma Elish is typical of ancient near eastern creation epics by beginning with a long genealogy of the gods. By contrast the first statement in Genesis, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, is distinctive P; there are no other gods and before God performed this first act of creation there is nothing to report.14 Centuries later Jews and Christians would elaborate the monotheistic principle by describing God as omnipotent, omniscient and good. P describes what God does rather than what God is, but those later descriptions are in keeping with the theology described here.

The main argument against strict monotheism is the question of why a good God should allow suffering and evil. There are four basic answers, which have remained the same since P’s time. Three are that God lacks complete power, or knowledge, or goodness. The fourth is the ‘free will defence’: that God is indeed perfectly omniscient, omniscient and good, but has withdrawn from complete power so as to allow humans freedom to choose between good and evil. This theory produces the distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s regular power which the medieval scholastic explored. In the second and subsequent chapters of Genesis P dwells at length on the dangerous implications of God’s gift of freedom;15 our present concern, however, is with Chapter 1’s insistence that God is indeed perfectly omnipotent, omniscient and good.

One of the attractions of polytheism is that it can explain disorder and tragedy as the result of interactions between different gods who contributed to creation. In the Enuma Elish a great deal happens in heaven before the world is created. This explains why the world was created: Marduk intended to relieve the gods of housework, so our role is to maintain their temples and offer sacrifices; if we do not, a return to the primeval chaos threatens.16 Though supreme, Marduk had gained power through a historical sequence of heavenly events and could in theory lose it again. In Genesis by contrast there is only one God and there are no restrictions on God’s power. The repeated refrain ‘God said’ followed by ‘and it was so’ establishes God’s omnipotence.

Similarly with God’s omniscience. Other ancient near eastern creation myths abound with stories of failed and imperfect creations. In Genesis, after the repeated ‘God said’ and ‘and it was so’ comes ‘it was very good’. The creating mind not only has complete power to create exactly what was intended, but also gets it right every time.

Together with omnipotence and omniscience God’s other main attribute is goodness. In the absence of any rivals or limitations God has no self-concern. Whereas in the Enuma Elish humans are created to serve the gods, Genesis 1 tells us that after creating us God blessed us, and later books in the Pentateuch, especially Deuteronomy, insist that it is for our own well-being that God has created us and given us laws.

Here then is a text which differs from all other known ancient near eastern texts by its emphatic monotheism. This is qualified only by the absence of a doctrine of creation out of nothing. That idea developed much later, but perhaps is a legitimate development. Claus Westermann describes four main types of ancient near eastern creation myth: creation through word, making, birth and conflict.17 P of course has no place for creation by conflict; instead he combines creation by word and by making, each of which is monotheistic but open to a polytheistic interpretation: creation by decree denies the influence of other gods but can be taken to imply magic or subordinate deities being commanded, while creation by making avoids any hint of other gods but can be taken to imply pre-existent materials not created by God. P uses the best tools available to express monotheism.18

Order

Having established what kind of God Genesis is affirming, let us now turn to the acts of creation. The first three constitute, so to speak, the physics of creation. God performs acts of separation: between light and darkness, between the earth and what is above and below it, and between the earth and the waters surrounding it. These describe the dimensions within which ancient Jews and their neighbours believed they lived.

The first is time, expressed by the alternation of day and night. Commentators have noted an inconsistency: P is aware that light comes from the sun and moon, but describes the creation of light first and the heavenly bodies later. This inconsistency suggests theological purpose. The Babylonians were the first to develop astrology, on the basis that the heavenly bodies were gods who could see and influence events on earth.19 P suppresses the idea; they are created by God, their creation is relegated to a late stage and even their names are not mentioned: the sun and moon are merely referred to as greater and lesser lamps.20

The second separation is the vertical one. Here Genesis diverges most strongly from modern science. Throughout the ancient near east it was taken for granted that when one looks up at the sky on a sunny day what one is seeing is a solid inverted bowl, translated into English sometimes as ‘dome’, sometimes as ‘firmament’. The Hebrew word means something that has been hammered out; Homer described it as made of iron.21 The text tells us that it separated the waters above it from the waters below it. The picture being painted here is the classic ancient near eastern one. The earth is flat. Above it is the sky, topped with its solid firmament; and waters swirl above the firmament and below the earth.22

The third separation is the horizontal one. God commanded the waters under the dome to recede, making space for dry land and thus preparing for the creation of animals and humans. In these three acts of separation God establishes time, and the vertical and horizontal dimensions of space, as permanent features of reality at the very beginning.

In other ancient near eastern creation myths what is created is always to some extent relative. The dominant god is usually a young one, has often gained preeminence through battle, and represents the dominant political power. The gods representing earlier empires are not completely forgotten but are kept in the list of gods, demoted to inferior status. Since the current world order has been established by the youngest generation in a succession of gods it is possible that one day things may change again. Such changes are expressed on earth by the rise and fall of empires, and perhaps also by changing natural phenomena – plagues and floods, the appearance and disappearance of giants. In principle anything could change if a new supreme god chooses to change it. The monotheism of Genesis tells a radically different story. By breaking the connection between the supremacy of the nation and the supremacy of the national god, and conceiving of the nation as a ‘chosen people’ in ways which were nothing to do with conquering empires, they were able to envisage a supreme God establishing an order which is independent of the ups and downs of military power. If it is correct to interpret the first act of creation as the creation of time, then not only does the idea of a prehistory before it become meaningless but also the idea of a subsequent history after the rule of this God becomes equally meaningless. These three acts of separation establish order, and locate it in all physical reality and all time.23 Polytheists have no theoretical basis for expecting the world to be so ordered, let alone so permanently and reliably; nor, as postmodernists point out, do atheists.

Comprehensibility

Whereas Genesis 1 emphasises order to express a radical difference between monotheism and polytheism, comprehensibility was not under dispute. The surrounding polytheists knew that the world processes they experienced contained many regularities. Crops might be destroyed by floods or droughts because of a god’s anger, but they still needed to be planted and harvested at certain times of year. They did not share either the early modern hope of establishing complete knowledge of the universe, or twentieth century non-realism and allied theories of radical ignorance. It was taken for granted that the ways of the world could be understood well enough for everyday purposes while much of it was beyond human comprehension.

Comprehensibility is therefore not asserted so strongly in Genesis 1. It is, though, still part of the story. Two affirmations are worth noting: that God created us ‘in his image and likeness’ and that God gave us ‘dominion’ over other living beings. Both have been the objects of extensive discussion.

Image and likeness have often been interpreted to mean that humans have God-like qualities, either mental ones like the ability to reason or physical ones like the ability to stand on two feet. Most Hebrew scholars now believe the text represents a democratized version of imperial practice. It was customary for ancient near eastern emperors to mark their authority over subject regions by erecting statues of themselves in prominent places. These statues were the ‘image and likeness’ of the emperor and functioned as signs, reminding the people who the supreme ruler was. The ruler, in turn, was the chief representative of the nation’s god.24 P adapted this tradition for the post-exilic situation. Israel no longer had its human emperor; instead, God was its emperor. God was to be represented neither by a human ruler nor, as the Ten Commandments insist, by carved statues; instead the God of the whole world was represented throughout the inhabited world by humans, and more specifically by the Judean community as it obeyed the laws in the Pentateuch.

It appears, then, that calling humans the ‘image and likeness’ of God is an analogy with the way statues are images and likenesses of emperors. The implication is that humans, while not ourselves the legitimate rulers of the world - because God is – do symbolize God to the world. We have a point of connection with God, a relationship with God, which other living beings do not have.

God’s gift to humanity of ‘dominion’ over other living beings has been central to western Christian debates about the legitimate use of technology. At their most extreme, supporters of technology argued that it gives us permission to do whatever we wish with everything in the physical world except other humans.25 Conversely, others have blamed Christianity for its environmentally reckless character. The authors of Genesis, of course, had no idea what scope modern science would give for adapting our environment. They were, however, aware of the latest technologies in their own culture, the domestication of cattle and ploughing the land. Both raised religious questions which have been asked all over the world. We would not find it acceptable for cows to domesticate us; why is it acceptable for us to domesticate them? Does digging the ground cause pain to Mother Earth? Responding to these questions, P tells us that neither animals nor the earth are divine; they have been created by God, and God has intentionally designed us with the capacity to make use of them. This still does not mean we can do whatever we like with them, and later texts in the Pentateuch lay down a great many limits. Nevertheless human technologies are in principle legitimate practices.26 We are encouraged to make use of the resources God has made available to us.

It is this humanity, created in the divine image and given dominion over other animals, who will be given freedom, law, creativity and desire in Chapter 2, will misuse them in Chapter 3, and whose misuses will cause greater and greater misfortunes in subsequent chapters, setting the scene for the call of Abraham, the creation of Israel and the imposition of law. P describes us as free, capable of reflecting on the consequences of our actions and therefore morally responsible. Although the emphasis here is moral rather than scientific the roles of knowledge and technology are acknowledged. P affirms, and approves of, our ability to observe features of the world’s order, understand them, and plan our lives accordingly. It is arguable that the authors intended either the image and likeness text or the dominion text, or both, to convey just this; even if not, the comprehensibility of the world remains essential to their account of humanity’s God-given authority to till the earth, domesticate animals and choose between good and evil.

Practical details

By contrast, the practical details which anti-evolutionists and six-day creationists prefer to emphasize are borrowings from the beliefs of the day which are not at all essential to P’s theological message. Whether or not they accord with modern science they express how the people of the ancient near east understood the world. The overall order of events for example matches the Enuma Elish in many ways: chaos at the beginning followed by the creation of the firmament, dry land, the heavenly bodies and people. God’s rest corresponds with the Babylonian feast of the gods when the creation is complete. Other scholars have argued for additional correlations.27 For Christians today to insist that these were divinely inspired truths is to say that the Babylonians were inspired and the authors of Genesis copied them.

On these matters there is, though, one significant change, the conversion of an eight-day creation into a six-day creation. Even here it is inconceivable that P would have been motivated by blue skies speculation about the exact number of days it took God to create the world. These authors inherited the eight acts of creation and had no wish to eliminate any of them. However elsewhere in the Pentateuch they emphasize that everybody, including slaves and even cattle, should be protected from over-exploitation by being granted a day of rest every seven days. If we were to be convinced that the text is God’s way of telling us the scientific facts about creation, we would have to conclude that, unlike modern scientists, the ancient Babylonians got most of the facts right but were just two days out in the time creation took. Instead of treating Genesis like this we should celebrate its achievement. By describing the creation of the world as a work of six days followed by a day of rest, P presents the sabbath as an inherent part of a universal established order. Not just Jews but everyone should have a regular day of rest. Rarely has an economic innovation met with such widespread and long-lasting success as the Jewish invention of the week.28

Conclusion

To summarize, when scholars compare Genesis 1 with other ancient near eastern texts, a pattern emerges. The factual details which modern science considers inaccurate were not the message of Genesis; they were merely the beliefs about the world which were traditional in that time and place, and which the authors of Genesis accepted. On the other hand when we turn from what these authors inherited and accepted to what they positively affirmed, we find an emphatic message which is theological. Reacting against the polytheism dominant at the time they hammer home a strict monotheism: the world and everything in it have been created by the one and only God who has complete power and knowledge. The basic structure of reality is ordered, and permanently so. Part of God’s creative gift is to delegate power to humans, and with it the ability to understand how the world operates.

Where the authors of Genesis made changes to the accounts of creation they had inherited, they did so for theological reasons: to deny other gods and creation by conflict, to present humans not as slaves working to meet divine needs but as free and blessed agents, to establish the sabbath rest. The descriptive details they retained were the tools they used to express their theology. What they were proclaiming was not that God created the world flat, but that the flat world has been created by this God; not that the world was created in six days, but that the six-day creation tells us to rest as well as work; not that God created humans as a separate species, but that the separately-created humans are endowed with understanding, power and freedom, if we so wish, to become holy like God.

Historically there is no doubt that this is the ground in which the seeds of modern science grew. Because P’s successors understood the world to be ordered, intended, and benign it made sense to speculate about the nature of that order. It was not a linear progression: often enough the ubiquitous presence of angels and evil spirits manipulating the environment made it hard to believe the world was ordered, and some medieval scholars argued that the attempt to establish regularities in nature were heretical denials of God’s freedom. Nevertheless order, and science, eventually triumphed.

It is most unfortunate that over the last couple of centuries this crucial text has so often been used to oppose the scientific outlook which it had once made possible. Rather than being embarrassed by the errors made by the authors of Genesis, Jews and Christians should celebrate them for their great insights: as far as we know they were the first writers to propose the hypothesis, essential to all science, that the world is ordered and the human mind is able to comprehend its order.

Notes

1Mandelbaum, Maurice, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971, provides a good discussion of the development of nineteenth century positivism.

2I discuss this at greater length in Clatworthy, Jonathan, Liberal Faith in a Divided Church: O Books, 2008, Chapter 4.

3Trigg, R, Reality at Risk, Brighton: Harvester, 1980, especially pp. 5, 9, 61-62.

4Kaiser, Christopher, Toward a Theology of Scientific Endeavour: The Descent of Science, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, argues that four features are essential in any society capable of generating scientific research: the belief that the universe is lawful, the belief that the human mind is capable of understanding it, a cultural tradition which encourages the investigation of hidden aspects of the world, and a social and technological infrastructure able to support new research. It is the first two, order and comprehensibility, on which I focus here.

5Honderich, Ted, How Free Are You?, Oxford: OUP, 1993, Chapter 2; Trigg, Reality at Risk, , p. 49; Kenny, Anthony, The Metaphysics of Mind, Oxford: OUP, 1989, p. 4; O'Hear, Anthony, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: OUP, 1991, pp. 207-8.

6E.g. The Gospel of Truth 28-30. Robinson, James M, The Nag Hammadi Library: The Definitive New Translation of the Gnostic Scriptures, Complete in One Volume, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990, p. 45; and the Seventh Hermetic Tractate 2.3, Rudolph, Gnosis, p. 114 (and see also the discussion on pp. 90-92).

7See Patricia Churchland’s argument in Journal of Philosophy 84 (October 1987), p. 548, quoted in Helm, Paul, Ed, Faith and Reason, Oxford: OUP, 1999, p. 265. ‘Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing... A fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival [Churchland’s emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.’

8As David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, when we say that one event causes another, what we actually observe is only that one event is habitually followed by another. However often we observe the second event following the first, we never perceive the first causing the second; the idea of causation is supplied by our minds. Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Oxford: OUP, 11th impression 1990 of 3rd Edition (1975), 7.2.60.

9Kaiser, Christopher, Creation and the History of Science, London: Marshall Pickering, 1991, pp. 4-34.

10Gaskin, J C A, Hume's Philosophy of Religion, London: Macmillan, 1978, pp. 17-37 & 94-106.

11O’Hear, Science, Chapter 2.

12Harris, Harriet, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, pp. 161-66.

13Westermann, Claus, Genesis 1-11, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994, p. 120.

14Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 97 & 97.

15I have discussed this in my Good God: Green Theology and the Value of Creation, Jon Carpenter, 1997, Chapter 2.

16Westermann, Genesis 1-11, p. 36.

17Westermann, Genesis 1-11, p. 29.

18Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 26-47.

19Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 132-134.

20Westermann, Genesis 1-11, p. 112.

21Westermann, Genesis 1-11, p. 117.

22Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 116-7.

23Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 80-123.

24Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 147-158; Barr, James, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, Chapter 8.

25In effect the idea has been central to the cult of technology since Francis Bacon’s arguments to this effect. See Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1983.

26Murray, Robert, The Cosmic Covenant, London: Sheed & Ward, 1992, p. 98.

27Westermann, Genesis 1-11, p. 89.

28Westermann, Genesis 1-11, pp. 167-173.