Author’s Note: This part of a weekly series on geology for a class I am taking this semester at BYU-Idaho. This week’s prompt required students discuss how they reconcile geologic time with the time frame described in the Bible. Other posts from this assignment can be found under the “Geology 111” category.
I don’t generally like incorporating my religious views into my weather blog. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to discuss religion with you, I just don’t feel like this is the place to do that. This blog post will be an exception to that rule.
The purpose of this post is not to start a religious debate, but to explain my views on the subject and to get a good grade. As always, I welcome comments of those wishing to express their views on any subject I write about, but any comments that I feel are hostile or take away from the tone I wish to have within my blog will be deleted without question.
Also, in case anyone’s wondering, I generally read the King James Version of the Bible.
I am a pretty religious person myself. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (archive). I even teach a Sunday School class for 12 and 13 year old’s each Sunday. I am a Christian, and as such I believe the Bible to be the word of God. In fact, our eighth Article of Faith states:
We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. (Articles of Faith / archive)
I also love science, which anyone who regularly reads my blog may have guessed. In science, we talk about time on colossal scales like the events that follow (yes they all link to Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia is awesome and I’ll fight you over it).
- Mount Rainier started to form around 840,000 years ago.
- An asteroid struck earth 66 million years ago, contributing to a mass extinction.
- Pangaea began to break apart 175 million years ago.
- The oldest fossils of plants and fungi living on land have been dated to 460-480 million years ago.
- A snowball earth situation may have existed 635 million years ago
- The first free oxygen in our atmosphere may have existed 3.5 billion years ago.
- The earliest known life forms lived between 3.77 and 4.28 billion years ago.
- The earliest liquid water on earth can be found about 4.4 billion years ago.
- The generally accepted date for the formation of the Earth is 4.54 billion years ago.
Take these dates and compare them to the timeline mentioned in the Bible – that God created the earth in six days and that it is about 6,000 years old. Many Christians accept these time frames without reservation, not taking into consideration variables such as erroneous copies of early manuscripts, erroneous translations by various individuals, changes made to the text made on purpose by individuals for their own gain, and differences in individual definitions of time periods in early civilization. And, lets not forget that God’s reckoning of time is not necessarily the same as ours.
Remember that members of the LDS Church believe the Bible to be the word of God so far as it is translated correctly. The unfortunate truth is that the many translations of the Bible available today contain a hodgepodge of small errors (accidental or otherwise) that make it hard to use it as a definitive resource for time frames of early events.
I really enjoy a talk that Russell M. Nelson (archive), now President of the Church, gave in a General Conference in April 2000 called The Creation (archive). I’ll probably pull pretty heavily from this talk for the remainder of my post.
The physical Creation itself was staged through ordered periods of time. In Genesis (archive) and Moses (archive), those periods are called days. But in the book of Abraham (archive), each period is referred to as a time. Whether termed a day, a time, or an age, each phase was a period between two identifiable events—a division of eternity.
So like we discussed previously, the term ‘day’ as used by Moses in the Bible could just be talking about time periods rather than literal days. Could God have created the earth in six days? Sure. I don’t think any Christian believes otherwise, but God – like us – is bound by natural law. The difference between Him and us is that He knows things like the Law of Physics so perfectly that He can manipulate nature to His own desire. This probably took some time, though it may have only felt like a few days to Him.
Looking at the events during the Creation as told by the Bible, we see a clear order:
- The earth was without form and was unorganized. (Genesis 1:2)
- God created a light source and the atmosphere was formed. (Genesis 1:3)
- God separated the waters from the land as well as water vapor in the atmosphere. (Genesis 1:6-10)
- God created plant life. (Genesis 1:12)
- God further developed the sun, moon, and stars to put them in a manner that we could use to tell time. (Genesis 1:14-18)
- God created animals. (Genesis 1:20-25)
- God created man. (Genesis 1:26-29)
This order provided in Genesis is remarkably similar to our understanding provided by science:
- A solar nebula forms the sun and planets around it.
- As earth takes a more defined shape, it develops an atmosphere.
- The moon is formed.
- Liquid water appears.
- Cellular life forms, which is reliant on photosynthesis (we can reasonably call these plants).
- Some of these plants evolve into what we can reasonably call animals.
- Humanity evolves.
Sure, there are a few differences between the two timelines, but the similarities are fascinating to me. Not much else is provided in scripture regarding the creation, yet as President Nelson stated:
Though our understanding of the Creation is limited, we know enough to appreciate its supernal significance.
Science has taught us many things in recent years. On this and the religious tendency to attribute everything that science has yet to explain to being the work of God, Neil deGrasse Tyson said the following in an interview (archive):
If that’s where you’re going to put your God in this world, then God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance. If God is the mysteries of the universe, we’re tackling these mysteries one by one. If you’re going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to be more to you than just where science has yet to tread.
It is my belief that God is all knowing, and by virtue of being all knowing He is also all powerful. A religion that believes in a divine creation must also incorporate scientific and mathematical truths. No, these truths don’t pertain to salvation, but they are still truth nonetheless.
There is no truth but what belongs to the Gospel. If you can find a truth in heaven [or] earth, it belongs to our doctrine. (Brigham Young)
Some may say that since science is always changing it can’t be true. This is a misunderstanding of how science works. Very rarely do we have huge changes in our understanding of a scientific topic, but instead we are constantly refining our understanding of the universe in small but important steps.
Still, there stands a chance that our scientific knowledge of a topic will undergo massive changes in the future. When this happens, my faith is not shaken. It has taken the hard work of countless individuals to know what we do today, and it will undoubtedly take the work of countless individuals in the future to continue to refine that.
Instead of viewing my God as one who does all the things I can’t explain, I view science as our conduit to learn more of the mysteries of how God created everything around us.
