Seven Days that Divide the World, 10th Anniversary Edition

The Beginning According to Genesis and Science

John C. Lennox

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310127826
• Edition: 10
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Now revised and updated--John Lennox's acclaimed method of reading and interpreting the first chapters of Genesis without discounting either science or Scripture.

What did the writer of Genesis mean by "the first day?" Are the seven days in Genesis 1 a literal week or a series of time periods? If I believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old as cosmologists believe, am I denying the authority of Scripture?

With examples from history, a brief but thorough exploration of the major interpretations, and a look into the particular significance of the creation of human beings, Lennox suggests that Christians can heed modern scientific knowledge while staying faithful to the biblical narrative. He moves beyond a simple response to the controversy, insisting that Genesis teaches us far more about the God of Jesus Christ and about God's intention for creation than it does about the age of the earth.

With this book, Lennox offers a careful and accessible introduction to a scientifically-savvy, theologically-astute, and Scripturally faithful interpretation of Genesis.

Since its publication in 2011, this book has enabled many readers to see that the major controversy with which it engages can be resolved without compromising commitment to the authority of Scripture. In this newly revised and expanded edition, John clarifies his arguments, responds to comments and critiques of the past decade since its first publication. In particular, he describes some of the history up to modern times of Jewish scholarly interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative as well as spelling out in more detail the breadth of views in the Great Tradition of interpretation due to the early Church Fathers. He shows that, contrary to what many people think, much of the difficulty with understanding the biblical texts does not arise from modern science but from attempting to elucidate the texts in their own right.

CHAPTER 1

BUT DOES IT MOVE?
A Lesson from History

This book deals with a very controversial topic. There is a certain irony about it, since there would be little controversy if we only possessed the New Testament (NT) and not the Old Testament (OT) as well, as is the case in many less privileged parts of the world. If that were the case, we would know that there had been a beginning and that the world had been created by the Word of God. But we never would have heard of the seven days. So it might be a good thing, before plunging into the nitty-gritty of this book, if you, the reader, paused to reflect on what you would believe about creation if you had never seen the OT.

At times, disagreement about the interpretation of the Genesis narrative of creation has been rather acrimonious. However, even though I am Irish, I am not going to suggest that the best way to approach it is to have a good fight! Indeed, in order to get some kind of perspective on the way we handle controversy, we shall consider another controversy, one that arose in the sixteenth century. If I had been writing a book like this at that time, I might well have been addressing the question: What are we to think of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s suggestion that the earth moves, when Scripture seems to teach that it is fixed in space?

Would that topic set your pulse racing? I suspect not. Yet only a few centuries ago, it was a very hot-button issue. The reason? In the fourth century BC the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle had taught that the earth was fixed in the centre of the universe and that the sun, stars, and planets revolved around it¹ – although it is interesting to learn that Aristarchus of Samos (d. 230 BC), a Greek astronomer and mathematician, as early as 250 BC had proposed a heliocentric² system, even placing the planets in their correct order of distance from the sun. Aristotle’s fixed-earth view held sway for centuries. After all, it made a lot of sense to ordinary people: The sun appears to go round the earth; and if the earth moves, why aren’t we all flung off into space? Why does a stone, thrown straight up into the air, come straight down if the earth is rotating rapidly? Why don’t we feel a strong wind blowing in our faces in the opposite direction of the earth’s motion? Surely the idea that the earth moves is absurd, isn’t it?

Aristotle’s work was translated into Latin, and in the Middle Ages, with the aid of the massive intellect of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), it came to influence the church. Aristotle believed not only that the universe was old, but that it had always existed. Aquinas had no difficulty reconciling an eternal universe with the existence of God as Creator in a philosophical sense, but he did admit there was difficulty reconciling that view with the Bible, since the Bible clearly states that there was a beginning. The idea of a fixed earth was different: it seemed to fit in well with what the Bible said. For instance:

Tremble before him, all the earth;

yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.

1 Chronicles 16:30

Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.

Psalm 93:1

He set the earth on its foundations,

so that it should never be moved.

Psalm 104:5

For the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s,

and on them he has set the world.

1 Samuel 2:8

Furthermore, the Bible seemed not only to teach that the earth was fixed; it seemed equally clearly to say that the sun moved:

In them he has set a tent for the sun,

which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,

and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.

Its rising is from the end of the heavens,

and its circuit to the end of them,

and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

Psalm 19:4–6

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,

and hastens to the place where it rises.

Ecclesiastes 1:5

It is not surprising, therefore, that when Copernicus published his famous work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs in 1543, in which he revived Aristarchus’s theory with attribution, suggesting that the earth and the planets orbited the sun, his view was called into question by many Protestants and Catholics alike. It is alleged that even before Copernicus published his book (1539), Martin Luther had rejected the heliocentric point of view in rather strong terms in his Table Talk:

There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody . . . moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.³

It should be said, however, that many of Luther’s comments in Table Talk were made tongue in cheek, and there is considerable debate about the authenticity of this quote. Historian John Hedley Brooke writes, “Whether Luther really referred to Copernicus as a fool has been doubted, but in an off-the-cuff dismissal he remembered that Joshua had told the sun, not the earth, to stand still.”⁴

John Calvin, on the other hand, believed that the earth was fixed: “By what means could it [the earth] maintain itself unmoved, while the heavens above are in constant rapid motion, did not its Divine Maker fix and establish it?”⁵

Some years after Copernicus, in 1632, Galileo Galilei challenged the Aristotelian view in his famous book Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems. This incident has gone down in history as an iconic example of how religion is antagonistic to science. Yet Galileo, far from being an atheist, was driven by his deep inner conviction that the Creator, who had “endowed us with senses, reason and intellect,” intended us not to “forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”⁶ Galileo held that the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the “language of mathematics”⁷ and that the “human mind is a work of God’s and one of the most excellent.”⁸

Historian of science Paul Marston gives a fascinating account of Galileo’s life, work, and tribulations. His considered view of Galileo is:

He was a fundamentally proud man, with an inflated idea of his own importance. He was dismissive not only of the ignorant, but of Tycho [Brahe] (as verbose) and even [Johannes] Kepler (as what we might call a ‘luney’ because he believed the moon caused the tides). Galileo worsened with age – though recurrent illness and a painful hernia may partly explain this. The Starry Messenger and Letters on Sunspots were fairly polite, The Assayer was largely an outburst of unjustified conceit with little of value in it, and his first Dialogue treated all opponents (and his friend the Pope) as idiots. His treatment of various Jesuits (particularly [Christoph] Scheiner and [Orazio] Grassi) and Urban VIII probably deserved much greater enmity than he actually received. Other friends could only look on as good prudent advice was ignored and Galileo painted himself (and his church) into a corner.

How should we view the “ ‘trial’? As [Arthur] Koestler said in his classic book [The Sleepwalkers], we cannot see it as a kind of “showdown” between enlightened reason and blind faith. Galileo himself never wavered in his Catholic faith; he was advocating science which was at least twenty-four years out of date and had no proof at all that the Earth moved apart from a bogus one which contradicted his own dynamics.⁹

There is, of course, no excuse whatsoever for the Roman Catholic Church’s use of the Inquisition to muzzle Galileo, nor for its subsequently taking several centuries to rehabilitate him. Yet, again contrary to popular belief, Galileo was never tortured, and his ensuing house arrest was spent, for the most part, in luxurious private residences belonging to friends. Furthermore, he clearly brought many of his problems on himself by his lack of tact.

Many historians of science conclude, therefore, that the Galileo affair really does nothing to confirm the simplistic conflict view of the relationship of science to religion.¹⁰

It took many years thereafter to establish the heliocentric view, which my readers, I presume, now accept, being quite comfortable with the idea that not only does the earth rotate about its own axis, but it moves in an elliptical orbit round the sun at an average of 30 kilometres per second (about 67,000 miles per hour), taking a year to complete th...