The Book of Genesis and Creation
If we take Genesis literally, must we believe that the material universe is only six thousand years old?
II Kalendas Februarii (31 January) Anno Incarnationis MMXXIV
As the glory of Christmas and the Epiphany fades into memory and the time of Septuagesima is now upon us the Western Church in her Divine Office begins to recount the history of the Creation of the universe and the human race, and of its Fall. At the Hour of Matins in the first nocturn of Septuagesima Sunday,1 after the alleluia has gone into its long slumber, she reads from Genesis 1: 1-26 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram… and in so doing she acknowledges just Who is the first cause of everything and to Whom we owe our allegiance and our devotion: to Whom we owe our every capacity to do anything at all - including and especially our next breath.
Needless to say this acknowledgement has fallen on hard times recently. The powers who have been permitted to govern the world at this moment in time seem to cry out from every direction that it is not so. That this God of yours, if he is anything more than a figment of your imagination, has nothing to do with your life. Science has proven that all that stuff in Genesis is just a fairy tale bunch of hokum dreamed up by the evil Church and other oppressors and exploiters to hold you down.
Mister Charles Darwin had the gall to ask…
The words quoted above come from a song by the band R.E.M., Man on the Moon, released in 1992 and perfectly encapsulate the attitude of our era towards what the Book of Genesis tells us concerning the Creation of the material universe and the human race. It stems from an underlying current of thought that is present in every societal institution in our time but rarely if ever explicitly stated - even if implicitly it is omnipresent. It goes something like this:
“There was once this fable that there was a God who made the universe and supposedly created the human race as its crowning glory. According to this fairy tale the human race allegedly fell from glory by choosing to take part in something that their mean old Creator who never wanted them to have any fun had warned them to stay away from. This something looked very good and tasted even better. It lit up their senses and their desires and it made them feel good - but the evil and oppressive Church and its priests have conned everyone into believing that this nice and tasty thing was very evil and it was the choice to taste its delicious fruit that was responsible for all of the pain and misery that we suffer in this world - just so they could get their supposed God off the hook for creating a world full of evil and suffering and putting us In it.
Then they told us that the answer to everything was some crazy rabbi who showed up one day in a bygone age whose deluded followers claimed to be none other than their same God who allegedly created the earth but was stupid enough to get himself crucified. This guy, if he ever existed, said he was our ‘savior’, but only if we did what the priests tell us to do. And the priests tell us that this guy laid down a ridiculous set of rules that nobody can follow and against which the slightest infraction gets you sent to hell for all eternity without an electric fan. I mean really…
Then came Charles Darwin who unlocked the genius of science that had been locked away by that evil Church when they enslaved the ignorant masses with their superstitious gobbledygook and, peering into the secrets of the natural world, he discovered that it was all a hoax. There was no Creator. There are no rules. The existence of life on earth could be explained by purely natural processes. We don’t need no God. And as for human beings they are no better than the wild beasts. Sure they might be a bit more clever from time to time but fundamentally there is no difference. If there is any God he is distant and aloof, more to be despised (or at best placated) for having planted us in this vale of tears than loved and honored as our naïve and ridiculous ancestors had done. I mean really: wasting all of those resources building churches when they should have been building pleasure palaces and casinos… I mean when they should have been feeding the poor. And certainly there is no law. Life is short so get what you can and take what you can get: fulfill your desires, gratify your senses, and do whatever you want - and to hell with anyone who says otherwise.”
The above is the popular view concerning the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis and is more or less the Darwinist creed that has become the governing philosophy of our world as we come to the close of the first quarter of the twenty first century. Sadly, at least in its broad outlines, this way of thinking also dominates many Catholic institutions2 from your local parish right up to the highest reaches of the Vatican City State, though they would rarely put it in quite those words – at least not in public.
But the truth is that if you don’t believe that the opening chapters of Genesis are accurate in their recounting of the early history of the material universe and the human race then whatever you tell yourself and the world you are not a Christian. This is the foundation of Christianity and if you believe these chapters and take them literally and to heart then you can be a successful Christian; but if you refuse then you are nothing and you are better off being a public atheist than a fake Catholic.
Until the Catholic Church’s institutions can get a grip on what people think they know about the Book of Genesis they will have no success in this world. No effort to spread the Gospel will have anything beyond the most miniscule level of success or staying power until what people (including a great many Catholics of all ideological stripes) think they know about the Book of Genesis has been dealt with. The timidity in confronting this question is why so much of Catholic life in the early twenty first century seems doomed to failure before it even begins: if we cannot effectively proclaim and back up the foundation of our religion then we have no religion.
This being said, while most Catholic apologetic efforts really do try their best to ignore and avoid this question and to change the subject when it is brought up (which is one of the many reasons why they are in the main miserable failures), there are an increasing number of Catholics, mostly of the so called ‘traditionalist’ stripe, who have started to address this issue. However they make a grievous error in the process when they insist that the literal interpretation of Genesis demands that we accept that the material universe is only six thousand years old; an assertion that all of the best scientific observations have demonstrated to be false.
Darwinism and the age of the earth
Because ultimately the question revolves around the age of the earth. The so called ‘science’ behind Darwinian evolution, despite the fantastic publicity campaign over the last century and a half, is an entirely unproven and even unobserved hypothesis. No one has ever seen anything ‘evolve’. No one has ever seen a group of individuals within a given species experience a random yet identical and simultaneous genetic mutation that somehow permits them to mate and reproduce with each other but no longer to do so with other members of their (former) species. This is what the supposed ‘science’ of Darwinism rests on and it has never been observed occurring anywhere in any place or at any time.
There is however fairly good and reliable evidence that the material universe is quite a bit older than six thousand years. The best estimates put the age of our planet at something like four and a half billion years and date the beginnings of the cosmos to several billion years before that.
Unfortunately however far too often the question of the age of the earth gets skillfully blended in with Darwinism by forces who are adversarial to the welfare of the human race. The implication (dogma) that if one accepts the very good scientific evidence that the material universe is quite a bit older than six thousand years that means that Genesis was wrong and Darwin is right has been so masterfully and minutely woven into the fabric of our culture that it is now universally accepted without even the slightest bit of critical thinking applied to it. But if the earth is far more than six thousand years old does that really mean that Darwin was right, or for that matter that Genesis is wrong?
No it really doesn’t. It is true that one can interpret the opening chapters of Genesis to read that the earth is six thousand years old if they choose to do so but there is absolutely nothing in them that mandates that it be so. And this is where the ‘rad trad’ crowd make their mistake. I recently heard a fairly prominent media figure from this camp giving a Bible Catechism saying that it is mandatory that all Catholics believe in what he called a ‘young earth’ i.e. that the material universe is only six thousand years old - because the Fathers unanimously taught this.
Well they did and they didn’t. Because while it is true that we must give assent to the articles of the Faith that the Fathers have unanimously agreed upon in this case there is a fairly large caveat. Namely that while it is true that in the Patristic age the Fathers of the Church generally did date the origin of the earth to what for us living now would be six thousand years ago it is also true that this idea, unlike say the doctrine of the Trinity or the Person of Jesus Christ, was never put to the test in their epoch and was therefore never a subject of serious investigation or debate on their part.
The Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed to which we are all required to assent was by the time it was formulated in the late fourth century the product of really more than a century of arduous debate over and investigation into how to specifically define what the Apostles had taught concerning the Trinity and the Nature of Christ. The age of the material universe however was never subjected to that or any other kind of scrutiny either in that era or any other until maybe the late eighteenth century. It really was not a question that the vast majority3 of the Fathers were at all concerned about. When they did bring it up it was more like an ornament to their theology than its central point.
Nor can it be said that, unlike the doctrines of the Trinity and the Nature of Christ, that the Church has ever authoritatively stated anywhere or at any time that it is binding on anyone under pain of sin much less excommunication to believe that the earth is a specific number of years old. What we must do is to believe with all our hearts and without reservation that a) God is the one who created and actively sustains the material universe4 and b) that the Book of Genesis must be taken literally and seriously as the best source of information as to how and why He did it. But what does it mean to take Genesis literally?
The Biblical Commission of Pope Pius X
When it comes to the question of the age of the earth the Catholic Church in our own time, at the opening of the twentieth century when it had become necessary to debate and to define these things, has pronounced definitively on at least one aspect of the literal interpretation of Genesis 1 that is highly relevant to our topic. In 1909 the Pontifical Biblical Commission under Pope Saint Pius X published in the Acta Apostolica Sedes a response to a dubia which spoke directly and specifically to how a Catholic is bound to understand what the word ‘day’ means in Genesis chapter 1:
Utrum in illa sex dierum denominatione atque distinctione, de quibus in Geneseos capite primo, sumi possit vox Yóm (dies), sive sensu proprio pro die naturali, sive sensu improprio pro quodam temporis spatio, deque huiusmodi quaestione libere inter exegetas disceptare liceat?
Resp. Affirmative.5
Whether it can be freely debated among exegetes concerning the question of whether in that designation and distinction of six days in the first chapter of Genesis whether the meaning of yom (day) could be taken in its normal sense of a natural day or in the unusual sense of a certain space of time?
Response: Affirmative6
In other words no Catholic is now nor has ever been bound in any way to interpret the ‘days’ of Genesis chapter 1 as twenty four hour periods - which immediately kills the six thousand year thing. And quite frankly why would anyone take them to be twenty four hour periods? Read from the account of the first ‘day’ in the Vulgate:
Dixitque Deus: fiat lux et facta est lux. Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit lucem a tenebris. Appelavitque lucem Diem et tenebras Noctem factumque est vespere et mane dies unus.7
And God said: let there be light and there was made light. And God saw the light that it was good and divided the light from the darkness. And He called the light Day and the darkness Night: and so were made evening and morning day one.
How long did that take? How do we even guess? It could have been an instant or it could have been ten billion of our years. We have no idea. This is God’s time, not ours.
In all honesty there really isn’t even any basis at all for interpreting this as a twenty four hour day. It isn’t even until the fourth ‘day’ that the sun and the moon and the stars appear in the heavens where it is specifically stated that they are put there to mark8 the days and nights and times and seasons. This is a dead giveaway that these ‘days’ of creation actually are not meant to be understood as natural days measured by the time it takes our planet9 to spin once completely on its axis but as some epoch of time that is not specified and thus left to us to interpret by following where the best evidence10 leads.
Combatting the Darwinist sect
Thus a Catholic is perfectly free to accept any good scientific evidence, of which there is an abundance, that says the earth is around four and half billion years old and the cosmos may well be something like thirteen billion years old. What we are not free to accept is the pseudo scientific false religion of Darwinism (for which once again there is no real evidence) that claims that the existence and immense variety of life on this earth is purely the result of random chance and natural processes and that the human race is essentially nothing more than a glorified field mouse with a bigger brainstem.
This is an issue that needs to be brought up time and again with great force and vigor. The Darwinist sect has done immense damage to the Western world in particular and to the human race as a whole. Their baseless ideas need to be combatted with warlike vigor wherever they are found and this needs to be done every day and all the time until they are ground into dust and dispersed by the wind.
And we can do this. But we need to stop being afraid of real science and start reading Genesis the way it was actually written.
The cycle concludes with the account of Abraham’s rescue of Lot and his blessing by Mechizedech (Gen 14: 8-26) on Quinquagesima Tuesday but there is evidence that it once went farther, before Ash Wednesday became the start of Lent in the middle of the first millennium
If you doubt this think of the whole ridiculous Old Church/New Church divide that has tied us all up in knots since Vatican II. It certainly seems to rest on the assumption that the Church has been wrong about something…
Augustine is the principal exception here. He dealt with the topic of Creation and Genesis extensively to combat Manichaeism.
This is the first article in both the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds
Acta Apostolicae Sedes-01-1909 pp. 568-69
Translation mine.
Genesis 1 3-5, translation mine.
Genesis 1: 14, 18
This is an important and often overlooked point. We are talking about the cosmos on the first day. What could a ‘day’ possibly mean? On the planet Earth where we live a day is roughly twenty four hours. On Jupiter it is under ten hours. On our Moon a day is a month long. On Venus one ‘day’ is 212 of our days! And that is just a tiny sample from within are very small solar system.
The other killing blow to the idea that these ‘days’ were twenty four hour periods is that if this is the case then what did God do on the eighth day? Genesis says He completed the titanic works of Creation on each of the first six days and that He rested on the seventh. So fine, then what did He do on the eighth twenty four hour period? If you interpret these ‘days’ as ages of the earth’s history then you know very well that the eighth ‘day’ is the resurrection from the dead and the new heavens and the new earth.