4 ways billions of years highlights the glory of God
The numbers, to the scientific community, are staggering: fully 38% of Americans believe that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.” This, according to the linked poll, is equal to the percentage of people who believe humans evolved over millions of years from lower life forms in a God-guided process. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this is the first time that a recent creation origin of humanity has not been the belief of a plurality of Americans.
Interpretation of Genesis 1-2 has been a touchy subject for Christians since Darwin. Many Christians continue to go with the system popularized by the Irish bishop James Ussher, who said the heavens and earth were created in about 4004 BC, and basically everything was created in pretty close to its present form. The popular term for such a belief is young-earth creationism.
This view carries with it many associated theories and implications, because it varies so wildly from the scientific community’s narrative. The dinosaurs coexisted with humans and died out after the flood. The fossils in the ground were buried rapidly by the flood which piled millions of years’ worth of rock on top of them. The Ice Age was right after the flood, and there was only one. The starlight from more than 6,000 light-years away gets here…somehow. The canine family and other families (“kinds”, NIV) speciated into hundreds of species into hundreds of years. Radiometric dating, stellar and planetary and biological evolution, and the like are all wrong.
That’s what I thought for a while. I thought people who believed otherwise were being unbiblical and down the slippery slope to compromise. Plus, there’s just something a little uncomfortable about the idea of a slowly-developing, 4.6-billion-year-old Earth. It seems to lack the direct hand of God and point to a more passive God. It can seem like we’re willing to push God into the background and open the door to an explanation of the natural world that doesn’t involve him.
But I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it tells us some important things about God, and ultimately enhances his glory.
1. God’s work is glorious enough to be found and observed by us in all creation (Romans 1:19-20). He’s made a universe with predictable physical laws that we can study and learn to use to our advantage. This not only allows us to make observations about the natural world in the present, but predictions for the future and extrapolations back to the past. It’s evident from our observations of geology that, left to themselves, geological formations take a long time to come together. It’s even more evident from our knowledge of astronomy and chemistry that stars out in the universe take a long time to reach each stage in their life cycle (not to mention the time it takes for their light to reach us). Radiometric dating also indicates an older age for Earth’s materials. The natural conclusion to come to is probably the same one scientists have come to — unless there is some overriding information that is more reliable than our observations of the natural world, which would tell us that our interpretations of what we observe are incomplete. Some people would say that, regarding this question, the Bible does just that. However, we must keep this in mind:
2. God’s glory is so expansive that he gives us different means to discover different fields of knowledge, and all of them can point back to himself and his glory. We readily accept the word of the scientific community when it comes to most other things. It’s the advancement of scientific knowledge that has created the technologies that make our modern world so enormously different than the ancient world. We rely on doctors to tell us how medicine works, meteorologists to tell us how the weather works, and technicians to tell us how computers work. That’s because we recognize that God gave us different means to gain different kinds of knowledge. He gave us the Scriptures to show us who he is, and he enabled us to discover how the natural world works by observing and experimenting with the natural world. So we accept observation of the natural world as the way we gain knowledge of the natural world, and study of the Scriptures as the way we gain knowledge about God. So we, in almost all other cases, feel free to go with the scientific consensus on the natural world, because God shows himself to us that way as well as through the Scriptures.
“But,” some say, “that’s because the scientific consensus doesn’t contradict the Bible in most cases, but it does on the issue of origins.” But does it? If so, that would mean God intended to convey a scientific account of the world’s origins in Genesis 1-11, which I’m not sure is the primary purpose of the Scriptures.
3. God is glorious enough to be the center and focus of all Scripture. The Scriptures are meant to tell us about God. Of course, that entails talking about things God has done in history — we can’t allegorize the entire thing. But we must note the fact that Genesis 1-11 are written a little differently from the rest of the book, jumping rapidly between stories and sounding very poetic at times (one writer has called it “exalted prose”). The Hebrew word for day in Genesis 1 (yom) can be figurative, especially when used in more poetic writing. Plus, an important thing to note is that the ancient Hebrews didn’t care about a scientific account of the world’s creation. That would have meant nothing to them. They wanted to know the God behind the creation story more than the creation story itself. It could be that the way God inspired the creation accounts was more to reveal who he is in a way they could understand and relate to. The history they did care about was that of the patriarchs, starting in Genesis 12, because that was what informed their national and religious identity. So, if God did not intend to convey a scientific account of the world’s origins, then there is no contradiction.
4. God is so glorious that he sovereignly planned out the duration of the world over an immense amount of time and space, all the way down to the details of our lives. I have heard before that if it “took” God 13.8 billion years to make the universe what it is today, that somehow diminishes God’s glory. I think it is exactly the opposite. What kind of incredibly complex and wondrous mind would it take to arrange a series of events to unfold naturally over the course of 13.8 billion years to get us where we are today? That must be an incomprehensibly powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful mind. The arrangement of every star, planet and galaxy, the arrangement of every atom in every atomic width of at least 93 billion light years of space and 13.8 billion years of time, is incredible. Surely that God could arrange our (hopefully) 70-80 years according to his plan.
If it took God 13.8 billion years to make this universe, it’s probably because he wanted to show us just how in control he is, that he can rule over that much time and space with complete and total knowledge and power. Would it show God’s power if he made the whole world in six days? Sure it would. But billions of years doesn’t diminish God’s glory or push him into the background; it highlights God’s amazing sovereignty.
