Genesis

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Given that I'm a physicist one might be inclined to ask how I can be a man of science and yet still hold the account of Genesis to be an accurate description of the creation of the Earth and universe. That is a very good question which I will respond to here.

Cosmologists tell us that the universe is upwards of about 15 billion years old. Yet if we take the days mentioned in Genesis as being 24 hours long, as we understand hours, then one might conclude that Genesis must be wrong. Therefore something else must be meant here. Perhaps a day for God is/was a great deal longer than a day is for man. But now one might say that I'm not taking the Bible to be literally true. Is that correct? On this point there are a few comments in the Bible, the book of Psalms and Job, which addresses this  -

Psalms 90:4 For a thousand years in your sight are like a day gone by, or like a watch in the night.

Job 10:5 Are your days like those of a mortal, or your year like those of man?

This passage seems to make it clear that the days of God may be different from the days of men. Thus I am being quite consistent with the Bible when I ask whether the days of God are the same as the days of man. Any serious physicist who is also a person of faith accepts this as true, especially given what we know about time dilation and Einstein's theory of relativity. In fact Nathan Aviezer took the six  days of creation and compared them to six phases in the creation of the universe and the Earth [1]. The comparison is astonishing!

What about evolution? Didn't Charles Darwin prove that man came from ape and therefore we don't need a God to have created us? The answer is that the theory of evolution does not say that man came from ape. It says that man and ape came from the same primitive type of  being. And while it tells us how species evolved here on Earth it does not even hint as to the mechanism as to how life began here on Earth. That has yet to be determined by scientists. And as for Darwin, recall his last words in his famous text The Origin of Species (Mentor Edition, 1958), page 450.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into one form; and that from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have evolved.

Back in 1922 when William Jennings Bryan heard about a proposal in  Kentucky to make it illegal to teach evolution in the classroom. The proposal in Kentucky lost by a single vote early in 1922. In March 1925 the Tennessee legislature had declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible. Bryan attempted to argue that Evolution wasn't a science. His arguments were very poor in this area. Bryan never should have argued from a point of science since he himself was not a scientist and he failed to consult scientists on his opinions in this area. Bryan also had a poor understanding of evolution. This is seen in his invalid  assumption that evolution teaches that man descended from ape. Evolution has never made such a claim and this invalid assumption remains until today. Evolution teaches us that both man and ape descended from a common ancestry, which clearly is different than what Bryan thought it was. Bryan based his assumptions on Genesis, claiming that the world was created in six days and that was far too short of a time for evolution to work. However Bryan himself admitted that the earth could be six hundred million years old! [2]

Evolution

What about evolution? Since I had no real knowledge of evolution, i.e. all my knowledge of it at that time was based on hearsay and TV, I decided to go learn evolution. I've already read Larson's book and a book by Nathan Aviezer. I will be doing a lot more reading on evolution until I believe I'm knowledgeable enough to speak intelligently on the subject. The same holds true of geology.

[1] In the Beginning ... Biblical Creation and Science, Nathan Aviezer, KTAV Publishing House (1990)

[2] Evolution: The Remarkable History if a Scientific Theory, Edward J. Larson,  A Modern Chronicles Book, page 216.

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