It would be pleasant to) leave the matter there. This could be a short chapter. We could feel that everything had worked out rather nicely. Unfortunately, we can't leave the matter there. For these opening portions of Genesis have been the subject of so much controversy that we cannot ignore the fact.
The difficulty arose about a hundred years ago when scientists began to point out that the world had taken millions, perhaps billions, of years to evolve into its present form. The stanch believers in the Bible said that this was blasphemy. Didn't the Bible say that God created the world in "six days"? Nobody was going to tell them that
6 days=1,000,000,000 years (or so).
Who was right -- the "religionists" or the scientists? To ask the question this way (as we usually do) is to miss the point. Let us rather ask first of all what these Creation stories are trying to say and what they are not trying to say. As we have seen, they are stories praising God, a God so great that he has created the universe. They are dealing with the religious question, "Why?" Why the world? Because God in his greatness and love has brought it into being. Now in making this profoundly important religious point, the authors say something of "how" God did all this, and it is here, and here only, that science raises some questions. For science investigates answers to the question, "How?" The authors of the Creation stories quite naturally based their stories on the scientific information available to them about 500 B.C. The fact that our scientific knowledge has changed considerably since then does not undercut or disprove the religious insights of the authors. There is no real "conflict" in believing in the scientific accuracy of modern evolution and at the same time believing in the religious accuracy of the Genesis stories.
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