Do Christians Have to ‘Believe’ Genesis?

One stumbling block frequently encountered in speaking to unchurched people about Christianity is the creation account in Genesis. It seems like ‘believing the Bible’—a critical element for most evangelical Christians wanting to share their faith—is liable to fall at the first hurdle, the very opening chapters of the Bible.

Conservative evangelicals themselves will often say, “If you can’t believe all of the Bible, then you can’t believe any of it.” And yet that cute-sounding little soundbite comes back to bite them (metaphorically speaking) when it comes to Genesis and science.

For many people, Christian or otherwise, believing in Genesis is a relic of a pre-critical era, before the Enlightenment, when the truth of the Bible was taken for granted. Before modern scientific discoveries, there was little reason for most people to question the Bible's account on scientific grounds. However, once science began to discover more and more about human origins and the development of planet Earth, sincere Christians were increasingly faced with a choice: deny science (pitch God and the scientists on opposite sides of an argument) or deny the Bible.

One example is the age of the earth. So-called ‘young earth creationists’ (among fundamentalists in the USA, especially) claim God’s creative acts to have occurred between 6–10,000 years ago, rather than the scientific consensus that places Earth’s origins more like 4.5 billion years ago. Quite a disparity, I think you’d agree.

A popular date amongst young earth creationists is 4004 BCE, specifically October 23, based on the calculations of Archbishop James Ussher in 1650. The uncertainties in the data—Old Testament chronologies, with numbers of years cited—are the reason that young earth dates for creation vary.

Hand-in-glove with this, of course, comes the belief that God’s creative acts—presented in Genesis as occurring during a period of six days—are to be taken literally, as 24-hour periods of time. Indeed, pretty much everything in Scripture is to be read literally, defining faithfulness to the divine inspiration of the text. The reasoning seems straightforward: God inspired Scripture, and God would not lie. Evangelical fundamentalists treat divine inspiration as the functional equivalent of divine dictation: for them, the Word of God is, for all practical purposes, the very words of God. That understanding controls their view of the nature of Scripture—what it ‘must be’ (and ‘can’t be’).   

Hence the dilemma faced by evangelicals: ‘God’ or ‘science’?

We’ve noted on numerous occasions how evangelical organisations are so at pains to affirm the divine inspiration of Scripture that even many conservatives would say some of their compatriots’ rather ‘OTT’ claims for it border on bibliolatry (Bible-worship). This tendency is reflected in unqualified terms such as ‘inerrant’ and ‘infallible’.

This, of course, becomes very intimidating for thoughtful evangelicals seeking to reconcile a scientifically informed view of creation with a biblically informed view (and much else in Scripture that’s in the same vein).

One thing that it is not healthy to do in evangelical circles is to question the nature of the Bible, however thoughtfully, especially among those who are fundamentalist in their worldview. However, there is often a disconnect between popular assumptions about what evangelicals are required to believe and the more nuanced statements of faith drafted by evangelical scholars that often don’t seem to filter down.

For example, the Evangelical Alliance and World Evangelical Alliance both qualify their language about the ‘supreme authority of the Bible’ as specifically in relation to matters of faith and conduct. In other words, at least by implication, not supremely authoritative in relation to matters of science and history.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) is one of the most conservative of all evangelical statements, yet it, too, qualifies Scripture’s intentions in some interesting ways. Article XII cites Scripture’s authority and inerrancy in matters upon which it touches (and similarly, Article XIV, all that it affirms). But does the Bible touch on science and history, one might ask? Does it affirm matters of science and history? Do we detect a degree of constructive ambiguity (one might say, a potential ‘fudge’) in this language, enabling the more fundamentalist-minded to read it in their preferred way? Article XIII states, “We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.” That phrase can similarly be read as validating whatever someone believes Scripture’s ‘usage’ and ‘purpose’ to be. I very much doubt that the Chicago Statement’s authors intended to be saying, “What’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me,” but there does seem to be some room for different readings.

In The Lost World of Scripture, John Walton and Brent Sandy say that the Bible is inerrant in all that it intends to affirm, and they explain the meaning of that very clearly. Firstly, the Bible does not have scientific objectives. Scientific references that we might see in the text do not carry scriptural authority, since they would naturally reflect the then-current beliefs of the ancient world on such matters. Hence, we should believe the theological truths (such as God created the world) without expecting to derive from the text the methods that he used or the time that it took.

The Bible is concerned with theological truths, not scientific truths. Its interest lies in who made the world, and why (and why the world is the way that it is). Its interest was not in how it was made (a question that we assume it should be answering for us because we live in an age of science).

Some Christians try to find a halfway house to defend their assumptions about what the truthfulness and reliability of the Bible require in terms of what we today would call factual accuracy. Thus, for example, they will argue that the six-day periods in which God created everything according to Genesis 1 are not literal 24-hour periods but stages in the process, each ‘era’ accurately portrayed chronologically, but the ‘days’ being picture language. I applaud their sincerity, but it fails at the first hurdle. In fact, it makes the lack of credibility worse.

The first divine creative act on day one is to create light (Genesis 1:3). However, the sun and the moon are not created until day four. Why? The ancients did not understand the role and function of the sun as we do today. Incidentally, the reason the authors called them the ‘greater light’ and the ‘lesser light’ (not naming them) was to reinforce that they were not gods, but rather, the creation of the one God.  

Genesis speaks of God setting the great lights into the dome of the sky; we now know that there is no such solid dome (it just looks as though that’s what it is). Obviously, one can claim ‘it’s just picture language’ as a defence if one wishes. Perhaps a little harder, though, when it comes to Genesis 1:7: “God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome [i.e., the seas] from the waters that were above the dome.” The ancient world believed that beyond the dome of the sky was water. God would, from time to time, open the equivalent of Velux roof windows, which would cause rain to fall. It’s what Genesis 7:11 is referring to in the story of Noah when it says, “the windows of the heavens were opened” until, in Genesis 8:2, “the windows of the heavens were closed.”   

Then there is Adam and Eve. There’s much that one might say about this couple, but suffice to observe one thing that’s often not noted. One of the most stridently affirmed truths for many conservative evangelicals is that Adam and Eve represent not just a ‘norm’ but the normative model for human sexual relationships and family structures (and that Jesus himself affirmed that truth when he was teaching about divorce). And yet, despite this significance, we never actually see Adam and Eve get married. When English translations say ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, most readers fail to appreciate that neither biblical Hebrew nor Greek had words corresponding to husband and wife, only generic ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Hence, translators are choosing which of our English words to use depending on (a) how they read the context, and (b) their doctrinal stance. (Imagine the outcry if translators chose ‘his woman’ throughout Scripture, over the more modern-sounding ‘his wife’).        

Then there’s the curious case of Genesis 4:17: “Cain had sexual relations with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch.” Nothing too surprising about that, you may say. But where did his wife come from? Cain was Adam and Eve’s son. Did he therefore marry one of his sisters? If not, did God create her in a separate action, similarly to how he created Adam and Eve in the first instance? It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask those who insist that Genesis should be read literally.

We could say more, but back to the starting question: Do Christians have to believe Genesis? It’s not avoiding the question by saying that it all depends what one means by ‘believe’.

We never ask whether a poem is true, or a song is true. It’s a category error. That does not mean a poem or song does not convey truths, of course. But it doesn’t rely on scientifically correct categories of truth to convey its truths.

We should be coming to the text asking what theological truths are intended to be conveyed, which Genesis has in abundance.    

Believing Genesis does not mean straining to find ways to read it that come as close as possible to everything being literal. By the time we’ve made numerous exceptions and explained countless things as ‘that’s just picture language’, the plot will have been lost. It’s unnecessary—even pointless—to do that. Not to mention the loss of credibility we will cause, not just for the Bible, but for God himself, in the eyes of the unchurched.   

The irony is that by insisting on reading Genesis as literally as possible, we may unwittingly be diverting attention away from how it ought to be read and the truths it intends to convey.