Are the days of creation real or are they periods?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I don’t view these concepts as discrediting anything. Rather quite the opposite, I view it as respecting scripture by acknowledging what it says.

That’s why I quoted scripture numerous times.

For example, one example you quoted me as noting, is that Adam was created on Day 6 in Genesis 1 after plants and animals were created on prior days, and then in Genesis 2 Adam was created before plants and animals.

Some people might feel offended by this information. But to be fair, this is what the scriptures actually tell us. There’s no discrediting going on, it’s just an observation.

My other comment that the leviathan had multiple heads and breathed fire. I gave passages straight from scripture that state just this. It’s just what the scriptures say. These aren’t dinosaurs being described in Job. It’s a fire breathing hydra just like the Bible says. (Psalm 74:14, Job 41:19)

The solid dome of the firmament. Look, many cultures in prehistory held this same view. So when we read scripture and we see Job (37:18) describing the raqia as molten metal, or we see it described like crystal (Eze 1:22), or like saphire (Exodus 24:10), glass (Rev 4:6) or like pavement (Also Exodus 24:10) or like a tent or canopy etc (Isaiah 40:22). These are all words used to describe the raqia in scripture. And it has windows in it that open and close to let the flood waters through. (Gen 7:11, Gen 8:2) And stars were placed in it. The stars were not placed above it, nor below it, but in it (Gen 1:14). That’s just what scripture says. Though God is still observed walking above it, none the less (Eze 1:26). The windows that open and close to let water through, that’s just what Genesis says. (Gen 7:11, Gen 8:2).

It’s not a matter of discrediting anything. This is just what scripture says.

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And once we gain this understanding of the old testament cosmology, the whole young earth vs old earth, 7 days vs billions of years “debate” simply evaporates because we recognize that scripture isn’t presenting an old earth or a young earth position, rather it’s an ancient near-east cosmology that is completely independent of science.

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Are the days of creation real or are they periods?

Real what?
Really periods of the sun moving in sky of the earth? How could that be before there is any sun?

Is the story told from the view of God or from the view of human beings?
God.

Does God experience time the same way we do?
Not according to Peter (2 Peter 3:8).

The biggest problem as I see it, is with the whole question of whether we should be taking this as a scientific or observational account of how God did things. It certainly doesn’t match up to the evidence. I tend to go with an understanding of the text which yields the most meaning. And the most meaning I have ever heard regarding Genesis 1 is that this is an account of how all these things are not God but creations of God so… we should not be worshipping sun, moon, stars, earth, the waters, plants, or animals… but the God who created all of them.

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The notions of days characterized by the alternation between day and night have meaning only for men. While in the DRC, someone before going to sleep is thanking God for protecting him during the day, somewhere in the USA, someone has just woken up and is asking God to protect him during the day. So providentially for God, there are only times that count to be characterized by the fulfillment of things or situations. So, after the completion of each situation, we move on to the next day, which is different from our 24-hour days. An evening and a morning are only the times of growth and evolution.

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For you, it is a debate between the biblical young earth of 7 days and the billions of years according to science. But, for me, it is a clarification of what the biblical 7 days represent but, which the conservative do not want. I do not question the billions of years of the creation of the Earth. I simply say that the 7 biblical days are periods, and this, after having analyzed the 3 days where there were no stars as a measuring instrument to determine their duration. So I am not arguing on the basis of a personal argument. I hold up the verses and not the science so that I am not called a concordist.

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You are right in saying that this story is told from God’s point of view and that for God time is defined according to (2 Peter 3:8). This is what I just reminded the previous speaker by saying this: "the notions of days characterized by the alternation between day and night have meaning only for men. While in the DRC, someone before going to sleep is thanking God for protecting him during the day, somewhere in the USA, someone has just woken up and is asking God to protect him during the day. So providentially for God, there are only times that count to be characterized by the fulfillment of things or situations. So, after the completion of each situation, we move on to the next day, which is different from our 24-hour days.

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And since Genesis was written for men that must be what was intended. You think Genesis was written for you, but it wasn’t. You first have to understand how it was understood by the original audience. Then you make application to you.

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When you say: “First you have to understand how the original audience understood it, then you apply it to yourself”, I am very interested,.The original audience understood it as a day because of their limitation. But, we, with the scientific development, the opening of the intelligence, we cannot have this limitation anymore. So, it is after analyzing what happened in the first three days without stars that we understand that these were not ordinary days. Even if we go to the sixth day:
Gen 1:24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, beasts and wild animals after their kind.” And so it was.
Gen 1:26 And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
Gen 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Gen 1:31 And God saw all that he had made, and, lo, it was very good. There was evening and there was morning: sixth day.
It is because it is written that there was evening and there was morning that we think of the twenty-hour days. But, even on the first day when there were no stars to mark the alternation between day and night, the author had always closed with “There was evening, there was morning”. Moreover, it was not the narrator who was creating. The narrator was reporting what happened billions of years ago and adapted the language to suit his contemporaries. In his sixth days, there are two main verbs “to form which requires intelligence and to create which means the putting together of things to achieve something”. When you tell me that it is a 24-hour day, is it to mock the narrator who is Moses or to defend the original text?

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They understood it as a day because that is what fits the message. The message is God created the Sabbath which requires a normal 7 day week. What you are trying to shoehorn in doesn’t fit the message that was intended for the original audience.

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You’re right, the 7 day message matched the original cart audience, it justified the Sabbath. Also to say that the universe has gone through 6 periods does not detract from this message, but makes the biblical diagram of creation founded. There is an original message where Moses told the Israelites that eating without washing hands is a sin. This is because the Israelites only obeyed a commandment when it related to sin. But, Jesus knew that it was only related to health education. And, when Saint Peter tried to remind him that he had committed blasphemy by denying that it was a sin, Jesus’ response was “are you also without intelligence? don’t you know that what we eat finishes their race in the toilet?” (Mt 15:1-20). On another occasion Jesus told the Jews that he forbade them to divorce except for adultery. The Jews replied that Moses had given them permission. And Jesus replied to them: It was because of the hardness of your heart that Moses gave you this precept. (Mk 10:1-11). Moses prescribed the law of Tallion because the Jews did not yet have the maturity to reason about love of neighbor. But, when Jesus came, he prescribed love of neighbor by removing this law. Jesus came 1500 years after Moses and he understood that certain prescriptions of Moses were not lies but they were linked to the education of the time, but that this time the people reached a certain maturity. It is the same today where science teaches us what is valid, but you think that to accept it is to deny the divine power. No, divine power manifests itself in the perfection of things He created no matter how long it took. It is from science that we learn the details of what religion teaches, for in religion only the great sets are quoted. For example, when religion tells us that man was created from the dust of the earth below. Today, it is science that details the composition of this dust by confirming these verses. So science is not there to contradict religion. All contradictions between science and religion are often due to misunderstandings and sometimes to religious conservatism.

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Sorry but periods are not the same as days. Converting them to long periods actually destroys the original message.

Matthew 5:17 Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets.

There is no contradiction between science and the Bible for the simple reason that the Bible doesn’t address science in any shape, form, or fashion. The contradictions are between an interpretation and science.

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When the Bible was written, there was no science as we think of it. People were just learning a trade in the field. Those who could read and write were among the learned. And Moses, to whom this pattern is attributed, was a great scientist whose prowess during the crossing of the deserts is no longer to be demonstrated. If I start to tell you about these feats, which are thought to be divine interventions, when in fact they were physical achievements, you will not believe it. We are the ones who maintain that these were days because they were written that way. As for me, I tell you that he lacked the right words to express these ideas and that they were stages of the creation of the Universe. In order to understand that he lacked adequate words, I hope that you have read my second and third publication entitled what “In the"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” mean? What does “in the beginning God created the heaven” (i) - Open Forum / Biblical Interpretation - The BioLogos Forum

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No science but Moses was a great scientist? Make up your mind. Which is it? And what “prowess”? He took 40 years to cover a distance that could be covered by foot in only what, a few weeks at most?

If God was the source of this hidden knowledge as you claim I am sure God could have overcome the lack of just the right words. After all, if God is giving him the knowledge why not also the words to use?

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I want to make a clarification. Someone said that we make God a liar by saying that the biblical days were periods. I tell him that I myself am a Christian and I consider God as my Father. In language classes, our teachers often asked us the question, "What did the author mean by that? This question also came up often in theology and philosophy classes where we often discussed ancient texts where these authors had a very poor vocabulary. I even remember when I was in high school, we were debating on a text and the teacher asked us the question; "What did the author mean by the Present of the reading? I replied, "He meant the gift of reading. I had just typed in the Professor’s idea and he offered me $1. Does that mean I made a liar out of that author? We have said that the six days represent stages or periods, not because science has discovered that the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago, but it is according to the Bible itself, referring to the first three days when there were no stars to mark the alternation between day and night. When we say that this idea represents such and such a thing, it does not mean that we make the author of the idea a liar.

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The Bible does not say the entire universe was created at the time of the earth. That is a fundamental error in theology…I cannot understand why people continue to hold to this nonesense. The sun moon and stars referred to in the creation story related only to our region…it does not represent the rest of the universe.
The main reason why this error is so significant…it’s essentially making the claim that an eternal almighty God, who has always existed, up until the creation of this planet, did nothing for eternity in the past.
The really big issue here…13.6 billion years for a God who is outside of time, is a grain of sand in the ocean. It does not adequately explain the extent of God’s existence. It makes zero difference…6,000 years or 13.6 billion… These are trivial meaningless numbers to that kind of God.
To put it another way, which is worse…stealing $1 or $1000 dollars? Isn’t the point all about the “stealing”. It’s the evil thought that condemns us, not the amount.
13 billion years does not support Theistic Evolutions claims.
In addition to that I have another problem…if the building blocks of life are realively universal, and probability says they must exist somewhere else in the universe…
Given the expansion from a singularity finds many other galaxies much older than ours, why have we not encountered signals that, using the probability model of intelligent life at some point in the evolutionary process, why have we not found signals left by other life forms when they were at our stage in the evolutionary process?

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Primarily due to the vastness of space, if they are in fact there or were there. Our strongest broadcast signals would be undetectable to us even if they arose from one of the nearest stars. We can barely determine if they have planets around them.

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Who says any of them learned to read and write a known human language or needed one or, knowing a human language didn’t leave writing samples.

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Evolution, with or without the Theistic, makes no claim the universe is 13 billion years old. That would be astronomy. An entirely different science.

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Hi Adam! I’m not sure if we have a lot in common, but that what you mentioned here is something I realized recently. I see nobody else acknowledged it, so I thought at least I will let you know that there are other people who noticed it too. God bless :pray:t2:

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Interesting take, but to me that seems like we would be reading something into the text that would be incomprehensible to the original author and audience. They saw the earth sun moon and stars as all part of the original creation, and would not understand that there were billions of galaxies with billions of stars that were unseen in the sky until the Hubble telescope was focused on them thousands of years later. They saw stars a something completely different than we do today, and indistinguishable from the tiny bits of space dust that we see as meteorites when they enter the atmosphere and they considered a fallen star.
The “gap age” interpretation is a good intermediate step in understanding how scripture can be comparable with our knowledge of physical reality, but ultimately is inadequate to fully integrate into a cohesive understanding of both, much as progressive creationism falls short.

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Hi,
No that is not the way the text is read.
It says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
What it does not say is that all of them were created at the same time.
Yes there were seven days in the narrative concerning the creation of our earth and solar system, however considering what is written for example in the books of job and Revelation, other life on other planets clearly predates our own. I have no problem with the idea of other universes. I do not see a limitation in that regard. It certainly explains the problem you have raised.
One can also put a more logical spin on the creation story…

  1. God is everlasting and eternal is he not?
  2. Does a creative being who has always been and will always be only decide now (last 6,000 years) to create something? Do you honestly consider based on your own intelligence believe that if you lived for countless trillions of years before the creation of the earth that you would only now (time of earth’s existence) come up with the idea that you are all alone and need to create intelligent life?

Sorry but the claim we are the first creation only a few millenia or even a few billion years ago is simply not consistent with the idea of a timeless powerful God.

I can simply say this, I’m of limited intelligence and it didn’t take me long to want to make stuff and interact with it…to dream about such things. I’m sure a trillion trillion trillion year old God wouldn’t need 4-13 billion years to come up with a similar idea and has spent the trillions of years before that living in complete darkness twiddling his thumbs wondering what he should do about it!