Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [24]
Who was right, Genesis or Darwin?
The first letter published in the reader’s mail section of the May/June 1997 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review is an interesting one. In it, the letter writer comments on the magazine’s description of a “prehistory” archaeological dig. The writer asserts that this word is incorrect and concludes:
This year [1997] marks approximately 6,000 years since the world’s history began, when God created the heaven and the earth (Genesis 1:1). The terms “prehistory” and “Paleolithic” and “Neolithic” are a mockery of God’s word, the Bible.
Set that letter against two recent news stories. In August 1997, scientists reported the discovery of fossilized footprints of anatomically modern humans that date back about 117,000 years. A few weeks earlier, in July, there was a report announcing the discovery of the most distant object ever seen in the universe. Combining observations from Hawaii’s Keck telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of astronomers reported sighting an infant galaxy 13 billion light-years from the earth. In other words, this galaxy, “far, far away,” came into being thirteen billion years ago. Smaller but brighter than our own Milky Way, it is so distant from the earth that we are just now receiving the news.
And you thought your mail was slow.
Here is the great raging war of the last few centuries reduced to a nutshell. How do you balance a belief that the world was created by divine pronouncement, a mere 6,000 years ago, with the scientific observation that modern humans walked 117,000 years ago and a galaxy was born 13 billion years ago? This is the war between science and faith. It’s not simply some drawing-room argument or a nice academic debate over sherry in an ivory tower. The question of science versus faith has spilled into classrooms and courtrooms over such major controversies as cloning, Christian Science, Kevorkian, and Creationism.
Until Charles Darwin rolled into town in 1859 with his notion of “natural selection,” most people accepted that God made the world in six days and then “he” rested. For nearly four thousand years, many people accepted Genesis as a perfectly viable account of the world’s beginnings. Relying on biblical sources such as the chronologies and genealogies in Genesis, numerous people have attempted to pinpoint a time and date for the precise moment of the Creation. Ancient Hebrew scholars placed the moment as 3761 BCE. Perhaps the most famous Creation date was the one produced by Irish bishop James Ussher (1581-1656). Using Genesis, Ussher dated the moment of Creation to the early morning of the twenty-third of October in 4004 BCE (Ussher actually used the Julian calendar year of 710). Although it might seem silly to modern readers, Ussher’s calculation was widely accepted by European Christians for centuries and was included in the margins of many editions of the King James Bible, giving it nearly divine “authority.” There are still biblical literalists, such as the letter writer mentioned above, who accept Ussher’s date as an article of faith.
Then science turned into the skunk at the garden party. When Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the genius of the Italian Renaissance, found sea fossils in the Alps and asked how they got there, the conventional wisdom simply said it was proof that a Flood once covered the earth. When Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo suggested that the earth revolved around the sun, they were mocked or worse. In 1616, Galileo was accused of heresy, placed under house arrest, and prohibited from further scientific inquiry. Then Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) proposed that man had evolved slowly, sharing common ancestry with the apes. Most of the religious world did not take kindly to this suggestion. It was one thing to discover that Galileo had been right about the solar system. It was another to accept that humankind was kissing cousin to the monkey.
Before Darwin, much of