For a long time now, the Biblical idea of a seven-day creation has troubled me. The new book on Theology that was recomended for my B. Th. (Theology: Theology: A Very Short Introduction
First, there is a negative guideline: never conceive of God without taking all the dimensions of the Trinity into account – that God is creator and transcends creation;…
It does go on, but this was the statement that leaped out at me. I’d never really wrestled with the idea of God as Creator before. I’d always taken the idea of Evolution as fact, based on the wealth of scientific evidence. I won’t repeat it all here, there’s enough of it out there on the web. I’d never, however, looked into the alternative idea of the “Young Earth”.
The most sensible page on this particular phenomena that I could find was based on the work of one Archbishop of Ireland (James Ussher (1581-1656)). He worked on the basis that because there was a lot of sketchy history about at the time, the most sensibly way to work out how old the earth was was by going by the only book that he could conceive of as being infallible, the Bible.
Working from the date of the death of King Nebuchadnezzar as a reliable date upon which to anchor all the earlier biblical dates, he worked backwards through the Bible, using the timings proffered there. From this, he worked out that the world had started on what would now be considered the 23rd of October, 4004BC. It was a triumph of mathematical and historical working. He took into account all the changes in calenders that they were aware of, including when there were days lost and added to take into account of seasonal drift. It was a startling revelation, and was held as truth by the Church for a long time.
Then came Darwin with his Evolution, and Geologists with their carbon dating. This successfully proved that the earth was older. Much, much older. Around 4.54 billion years older*.
Some people hold to the idea that the scientific community is wrong. That their way of “interpreting” the data is wrong, that if they only looked at it in a way that included God, they would see how wrong they were. You can find a whole host of misinformation, of psudo-science and fact that excludes information that doesn’t fit.
Where does that leave us with the Creator God?
Some Christians maintain that to ignore Evolution is to undervalue God. Setting up Evolution would require immense foresight and genious. Qualities that are easily assigned to a creator God. For some reason that I don’t quite understand, I’ve not yet managed to identify fully with this part of God. The thing that seems to make the most sense to me is based on an idea from the Hogfather 
In this, Death and Susan need to return the belief in the Hogfather otherwise the sun won’t rise. At the end of the book, as Susan questions Death about this he says that a ball of flaming gas would come over the hills, but the sun wouldn’t rise.
This idea seemed to fit for me with the Creator God. With the Creator God, there is the whole of Creation, without him, there is simply nature. Of course, this idea is in need of some fleshing out. It neatly dodges the bullet of what actually created the world/universe, and the “what created God” argument. It also won’t satisfy the majority of Fundamentalist Christians. It could also be seen as selling God short. I’m guessing that there’s more to be fleshed out about this approach to the Creator God, or perhaps, even, as I learn more my idea may change again.
Any thoughts?
~Black Xanthus
* I am aware that wikipedia is not the best source of Scientific data. There are much better people than me that have explained how they worked out the age of the world.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.