Ever since the infamous Scopes-Monkey Trial, there has been an growing insistence that the Creation Account in Genesis is not a scientific account.  With an equal vehemence, those in the Church have insisted likewise.  When the opening chapters of Genesis are spoken of, they are always introduced with a disclaimer that they do not seek to give a scientific account of how the world was created.  This much, of course is true, but most people do not understand why it is true.  Instead they focus on trying to make the account fit with a scientific explanation of the origins of the world and of mankind.  The Big Bang replaces creation ex nihilio, days become eons, and Adam arises from the slime of primates.  Pope Leo XIII’s prediction that “For the young, if they lose their reverence for the Holy Scripture on one or more points, are easily led to give up believing in it altogether” becomes more prescient every day.

When pressed for why Genesis does not offer a scientific explanation, most exegetes will say something along the lines of “God didn’t write a science textbook but wanted used mythic language to let us know that it was He Who created all things.” The problem with this explanation is that the supposed mythic language leaves the door open to any naturalistic explanation of the origin of the universe. 

The Failure of Science and Our Origins

The reason why God did not give us a science textbook is, not because He didn’t want to, but because it is impossible.  Science concerns itself with explaining natural phenomena.  The Creation accounts of the first six days were not natural events but supernatural.  Science can no more explain the creation of the universe and all that is in it than it can explain how Our Lord turned water into wine or how the Sun danced at Fatima.  It was a supernatural event which can only be explained through Revelation. 

God did not create according to scientific laws because the scientific laws are one of the things He created.  The laws that govern the Universe are not co-eternal with God but something that He creates in the process.  Those laws are not even operative until He ceases the creative act at the end of the sixth day.  It is only after the miracle of Creation ceases on the seventh day that God “rests” from creating and Divine Providence takes over. 

A careful reading of the text that respects the literal meaning (even if it sometimes resorts to symbolic language) reveals this truth.  Starting with the “beginning,” God sets the standard for all days: “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day” (Gn 1:5).   Light is created (with no natural source) by separating it from the darkness.  This transition from day to night is then called “one day” as the text says.  Note that the author does not say this is the “First Day” but “one day” as St. Basil points out.  God creates time ex nihilio, and it is not until the fourth day that He creates the Sun and Moon as means to measure or “rule” over time.  As St. John Chrysostom says “He created the sun on the fourth day lest you think that it is the cause of the day.”  Nature’s clock could not be used to measure time because it did not yet exist.  This means that we must rely on the revealed texts themselves.  It is literally three days until the creation of the sun and moon.

The Hebrew word, yom, which we translate as day, always refers to a single day when it is used in Sacred Scripture.  According to Fr. Victor Warkulwicz it is used 1904 times in the Old Testament and it is always used in the same sense as we use the English word day.  Likewise it is used 359 times with an ordinal number and all of those refer to a regular day.  The Pontifical Biblical Commission, which used to be a part of the Church’s official Magisterium, also said that the word yom must refer to either a literal day or a certain space of time to be consistent with its usage in other places in the Hebrew Scriptures.

To declare that the world was created in six literal days is to invoke the scorn of rationalists and even most Catholics.  But again, science can tell us nothing about our origins because it is the wrong instrument to measure supernatural events.  The idea that the universe was formed over eons of time by natural forces is nothing new.  The Greek atomists came up with the same idea in the Centuries before Christ.  The Fathers of the Church were all familiar with their ideas and universally rejected them favoring the fact that the Universe was made in six days.  We might be tempted to dismiss them as scientifically uneducated, except the Church has repeatedly said that those things that are held by unanimous consent of the Fathers and Doctors are to be held definitively by the Faithful (see Council of Trent and Vatican I for example).  Again, it is a question of theology and not empirical science.

Avoiding the Galileo Trap

What is perhaps most disturbing in all of this is the fact that many Catholics have abandoned this teaching in favor of “science”.  But science is far from definitive on the question of the age of the universe.  First, there is the uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell which posited that that the fossiliferous strata were produced by the geological processes of erosion and sedimentation working slowly over immensely long periods of time.  The problem with this is that normal sedimentation does not produce fossils—they will decay long before they are covered over.  Only rapid burial from some catastrophic event (like a world-wide flood) will produce fossils.  The data actually suggests that if we had such a worldwide flood working on the surface of the earth for five months, then layer after layer of sediment would produce much of the strata that have been found.  There are no surface irregularities where strata meet which means there was no erosion between them and thus they must have occurred in short succession.  This combined with what are called Polystrate fossils, which are single fossils that pass through more than one stratum, which by uniformitarian reckoning, would leave the tops and bottoms of the same tree differing in age by millions of years, leaves aging of the earth through the fossil record far from an accurate measure of age.  The ages could be off by millions of years.  Christians would be foolish to abandon the traditional understanding of the Creation account on such shaky scientific ground.

Even if we concede the uniformitarian view there are still reasons to question the scientific accuracy of the age of the Earth.  Fr. Warkulwicz names just a few issues with a 4.54 billion year old Earth:

1. By examining the decay of the earth’s magnetic field in reverse and extrapolating it back in time just 20,000 years the heat generated would have been enough to liquefy the earth.  Reversal in the magnetic field could only be instigated by a catastrophic event like the Great Flood.
2. The concentration of helium in the atmosphere and has been measured and suggest a young earth
3. The Mississippi River pours about 300 million cubic yards of sediment into the Gulf of Mexico a year which means it would have only taken 4000 years to form the Mississippi delta
4. Related to (3), the thickness of the sediment on the ocean floor indicates it is a much younger Earth.

The point then is not so much that the Science is wrong, but that it is far from certain and there is plenty of evidence that the Biblical rendering is supported by science.  The problem is science is dominated by a scientism that seeks to eliminate God from any discussion in Creation.  By taking the science as certain and attempting to remove the Traditional interpretation, many in the Church are setting themselves up for another Galileo method.  Catholics should educate themselves on the science and not be intimidated into changing their belief.