Not Literally Six Days: Why Theistic Evolution is Consistent with the Bible, and a Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1-2 is Not.

elief in a Six 24-hour Day Creation on biblical grounds is irrational and should not be taught to Christians today.

Them's fightin' words, against the cherished beliefs of many "Evangelicals," I know.  In fact, I discovered last month that the denomination in which I was baptized, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, has as one of its beliefs, which no LCMS pastor can preach contrary to, a commitment to literal six-day Creationism.*  Not the reason I left, but a decent reason to stay out, even were I not so enamoredly Catholic.  I really think that Christians' bad arguments and irrationally dogmatic insistence on literal six-day Creationism cause atheists and other unbelievers to reject not only this peripheral issue, but the entire idea of Christianity, and the amazing person of Jesus Christ.  At the very least it makes a tempting straw man argument that we should not provide the enemies of our Faith.

Raphael wasn't lying, either: School of Athens (1511, C.E.)

So why am I so sure the literalists are wrong?  It's quite simple, and (this may surprise you) it has nothing to do with the current state of Academia's research into evolutionary and geological history.  Yes, Earth science obviously points to the fact that our planet is billions of years old, rather than thousands.  But that in itself does not mean that an all-powerful God could not give Adam a belly-button, as it were:  make the planet seem as though it were so old, for the same aesthetic reasons a painter might place perspective into a flat painting.  The painter does not lie to his audience by doing so, and neither would God be lying if he so desired.  But, patient reader, we have zero scriptural reason to believe He did, as I will show.

The reason I can be so sure is that the Bible contradicts itself if one interprets it literally in this regard.  As biblical scholars know from stylistic analysis of the Hebrew text, there are two Creation accounts given in Genesis from different literary traditions.  Genesis 1: 12-13 reads: "The earth brought forth every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it. God saw how good it was.  Evening came, and morning followed--the third day."

If we skip ahead a bit to day six, we see that on the sixth day God first creates the animals (24-25), then he creates man, male and female (verses 27-31).  In this account, then, we have this order: 

(1) All Plants, (2) All Animals, (3) Man and Woman 

But in Chapter 2, we get a very different and temporally contradictory order:

(1) Man, (2) At Least Some Plants, (3) Animals, (4) Woman.

"At the time when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens--while as yet there was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted, for the LORD God had sent no rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, but a stream was welling up out of the earth and was watering all the surface of the ground--the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.  Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed."  Later, in verse 18, we hear God saying that he wants to make a partner for man, and as a result in 19, he forms the animals, followed by woman as the final solution to man's loneliness:

God always has the best solutions for man's problems.

So as I said, in this account we have man appearing before field-shrubs (a type of plant), after which the plants are placed in a garden, and then later, animals appear followed by woman: 

(1) Man, (2) At Least Some Plants, (3) Animals, (4) Woman.

Now I say "at least some" plants for the sake of argument.  Literalists have tried to rationalize their irrational interpretation of the text by explaining that the second account mentions only certain kinds of plants.  Yet logically, if we're going to be woodenly literal, these plants also would have been made on the third day of creation along with the rest, before man.  To make matters worse for the literalist case, in the first account, animals are made first, while in the second, animals are made for the purpose of ruling them out as a suitable partner for man, who has not only already been made, but is situated in the garden.  Again the literalists demonstrate their intellectual dishonesty by translating the simple past verb "formed" as pluperfect "had formed" (cf. New International Version) to try to extricate themselves from this problem.  Scholarly consensus agrees this is not how the Hebrews read the text, nor is it a good translation based on Hebrew mechanics (nor does it solve the plants-or-man-first timing problem).*

"...and he became a living being."  Sistine Chapel (1512, C.E.)

Praise be to God that he inspired the scriptures so as to prevent our misinterpreting the intended scope of the Creation passages.  For in the first account, God's orderliness in developing his Creation from the lower beings to the highest pinnacle of physical Creation--mankind--is emphasized.  Over and against the bloody Creation myths of the Babylonians and pagan tribes the Israelites lived around, God speaks the world into existence as transcendent lawgiver.  But then, lest we should misinterpret God's transcendence as indifference, the second account emphasizes the immense and personal care God takes in his love and care for man, and how all of Creation was made for him to rule over as God's steward, with his help-meet, the crown of God's creation, the woman.  

A good way to study your
scientific origins.  Leave the problem of 
your spiritual destination to the Bible.

Had the passages been written differently, our imperfect knowledge of the original context might lead us to these crazy literalist interpretations, but an honest reading of the text, fortunately, does not allow this.  The text is intended as a spiritual guide for man, or as Galileo Galilei (a Catholic priest himself) said and was later repeated by Pope John Paul II who exonerated Galileo in 1992, "The Bible was written to show men how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."  As John Paul II further said, "Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo...understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture." -L'Osservatore Romano, November 4, 1992 

Similarly, if we wish to know the scientific origins of the world to fully appreciate its complexity, orderliness and beauty, we cannot expect the Scriptures to answer questions they were never written to solve.  Rather, we must use the brains, principles of reason and clues from the existing world that Providence has given us to sift out what is probable and accept this as the truth whether or not it agrees with our prejudices. 

Notes:

*From the LCMS website:  After some gobbledy gook about not wanting to impose a "litmus test," the LCMS says this:  "Official members of the LCMS (congregations, pastors, rostered church workers), of course, pledge to honor and uphold the official position of the Synod on doctrinal issues, including its official position on creation" which then links to a PDF that says this:

 "We teach that God has created heaven and earth, and that in the manner and in the space of time recorded in the Holy Scriptures, especially Gen. 1 and 2, namely, by His almighty creative word, and in six days. We reject every doctrine which denies or limits the work of creation as taught in Scripture. In our days it is denied or limited by those who assert, ostensibly in deference to science, that the world came into existence through a process of evolution; that is, that it has, in immense periods of time, developed more or less of itself. Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world, we must look for a reliable account of creation to God's own record, found in God's own book, the Bible..."

*The context of the story reveals that the original Hebrew word in Genesis 2:19a (http://interlinearbible.org/genesis/2-19.htm) can be rendered only in simple past tense and not in past perfect or pluperfect tense.  The majority of English translations use this tense.

John Sailhamer gives a similar opinion: “The NIV has offered an untenable solution in its rendering the waw consecutive in wayyiser by a pluperfect: ‘Now the LORD God had formed.’ Not only is such a translation for the waw consecutive hardly possible, . . . but it misses the very point of the narrative, namely, that the animals were created in response to God’s declaration that it was not good that man should be alone(2:18).” John Sailhamer, “Genesis,” The Expositor’s Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), p. 48 

Another resource that gives the same judgment is the online Biblical study tool Net Bible: "Or “fashioned.” To harmonize the order of events with the chronology of chapter one, some translate the prefixed verb form with vav (ו) consecutive as a past perfect (“had formed,” cf. NIV) here. (In chapter one the creation of the animals preceded the creation of man; here the animals are created after the man.) However, it is unlikely that the Hebrew construction can be translated in this way in the middle of this pericope (context), for the criteria for unmarked temporal overlay are not present here. See S. R. Driver, A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew, 84-88, and especially R. Buth, “Methodological Collision between Source Criticism and Discourse Analysis,” Biblical Hebrew and Discourse Linguistics, 138-54. For a contrary viewpoint see IBHS 552-53 §33.2.3 and C. J. Collins, “The Wayyiqtol as ‘Pluperfect’: When and Why,” TynBul 46 (1995): 117-40."

Meanwhile the Septuagint Greek translation of the Bible (the translation that Jesus and his disciples invariably quote from in the New Testament Gospels) translate the word as "έπλασεν" which is undeniably in the simple past tense, not the pluperfect.