I am writing this as a Christian who also believes in the theory of evolution and the big bang to help reconcile much of the disparity between religion and science. People always ask, “Can religion and science co-exist?” For those who have studied the subject of evolution and the big bang in any depth and with an open mind, it would be absolutely apparent to them that the evidence for these scientific theories is very great. I was thoroughly convinced of the theory of evolution when I read Richard Dawkin’s “The Greatest Show on Earth”, a book by a famous evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist that, quite honestly puts forth very good argumentation and is well sourced. Carbon dating has been used to date ancient civilization while other radioactive clocks have shown the universe to be very ancient indeed. The fossil record indicates a succession of ancestors from homo habilis to homo erectus to homo neanderthalis dating before the rise of homo sapien and modern civilization. Geographical distribution of species seen all across the world (maybe you’re familiar with Darwin’s finches that had similarities across different islands) implies that most different species share a common heritage and the more apart a land is, the more exotic animals get. Australian wildlife is very different from European which has notable differences from America and so forth. Anatomical similarities and modern genome sequencing all point to the overwhelmingly high probability that evolution is, in fact, true, and that we share a common ancestor with our modern cousins the chimpanzee. Now the mainstream Christian mind of the contemporary age would argue that this is not possible according to the Bible. They’ll point to Genesis chapter 1, the famous creation story in which God created the Heavens and the Earth in six days, resting on the seventh to observe the first Sabbath. Reading carefully through Genesis, I started to imagine how evolution could fit into the context of Christian theology as I had had metaphysical experiences some years ago that ultimately led me back to the faith. Well, now obviously the first problem is going to be that the universe was created in six days, not 13.5 billion years, correct? My hypothesis here is completely dependent upon a realization that time is relative with God. Read the two verses below from the King James Version (I will always use the KJV Bible when referencing scripture in any article or book I publish until later notification from some strange fact I may or may not learn in the future) that imply time is relative and that a day may not necessarily mean a day in our understanding. Psalms 90:4: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”
2 Peter 3:8: “But beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” The premise that I am proposing here is that a day in God’s “six days of creation” was not a mere six days at all but it was in fact aeons of time. This idea was loosely inspired by the Hindu belief that a day of Brahman is equal to roughly 8.64 billion years of human time. That is an interesting and compelling parallel between the Christian scripture quoted above. Now, to explain why I believe Genesis may in fact support, rather than discredit, the theory of evolution, will be explained by an analyses of each verse in Genesis Chapter 1. Bearing in mind the relativity of time with God, let us begin to dissect the creation story. Genesis 1:1-2: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Conjecture: After the Big Bang, or creation, the Earth was without form and void. Matter had not yet formed into stars and quasars. Not even hydrogen atoms had had a chance to form and matter was as dense as if not more dense than the matter inside of a neutron star. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Indeed, according to the Big Bang model, in the early universe, all the matter was so packed together that photons were in fact trapped, they were not free to travel through space as space-time expanded with the rapid expansion of matter. “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” There was recent evidence from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva that the first matter in the universe may have in fact been a perfect liquid. My source is from the following link at live science: https://www-livescience-com/amp/first-matter-perfect-liquid.htm?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#AOH=16244130230179&REFERRER=HTTPS%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%2Ffirst-matter-perfect-liquid.htm While is wasn’t H2O as we know it, the waters in the beginning of creation were in fact making up the whole universe. The First Day: Genesis 1:3-5: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Conjecture: at a certain point in the development of the universe, the density of the liquid making it up began to decrease and photons were able to escape the mass and travel freely across space. This is the point at which God said “let there be light, and there was light.” The light was then perhaps divided up into different locations as quasars eventually began to form, strong radio beacons detected from the early universe. It’s a little hard in this model so far to contemplate what the evening and morning were in God’s eyes in this context, so it does appear a bit shaky and wishy washy here I must admit. All I’m trying to do here is conjecture as to how the big bang and Genesis can come together. The light was called Day, and the Darkness was called Night, so maybe these were separate regions of space or maybe the early universe had some massive astronomical cycles we don’t know about yet. Who knows. However, knowing that the Sun is the major source of light for daytime on Earth, it gets weird when you realize the fact that God didn’t even create the Sun and the Moon until the fourth day. The Second Day: Genesis 1:6-8: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the mist of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Conjecture: While most people will describe the firmament as the sky and the waters above the firmament as the clouds, the waters below as the oceans, lakes, and rivers, one could also take into account that most of the water in the universe is in space, either so close to the sun that it will be a thin vapor or so far away that it will be a chunk of ice like most of the rocks making up the rings of Saturn. As the matter of the universe began to expand away from it’s original liquid mass, clusters of matter stayed together, gravitationally bounded together. These clusters may have represented the point where God “divided the waters”, the firmament being created by this division being the vacuum of space. According to many models of the universe, space-time was in fact created at the big bang, not just matter, or rather, it wasn’t just matter being released from some supermassive singularity, but the formation of space and time itself, thus when matter began to lose density, God created empty space, represented in Genesis as the “firmament”. Above and below are not defined in space where there is not one single gravitational influence doing almost all of the work on a body, though maybe the waters below just mean the waters that were on planetary bodies or something along those lines. The Third Day: Genesis 1:9-10: And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: And God saw that it was good.
Conjecture: It makes little sense that the waters were all brought together unto one place from the perspective of Biblical creation, although some might argue that it was described for a Bronze Age culture based around the Mediterranean Sea where that was the major source of water in the known world. Another possibility is that God formed the dry land first by gathering the “waters” together (being the mass of matter that was composed of only subatomic particles and hydrogen) into stars where the process of nuclear fusion would create the more dense elements that would one day form into planets. After the “waters” exploded in the form of supernovae, the dense matter finally formed into dry land in the form of asteroids and eventually planets. Some planets developed water which had seas. The Curiosity rover has discovered evidence of riverbeds on Mars where waterflow has happened not too long ago. At any rate, Earth as we know it was created in this epoch of the universe most likely. Another thought is that the universe was still so hot back then that nuclear fusion could happen outside of the cores of stars and thus heavy elements like metals and carbon were created before the formation of stars. This last solution would satisfy the question of why the Sun, moon, and stars weren’t created until the Fourth Day. Genesis 1:11-13: And God said, Let the Earth bring forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit after his kin, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.And the evening and the morning were the third day. Conjecture: Noting that the third day occurred still one “day” before the creation of the Sun, as we will soon see, this goes to suggest that the first forms of life were created outside of this world. Some theories of abiogenesis suggest that life was delivered to this planet in microbial form long ago on ancient meteors crashing into the planets surface to seed the Earth with first life that eventually evolved into the modern biosphere. This suggests that maybe this theory is true. The first plants bearing seed may have evolved on other worlds across the universe by God’s will and eventually seeded the Earth. Perhaps in the early universe, as I said above, the universe was so bright that plants evolved to perform photosynthesis before the formation of the sun using quasars or early forms of radiation. The cosmic background radiation is today very small, but it was much stronger billions of years ago. After the Sun formed, they eventually evolved to use the radioactive frequencies of the Sun to produce glucose as natural selection made this an advantage as the cosmic background radiation died down. So in conclusion on my conjecture for the third day, this “day” was an epoch during which nuclear fusion in an early state of the universe led to the formation of planets, meteors, and even early forms of bacterial and plant life that thrived on early cosmic background radiation when the CBR throughout the universe was a lot brighter. The Fourth Day: Genesis 1:14-19: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. Conjecture: Eventually the firmament known as space became very great in size as the universe expanded and the cosmic background radiation died down, and the void between galaxies formed and grew to become millions of lightyears between galaxies as it is today. The early quasars and galaxies were probably dense soups like very thick nebulae where the first stars formed. From these emerged the lights that would become constellations, a very useful tool for navigation and, in the beliefs of astrology, events in the future. These lights in the firmament (confirming the firmament as the vacuum of space), are the stars. The greater light to rule the day is the Sun, the closest star to planet Earth around which it now orbits, and the lesser light is the moon. This model contradicts modern theories about planetary formation which say the Earth formed after the Sun 4.5 billion years ago. It is highly possible that the Earth actually formed within a nebulae long ago where the first plant life formed before the Sun formed and Earth was captured in orbit around the Sun. The Sun then moved out of the nebulae. One possibility is that stars actually became visible in the sky as the solar system ventured out of the nebulae of it’s birth and left the thick cloud. Maybe the sun also was not that visible within the dense atmosphere of a nebulae but became visible upon exit, or rather more prominent. It was likely during this period that the moon formed, perhaps through a meteor impact as is presently believed, creating the “lesser light to rule the night. Remember that there was light created long before the formation of these lights that were created much later, including the Sun. And that concludes my conjecture for the fourth day. The Fifth Day Genesis 1:20-23: And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. Conjecture: The fifth day was what we know today as the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion was a period roughly 600 million years ago when animal life started to emerge onto the scene of the fossil record suddenly. The theory is that sexual production allowed evolution to accelerate, causing multicellular life to form and evolve into countless forms, resulting in the formation of the Animal Kingdom. It’s understandable that plant life would form in the epoch before animals began to populate the world because the plant life and it’s use of photosynthesis makes up the base of the modern food web of the Earth. Eventually, as that stabilized and the atmosphere was transformed by the way these chemical machines released oxygen into the atmosphere, moving microbes were able to move around and developed sexual reproduction, where they breeded after their kind, evolving over generations. Modern theories suggest amphibians were the first land animals, but perhaps some animals started flying before they started crawling as opposed to the modern hypotheses. It kinda makes sense to me that some fish may have started gliding out of the waters and perhaps these gliders were replaced with flappers that eventually learned how to breath oxygen long before the emergence of amphibious life with legs. A modern example of flying fish is the Exocoetidae, known colloquially as flying fish or flying cod. This ability would have a selective advantage for fish to escape natural predators by getting out of reach above the water’s surface. Flying fish may have been more common before amphibians crawled onto the shores in the next epoch, although the earliest flying fish in the fossil record dates back to the Triassic Era, long after the Cambrian Era. So to combine Genesis with the modern theory of evolution, I suggest that flying fish became the first fowl before amphibians crawled out onto land, though that did occur later. The Sixth Day: Genesis 1:24-25: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. Conjecture: After the Cambrian Explosion, millions of years passed as evolution took many forms on land, amphibians evolving and the landscape eventually being dominated by giant lizards known as dinosaurs. After an extinction event that killed off most of the dinosaurs, mammals were given a chance to evolve, their warm blooded nature and empathy giving them an advantage over their reptilian predecessors. Small rodents would evolve into larger creatures like the wild boar and torus, the cattle, and creeping things also evolved over the land like insects and reptiles. In this epoch, land was conquered by life and dominated all the Earth, as life dominated the sea and the sky in the epoch before. Genesis 1:26-31: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Conjecture: All the beasts of the Earth besides fowl were created in the sixth day as well as man, meaning all animal life that crawls and walks on the land evolved in the same epoch as us. This makes sense in the modern understanding of evolution remembering that time is relative to God. In fact, it seems to fit perfectly. It’s been about 600 million years since the Cambrian Explosion, so in that time we have only existed for a very brief span of existence. Indeed, human civilization’s time spans a microscopic amount of time compared to the time life has walked upon the land. In this sense, in a “day” of God, it makes sense that our creation occurred in the same epoch as the creation of all land animals. We only represent a turning point in the history of evolution, most likely a point God had intended to guide the evolution of life to in the first place. Notice that before the Garden of Eden story, God said to “be fruitful and multiply”. Were humans told to multiply before the banishment from the Garden of Eden? He created them male and female before he created Adam and Eve, so I’m hypothesizing that Adam and Eve were very special humans, maybe the first couple that developed the modern neocortex. The eating of the tree of knowledge was a pivotal moment in the evolution of mankind. It gave us complex emotions and ability to understand the world, though that understanding perhaps entails some risk. Maybe God decided that for taking that knowledge, we must be tested, for the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were both forbidden, but we will be tested for the right to eat of the tree of life and be permitted into the Kingdom of God after the tribulation known as earthly life. My conjecture about Adam and Eve is that they were just a turning point, or even a special experiment conducted by God. In biology, incest does not work to produce a stable population of humans without time for genetic drift. Another point of note is that Cain, after murdering his brother Abel, was sent off to a land called Nod where he somehow found a wife and gave birth to a generation of people. Both of these things suggest that other humans capable of breeding with the lineage of Adam and Eve lived elsewhere in the world far away from the Garden of Eden. So what’s special about Adam and Eve? They must have had the genetic code granted by the tree of knowledge of good and evil that would allow people to build civilization. Remember of course that everything suggested in this article is nothing but pure conjecture. Take it with a grain of salt.