Clough Evolution Lesson 4
Problem of “Days”
Now we come to the second of six problems, the first problem was Genesis 1:1-3; our second problem is the problem of “days.” The next problems are Genesis 2:1-3; man’s creation, the curse and the flood. Now we begin with our second of six problems, Genesis and the “days.” What about the “days.” We’re dealing with specifically what are the days mentioned here in the early chapters of Genesis? Ages, or are they literal days? Which are they?
The first thing to notice historically about the problem of days is that they were originally taken as literal 24 hour days and continue to be so by most students of the text, including liberals, by the way, not that liberal theologians believed this account to be historically accurate, of course, but at least liberals are saying that to be honest to the text one has to admit that the days are literal 24 hour periods of time. So at least this is a historical comment, that historically it is always been that men have taken these days as 24 hours. Now this isn’t determinative in exegesis. This isn’t determinative in your interpretation of Scripture, but what this would force one to do is that if you do not believe the days are literal then you should be able to cite at least specific evidences… specific evidences, specific points from the text that this proves the literacy of the days, for after all, if thousands and thousands of Christians have looked at the text down over the centuries and have come to the conclusion that the days are literal it puts the burden of proof on those who would say that the days are not literal.
How did the idea that the days are not literal come into existence? The earliest back I have traced this has been Augustine, and Augustine raised the question of days on a philosophical basis. Augustine felt that philosophically it seemed absurd to conceive of literal 24 hour days when really the whole system of day and night had not yet functioned, not become functioning until the fourth day of Genesis 1. And for this and other reasons, Augustine raised questions about these days being ages. Martin Luther and John Calvin took them as literal 24 hour periods. And so the situation stuck with the people who followed Augustine having questions and many of the Reformers being quite dogmatic on the 24 hour day.
But then we have the rise of science and with the rise of science came the idea of antiquity, the idea that the earth was very, very, very, very old. And in my digging around on the subject, it’s kind of a debate as to why exactly the idea of antiquity came about; whether it came about because of science or whether science began to organize and interpret data because of a prior assumption of antiquity. It seems to be a problem here, which came first, sort of the chicken or the egg, whether the idea of antiquity came forward into the modern era of science on sort of a philosophical axiom and because scientists inherently assumed the antiquity of the earth and assumed the uniformity of natural processes, thereby began to construct their new discoveries of new data within a framework of long antiquity, or whether the idea of long antiquity came from their actual discoveries and the way they interpreted it. It’s kind of a circular question, one that should warrant considerable study.
One historical note, in 1691 a man by the name of Burnett [sp?] tried to write a harmony of science and the Bible based on the framework that he had worked out of 1 Peter 3 and in Burnett’s first work it’s interesting to notice that he said that man was a late phenomena, that is, that he believed in a fairly literal interpretation of Genesis. That was in 1681 when he made his first early report. But by 1691, only a decade later, Burnett changed his mind, largely on the basis of a failure to be able to explain certain physical features of creation in terms of creation and so therefore went over to the idea that the earth had been around for a long time and he allegorized the days. So from Augustine, circa 4th-5th century we move on down through the Middle Ages with the idea that the days somehow may not be literal, on down to the scientific age and the rise of inductive reasoning and the rise of historical geology and so on to Burnett in 1691 who now allegorizes the days, not because of philosophical assumptions directly as Augustine, but because of a clash with science. And of course, many Christians today hold to the idea that the days are indeed long ages.
I would have four basic objections to the idea that these days are ages. The first objection I would have is that there’s no textual support for saying this. Everywhere else when we have a day defined, or counted, the days are always literal, never ages. I am well aware of Christians saying that “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as one day” in Psalm 90 and 1 Peter and so on. And I am well aware of the fact that there are such things, figurative uses of the word days, the “day of the Lord” and so on. But these are irrelevant to the point at issue. The point at issue is: does the word “day” when prefixed in a counting sequence, such as first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and when they are defined by these adjectives, and when they are defined by evening and morning, evening and morning, when they are so defined, so specifically, where in Scripture are they ever anything but 24 hour days?
So I find no textual support whatever for the reasoning that these days are ages. And if one wants to do this, it’s not impossible, but if one wants to take the days as ages, one would have to go through the Scriptures and point to other cases. Otherwise by saying the days here are ages you’re making an unprecedented statement of Hebrew Lexicography that just doesn’t bear up at any other point. And furthermore you would have to explain Exodus 20:11; certainly in Exodus 20:11 the thought in Moses’ mind are literal days because after all, he makes the application for a literal seven day period, the week. So my first objecting to taking the days as ages would be that there is no textual support.
My second objection for taking the days as ages is if Moses meant to speak of ages he had the vocabulary available in his time to speak of ages as ages; why use the word “day,” why leave it so ambiguous when Moses knew very well how to speak of long periods of time. So many people think that God couldn’t have revealed long ages of evolutionary and historical geology; He couldn’t have revealed these to a naïve people of the ancient world and this is utter misunderstanding because most of the cosmologies of the ancient world such as those of Egypt, those of Babylon, were very amenable to evolution. These cosmologies of Egypt and Babylon took into account long ages, gradual development and so on. So it would have been very compatible with the existing cultural knowledge of the day to speak in terms of long ages. And the very fact that Moses had vocabulary accessible, he was accessible to the vocabularies which was powerful enough to express the idea of ages, forces one who will take days equal ages to explain why it is then that Moses refused to use the normal word for age and then replace them with the word day.
For example, turn to Genesis 17:7-8, the same book, we see there that Moses has access to the idea of long ages. “I will establish My covenant between Me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. [8] And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession,” so you see an everlasting covenant, you see a seed “in their generations,” you see in verse 8 “everlasting.” Moses had a powerful and descriptive enough vocabulary to use these words for “ages” had he really intended to mean ages. So it’s highly doubtful on the basis of the positive evidence of Scripture, not only my first objection against days as ages is negative, and that is that there’s no textual support to prove it, and my second objection is positive and that is that there is a vocabulary available to Moses to express the concept of ages had he desired to do so.
My third objection to taking these days as ages is that it doesn’t accomplish
what it’s supposed to do. The reason
why most people want to take days to ages is to harmonize with the geological
column, to harmonize with what is known.
But if you do this, you find lo and behold after it’s all over that you
haven’t really done what you wanted to do because if you do take the days equal
to ages and make them correspond to geological ages, the sequence is out of
order. For example, the fourth day, we
have the creation of astronomical bodies.
No existing cosmology that I know of in our modern thinking would
hypothesize the existence of the planet earth, the existence of plant life on
this planet earth, before the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars;
that is clearly taught in Genesis 1:14-19.
This is the fourth day, Genesis 1:14-19, and here after you have the creation of the earth, after you have the atmosphere, after you have the dry land appearing, after you have the plants appearing, then after all these things you suddenly have the creation of the stars, the sun and moon, and this doesn’t seem to fit very well and I don’t see how you can take days equal age in sequence and say that this corresponds to modern scientific cosmology because it just doesn’t do it. It’s not doing the job. You may object and say well now look, in Genesis 1:14-19 it’s not saying that God is creating new life, it’s not saying that God is…it’s just that these things appear, in other words some people believe the earth was encoded with a steamy canopy, a visible water vapor, and cloudy and these clouds dissipated in this age so that from the surface of the earth the stars became visible. And I will say that this is poor exegesis because it doesn’t say God made them appear, it says God made them.
Look at verse 16, “God made two great lights,” not made to appear, “He made two great lights.” In verse 17, “God set them in the firmament,” means He established in the firmament and they weren’t established before verse 17. So whether they appeared or not is not the issue; they were set up. Now had Moses intended to say God made them appear in verse 16 he had vocabulary to do this. All you have to do is just trace with your eye back up to verse 9; see in Genesis 1:9 where “God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear,” there’s the Hebrew verb to appear, why doesn’t Moses use appear in verse 16? If he wanted to say “God made to appear two great lights” he had the vocabulary, proved by the occurrence in verse 9. But he didn’t do that, and so obviously Moses is talking about the fact that God took the light that was created on the first day and He reduced it to light-bearing bodies of the fourth day, [can’t understand words] and the Hebrew word for light, ma’owr is the Hebrew for light body or light bearers. He created the light and the firmament and so on, and He “made two great lights” and so on. This does not, by the way, refer to angels. This refers to literal…angels, according to Job 38 were already in existence by the time God laid the foundations of the earth. So here we have one of the great problems and this is my third objection to using the word “days” for age; that it doesn’t accomplish the job it was supposed to do; namely that it puts the ages far out of sequence with modern scientific cosmology so it’s not a harmony at all, it’s just deception.
Furthermore, if this isn’t crucial enough you just have to continue down the narrative, you get to the fifth day. What’s happening on the fifth day? You pick up the narrative, it begins in verse 20, the fifth day, and ends in verse 23. In Genesis 1:20, “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly [the moving creature that has life,] and the fowl,” now in verse 20 you have the fish, fish life, sea life, water life appearing and you have fowl or birds appear. And you don’t have the animals, including amphibian animals appear until verse 24, on the sixth day. So here not only do you have the problem of the fourth day begin out of sequence with modern scientific cosmology but the fifth and sixth days are out of sequence, because no cosmology I know of would hypothesize that birds came before animals. Usually it’s stated that you have the fish, you have the amphibians crawling out of the water, adapting to land life and from these comes the birds. You have the birds with the animals so the fifth day, if this were to be a harmony the fifth day should only have fish life. Then the sixth day should have birds and animals, but that’s not the way the Bible has it. The Bible has birds back on the fifth day, not on the later sixth day. So therefore you have the conflict. So there are at least two major out of order problems with trying to take the days equal to ages and make these days correspond to geological ages. They just don’t do it.
And then finally my fourth objection to taking the days as ages would be that one has to fight the problem of Romans 8:18-20. And here you have Paul speaking of the corruption that he finds around in creation, that includes death. Death is obviously on his mind because in Romans 8:18 he says, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. [19] For the earnest expectation of the creature waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. [20] For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly but by reason of him who has subjected the same in hope.” And one could say well what’s the issue? The issue simply is that Paul is saying that all of creation has been subjected to corruption as a result of man. And if you have long ages that antedate man, then you have death, suffering and decay before man falls. Therefore, what significance is the curse of Genesis 3?
Do you see? If the days are ages, then you have got to have death, destruction, and the bloody struggle of tooth and claw, the bloody struggle for existence, for thousands and thousands and ages and ages before men, and yet in Romans 8 Paul says that the creation is made subject to vanity, not before man but because of man. And you could say yes but isn’t this just potentially, creation was made subject thousands and thousands of years before man for the sake of man who would then one day come onto the scene. But then you have Roman 8:21, “Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” The “bondage of corruption” definitely denotes a sinful connotation, death, sorrow that is the result of sin; corruption! Then look at verse 22, “For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now, [23] And not only they, but we ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, that is, the redemption of our bodies.” So the connection of verses 22 and 23 of Romans 8 clearly shows what Paul has in his mind. Just as we experience pain and sorrow and death, obvious results, in at least humanity, within humanity, results of suffering and death and sin. In verse 22 you have the creation groaning and travailing just like man does because of sin.
All right, you could say well, couldn’t creation have been subject to death before man came along. If you look at verse 22 and you have creation groaning and travailing in pain, crying out to God, how do you correlate this verse, Romans 8:22, groaning and travailing in pain, how do you correlate that with the fact that in Genesis God looks upon His creation and says it is good…it is good! Is that good? Groaning and travailing in pain? It certainly doesn’t seem to match Genesis 1 very well.
So for these four reasons I reject the idea that “days” are ages. First I reject it because there’s no textual support that when “day” is defined by adjectives like first, second, third and evening and morning, evening and morning, where you have a day defined, there is no textual evidence to find that it means anything other than a 24 hour day. Secondly, Moses had the vocabulary available to him had he intended to speak of ages, as proved by Genesis 17:7-8 and so on. Thirdly, even if you did take the days equal to ages, after you get through you haven’t got what you wanted because the days don’t line up with the sequence of modern scientific cosmology, which is the reason most people take the “days” as equal to ages anyway. And finally, fourth, the day-age theory would have decay and death in existence before man’s fall, and how this can be “very good” is beyond me. How you can correlate Romans 8:18-25 with God’s description of what He created as perfect and good is just beyond me.
Now I’d like to deal with the idea that the days are literal. Just because one takes the days as literal does not mean, necessarily, they are seven literal days in sequence. And to show you this I want to bring to your attention the fact that literal days have been taken in many ways recently. In other words, the fourth of the arguments that I have given, the four objections, basically the first, second and third objections, have forced men more and more to admit that these days must be literal and so both on traditional grounds and on linguistic grounds men are coming around more and more to saying these days are literal. And so then we have different ways one can take these literal days.
First, you can have the traditional idea that they represent seven literal days in sequences, just like a week, creation week.
Or two, you can have the days equal to days of revelation. In other words, on the first day God revealed that He had said, “Let there be light.” And then the second day God revealed to Moses that He had done such and such. Then on the third day God revealed to Moses that He had done such and such. Then on the fourth day God revealed to Moses He had done such and such, and so on. In other words, the days then become days of revelation in the life of Moses, and so the days are days of revelation, not days of actual creation. This theory was first propounded in the 19th century, I believe Lewis, Taylor Lewis in his commentary on Genesis in 1855 first put this idea forth. It was revived by Weisman in 1948 and again by Ramm in his book, The Christian View of Science and Scripture in 1955. So this theory has had a recent resurgence. However, most scholars seem to flag off this theory, just seem to not pay too much attention, because it has a very, very difficult problem in Exodus 20:11. If these days are days of revelation, how does one harmonize this what is said in Exodus 20:11? In Exodus 20:11 it says “in six days God made…” “…made the heavens and earth,” he doesn’t say in six days God revealed what He had made; “in six days God made,” not revealed. So Exodus 20:11 seems to be a formidable barrier to the theory that the days are days of revelation.
Besides the traditional idea of seven literal days in sequence and days of revelation there’s a third way in which one can accept the literalness of the “days” and at the same time avoid putting them in literal sequence, and that is that the idea that the “days” are a figurative form; it’s a literary form of expression which also could be used, for example, in ceremonies. This narrative might have been read on the first day of the ceremony they read “God said, Let there be light.” On the second day of the ceremony they read thus and such. On the third day of the ceremony they read such and such. On the fourth day of the ceremony they read such and such, so here we have the days are actually not days of revelation or days of creation but simply literary devices, either designed for some sort of ceremony or designed for some other reason. And too authors that I have found go along with this view, Meredith Kline, formerly of Westminster Seminary, I believe now in 1969 Kline is at Gordon College and Kline wrote in 1955 in his review of Ramm’s book this idea that the seven days were a figurative format, an artificial sabbatical week. It was also put forward by a man by the name of Payne in 1962, the Tyndale Series of papers, Genesis One Reconsidered, where Paine, in 1962 promotes the same idea, that these are not days of creation nor days of revelation but are days figurative and literary in form, used probably for some sort of ceremony or something else and basically they are a ceremony.
Now I feel this theory, the third theory, the days being literary in form has the same kind of stumbling block of taking the days as days of revelation, and that is Exodus 20:11 again. It says in Exodus 20:11, “God made” these things. And it doesn’t say…[tape turns]…we read or seven days we celebrate God’s making of the heaven and the earth, but that “God made” this, and I think it’s very significant the location context of Exodus 20:11. Exodus 20:11, at this point you notice, Exodus 20:11 is cited by God in the Ten Commandments for the express purpose of establishing a ceremony on this base, for Exodus 20:11 follows the commandment in verse 8, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” and Exodus 20:11 gives you the reason for the ceremony. So my point is that Exodus 20:11 is the historical basis which is used to establish a ceremony. Now if the seven days of Genesis are actually a ceremonial procedure in itself, it seems strange to me that in Exodus 20:11 Moses turns back to another ceremony to establish the ceremony of keeping the Sabbath day. In other words, you’ve got one ceremony built on top of another and this is completely contrary because ceremonies in Scripture are built upon the historical acts of God in history. God really did these things and therefore we make a ceremony celebrating it. So it seems very weak, very weak, the days being in figurative form.
So one is forced back, then, “days” are not ages, therefore they’re literal. If they’re literal, are they days of revelation? No, Exodus 20:11. Are they artificial days perhaps used in the ceremonial format? Exodus 20:11 again would say no. So we’re forced back once again to the traditional view that the days of Genesis are literal 24 hour days in sequence. You say wait a minute, what about the sun and the moon was created on the fourth day, how come you can have days one, two, three? Because you do not need a sun and a moon for night and day, all you need is a contrast between light and darkness and that’s established on the first day of Genesis 1:3.
So our conclusion to the matter in this second problem that we’ve been considering in the text of Genesis, the first problem being Genesis 1:1-3 and the problem as far as the “days” are concerned, our conclusion on the matter of days is that the literal days seem the most stable interpretation. Ultimately the readers of Moses day would have understood the text in terms of literal days. And I can’t help but cite several quotations here because these quotations deal with the psychology of embarrassment. Christians are embarrassed by this narrative in Genesis so they try to squirm out from under the obvious implications, I feel. And this doesn’t impress people.
For example, Marcus Dods who was a liberal exegeting Genesis, in his commentary on Genesis makes the point that these days must be literal, and he quotes, on page 4 of his commentary on Genesis, “If, for example, the word “day” in these chapters does not mean a period of 24 hours, the interpretation of Scripture is hopeless.” In other words, if you have to fudge things this badly just throw the whole thing out, it isn’t worth bothering; it’s such a clear cut straightforward narrative account of Genesis 1-2 has to be manipulated and twisted to fit what it’s really supposed to say then God only knows about the rest of the Scripture. If we have to twist and turn the rest of Scripture like Genesis 1-2 to get the real facts out of the case the whole thing is a hopeless case. And I think Marcus Dods point is taken well. By the way, Marcus Dods doesn’t believe in a literal 24 hour creation, but Marcus Dods is an honest liberal Hebrew scholar of the text and wants to perform an honest exegete; Marcus Dods wants to get an honest answer to the question, what did Moses intend to mean, or of course Marcus Dods would believe what did the authors of Genesis 1 [can’t understand word]. And I would say that his point is well taken, and I would face those of you who would say that these are not literal days and we have to fudge the text and so on, I would face you with the statement of Marcus Dods. It the word “day” in these chapters does not mean a period of 24 hours the interpretation of Scripture is hopeless.
Now I want to show you something else, that compromises on vital issues like this don’t impress the people it’s intended to impress. For example, T. H. Huxley which was quoted in Oswald T. Allis, God Spoke By Moses, page 158 of that book, Allis quotes Huxley, and he says, “A person who is not a Hebrew scholar can only stand aside and admire the marvelous flexibility of a language which admits to such diverse interpretation.” See, it’s a sarcastic note typical of Huxley but nevertheless true, and Huxley’s not impressed at all by Christians who are trying to fix up the days into ages to impress people. He’s not impressed at all and he just sneeringly refers, “A person who is not a Hebrew scholar can only stand aside and admire the marvelous flexibility of a language which admits to such diverse interpretation.”
I have another quote from Professor John C. Greene in his book, Darwin and the Modern Worldview, page 32. Professor Greene is a professor of the history of science at Iowa State, at least he was when this was when this was written and on page 32 of his book Professor Greene is reviewing a book put out by the Evangelicals, I believe its Mixter’s Evolution and Christian Thought Today, and he was reviewing this, and this volume takes the position that we can fudge the interpretation out of the traditional framework to fit science, to make it historically true, days can be ages and so on, and Professor Greene, as a person outside the evangelical camp, has a very pertinent remark. (Quote) “Maintenance of what these writers call ‘verbal inspiration’ is likely to prove possible only by continual reinterpretation of the Bible. In the long run, perpetual reinterpretation may prove more subversive to the authority of Scripture than would a frank recognition of the limitations of traditional doctrine.” Now we don’t agree with Professor Greene on his idea of verbal…knocking verbal inspiration and son on, but his point is well taken, that “In the long run, perpetual reinterpretation may prove more subversive of the authority of Scripture,” and I think this is a pertinent point.
The final quotation comes from Professor J. Frank Kissel [sp?], a zoologist and member of the American Scientific Affiliation, writing in the Journal of The American Scientific Affiliation, June, 1960, page 15, discussing Bible teaching through fudge, Bible teachers who would say oh well, maybe those days are ages, after all I’m not impressed by you scientific people and maybe those days are ages. And here’s, in a moment of candor, Professor Kissel lays bare his heart (quote), “I still wonder, whether he’s given me more time because I demanded it or because it’s really there,” (end quote). This is an important quotation, “I will wonder whether he’s given me more time because I demanded it or because it’s really there.”
I think the lesson to these three quotations if you’ll study them carefully is that a mere compromise on difficult parts of the text, instead of forthrightly facing the difficulties, instead of being honest and just simply saying yes Lord, I don’t know the answer here, but this is what your author intended us to take, and this is what the Hebrew is saying, this is what the original languages are saying. This attitude is far more glorifying to God in the long run than the ostrich sticking his head in the sand and trying to manipulate Scripture to fit any modern scientific cosmology that happens to come along, that happens to be the fad of the moment. When we do this we destroy legitimate interpretation and tragically tragedy upon tragedy, it doesn’t impress the very people it’s intended to impress, as shown by these quotes.
So our conclusion on the second point of Scriptural problem is the fact that these days of Genesis are unquestionably 24 hour literal days in sequence and that God did make the heavens and the earth beginning in Genesis 1:3 down through Genesis 2:3 in seven literal 24 hour days. Of course the climate of the earth and exiting materials antedated the beginning of Genesis 1:3, if you kept the diagram from our previous discussion, our seven days includes only the right hand side of the paper. There was time before that but we don’t know how long it was. However, all the great tasks, the establishing of the universe, the establishing of the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the establishment of the physical atmosphere, of course the interaction with living things, the creation of man, all these things took place within a period of seven 24 hour days.