Early Scholarship.  Very much has been written lately concerning the “days of creation” that are presented in Genesis.  Recently, many conservative theologians have considered the belief in a literal six day creation as a litmus test of one’s faith.  Indeed, in some churches, it is impossible to gain membership if you do not confess your belief in such a system.  The problem is that such a belief is not at all reconcilable with known scientific facts.  Just as it is impossible to believe in a universe that can into existence by natural causes and subsequently produced life by accident, it is also impossible to believe in a universe that was created by six days.  There is just too much good, hard, scientific evidence against it.  But what is even more troubling is the insistence of some Christian communities to consider this point of faith as important as belief in Christ.  This bigotry has caused many scientists who recognize the inability of the earth to be created spontaneously to not accept Christianity because of the insistence of some parts of this faith to insist upon a six-day literal creation.

It might be assumed by the ranting of some fundamental religious groups that the doctrine of a literal six-day creation has been orthodox from the beginning of Christianity; but such is not the case.  For example, such luminaries as Augustine, Origin, Basil, Aquinas, and Iranaeus all considered the creation days of Genesis to represent extended periods of time rather than just days.  Their scriptural views cannot be said to have been shaped to accommodate secular opinion.  Rather, these opinions were shaped by a rationed reading of the Bible.  Scientific understanding of the age of the earth using astronomical, paleontological, and geological evidence did not begin to be shaped until the 19th century.

Ussher and the six days of Creation.  Archbishop Ussher calculated the age of the earth using genealogies provided in the Bible.  Using this evidence, he provided a calculation that man was created in 4004 B.C..  Certainly, these calculations can be done using this data, but the critical assumption is that these genealogies represented all the people in between each generation.  It could well be argued, again from evidence in the Bible, that each generation listed in some of these genealogies might instead represent several generations.  When the Bible speaks of a son, it might really mean a distant son rather than the man’s literal child.  Nonetheless, Bibles were then produced using Ussher dates from the creation of man to the present; each significant event in the Bible was literally dated.  These dates in the margins of many King James Bibles forever fixed in the minds of many Protestants that Creation had to be as Bishop Ussher said.

Furthermore, fundamentalism saw creationism as one of the great evil philosophies of modern man, and any philosophy that might support evolution as evil by association.  Fundamentalism got its name and start from two laymen, Milton and Lyman Steward, who sponsored the printing and subsequent distribution of twelve small books entitled, “The Fundamentals: A Testimony of the Truth.”  Fundamentalism organizationally got its start when the World’s Christian Fundamental Association was formed at a conference in Philadelphia in 1919.  Ussher’s time scale was especially important because it was seen as a “proof” that natural, biologic evolution must be wrong.  It then became incorporated into doctrinal theology, must like any significant doctrine of the church.  Thus, to not believe in a six-day creation with the time of man’s creation set at 4004 B.C. became heresy; you could not be a Christian and not believe in Ussher’s chronology.

Unfortunately, such a bias is still prevalent among fundamentalists today; that is, to believe in any form of creation other than a six literal day understanding is heresy.  I believe, however, that such an understanding of Scripture is misguided at best, and seriously impedes the progress of the evangelical church among scientists at worst.  It is unfortunate that the incorporation of this artificial theory with little merit in scientific scrutiny has been incorporated into official church canon as it has erected false obstructions where there should be none.

It is the purpose of this site to more seriously investigate the idea of six literal days of creation in light of what we now know concerning the very early origins of our planet and the universe.

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