Genesis and the history of the universe

I've been reading the book of Genesis from the beginning, and I must admit it's quite challenging to me on many levels. Every time I read a particular story that sounds pretty fantastic, I poke around and see what other people have to say about it. It's lead me to put together an entirely new interpretation of the creation story than if you took the book of Genesis literally, word-for-word. After a little research, I’ve put together two basic timelines for comparison. One is the Naturalist timeline, based on as much scientific data as we have available today: archeological, radioactive, chemical, genetic, etc. The second is a timeline based on the events listed in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis.


Naturalist timeline:

Universe forms from a single point and all matter is expelled outward.

Earth forms and solidifies from swirling nebulaic dust. Sun begins to form about the same time. Earth is a rotating celestial body, being bathed on one side with light and radiation energy from our developing sun. You could say these are the earliest “days” and “nights”.

A giant object strikes primitive earth, blowing a tremendous amount of matter into orbit around the earth, forming the earth’s only moon.

The earth’s surface cools, earth's first atmosphere is formed from volcanic activity and steam escaping from the crust. Oceans had not yet formed, as there was not enough water on earth yet.

Icy protoplanets and comets impact the earth, vaporize, and eventually settle onto the earth, covering the entire surface with water.

The first land masses appear as a result of the cooling of earth’s crust and mantle.

First life appears in the oceans in the form of single-celled organisms. Blue-green algae, archaeans, bacteria. Due to the incredibly high-energy asteroid bombardment of earth at the time, it is possible that life developed and was extinguished more than just once.

The many land masses merged into one supercontinent, called Rodinia.

Ocean is filled with all existing phyla of life, albeit in their primitive forms. Supercontinent of Rodinia breaks up into smaller land masses.

First primitive plants appear on land.

Bony fishes and other complex marine life evolves. First amphibians appear - essentially the first animals to live at least partially out of the water.

First winged insects appear. These are the first living creatures that fly through the air.

Land masses again form into one supercontinent called Pangea. Reptiles appear; along with winged insects, these are the first animals that can live solely out of water.

Dinosaurs and the first mammals appear, and follow through the 3 periods of dinosaurs: Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretacious. The supercontinent Pangea breaks up and the resulting land masses start to resemble modern-day continents.

The first birds appear in the Jurassic period. Most of modern plant life evolves during the dinosaur era.

Dinosaurs end in extinction probably due to asteroid impact or high tectonic/volcanic activity. The first marsupials develop.

The first large mammals develop and proceed to thrive successfully.

First hominids appear – these are the first primitive primates to walk upright. Australopithecus Afarensis is among the first known hominid species. Megalodon (ancient giant shark) appears in the seas.

After about 20 different hominid species, the first modern humans (Homo Sapiens) appear in east Africa. Prehistoric beasts are aplenty: mastodons, saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths.

Human civilization develops as humans leave Africa to populate the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. The migration is mainly fueled by the increase or recession of ice ages, which provided either an abundance or shortage of available food, and also geographically unlocked different parts of the globe.


Biblical timeline:

Universe forms. Earth and oceans form.

Light from the sun provides the first days and nights.

The sky/atmosphere develops, separating the earth’s water from the rest of the universe.

First land masses appear. The land produces all modern complex plant life.

Every other celestial body in the universe develops (or at least appears visible on earth), appearing as our solar star during the day, and our moon and other stars in our night sky.

Life develops in the oceans. Birds develop.

Life appears on land in the form of all complex modern life.

Modern humans appear on land, namely the Garden of Eden, hypothesized to exist anywhere from Iraq to northeast Africa (in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers)

Human civilization develops in Mesopotamia until God scatters humans across the globe after the building of the Tower of Babel.


Reading these two sequences of events gives obvious notice of their differing order, and the lack of mention of many events in the Biblical timeline. The timespan of the Naturalistic timeline is about 15 billion years, with the earth forming and all life on earth developing during the last 4.6 billion years. So for each item in the list, figure anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of years. The bible gives a timespan of 6 days. However in recent years, as more Christians accept scientific data showing the true age of the earth, these “days” have been interpreted as ages or eons, so that the biblical timeline extends to hundreds of millions of years and more closely reconciles with the actual age of the earth.

This last note about the 6 “days” or “eons” gives rise to a very important note: If you take the first chapter of Genesis literally, it doesn’t even remotely agree with an overwhelming amount of scientific data that has been discovered since Genesis was written. However if you choose to interpret the story as a metaphoric narrative, then it can be loosely reconciled with the naturalistic history of the universe. But of course this is where the whole of the faith comes to a gripping paradox: if the creation story itself must be interpreted a certain way to make sense, and is not necessarily the literal infallible word of God, then what else in the Bible can we take this way? If Genesis can only make sense when taken with a grain of salt, then it leaves the entire faith up to interpretation.

There is much in the bible that is pretty historically accurate, although sometimes a little contradictory. It was written by many different sources over thousands of years, but when brought together the core of the different stories overlap pretty well to give a fantastically detailed history of north Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East over the last several thousand years. But like the history of the universe and earth, it fails to mention what was going on in the rest of the world. That doesn’t make it inaccurate, just incomplete. I don’t think it challenges the validity of the bible just because they didn’t give a detailed history of South America, I just think the people who wrote it had no idea about the rest of the world, just the parts that they were directly experiencing. But many people will say that this itself challenges the divinity of the bible. If its authors were being channeled by God’s divine and all-knowing word, why wouldn’t they write about things that no man could have truly known at the time, such as the existence and extinction of dinosaurs? Or at least the proper order of the development of life in the sea, land, and air? It could be said that the history recorded in Genesis is really a matter of the authors' perspective and limited understanding of the world. Maybe God did impart to them the infinite nature of the universe and the exact formation of the earth, but they really only understood and wrote down a small fraction of it. This still of course challenges the literal word-for-word infallible nature that the bible is supposed to uphold. However personally, I don't have a terrible problem with it if that's the case. If these people were gifted with such an overwhelming insight, I think they did pretty well with what they had to work with.

It is also safe to say that science isn’t always 100% accurate either. Just the discoveries made in the last 15 years through genetics has already shed new light on old scientific facts. However science is much more accepting of changing data then religion. Despite politics and profits, over the course of time science will always gravitate toward new and provable data to mold its most updated explanations of the universe. Whereas religion already has their answer, and they will pick and choose (or re-interpret, or ignore) data as they see fit to property reconcile with their holy doctrine.

I’ve heard it said “Science has questions that may never be answered. Religion has answers that may never be questioned.”

It’s this kind of thing that reminds me just how freakin’ small we are.


Interactive slide showing the scale of the universe

If you want to read the Genesis of the bible and believe that it literally describes the exact creation of the entire universe – all 14,000,000,000 light-years of it, every galaxy, nebula, black hole, red giant, neutrino, quark, and preon – then that’s totally your choice. Given the information that man has discovered since the time the bible was written, it might be beneficial if you take it with a slight grain of salt. It could be a vast metaphor. It could be completely made up. It could only pertain to our planet, not necessarily the whole universe because we didn’t need to know that at the time. Or let’s say God was transcending the knowledge of the universe into the meager minds of humans 4,000+ years ago – do you think there’s even a slight chance they might have missed 99% of the point, and just paraphrased the best they could?

Anyway, when you’re presented the whole of the known universe in a silly (yet impressive) little internet applet like this, I think it simultaneously brings two things to light:

One: we know for a fact that the universe is bigger and more complex than anything ever imagined by the guys who wrote the bible on dried tree bark. I mean these guys didn’t even have the vague concept of a celestial body, including the one called Planet Earth that they lived on. They had no concept of sub-atomic particles or ultra-violet light waves. So to think this simple explanation of the creation of the universe and all complex life on earth, which happens in just a few pages, can word-for-word accommodate for all that we know exists is kinda silly.

Two: I think by illustrating how much we know about the universe, it also illustrates how much we DON’T know about the universe. As I’ve discussed before, the human perception and comprehension of our reality is pretty limited. We only exist in 4 dimensions: length, height, width, and time. And we can’t even control anything about that last one, we’re just along for the ride. Yet we know there are countless other dimensions that are provable mathematically, that actually do exist, yet we will never be able to experience. At the smallest end of that “scale of the universe” chart is the theoretical quantum string. Who’s to say this isn’t exponentially more enormous than truly the smallest bit of matter, or that it doesn’t continue shrinking to infinity? And neutrinos… what the HELL are those things? They travel through matter at the speed of light and actually go back in time. All the time, everywhere, right now, as you’re reading this.

Who’s to say there isn’t something tying together every sub-atomic particle in the universe, perhaps even an intelligence that exists in every point and dimension simultaneously? If it all exists now, it had to have been created from somewhere, but who or what created it? God? Chaos?

Who. The. Fuck. Knows.

I think the concept of God goes beyond any scientific concept or theory human beings could ever dream about. And yet science has shown us innumerable things that every religion in existence fails to mention. It’s a toss-up, folks. So take your pick, and be very happy with it. But it’s not advisable to proclaim that your choice is the “truth”. It’s more like “the best conclusion you could come up with based on the evidence you were given.”

Creationist logic

There’s a lot I don’t care for about the logic process of creation scientists. I think the bible is a wonderful history book in so many ways, but on the surface, much of it seems very questionable and requires research to get your brain around. It also requires – get ready for the cliché – a leap of faith.

I’m reading the book of Genesis right now, and it’s really hard to take a lot of that stuff at face value. I’ve only gotten through about chapter 10 (the story of the Tower of Babel), and I had to stop reading and start doing some research. The general core of the story contradicts almost everything we know about the history of our planet as a celestial body and the fossil record of life on our planet. When reading about what different creationists have to say about the archeological evidence that supports these biblical stories, it seems they’re looking at the equation backward, and I can’t say I’m comfortable with that. Let me elaborate.

Let’s say you’re trying to determine where the origin of the human species came from. You would examine all available evidence that you’re capable of collecting (which is limited by the technology available to you), and that would help you determine the answer to your question. Evidence + More evidence = X.  Where “X” is the variable, the missing information that you don’t know, or in this case, the origin of the species. In other words, you look at all the things you know are true to help you answer the question that’s unknown.

The creationist logical process seems to be the reverse of this. They may have the same equation, Evidence + More evidence = X, but in this case, their answer is ALWAYS the same. X = God. So they work backward from their constant answer, only to look over the evidence to find the bits of information that best fit their already predetermined answer. Here’s an example of this:

The creationist answer to the origin of the human species is that God created two human beings: Adam and Eve. And the two of them were responsible for eventually creating every human being alive today. This act was pretty much repeated after the Flood, when Noah and his wife, three sons, and their wives were allegedly the only living humans. And they again were blessed with the task of kicking out babies and ancestoring everyone alive today. And since the bible MUST be the 100% infallible, perfect truth (otherwise the entire faith falls apart instantly) the answer to the question of the origin of the species must be God. And then the creationist must work backward over the evidence available and try to find pieces that fit this predetermined answer. However, innumerable glaring problems erupt from this equation immediately, incest being the most obvious. Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters (only a handful of which are mentioned by name), which means if those children were to eventually reproduce they would have to do it with each other, or with their parents. Yes, that means you have sex with your brother, sister, mom, or dad, and bear their children. Offspring born from that close of a gene pool have almost inevitable chances of congenital deformity, and many would be instantly fatal. Let alone if this process were to be repeated for thousands of generations. We know this for a very certain fact.


There’s of course the question of the actual origin of life and the evolution of humans from more primitive forms of life. Unfortunately we don’t have evidence of the actual act of spontaneous creation and then reproduction of a single-celled organism, and the concept is actually quite theoretical. However we do have quite a bit of evidence of species development over time through the fossil record. So a bit of holes here, however the scientific version of the equation still has the unbiased “X” at the end, hoping to fit together any and all available evidence to answer the unknown. Where the creationist already has answered “X” as “God”, and then selectively chooses their evidence trying to make the answer fit.

Now I do honestly feel that so much of the bible is metaphoric in ways that we may never understand, or so much of history has been condensed into a few short sentences that, at face value, makes no sense. It would be like taking the last 100 years of history, and summarizing with the sentence “There were great wars, and man learned to speak words over thousands of miles without a sound.” Or it’s like waking up from a dream that could have lasted an hour, but you only remember one or two completely disparate details and find yourself incapable of making any sense of it. But the way I feel about the creationist way of pre-supposing God as the answer to every mystery of the bible just to have it make sense doesn’t make me that comfortable.