Creation and Evolution

The young-earth reading takes each day as a day of twenty-four hours, numbered and closed with evening and morning, and it counts the age of the earth from the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. It reads Exodus 20:11 as proof that the days of creation were days of the same length as Israel's working days. It reads Romans 5:12 and Romans 8:20 as ruling out the death of animals before Adam's sin.

On the day-age reading every day of Genesis 1 is a long age, and the order of the days is the order in which God brought the universe and life into being. Its holders rest the reading on the wider sense the Hebrew word yom can carry and on its use in Genesis 2:4.

The gap reading places the ruin of a first world between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, and it reads the six days as a making again after that ruin. Its holders read the verb of Genesis 1:2 as became, so that the earth became formless and void through the ruin. The reading has its own page, The Gap Reading at Genesis 1:2.

The framework reading takes the six days as two sets of three, ordered by subject. Days one to three make the light, the sky and the seas, and the dry land. Days four to six fill them with the lights, the birds and the fish, and the land creatures and man. Kline drew the title of his article, Because It Had Not Rained, from Genesis 2:5.

Walton reads Genesis 1 beside the accounts of creation in Israel's world, where to create a thing was to give it its function and its place. On his reading the seven days set up the cosmos as God's temple, and God's rest on the seventh day in Genesis 2:2 is His taking up His rule in it. The account then leaves the age of the material world outside what it teaches.

Augustine taught that God made all things together in one act, and he rested the teaching on Genesis 2:4 to 5 and on Sirach 18:1 as his Latin Bible read it. He held that the six days set out that one work in an order a reader can follow, since things made together cannot be told together. He also held that God placed in the first creation the seminal reasons, the causes from which living things would appear in their own times.

Evolutionary creation holds that God made the living kinds through common descent, the process Charles Darwin described in On the Origin of Species (1859), which God upholds as He upholds all things. Its holders read Hebrews 1:3, where the Son upholds all things by His powerful word, and Psalm 104:24, where God made all His works in wisdom.

Intelligent design is a position on how living things came to be, and its holders take no single reading of the days. Behe argues that a system of interacting parts in the cell, such as the bacterial flagellum or the cascade by which blood clots, loses its function when any one part is taken away. He argues that such a system cannot be built by gradual steps of unguided selection and is best explained by design. He accepts the age of the earth that geology gives and common descent in many cases. Young-earth holders such as John F. Ashton welcome these arguments and press beyond their openness on the age of the earth.

The young-earth reading must answer mainstream cosmology and geology, which date the universe in billions of years. Its holders explain that evidence by a recent creation and a flood that covered the whole earth.

The day-age reading must answer that vegetation comes on the third day and the sun, the moon and the stars on the fourth, against the order the sciences give.

The gap reading must answer Exodus 20:11, which sets the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them within the week the LORD worked. The page on the gap reading weighs the grammar of Genesis 1:2 in full.

The framework reading must answer the young-earth reading, which holds that Genesis 1 reads as narrative, each day following the one before it.

The temple reading must answer Genesis 1:1, which names the heavens and the earth themselves as what God created, so the account speaks of the origin of the material world as well as its functions.

Augustine's reading must answer a text that sets the works of creation on separate days, the lights on the fourth and man on the sixth, which a single act of making leaves unexplained.

Evolutionary creation must answer Genesis 2:7, where the LORD God forms the man from the dust and breathes life into him. Paul's argument in Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:21 to 22 rests on one man through whom death came, and a long line of death before Adam must be reconciled with it.

Intelligent design must answer Francis Collins, who holds that its examples of irreducible complexity, such as the bacterial flagellum, are giving way as science learns more about them.