Can Genesis 1 be interpreted in a way that it fits with scientific evidence?

A day is a day.

1) If a day is an era, why are an evening and a morning even mentioned? Actual days must be intended, otherwise, men who lived hundreds of years, e.g., Seth and Noah, would really have lived millions of years. If a day is an era, then a year must be tremendously long, perhaps encompassing hundreds of millions of years;

2) If a day is an era, then much of the Old Testament becomes chaotic. For example, in each of the following verses the same Hebrew word “yom” is employed: “And the flood was forty days upon the earth” (Genesis 7: 1 7), “And he [Moses] was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights” (Exodus 34:28), and “Thus I fell down before the Lord forty days and forty nights...” (Deuteronomy 9:25). If “yom” means era instead of a 24-hour period, Moses was “there with the Lord” for a VERY long time.

3) If a day means more than 24-hour period, then how are we to interpret the following verses, as well as scores of others. “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath. . . . in it thou shalt not work... For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth… and rested the seventh day” (Exodus 20:9-11).

4) Genesis 1:16 (“And God made two great lights: The greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night”) states the sun rules the day and the moon rules the night. This obviously is referring to time as we know it, time with days that are 24 hours long with daylight ruling half of each.

5) Adam was made on the sixth day (Genesis 1:26-31) which was supposedly thousand of years long. This was followed by the 7th day which was also thousands of years long. Following the 7th day, Adam fell into sin and was expelled from the Garden. This would mean Adam lived thousands of years, which is false, since he died at age 930 (Genesis 5:5).

6) Genesis 1:5 surely spoke of literal day and literal night, and the inference from the statement, “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” is that it was a literal day of evening and morning, 24-hours. There is no Biblical evidence that the days of this chapter were longer periods.

7) If we do try to buy into what the Jehovah’s quote as “a day can be a thousand years” even this isn’t sufficient enough time. For the earth is at least 4.6 billion. The biblical passages concerning time should’ve read that days can be like MILLIONS of years. Obviously, their claim falls apart under mathematic speculation.

For those of you Christians who are STILL clinging to the idea that evolution can be reconciled with the bible, take a little advice from one of your own brethren on the matter. The following is a CHRISTIAN AUTHOR who admits that the word yom does mean a 24 hour period in the creation account:

"The Hebrew word for ‘day’ is ‘yom’ and this word can occasionally be used to mean an indefinite period of time, if the content warrants. In the overwhelming preponderance of its occurrences in the O.T., however, it means a literal day… Still further, the plural form of the word (Hebrew 'yamim') is used over 700 times in the O.T. and always, without exception, refers to literal ‘days.’" (The Bible Has the Answers, Henry Morris, p. 94).

Obviously even Creationist Morris admits the idea that each day represented an era is ridiculous. Not only is the day-age theory unacceptable scripturally, but it also is grossly in conflict with the geological position with which it attempts to compromise. My suggestion? Make a valid justification as to how the creation account can be plausible, until then don’t pimp feeble lies to cover up for your even more errant book.

The 120 was in regards to the flood. Not how long people would live. You should say some part of Gensis is true while others aren't. Because your picking and choosing what you want to believe and that's idolitry. I BELIEVE in Gensis. Anyway. If God could close the Ark door I jolly well think he'd be able to keep it afloat and keep everyone Alive. Why would he drown the whole world... and then drown/gas Noah and his family too. What is a crocodile. Well if it died out a couple thousand years ago it would have been a dinosaur. But it's still alive so it's just a reptile. WHAT ON EARTH? What is a dinosaur by the way? Well there were some 'dinosuar' like creatures described in the book of Job and other parts of the bible that I can't recall. But you can't presume dinosuars never lived alongside man because technically they still do. The grand canyon is geological proof and you should watch Answers in Genisis with Ken Ham that explains it really well. Once you watch this and know what we think and your not so ignorant that would be nice. Billion of planets. Who said at least one other planet MUST contain life. That's a presumption and your going off at us telling us to not give you any cr*p answers and then you come up with this lame argument!? 'If there was any other life form'... Well there isn't so it isn't evidense so shut up until they find some. And don't use water on Mars. Whoopie. H2O on mars. That doesn't prove anything. I'm pretty sure Mars is made up from a compound or two. And well what do you know. Water is a compound as well. WOW what a coincidense. That must mean.... nothing. Except there is water on mars. but no life form. You were so polite at the begining of your question but I'm offended at how rude you became so don't tell me I'm rude because that would make us both hypocrites. and next time please think before you ASK!

There are two schools of though on reconciling science and the Bible on creation. One is that the creation story is a parable. A short story to explain a moral teaching or a story to explain complex events quickly. So, some think the Biblical creation story is a parable where the days mean nothing other than the possible ordering of events.

The second alternative goes that our sequential time is not the same as God's heavenly infinite time. There are places in the Bible where days means infinite time and one year equals 1,000 years. So, it is possible that six days to God is 13.7 billion years in our time. This alternative makes more sense when you understand that M-Theory says there are eleven dimensions in the universe only four of which we can sense (left/right. up/down, back/forwards and time). These seven additional dimensions could explain much about heaven, hell, God the Son and God the Father. Each of these places (dimensions) may have completely different rules of physics and space-time.

These two schools do not answer Creationist basic problem. The principal problem creationist Christians have is really 6000 years, not evolution. These Christians add up the patriarchs life spans and births of sons in the Bible and believe that today is 5760 to 6012 years from Adam's creation in the Garden of Eden (the Jewish Talmuds say November 2008 is really the Jewish year 5769, which is the number of years since Adam's birth). Additionally, the Talmud records that there were 974 generations before the appearance of Adam as described by Genesis.

There are two answers to this problem. First, that the Bible doesn't list all the generations since Adam and Eve, just some. Creationists do not like this alternative because it isn't mentioned in the Bible. The second alternative is that true humans with eternal souls were created on the earth by God some time later in human history. This possibility has some weight in that modern homo sapiens trace there origin to a group 60,000 to 90,000 years ago in Central Africa when only 5,000 humans existed on the planet (genetic fact). The alterative goes that God introduced Adam and Eve here. With his alternative you avoid Seth, Adam and Eve's son, marrying a sister or niece and having children. The human record does show a change in human creativity at this point in time.

I hope this helps,

Godspeed.

Evolution is just a poor way for man to explain creation with out God, but the truth is God created everything plain and simple. People once believed the earth was flat now they believe in evolution both are wrong.

The short answer is that, yes, it can. Rather than engage in a massive, and inappropriate, cut and paste job here, I would suggest that you google Hugh Ross, and Ken Miller, as well as theistic evolution - and read up.

There are a number of ways to literally read the Genesis account such that it can be sqaured with the reality of creation.

Go back and study your evolution again. ALL living things came originally from the oceans. They came out onto land and evolved into various creatures, then for some unknown reason (at present), some of them returned to the waters.

Aquatic animals and birds DONT evolve from land animals. So maybe the timeframe maybe the same, but that doesnt mean everything else is the same.

Totally and it may take a read but Genesis does actually speak for science,you just have to break it down

On day one light could stand for the big bang where all matter, forces, time and space created in a moment .

Day two talks about the upper firmament separating from the lower one .the upper waters from lower waters.Interestinly from here one can either look at the cosmic or the planetary scheme simultaneously. At the cosmic level the firmaments could be nebular clouds of gas separating from dark matter as two distinct domains. At the same time if one thinks of strictly looking at the earth with nebular theory working …the earth as light burning hot like a star .Then the second day speaks of the gravitationally compressed ocean of magma separating from the envelope of cooler gas on the outside (which gas formed the atmosphere)

Now on the third day the bible says that the waters were collected in places as seas and separated from the land. Again at cosmic level particularly solar system look at how the planets closer to the sun are all rocky. Mercury, Venus, Earth and mars are rocky inner planets and then beyond the asteroid belt there come the liquefied gas giants(jovian planets) Jupiter, Saturn Uranus and Neptune. Could it be that the inner planets stand for earth and outer planets stand for water? Look at the earth it is still forming but if the liquid ocean of magma on the outer surface cooled into tectonic land plates and the envelope of gas cooled further still with heavier elements like water falling back to earth as rain and collecting as oceans .Again you see here that the 3rd day is working for both

Now we know that for life on earth to have life there needed to be oxygen and water. Water indeed provided single celled organisms the ability to colonise both it and land. I believe the first living organisms were plants because they would need to make enough oxygen through various processes of photosynthesis for animals to thrive so again on the third day the bible makes sense that plants were made.

Remember that to God a day is like a thousand years not a literal 1000 years but that stands for a length of disproportionate time. I always believe that a day in Genesis took eons upon eons .o the universe is indeed probably 13billion years old or more and as you can see all the above processes too millions of years. Why would I brigs this up you may ask? Well many scholars point out to how could earth exist before sun or moon. It did not. They were all existing together and forming together but it is only because we are earthlings that earth takes center stage in the narrative. So on the 4th day as genesis says it simply alludes to the earth being life receptive and so the sun and moon are revealed to show the times and seasons to its living creatures

Notice that on the 5ths day God created sea creatures most biologists again agree that life came from water. So sea creatures came first. I do not strictly believe that all sea creatures came from one primordial germ. I think God by miracle did create species through progressive evolution. (maybe that is why there are transitional fossils missing)

On the 6th day again he created creatures of land. Remember man was created last. Like I think that God did create dinosaurs and I do not believe he made animals immortal ,he only wanted man to be immortal so animals probably fed on each other and were not strictly vegetarian .He created the web of life that way but humans like Adam were created after some time just when conditions were right. Moreover even if we look at it another way who is to say Adam did not live 200million years and saw the dinosaurs and other creatures die off/?.The main problem is some literalists think that before Adam’s fall all animals were immortal, that is an entirely unfounded assumption and not supported by scripture In the bible we are not told how long he lived in Eden or earth. He could have lived millions of years. What is interesting is that when he told him 'don't eat of that fruit or you will die the day you eat it'. How did Adam know what death was? Yet he obeyed for a while. Logically this would mean Adam knew that animals died and to him it was normal but he probably feared to die himself. He must have observed that the sun sets and rises, the crescent moon grows full so death of other animals may not have been so strange to him Again notice he did not die in 24 hours or in the day of eating the fruit but lived for 930 years.Offcourse 930 years of existence compared to say 65 million years is a day. The bible in Daniel calls weeks days and in some books days are years for example numbers 14:33-34 and Ezekiel 4:5 so who knows maybe 930*52 is 48,360 years or 365 days*930is 339,450 years. For God anything is possible.

Most scientists believe the theory of evolution, which teaches that all living things evolved from a simple form of life that came into existence millions of years ago. The Bible, on the other hand, teaches that each major group of living things was specially created and reproduces only “according to its kind.” Man, it says, was created “out of dust from the ground.” (Genesis 1:21; 2:7) Is this a glaring scientific error in the Bible? Before deciding, let us look more closely at what science knows, as opposed to what it theorizes.

The theory of evolution was popularized during the last century by Charles Darwin. When he was on the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, Darwin was strongly impressed by the different species of finches on the different islands, which, he deduced, must all have descended from just one ancestral species. Partly because of this observation, he promoted the theory that all living things come from one original, simple form. The driving force behind the evolution of higher creatures from lower, he asserted, was natural selection, the survival of the fittest. Thanks to evolution, he claimed, land animals developed from fish, birds from reptiles, and so forth.

As a matter of fact, what Darwin observed in those isolated islands was not out of harmony with the Bible, which allows for variation within a major living kind. All the races of mankind, for example, came from just one original human pair. (Genesis 2:7, 22-24) So it is nothing strange that those different species of finches would spring from a common ancestral species. But they did remain finches. They did not evolve into hawks or eagles.

How can the theory of evolution be tested? The most obvious way is to examine the fossil record to see if a gradual change from one kind to another really happened. Did it? No, as a number of scientists honestly admit. One, Francis Hitching, writes: “When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there.”7 So obvious is this lack of evidence in the fossil record that evolutionists have come up with alternatives to Darwin’s theory of gradual change. The truth is, though, that the sudden appearance of animal kinds in the fossil record supports special creation much more than it does evolution.

Moreover, Hitching shows that living creatures are programmed to reproduce themselves exactly rather than evolve into something else. He says: “Living cells duplicate themselves with near-total fidelity. The degree of error is so tiny that no man-made machine can approach it. There are also built-in constraints. Plants reach a certain size and refuse to grow any larger. Fruit flies refuse to become anything but fruit flies under any circumstances yet devised.”8 Mutations induced by scientists in fruit flies over many decades failed to force these to evolve into something else.

Evolution from one kind/species to another is not a FACT it is just a theory. Meaning not yet proven!!!

Thus, in essential features the Bible is in harmony with modern science. Where there is a conflict between the two, the scientists’ evidence is questionable. Where they agree, the Bible is often so accurate that we have to believe it got its information from a superhuman intelligence. Indeed, the Bible’s agreement with proved science provides further evidence that it is God’s word, not man’s.

not really sure, I've read the book "The language of God" by Dr Francis Collins, He is the head of the human genome project and him and along with a colleague "cracked the code for DNA", he is an evolutionist and he also happens to be an evangelical Christian