Isn’t it amazing that Genesis 1 still makes sense to a scientist today?
Genesis 1 still makes sense to a scientist who believes in the Big Bang, quantum physics, spacetime, dimensions, subatomic particles, evolution, dinosaurs and all the scientific truths God has allowed us to see so far.
Would that have been possible if the Bible were not a living, spiritual book? How could a book, if it were written by humans with no input from God at the time the Bible was written, possibly still stand true for me, a scientist, in 2024?
The following article is for anyone for whom the impression of a literal “scientific textbook” approach to Genesis 1 is keeping them from Jesus. It is not intended to destabilise anyone else’s interpretation. Everything is to bring people closer to Jesus and remove barriers to people, especially scientists, coming to faith.
When I was converted from atheism a few months ago, Jesus revealed to me that he is who he says he is and that he is real. He made it so that for me to not believe in him would have required a huge (and, frankly, non-scientific) effort to bat this truth away. I consider myself truly blessed that he did this for me.
What this meant in practice, was that I had to accept Jesus is real and then read the Bible knowing this fact. You might say, I had to “work backwards” from the knowledge that Jesus is God. Therefore, when I started reading the Bible, I knew it had to be true, but I also was not going to abandon my scientific background. I was not going to abandon scientific principles or today’s leading scientific understandings, such as evolution. I wasn’t going to start saying the Devil put dinosaurs in the ground to confuse us.
I was actually quite nervous about this. I thought to myself, what if I encounter something which goes against my revelation that Jesus is real? If that were to happen, I would have to re-think my revelation, and the most obvious alternative explanation to me as a medical doctor would have been madness. I prayed and put my trust in Jesus that he would show me the truth. A certain passage came to me from believers I met along the way (Philippeans 1:6):
Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ
I marvel at how the Holy Spirit prepared me and taught me, using a combination of divine inspiration, the sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Bible, real-world signs and his believers and faith leaders here on Earth.
If anyone is holding back from Jesus because of the way they feel about Genesis 1 (the first chapter in the Bible about how God created the universe), I pray that my account will bring them closer to God.
The central question is: how can I possibly read Genesis 1 as a scientist and not have it contradict current scientific knowledge?
Truth
Remarkably, the answer for me brought me closer to God, because I realised that the Bible is a living, spiritual book of truth. I realised that the very fact that it speaks to any person, any time, any place, from a slave in a former empire to a scientist 200 years ago, to a person of any other faith, to an atheist without faith, to me now — this supports the hypothesis that it contains spiritual truth. I do not mean that you can read the Bible and decide it means whatever you want it to mean. Truth comes from marrying up the Word and the Spirit of Jesus and putting yourself before the Word in the utmost humility, as in prayer.
To understand what I mean, I need to describe to you a sign of God which I referenced briefly in a previous article. This happened driving past Heathrow airport in London. There were two other people in the car, one a child, and the other an adult who did not believe in signs from God. An aeroplane flew across our view, quite low and, to me, I felt the Holy Spirit in the car with us. To our left was a lake and the embankment was filled with many sheep next to the road, which I thought was slightly unusual. As the plane flew to the left of the car and turned to the left it suddenly appeared to stop and be suspended in mid-air. I was amazed as I stared at it and saw it was not moving in the air. The child shouted “it’s flying backwards” twice. The other adult saw this as well and was unable to deny that it did appear suspended in mid-air. This was indeed a miraculous phenomenon. I experienced it as a sign from God. Did I think that the engines literally reversed and flew the plane backwards? No. Did I think it literally stopped in mid-air? That was not the right question to be asking. There we all were, seeing a certain spiritual truth — that a Boeing passenger jet was apparently hovering without moving forward above a flock of sheep standing next to the motorway as we drove past Heathrow. The person who did not believe in signs from God, explained this away, as being just an unusual trick of the light to do with the way the plane was turning. And maybe it was. Yet a certain truth was there. God gave the option to understand a spiritual truth of this moment or to bat it away as “just an illusion”. This happened at around 09.35am on 26th December 2023.
My experience of reading the Bible is similar to the experience of the aeroplane hovering in mid-air. Do I literally believe that Genesis 1 is talking about 24-hour human day periods as I experience them in my day-to-day life (like a Monday or Tuesday) when it speaks of God creating certain parts of the universe in a “day”? For me the answer is no. Is it spiritually true to me that God created the heavens and the earth in the way described? Yes. This does not mean that someone else who read this truth and received it as a literal truth is wrong. My truth does not negate someone else’s truth: for example, a person reading Genesis 1 back in the days when people believed the Earth was flat and the sun orbited the Earth. Of course, that person would not have interacted with the Word of God in the same way as I am now. Of course, with my awareness of new discoveries of quantum physics, dark matter, the Big Bang and so on, my interaction with the truth should be different.
Just to clarify this point, the Bible conveys spiritual, living truth. Just as the real-world sign of the aeroplane required faith to understand it, so too does receiving spiritual truth from the Bible. I put myself before the Bible in the utmost humility as I read it. Similar to the way in which I put myself before the Lord in prayer. I am reading the universal, timeless, living Word of God.
To a literalist, if this is unconvincing from a new convert who is extremely immature in faith, let me give you another example from a Christian who many look up to: Derek Prince. He described how he understood the Bible, very well, in fact, because he was an experienced, orthodox and fervent Pentecostal minister. Derek Prince was definitely not a Laodicean Christian. He then had a conversation with God where he committed himself to take on a new ministry. This turned out to be the deliverance ministry. After he made his commitment to God to take his faith in this new direction, he stated that God revealed totally new truths to him when he re-read the Bible from that point on. He was granted a totally new understanding as he went forward in his journey. You can hear him saying this here: Derek Prince: Personal testimony about deliverance ministry — YouTube. He said:
08.10–08.25 “I was, I would say, a very orthodox Pentecostal preacher. And Pentecostal preachers are orthodox, they believe the Bible. I believed the Bible from cover to cover. Anything that was in the Bible I accepted as authoritative”.
He then promised the Lord:
09.21–09.24 “If there is anything further, I want to go further”.
He then described how the Lord gave him a “very clear specific answer” which he said was “a personal answer for me and it might not be the same for you”.
After this, it was revealed to him that “all progress in Christian life is by faith”. When he returned to the Bible, he read it in a totally different way. He said:
14.25–15.20 “I realised that God had put me back in what I would call a kind of post-graduate course. I think that’s not conceited; I could say that I was a spiritual graduate. But the Lord began to re-educate me. Now he did not do this through a bible school or through any human institution, but he did it by putting me in situations and circumstances where I came up with things that I had to turn to the Word to find the answer. And I realised that God planned this, incident by incident, he spared no time, no trouble and no expense, he would take me right across the continent and back again just to show me one thing. And he opened up certain areas of the New Testament for me in a completely new way. I had read the New Testament doubtless hundreds of times, but after this commitment, I found that there were things in the New Testament that I had never even dreamt were there. And I wondered how I could have read it so often and never seen them”.
So to say that Derek Prince did not know the Bible before would not be correct. He knew its truth very well and God then changed the truth of his Word for Derek Prince’s new ministry journey. This supports that the Bible is a living book and the truth it contains is spiritual, not literal, and it is certainly not fixed and unchanging. I recommend listening to his full testimony (and if it ever gets taken down from YouTube I have a recording available on request).
When you read the Bible you are reading universal spiritual truth. You are interfacing with God. For some person somewhere in time that might be a “literal” truth. For others, that might be a spiritual truth. This certainly does not mean you can pick and choose, and everyone can just believe whatever they want. There is nothing here about compromise. We should study the Bible in humility — humble enough to admit when we are wrong and change our minds. It is a great joy and a privilege to read the Bible, if God deepens our understanding of his Word, gifting us a personal conversation with him, we must give such thanks and praise: what grace that is!
This article is primarily for scientists to bring them closer to God. As a scientist dealing with probabilities, if the Bible were not God-breathed, what is the probability of Genesis being relevant today? Surely there would be a high probability of multiple blatantly jarring descriptions, such as “the world is flat”? And maybe if you come to the Bible in petulance, demanding it show you the truth and looking for proof of “wrong” statements, it will show you jarring descriptions of this kind.
Details
The following details are not presented as an argument to convince anyone of anything, but this is my testimony of how Genesis 1 spoke to me, as a scientist in 2024. My prayer is that this may resonate with someone and remove false perceptions that keep them in darkness.
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Let there be light is non-contradictory with the Big Bang, an event in which something came from nothing (empty/void). Light and even time itself did not exist before this moment. In fact, in my opinion, creation of the universe necessitates a timeless creator, outside of spacetime before it was created. So the opening verse introduces us to the subject of the Chapter, as if to say, “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth [as follows]…” There are those who believe that this line in Hebrew (written centuries before the birth of Christ) contains sacred prophetic code about Jesus: Hidden words in Genesis 1:1 — YouTube. It is not for me to dare pronounce one way or another what I think about this spiritual truth.
Then in verse 2, the moment is such that the earth did not exist, there was no light, the universe was empty. “Hovering over the waters”: well I can’t imagine this was literally H2O, but it does sound like a way to describe the situation before the Big Bang in a way a human can understand. For someone else, this may have meant the actual oceans of Earth. For me, this is the state of matter before it was created. What other word should God have chosen to express to us the state of matter that existed outside time and before anything except God existed?
The next passages of Genesis 1 state:
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Here the description shows that we are in a moment when the Earth is in existence in some form, with some form of day and night. A very large number of 24-hour Earth days (as we experience them) will have passed to get to this point. Spacetime is complicated, but essentially the two (space and time) are not separate. Time moves at different rates for different objects moving at different speeds relative to each other. This causes your sat-nav satellite orbiting Earth to need a time correction to stay in sync with you driving around on Earth’s surface. In no part of Genesis does it say that it is telling you every single thing that happened. In fact, later on (Genesis 4:17) it suddenly mentions the wife of Cain (Adam and Eve’s son) who would have been required for Cain to have children. She was not mentioned before but evidently she was there and presumably had parents (more on this further down). So I do not receive this truth as talking about 24 hour human-scale periods. I receive it with the knowledge that a “day” in the presence of God is relative. God is creating the Earth by assembling molecules in space, so I think it can be allowed that these are days on a divine scale: God’s days at the creation not my days as I wake up and go to work. We can even allow for it not to be linearly chronological. It is giving us divine glimpses of creation, it does not need to be read as a step-by-step guide. And if that’s not convincing as it seems linearly chronological to someone, then we would need to wait until verse 16 to hear about the Earth’s sun and moon (so to me it feels unlikely we would be dealing in 24-hour Earth days before verse 16).
God separated water from water, making the water on the surface and the water in the air (clouds are indeed made of water). For me, the heavens are not literally the three-dimensional space called the sky, the space you enter flying in an aeroplane above the clouds (although who hasn’t thought they were witnessing heaven, looking that this, our beautiful sky?) The existence of “heavens” would be entirely non-contradictory to current theories of dimensions (many scientists might say “time is the fourth dimension” and believe there are more than four) and quantum physics (where time can move forwards and backwards and quantum entanglement seems to show that something can communicate faster than the speed of light, which was previously thought to be a fixed “speed limit” beyond which nothing could travel). This is not bending to the truth to read what I want to read, this is the living Word, being a gift received by a scientist’s brain in 2024 differently to a priest’s brain in 1024. If you want a primer on quantum physics, physicist Jim Al-Khalili has a gift for explaining it in understandable terms (see Does Our Reality Really Exist? | Exploring The World Of Quantum Physics | Spark (youtube.com) and Einstein’s Quantum Physics Theory That Proved Him Wrong | The Secrets Of Quantum Physics | Spark (youtube.com)).
Next in Genesis 1, we read:
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
This seems quite reasonable, that the dry land should be formed by processes that separate it from the sea, such as the movement of tectonic plates, volcanic activity and whatever situation the Earth was in before it was sustaining life.
Next is:
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
So here we get a cluster of things. We get vegetation mentioned first before the sun, which suggests that we’re not dealing with a chronological step-by-step guide (we might be…Afterall, God created the universe so he can do whatever he wants, but that’s not how God’s truth came to me as I experienced Genesis 1). We get the moon (with nothing jarring against my scientific presumption that a meteor crashed into the Earth and a fragment broke off and started orbiting the Earth). The stars are being formed. It’s not especially relevant to me the chronological order of these statements, but it seems fairly regular that at the same broad time period that our solar system’s star (the sun), plant life and the Earth’s moon are mentioned, some other stars were also coming into existence across the universe.
The repeated refrain “And the evening and the morning were the fourth day” does not speak to me of literal, chronological time, but rather the spiritual link between God and humanity. God’s carpentry of the cosmos linked to us. For me it’s poetic, transcendent and not literal. A linking of God’s work with our quotidian work. A refrain to be understood spiritually, transcendent across all time. It should be received like divine music, not a science textbook statement. If you want to understand how words can have meaning beyond their immediate literal impression, read the rest of the Bible, or if you prefer a neutral text, read Octavio Paz’s Between What I See and What I Say or Piedra de Sol (“Sunstone”).
Next in Genesis 1, we arrive at:
20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Next we get a cluster with sea animals and then fowl (birds). How interesting it is that since the 1960s it was revealed that there were dinosaurs with feathers, and birds are evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs. Perhaps we even might allow ourselves to detect God’s sense of humour here: “and let fowl multiply in the Earth”. Does God have to mention every era? Or reveal all his divine truth from his days of creation and every wonderous thing that he did? Would it not be somewhat prideful of me, if when God allows science to show evidence of prehistoric creations before homo sapiens, I downplay this evidence and think God would not have delighted in these evolutionary ancestors of ours that he created?
And again we get the refrain, almost beating the rhythm of creation in this poetry, almost like divine music: “and the evening and the morning were the fifth day”. Perhaps God intended this to be beautiful for us, and fun?
Next animals are mentioned:
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Following this he gives us humans:
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
God refers to “us” and not “me”, as well as “our” and not “my”. To me, this meant Jesus was present and the father-son-spirit is at the creation. I had a profound experience as I realised that Genesis 1, written centuries before the birth of Christ, includes Christ in this way. I do not pretend to know all the sacred secrets of the Bible. I am only a new convert since December two-three months ago. For me, the father and son were in existence here and I realised Jesus is at the creation. The Old Testament Word, rather beautifully, foreshadows the New Testament. For example, John 1:1–5 says:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Genesis 1 also suggests that many humans populated the Earth. For me, it does not support the idea that Adam was the first, and for a while only, human. In fact, later on (in Genesis Chapter 4) it is confirmed there must have been other unmentioned humans around when Adam was created because Adam and Eve’s son, Cain, has a wife (Genesis 4:17). Then follows a lot of information about the ancestors of the Jewish lineage (part of the history of God’s people of the Old Covenant before Jesus was born on Earth). The line that tells us about Adam’s creation does not say he was the first ever man, only that God created a certain man (Genesis 2:7). Essentially, we must accept that even if we want to interpret every line of the bible “literally”, there must be truth that is not mentioned but which was in existence (such as the unmentioned wife Cain would have to have had).
Isn’t it amazing that many people are pushed away from God because they think the Adam and Eve creation story is unrealistic and yet the actual scripture confirms other humans must have been around (even if you believe the Old Testament is literal and not a phenomenal foreshadowing of Christ).
The bible is not a science textbook. Of course it’s not — it is the sacred Word of God. It can be “inerrant” without being “literal”. Would it not be prideful to think God has to mention all his secrets? Would it not be prideful if I thought that my truth, right now as I receive it, is the only truth? In science, we know we can only see part of the universe because we can only see the distance light has been able to travel since light was created. We cannot see beyond this because the light we would be asking to see would be older than our universe itself. In other words, if a star is more than 13.8 billion light-years away, we won’t be able to see it, because it is beyond the cosmic microwave background radiation (the furthest we can “see”: this is energy from about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, so light older than this won’t reach us). Why should I expect my glimpse of God’s divine truth of creation in his Word to be different?
If the impression is widespread that Genesis has to be taken literally, without a hint of allegory, metaphor, or living interaction between the divine and human worlds, and if this widespread impression pushes people away from Jesus, then this cannot be a good thing. The Bible is full of metaphor and allegory. To give one prominent metaphorical example, many Christians interpret Revelation 12:4 to mean that Satan took down a third of the angels in rebellion, but all English Bible translations say “stars” not “angels”: “And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth” (Revelation 12:4). It would seem to be quite prideful for a human to claim to have the only truth and everyone else is wrong. That idea led to the inquisitors.
The aeroplane can fly backwards spiritually and truthfully without having to fly backwards literally. The same vision can be received as “flying backwards” by one person and “suspended in mid-air” by another right next to them. The same vision can be interpreted by different people in different ways. But the vision remains true. It remains sacred. It remains of God.
Let’s end with the sacred words of Jesus as found in John 14:2–3:
In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
…
Welsh Christian Revival
18 February 2024
