The six days of Creation
The creation account with which the Bible opens is a stumbling block for all. Evolutionists dismiss it as myth because it bears no resemblance to their own story. Creationists, surprisingly, also struggle to relate it to what is known about the world. Others look for the middle road, claiming that the order of events is as near as matters to the order of events according to modern science, or that its meaning is spiritual rather than literal, about the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’. This article looks at what the text says without the preconceptions of these three parties. Nothing, it is suggested, is to be gained from not taking the account literally, for the world no longer exists in its original form – everything has been metamorphosed.

The antediluvian world
The world that existed before the Cataclysm does not exist now, so we have no direct evidence of what it was like. Although many ancient traditions refer to it, our main source of information is the book of Genesis, and what this describes is a world significantly different from that which we know today. The water supplying its rivers came from a subterranean body of water called the ‘deep’ as well as from rainfall. The land had a different geography (though certain place names were carried over to the new world) and the interior of the planet was initially probably cold. Over time it heated up, leading to eruptions of magma and deposits of metals such as gold, iron and copper. The same processes totally covered the original surface of the Moon.

Antediluvian fauna and flora
Plants and animals existed on the Earth from the beginning. Most, however, would have looked different from the ones familiar to us today, since the original kinds were the ancestors of creatures that over time increased in diversity and we see only their final forms. Here we consider the tradition that from the beginning men were keeping tso’n, sometimes translated as ‘sheep’. Is this mention of tso’n an anachronism, or is the word consistent with the possibility that modern sheep are members of a diverse family whose primogenitors looked nothing like them? The extent of the diversity is certainly remarkable. Who would have thought that cows, bison, antelope, deer and giraffes are all related?

Worlds in collision – a false start

Man and God

The evolution of snakes