Elsewhere on today’s editorial page, University of Georgia plant biologist Mark Farmer briefly recounts the development of the scientific understanding of “deep time,” which helps fix the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion years.
Farmer’s column is, at least in part, a response to the recent assertion by Rep. Paul Broun, who represents this area in Congress, that there is scientific support for a biblically based “young Earth” chronology putting the planet’s age at just several thousand years.
In a September speech at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, in the midst of dismissing evolution, the “big bang” theory of the universe’s origins, and other aspects of science as “lies straight from the pit of hell,” Broun said, “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”
(Please, if you’ve read this far, keep going — I promise this isn’t just an excuse to quote Broun’s thoughts on science just one more time.)
And there’s something else the Bible says about the six days of creation. In the first creation narrative in the Old Testament book of Genesis, the heavens and the earth are created in stages. First, light is created and separated from darkness. Then, the sky is created. Next comes the separation of water and dry land. From there, the land produces vegetation. The stars, the sun and the moon come next, followed by the creatures of the sea and the creatures of the land. Then, as the culmination, comes mankind.
And thus it is that the Bible outlines an evolutionary creation of the earth, its plants and creatures, and us. The creation story outlined in Genesis is certainly imperfect as a scientific narrative, but it does remarkably parallel a modern understanding of the science of evolution.
And that, to me, was exactly the point toward which writer Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel “Gilead,” and Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, were moving Sunday in “On Being,” an American Public Media radio show that airs locally on WUGA-FM (91.7/97.9).
Here’s Robinson in conversation with Gleiser and “On Being” host Krista Tippett: “Well, I think that if you look at, for example, the first creation narrative in the Old Testament ... it’s perhaps overstating the case, but better than anything else, it does anticipate the modern cosmology ... .
“It describes the emergence of the cosmos and of life in the world in stages. They don’t exactly line up with ours but still, you know, that’s an interesting insight.”
And here’s Gleiser: “So I actually wrote a book ... ‘The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang.’ ... I look at all sorts of different creation myths ... and I look at cosmology in the 20th century, before we had data. And what happened? All the models, the theories that cosmologists use to explain the universe reproduced these mythic ideas.”
So what’s the take-away here?
Well, maybe Broun and others who share his conservative Christian viewpoint should take a deeper look at the creation story in Genesis, which comes close to confirming the evolutionary processes that Broun, in a Sunday speech at a Morgan County church, derided as a misguided “goo to zoo to you” theory of mankind’s origins.
And maybe those who were quick to deride Broun, by writing in 19th-century British naturalist Charles Darwin — who laid the groundwork for evolutionary theory — in last Tuesday’s balloting for Broun’s all-but-uncontested 10th Congressional District seat, should find a Bible somewhere and give a close reading to its first 31 verses, to see exactly how closely parallel are the spiritual and scientific understandings of our origins.
• Editorial Page Editor Jim Thompson can be reached by email at email@example.com, and can be followed on Twitter @Jim__Thompson.