Science and Christian Faith 101 operations through the aeons of time during which the world, with its teeming populations of fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals, was preparing for man’s abode—when the mountains were being upheaved, the valleys being scooped out, and veins of precious metals being inlaid into the crust of the earth. Does science, then, really, contradict Genesis I. ? Not surely if what has been above said of the essentially popular character of the allusions to natural things in the Bible be remembered. Here certainly is no detailed description of the process of the formation of the earth in terms anticipative of modern science—terms which would have been unintelli gible to the original readers—but a sublime picture, true to the order of nature, as it is to the broad facts even of geolog ical succession. If it tells how God called heaven and earth into being, separated light from darikness, sea from land, clothed the world with vegetation, gave sun and moon their appointed rule of day and night, made fowl to fly, and sea-monsters to plow the deep, created the cattle and beasts of the field, and finally made man, male and female, in His own image, and established him as ruler over all God’s creation, this orderly rise of created forms, man crowning the whole, these deep ideas of the narrative, setting the world at the very beginning in its right relation to God, and laying the foundations of an enduring .philosophy of religion, are truths which science does nothing to subvert, but in myriad ways confirms. The “six days” may remain as a difficulty to some, but, if this is not part of the symbolic setting of the picture—a great divine “week” of work—one may well ask, as was done by Augustine long before geology was thought of, what kind of days these were which rolled their course before the sun, with its twenty-four hours of diurnal measurement, was appointed to that end? There is no violence done to the narrative in sub stituting in thought “seonic” days—vast cosmic periods—for “days” on our narrower, sun-measured scale. Then the last trace of apparent “conflict” disappears.
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