I grew up in a church that believes that Genesis 1 is a literal account of creation, and which takes this interpretation so seriously that we keep a Saturday Sabbath, despite the fact that the calendar we use now may not actually line up with these first seven days of existence, since it was not invented until thousands of years later. So Genesis 1 is A Big Freaking Deal.
See, unlike many -- though certainly not all -- now-liberal Christians, I wasn't brought up with the option of an allegorical view of Genesis. Seventh Day Adventists do not play about creation. When we say Creation, we mean: seven literal days, the world hinging on God's own words, and God help you if you can't reconcile that with science, or reason, or whatever else might be holding you back. (No, sincerely -- we are generally not hateful about you and your doubts; it's just that if you were really walking with God, this would not be irking your nerves so much.) In my Teen Sabbath School class, my somewhat histrionic expressions of anxiety over the literal interpretation of Genesis were dismissed as an amorphous glut of Satan-speak. My grandfather -- a college professor, and the most educated man I knew for the first fifteen years of my life -- firmly believed that dinosaurs were a trick by Satan to confuse humanity.
No matter how much I edit it, that first paragraph sounds like I intend to criticize -- or, okay, like I am criticizing -- Creationists, or fundamentalist Christians. I don't; I'm not. I mean, hell, I don't know either. I am twenty six years old: on a given day, I will vomit up oranges because I am entirely unable to see that oranges will not make me fat, or that my life would be worth living if they did. Clearly, there is nothing like omniscience going on in this corner of Brooklyn -- so who am I to say things couldn't have happened just like that?
Maybe God did speak the universe into existence. Or, maybe the story is an allegory for some more complicated, more scientific process of Creation that would not have made sense to Moses, existing as he did in a pre-Copernican, pre-Mendellian, pre-Einsteinian and -Darwinian and -Dawkinsian world (lucky him, on that last one!) As Chris Hedges points out in I Don't Believe in Atheists -- a book that, as far as I can see, is at least unilateral in its dismissal of everyone's truth claims, rational or spiritual -- every belief system requires a leap of faith. This is the case whether your faith is in science or in reason and materialism.
I am more comfortable with truth claims that announce themselves as deriving from faith than I am with those that attempt to pass themselves off as wholly rational. In my mind, the claim that an intricately ordered universe arose of its own accord, with no Creator, produces a more jarring cognitive dissonance than does the claim that an infinite and rational Being is responsible for a finite universe. Because you can't prove either claim rationally, right, but one claim says that the rational is all there is, and the other says that the spiritual transcends the rational. So you have one camp saying, I can logically prove X, when clearly you can't, and the other saying, I can't logically prove Y, but that is because there is a system that is outside of logic, and Y is evident in that system. One system, then, seems flat-out contradictory to me, and the other seems like a leap of faith that leaves open the possibility of coherence.
All that being tentatively established, then, I'm back at Genesis -- minus the felt animals I coveted in Sabbath School as a child.
For Genesis 1, I'm working out of the New English Bible, which is a new translation for me, and I like what it does in Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning of creation..." I am used to the more vague NIV translation, which doesn't say what, exactly, is beginning. For me, that vagueness prompts a kind of chicken-and-the-egg conundrum: can God create a stone so heavy He can't lift it? Can He direct a beginning at the beginning? The NEB makes evident a distinction that isn't articulated in other translations: here, creation is beginning, but God is already kicking it in some God-space and -time (Earth space and time not yet being in place).
For me, honestly, it takes a greater leap of faith to believe is the one where one minute there is literally nothing, and the next there is something, than to believe in an infinite Being that extends beyond the material world. Infinity is a total mind-fuck, but it's one that I started to absorb back in high school Calculus. I have less and less of a problem with acknowledging that clearly there was something here I can't wrap my head around, before all this stuff showed up.
I've struggled with this -- reading books, arguing with people, praying the Lord-I-believe-help-Thou-my-unbelief prayers -- a lot in the past year or so. And, more recently, I've read and re-read this first chapter of Genesis, have read commentaries that alternate defend it rabidly, validate it in a qualified, apologetic kind of way, dimiss it entirely, and hold it up to ridicule. Being an adult has given me the freedom to struggle with all of these readings, and with the text itself, in a more authentic, rigorous and convincing way than I could as a teenager. And the most honest and rigorous conclusion I have drawn, at this point, is this:
I do feel like the essential truth of the passage --that God existed before Creation, and that He is wholly responsible for it, and for the laws that govern it -- is convincing to me. I believe that it is true, in a different and more active way than I know that f=ma, or that hot coffee burns my mouth. My belief, in this case, comes from conviction, but also from experience, in a way that neither intellectual understanding or epistemological observation can.
But I also believe that the scientific processes governing the world now didn't just show up or start once human beings had the knowledge to make sense of them: if gravity and physics and astonomy are what direct earth today, it seems that they would have directed the Earth at its inception as well. So here, as painful as it sometimes is, I really struggle with the faith that I grew up with. Was God's act of Creation really as simple as saying "let there be..." and it was? Or is this a gloss for a more complex act of creation -- one that, maybe, I still am not smart enough to understand?
Reading the breakdown into the six days of creation, I sort-of believe -- am beginning to believe -- that the distinctions in Genesis 1 between what God created on what day are designed, in part, to highlight the physical realities that direct the universe. I believe God is responsible for these laws as much as for the material world -- but, given what I admit is a limited understanding of how the ancient world understood nature, I don't think that Moses, or J, or whoever, would have distinguished between the dancer and the dance, so to speak. The fact that the Bible distinguishes, for example, between light and the sun and the role of the sun in the seasons, suggests an understanding outside of that of your average human being, circa Ancient Israel. I think God organized and revealed the Creation story in this way, not because that was exactly, word for word, What Happened, but because by doing so He pointed to the intricate nature of the universe in the clearest way possible at that time.
Ultimately, too, I feel like God's responsibility for creation is more important than exactly how He created everything - and that the story in Genesis 1, while divinely inspired, was not experienced by its author. It was a revelation: obviously, Moses wasn't there. What is evident in the text of Genesis 1 -- what is unavoidable -- is that the world was created intentionally, that it is not the result of millions of statistical luckings-out. Because I believe that this is true, I understand my responsibility and role in the world in an entirely different way than I would if I believed that it, and its inhabitants, were the result of dumb luck. To believe in the Creation story at all -- whether as allegory, or literal fact, or any other kind of truth -- is to believe that the world matters. Respectfully, I would submit that a belief that the world came into being randomly does not necessitate this conclusion.
I absolutely do not want to negate the efforts of any well-meaning atheists who believe that life and people matter, and who live accordingly. I do believe that, for a Christian, the implication of Genesis 1 has less to do with arguing for Intelligenct Design and more to do with the obligations of those who accept it to treat the world, and other human beings, as valuable, and to strive to inhabit one's place in the world in a reverent and responsible way. I don't think you can honor the Creator without honoring His Creation; I don't think you can honor His Creation without focusing on His Will for how you engage it.
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