How a oddly-created issue evolved to remove us from reality
Aristotle, the father of all modern logical thought, spoke of an "Unmoved Mover" as the center of all creation. While his underlying logic is different from today's usage, the concept is appealingly simple. Can't we leave it at that?
As for the teapot tempest today about how things came to be as they are: The debate is fueled by those with poorly-hidden agendas, unahppily bigoted and vicious. It's no more than that.
In simple (but not simplistic) terms, it's a matter of Faith and Reason, two faces of one coin. There can be no valid argument about supremacy of one or the other, since Faith and Reason speak on two different levels of discourse. We can easily live with two different views of how things came to be "evolved" and/or "created": How lacking in significant difference are these two world views!)
A sense of Wisdom would let the matter rest in peace (RIP). After all, aren't there simply too many REAL problems that need to be faced in daily life, problems for each of us individually and collectively, problems that are frighteningly global in scope? Now, is the "tempest in a teapot" perhaps a mechanism to avoid thinking about what's TRULY important: Peace, justice, an end to violence and to hunger and to all the miseries all too real in our world? Obsessing on other topics pales into selfishness by comparison.
On creation/evolution and the word "day" in Genesis
While many people find a problem with the fact that evolution couldn't occur because it violates the scriptures rendering of God's creative works being completed in seven days, I'd like to make a note on the word "day" and the implications it irrevocably intimates. There are seven days and God's early creative endeavors are complete (Of course, He rests on the seventh day).
It's interesting to note that the stars aren't created until the fourth day. Our sun is a star. What I am assuming here is that the light in "Let there be Light" isn't the sun. The sun is created along with the rest of the stars in day four. Now, if that is the case, and if we base our solar mean days on the spinning of the earth on its axis with the sun as a reference point(e.g., light-day/dark-night/back to light=1 day), how were the days prior to the sun being created (i.e., days 1-3) calculated? They couldn't be.
This poses an interesting question? What does the word "day" mean then. Interestingly enough, the original Hebrew word is "yom," which can be translated day (literal day). However, it can also be translated aeon, or age. Think about this. 7 yoms or 7 undisclosed periods of time through which God effects reality and everything in it (universe, space, time, light, etc.) Now we can go back to each day and surmise what is being said
[ASIDE: The Bible is neither a book of history nor science (though both can found therein), i.e., it was never intended to written as a scientific or historical work. According to Christians, it is the exhaustive story of the redemptive work of God for man. Also the original Hebrew language of the Old Testament is extremely poetic. These are writers writing with their own individual personalities emanating from their work.]
Day one-Darkness, emptiness, and a mysterious water (no one knows)
"Let there be light"-big bang perhaps?
The rest can be perceived as the story of evolution from the first forms of energy being converted into mass, according to Einstein's E=m(c squared). First formations of stars via interstellar media. Planets evolving from dead star matter...and then Darwinian evolution.
According to the Bible, the first organisms aren't created until the fifth day (yom). The first vegetation was created on the second day. Who knows how long this actually took and how it was effected. Note that the Bible never says. Why could God not have chosen to use evolution as His creative apparatus. And the rest of the story, all the way to the emergence of man in verse 27, follows the same train of thought.
I find this to be the most plausible theory in amalgamating the belief of the scientific erudites and the religious community that affirms creation.
The psalmist addresses God, "Lord,...You turn men back to dust, saying, 'Return to dust, O sons of men.' For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night" (Psalm 90:1-4).
This may seem bizarre and fanciful language to some, but most theologians well affirm that God exists "out of time." That is, they believe that God is not bound by the constraints and confines that time exerts; as time is a creation of God, God necessarily remains unfettered by time's trappings. While this seems a bit mystical and speculative to some, self-avowed atheists who are thoroughly acquainted with the principles of Relativity would have no problem with this maxim of theology. For they note that if something can travel fast enough, space and time can be literally manipulated to any scale (Time dilation & length contraction for those that care).
Theoretically, if someone traveling in a space ship travels to a distant star 20-ly's away (ly-light year, where one light year is defined as the distance light travels in a year--approx. 6 trillion miles, i.e., 6x10^12 miles) with a velocity of 80% of the speed of light, by the time the person in the ship made the round trip, people on earth will have aged 50 yrs., whereas the crew aboard the space ship will have only aged 30 yrs. The math is simple algebra and the explanation is a bit technical, but the idea, famously called the twin paradox, denotes that the faster one travels, the slower time becomes. Again, theoretically if one could travel at the speed of light, time would cease to exist. This is what occurs at the event horizon of black holes (the beginning of curvature toward the black hole's singularity--the escape velocity to escape the pull [gravity] becomes so great that even light at an amazing speed of 186,282.860 miles per second (299,792.458 km/sec) can't escape it).
I have a point with the science lesson, I promise. Most, if not all Christians posit that God possesses attributes which separate Him completely from anyone/anything else. He is omniscient-knows all things. He is omnipresent-everywhere at all times. He is omnipotent-can do all things (ASIDE: all things that do not violate His moral/righteous nature, e.g., God cannot lie or do evil). The last point on His Omnipotence is important. If He can do all things, he can travel infinitely fast if need be to be everywhere always. While I am not stating that this is the case (Most theologians state God as spiritual and not corporeal---though if he wants, he can adopt a corporeal nature, e.g., Jesus Christ's kenosis), I am simply stating He could do this should He so choose. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that if He were bound to the constraints of time/space, He could break free and slow time, freeze time, and/or travel back in time (think about what might happen if, when traveling at the speed of light-time stops, what would happen if you traveled faster than the speed of light. Therefore, the relativity learned atheist would tell you this kind of God could stop time. Then they would tell you He doesn't exist.
Conclusion. Of course a day in God's "time frame" is different from ours. Because God is not bound to time in the sense that we are, it is exactly possible, in fact, more plausible to believe that the enumerated days of the Genesis story are not literal 24-hour periods.
Further food for thought on the matter. Where did the moon come from? Do a little reading and you'll find that the leading theory promulgates that early Earth, in its early formative years some 4.5 billion yrs ago (at this stage, the smaller Earth is called a planetesimal), collided with another smaller planetesimal. Early Earth absorbs much of this colliding planetesimal's matter due to gravity (This augments Earth's mass to its current spherical size) but much of the debris from the collision flies off in all directions which eventually forms an orbiting ring reminiscent of Saturn's rings. Eventually the debris coalesces into a giant satellite we call the moon. At this time, the moon is so close to Earth (39,000 miles away) that the gravitational tidal forces (the same forces that create high/low tides in the ocean) literally squeeze the earth as it spins on its axis. This literally produces an effect like spinning a merry-go-round. Earth spins faster. At the arrival of the moon, the earth made one revolution in six hours. That's right. One day lasted six hours. The reason for our current 24-hour day (actually 23.93 hrs [called a sidereal day] as opposed to the solar mean day of 24.00 hrs) is because the moon has slowly drifted farther away from Earth. It is currently about 239,000 miles away (and drifts about 1.5 inches farther away every year) and therefore exerts less of a gravitational force than it did in the beginning. This means that our 24-hour day will eventually become a 25-hour day, a 26-, 27-, 28-, you get the point. Puts a new perspective on the Genesis story doesn't it? A literal 24-hour day? Not likely, but not a problem for the creationist argument.
