The World Wasn't Made in Seven Days

The very first story in the Bible says that God made the world in seven days (Genesis 1:1-2:3). It tells us that God made different things on each of the first six days, and then on the seventh, after his work as completed, he rested. It seems, then, that Christians have to believe that the world really was made in seven days. The narrative plays out just like any other story in the Bible, and there aren’t any obvious indications that it’s meant to be anything other than a literal account of how our world came to be.

Because of this, many people today mock us for this obviously incorrect account. Modern science tells us that the world was most definitely not created in seven days, so the Bible is just flat-out wrong. This is clearly a very serious charge, and in response, Christians often insist that we are in fact supposed to take the seven-day creation story figuratively. They say that it’s not intended to teach us about the exact details of the world’s creation; rather, it’s simply meant to teach us spiritual truths about the relationship between God and the world. As a result, it doesn’t conflict with modern science, so people can’t use it as an argument against our faith.

However, this line of reasoning has a fatal flaw. While its conclusion is correct, the way it gets there is faulty. The problem is that we can’t simply declare a certain passage of Scripture to be figurative. If the text itself gives no indications that it’s intended to be anything other than a literal account, then to read it figuratively is simply to misinterpret it. Consequently, since the seven-day-creation account looks like it is intended to be taken literally, to impose upon it a meaning it was never supposed to have is just a les honest way of admitting that it’s wrong.

The Pattern

The only way to maintain the truth of this story is to find an indication that the text is actually intended to be taken figuratively. We need to look at what it actually says and find some clue to the author’s real meaning, and I would argue that there is in fact such a clue. The days of creation follow a very clear pattern. On the first three days, God creates various habitats, and then on the next three days, he fills them with inhabitants:

Habitats

Day 1: Light/day and darkness/night

Day 2: The sky, which separates the waters above (basically what we now know are clouds) from the waters below (the seas and oceans)

Day 3: The waters below the sky are gathered into one place, and dry land appears

Inhabitants

Day 4: The sun and moon “to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:18)

Day 5: Birds to fly in the sky and sea creatures to swim in the ocean

Day 6: Land animals, including man

When we lay it out like this, the pattern is impossible to miss. However, there is a more specific pattern here as well: each day in the first half corresponds to a day in the second half. Days 1 and 4 go together, days 2 and 5 go together, and days 3 and 6 go together. To see this, let’s group the days together a bit differently:

Day 1: Light/day and darkness/night

Day 4: The sun and moon “to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:18)

Day 2: The sky, which separates the waters above (basically what we now know are clouds) from the waters below (the seas and oceans)

Day 5: Birds to fly in the sky and sea creatures to swim in the ocean

Day 3: The waters below the sky are gathered into one place, and dry land appears

Day 6: Land animals, including man

When we look at the days this way, the organization of the story becomes clear. God’s creation of the world in this story follows a strict pattern, with each habitat filled three days after it’s created. That’s the first step in recognizing the figurative nature of this story, but our work is by no means done. We need to dig a bit deeper and see if the author believed that God literally created the world according to this pattern or if this is just a literary framework he invented to structure his narrative.

The Problem

And when we do that, we can see that there’s a problem with this story. God creates the sun and moon “to separate the day from the night” (Genesis 1:14) and “give light upon the earth” (Genesis 1:15) on the fourth day, but those things were already done on day 1. The very first thing God creates is light (Genesis 1:3), and he separates it from darkness and calls them day and night in the next two verses (Genesis 1:4-5). As a result, the story doesn’t work when taken literally. How can there be light before the sources of light are created? How night and day be separated with nothing to separate them?

Now, there actually is a way to resolve this difficulty while still maintaining that the story is meant to be taken literally: God could have miraculously made light and caused night and day to alternate for a few days before he made the sun and moon. God can do whatever he wants, so if he wanted to do this, he very well could have.

However, there’s a problem even with this explanation. The opening chapters of Genesis actually have two creation stories (they’re supposed to complement rather than contradict one another), and in the second one, we read that in the beginning, “no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground” (Genesis 2:5). This tells us that when God created the world, he didn’t miraculously cause things to behave contrary to their natures. He let the earth remain barren until it got what it naturally needed for plants to arise, and we can extrapolate from this and conclude that he would’ve let the world remain in darkness and without any difference between day and night if he didn’t create the sun and moon right away. Consequently, the problem still remains.

The Solution

A better solution is to note that while the creation of the sun and moon on day 4 doesn’t work as a literal account, it works perfectly as part of the pattern that we saw earlier. In other words, the creation of the sun and moon are in the wrong place if the story is supposed to describe exactly how God created the world, but it’s in the exact right place if the author simply created the seven-day pattern as a literary framework for a story that was intended to teach us spiritual rather than scientific truths. And that’s our smoking gun. It shows that the author of the story was trying to fit the various events in the story into a predetermined literary framework, even if that framework doesn’t entirely make sense when taken literally, rather than into a literal chronology. Simply put, it shows us that the author took the seven days figuratively, so we should too.

And once we realize that, the problem caused by this story vanishes. It doesn’t conflict with modern science because it’s not trying to teach us exactly how God created the world. Rather, it’s simply trying to teach us spiritual truths about God and creation, and science has nothing to say about those matters. As a result, we don’t need to be embarrassed by the seven-day creation account in Genesis. No, we have a very good reason for reading it figuratively, so we can rest assured that what the truth of our faith is in no way endangered by modern cosmology.