This Sunday in the Church Calendar: Six-Day Creation Sunday

Six-day creation reflects a fundamentalist impulse that views human culture and, in particular, science as controlled by a denial of God and of Christian faith. This is a theological error.

This Sunday, my church is celebrating “Creation Sunday,” focusing on the doctrine of creation, with guest speakers in the service and Sunday school. I say “the doctrine of creation,” but, well, it’s really the doctrine of six-days-of-twenty-four-hours-each creation. And I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. Maybe I’ll serve in the nursery again.

My wife has asked me to explain why I think that “six-day creation” is not the correct theological view of the matter or a strategically wise move as Christians in the present culture. While I could speak of the details of the exegesis of Genesis 1 or of the scientific literature, my main objection is of a different character: “Six-day creation” is a theological view that is representative of the wrong approach to two significant theological problems: Christ and culture, and reason and revelation.

My own view, which I believe reflects a better way of relating Christ and culture and reason and revelation, is that of old-earth creationism, and not any form of theistic evolution.

Six-Day Creation Is Fundamentalist and Contrarian

In the first place, “six-day creation” displays a “Christ Against Culture” approach in the terms of Richard Niebuhr’s taxonomy. In common parlance, we call this “fundamentalism.” It involves an unduly combative relation to human culture, nature, and knowledge that is all negation and no affirmation. It views human culture and, in particular, science as entirely determined by a denial of God and of Christian faith, and a Christian approach as entirely distinctive and contrarian in relation to it.

In the early twentieth century, a significant number of American Christians took this approach to culture as they fought modernism and theological liberalism. While correct in parts, it was only a couple of decades later that the “neo-evangelical movement,” as represented by Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, Harold Ockenga, Jr., Carl F. H. Henry, and others determined to take a less combative approach to culture, distinct from both that of theological liberalism and fundamentalism. They sought for theologically orthodox American Christianity to be culturally and intellectually engaged.

The division between fundamentalists and evangelicals persisted for several decades before being blurred during the rise of the religious right. Today, while there remain distinct institutions and traditions of fundamentalism and evangelicalism (like Bob Jones University and Wheaton College), the intellectual and cultural impulses of both are intermingled among different Christians. The major question for orthodox Christians in America today is when and where to adopt a fundamentalist posture of “no compromise” and separatism, and when to accommodate and engage. I assume that both postures have their place in different areas of life, different cultures, and different callings.

I identify “six-day creation” with the fundamentalist impulse because its impulse is to deny not only the current scientific consensus on the age of the earth and the origin of species, but the entire practice and method of modern science. In doing so, fundamentalism concedes ground to secularism. It grants that scientific study and observation of the world would lead one to think that the world came into being without God.

As a result, the characteristic effect of fundamentalist teaching is primed to take place: The abandonment or accommodation of the faith by the next generation on contact with culture. By treating science as verboten and dangerous, fundamentalism is just waiting for a child to go off to college, study science in depth, and leave behind what he or she was taught as a child by the church. Many leave the faith, and others compromise, perhaps adopting a theistic evolutionist view. (The majority of people I hear advocating a theistic evolutionist view present it as the alternative, not to old-earth creationism or intelligent design, but to six, twenty-four hour day creationism, showing that they have leapt from one extreme to the other.)

What goes for the children of believers goes also for the general public: Being told that becoming a Christian requires turning off the human desire for scientific knowledge, those who have tasted the creaturely good of such knowledge cannot bring themselves to be Christians. On the fundamentalist view, being a Christian requires denying a facet of human nature, in this case, the scientific impulse. In doing so, fundamentalists treat divinely created human nature with an inappropriate and ungrateful disdain.

Six-Day Creation Assumes a Bible-Only Epistemology

So far the fundamentalist error with regard to Christ and culture. Human knowledge is one aspect of human culture, and so the problem of reason and revelation is a sort of subset of the problem of Christ and culture. The theological problem is what sources of knowledge a Christian may depend on to know the world, revelation alone, or revelation together with natural human knowledge, i.e., human reason.

Again, the fundamentalist, or “Christ Against Culture” impulse is to treat human reason as entirely conditioned by its fallenness and sin. Human reason is the attempt autonomously to know the world without reference to God and to the end of indulging one’s sinful nature. Revelation can be the only source of Christian knowledge, and hence, all Christian knowledge and thinking must be distinctively Christian because distinctively and exclusively based on biblical revelation. This is all but the very theory of Christian worldview-ism (presuppositionalism, “Christian Coherentism”), which I have discussed elsewhere, but it is often the practice of Christians in an attempt to be biblical and untainted by secular worldviews.

If you ask the question, “How did the world come into being?” and you commit to use only the Bible as a source of knowledge, and no empirical science, it is unsurprising that one would arrive at the view of six-day creation. Simple biblical quotation is enough to confirm this view: “In six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth” (Exodus 20:11). Now, I will not grant that this is the correct implication to take from the biblical text, but I can understand that the attempt to find an answer to this question from the Bible alone without any other source of knowledge intervening would lead to this conclusion.

But the difficulties for the Bible-only epistemology (for that is what it is, an epistemology) are numerous. Chiefly, it forswears the possibility that natural human knowledge, whether scientific or of some other sort, could confirm and bolster biblical teaching. Why not welcome confirmation from other fields of human knowledge? Without this, one appears to admit that the world sure looks evolved and old, but the Bible says it's not. (“So who’re you goin’ to believe: The Bible, or your lyin’ eyes?!”) To me, this puts you in the same position as Richard Dawkins is in: “The world sure looks designed, but trust me, it’s not.”

The Scientific Evidence Points to an Old Earth and Intelligent Design

What disappoints me most about six-day creation being held by intelligent Christians in 2023 is also what disappoints me about theistic evolution being held by a great many other intelligent Christians as the purportedly scientific view: Both ignore that the best of the contemporary science supports an old-earth creationist point of view.

The research of the intelligent design movement reveals that the scientific evidence for evolution, certainly evolution by natural selection on random mutation (called “neo-Darwinism”), is not only very little; the evidence rather points toward intelligent design as a necessary cause of biological life.

Given that the science of intelligent design depends on such things as gaps in the fossil record, including the Cambrian explosion, projected to have occurred 538 million years ago, acceptance of a long geological and cosmological history is generally preferable in the search for scientific evidence of creation and intelligent design. For this reason, I think accepting the old-earth creationist view is part and parcel of seeing science and faith as in harmony with one another. Being open both to biblical revelation and natural science, facilitated by an acceptance of a non-literalist reading of Genesis and a long geological timeline, represents the best approach as a Christian to the problems of Christ and culture and reason and revelation.

What is more, it may please my six-day creationist readers to know that old-earth creationism is still plenty to imperil one’s academic position or to be viewed with great suspicion by secular intellectuals. If proving the necessity of intelligent design from science is a form of compromise with autonomous reason, someone should let the secular intellectuals know. It might help me with my own academic prospects.

(For more on intelligent design, check out Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Stephen Meyer, a premier scientist and writer on the subject.)

A model of a fossil of a giant toothed platypus from the Riversleigh fossil fields. About a metre long and more than twice the size of platypus today. Link.