[BPSDB]In today’s METRO the 60 second interview is with Dr Andrew Parker who claims that the Genesis story matches the history of the Universe so accurately that it could only have been written with divine intervention. When I went to Sunday School I don’t recall them mentioning which verses outlined the creation of particles and nucleii but it’s been a while so I thought I would take a closer look. I’ll be working from the King James version.
Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 reads:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”
Oh dear. This verse does rather suggest that Earth is as old as the Universe. In fact the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old whereas Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. Both figures are accurate to +/- 1%.
Verses 3 – 5 read:
“And God said Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the Darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
Again this makes it clear that the first ever photons illuminated Earth, suggesting it was present at the Big Bang, which does not really match scientific understanding.
Just to hammer home the point, the writers of Genesis clearly believed that Earth is older than every other body in the Universe because God does not get round to creating the rest of the Universe until the fourth day:
“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”
“And the evening and the morning were the fourth day”
So according to Genesis Earth is older than the Sun. Not a match with the history of the Universe then. As far as cosmology is concerned, Parker’s notion bites the dust.
Never mind. Parker is a biologist, so perhaps he is referring to the evolution of life on Earth rather than the history of the early universe. Life first gets a mention in verse 11:
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind…”
So the first ever life was land plants. Not single cellular organisms. Not even aquatic plants. Land plants. This does not match the fossil record which is inaccurate enough to sink his idea but even better, verse 13 males it clear that this happpened before the formation of the Sun so I am afraid Parker’s notion is an EPIC FAIL.
ETA: I should say that (for a change) I am not criticising the METRO about this feature. The interviewer, Graeme Greene, pointed out more holes in the idea.