Genesis

 

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" but when it comes to the timing and means of creation, particularly the interpretation of the sequence of days with which Genesis begins people have found the Bible not as easy to understand. Some believe the Bible "starts with a very silly, unscientific story of how the world was made in seven days." Even those who take the Bible seriously do not agree on the interpretation of the creation account.

 

Archbishop Ussher gave 4004 BC as the date for the origin of the earth. His calculation, based on taking the days of Genesis 1 as twenty-four hour days of one earth week at the beginning of the universe was quite different that the current scientific estimate of around four billion years.

 

Saint Augustine (A.D. 354-430) in The Literal Meaning of Genesis wrote:

 

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience.

 

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

 

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience in the light of reason?

 

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. "[1 Timothy 1.7]

 

 

Galileo Galilei, an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher wrote:

 

"I do not feel obliged to believe the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use"

 

Might be a motto for Christians today.