Table of Contents
The Old Testament and Science Findings
Few of the subjects dealt within the Old Testament,and likewise the Gospels, give rise to a confrontation with the data ofmodern knowledge. When an incompatibility does occur between theBiblical text and science, however, it is on extremely important points.
As we have already seen in the preceding chapter,historical errors were found in the Bible and we have quoted several ofthese pinpointed by Jewish and Christian experts in exegesis. Thelatter have naturally had a tendency to minimize the importance of sucherrors. They find it quite natural for a sacred author to presenthistorical fact in accordance with theology and to write history tosuit certain needs. We shall see further on, in the case of the Gospelaccording to Matthew, the same liberties taken with reality and thesame commentaries aimed at making admissible as reality what is incontradiction to it. A logical and objective mind cannot be contentwith this procedure.
From a logical angle, it is possible to single out alarge number of contradictions and improbabilities. The existence ofdifferent sources that might have been used in the writing of adescription may be at the origin of two different presentations of thesame fact. This is not all; different adaptations, later additions tothe text itself, like the commentaries added a posteriori, thenincluded in the text later on when a new copy was made-these areperfectly recognized by specialists in textual criticism and veryfrankly underlined by some of them. In the case of the Pentateuchalone, for example, Father de Vaux in the General Introductionpreceding his translation of Genesis (pages 13 and 14), has drawnattention to numerous disagreements. We shall not quote them here sincewe shall be quoting several of them later on in this study. The generalimpression one gains is that one must not follow the text to the letter.
Here is a very typical example:
In Genesis (6, 3), God decides just before the Floodhenceforth to limit man’s lifespan to one hundred and twenty years,”… his days shall be a hundred and twenty years”. Further on however,we note in Genesis (11, 10-32) that the ten descendants of Noah hadlifespans that range from 148 to 600 years (see table in this chaptershowing Noah’s descendants down to Abraham). The contradiction betweenthese two passages is quite obvious. The explanation is elementary. Thefirst passage (Genesis 6, 3) is a Yahvist text, probably dating as wehave already seen from the Tenth century B.C. The second passage inGenesis (11, 10-32) is a much more recent text (Sixth century B.C.)from the Sacerdotal version. This version is at the origin of thesegenealogies, which are as precise in their information on lifespans asthey are improbable when taken en masse.
It is in Genesis that we find the most evidentincompatibilities with modern science. These concern three essentialpoints:
- the Creation of the world and its stages;
- the date of the Creation of the world and thedate of man’s appearance on earth;
- the description of the Flood.
THE CREATION OF THE WORLD
As Father de Vaux points out, Genesis “starts withtwo juxtaposed descriptions of the Creation”. When examining them fromthe point of view of their compatibility with modern scientific data,we must look at each one separately.
First Description of the Creation
The first description occupies the first chapter andthe very first verses of the second chapter. It is a masterpiece ofinaccuracy from a scientific point of view. It must be examined oneparagraph at a time. The text reproduced here is from the RevisedStandard Version of the Bible. [ Pub.w. M. Collins & Sons for the British and Foreign Bible Society,1952.]
Chapter 1, verses 1 & 2:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and theearth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon theface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of thewaters.”
It is quite possible to admit that before theCreation of the Earth, what was to become the Universe as we know itwas covered in darkness. To mention the existence of water at thisperiod is however quite simply pure imagination. We shall see in thethird part of this book how there is every indication that at theinitial stage of the formation of the universe a gaseous mass existed.It is an error to place water in it.
Verses 3 to 5:
“And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there waslight. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the lightfrom the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he calledNight. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”
The light circulating in the Universe is the resultof complex reactions in the stars. We shall come back to them in thethird part of this work. At this stage in the Creation, however,according to the Bible, the stars were not yet formed. The “lights’ ofthe firmament are not mentioned in Genesis until verse 14, when theywere created on the Fourth day, “to separate the day from the night”,”to give light upon earth”; all of which is accurate. It is illogical,however, to mention the result (light) on the first day, when the causeof this light was created three days later. The fact that the existenceof evening and morning is placed on the first day is moreover, purelyimaginary; the existence of evening and morning as elements of a singleday is only conceivable after the creation of the earth and itsrotation under the light of its own star, the Sun!
-verses 6 to 8:”And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ And God made thefirmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament fromthe waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And Godcalled the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there wasmorning, a second day.”
The myth of the waters is continued here with theirseparation into two layers by a firmament that in the description ofthe Flood allows the waters above to pass through and flow onto theearth. This image of the division of the waters into two masses isscientifically unacceptable.
-verses 9 to 13: “And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered togetherinto one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God calledthe dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together hecalled Seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earthput forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearingfruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind upon theearth.’ And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plantsyielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit inwhich is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that itwas good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.”
The fact that continents emerged at the period inthe earth’s history, when it was still covered with water, is quiteacceptable scientifically. What is totally untenable is that a highlyorganized vegetable kingdom with reproduction by seed could haveappeared before the existence of the sun (in Genesis it does not appearuntil the fourth day), and likewise the establishment of alternatingnights and days.
-verses 14 to 19: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmaments of the heavens toseparate the day from night; and let them be for signs and for seasonsand for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of theheavens to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. And God made thetwo great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesserlight to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them inthe firmament of the heavens to give light upon earth, to rule over.the day and over the night, and to separate the light from thedarkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and therewas morning, a fourth day.”
Here the Biblical author’s description isacceptable. The only criticism one could level at this passage is theposition it occupies in the description as a whole. Earth and Moonemanated, as we know, from their original star, the Sun. To place thecreation of the Sun and Moon after the creation of the Earth iscontrary to the most firmly established ideas on the formation of theelements of the Solar System.
-verses 20 to 30: “And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures,and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.’So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature thatmoves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and everywinged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. AndGod blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the watersin the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ And there wasevening and there was morning, a fifth day.”
This passage contains assertions which areunacceptable.According to Genesis, the animal kingdom began with the appearance ofcreatures of the sea and winged birds. The Biblical description informsus that it was not until the next day-as we shall see in the followingverses-that the earth itself was populated by animals.
It is certain that the origins of life came from thesea, but this question will not be dealt with until the third part ofthis book. From the sea, the earth was colonized, as it were, by theanimal kingdom. It is from animals living on the surface of the earth,and in particular from one species of reptile which lived in the Secondera, that it is thought the birds originated. Numerous biologicalcharacteristics common to both species make this deduction possible.The beasts of the earth are not however mentioned until the sixth dayin Genesis; after the appearance of the birds. This order ofappearance, beasts of the earth after birds, is not thereforeacceptable.
-verses 24 to 31:”And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according totheir kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earthaccording to their kinds.’ And it was so. And God made the beasts ofthe earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to theirkinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to itskind. And God saw that it was good.”
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, afterour likeness; and let them have dominion (sic) over the fish of thesea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over allthe earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth”.
“So God created man in his own image, in the imageof God he created him; male and female he created them.”
“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Befruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and havedominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air andover every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ And God said,”Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon theface of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shallhave them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every birdof the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything thathas the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” Andit was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it wasvery good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.”
This is the description of the culmination of theCreation. The author lists all the living creatures not mentionedbefore and describes the various kinds of food for man and beast.
As we have seen, the error was to place theappearance of beasts of the earth after that of the birds. Man’sappearance is however correctly situated after the other species ofliving things.
The description of the Creation finishes in thefirst three verses of Chapter 2:
“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, andall the host (sic) of them. And on the seventh day God finished hiswork which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all hiswork which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it,because on it God rested from all his work which he had done increation;
These are the generations of the heavens and theearth when they were created.”
This description of the seventh day calls for somecomment.
Firstly the meaning of certain words. The text istaken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible mentioned above.The word ‘host’ signifies here, in all probability, the multitude ofbeings created. As for the expression ‘he rested’, it is a manner oftranslating the Hebrew word ‘shabbath’, from which the Jewish day forrest is derived, hence the expression in English ‘sabbath’.
It is quite clear that the ‘rest’ that God is saidto have taken after his six days’ work is a legend. There isnevertheless an explanation for this. We must bear in mind that thedescription of the creation examined here is taken from the so-calledSacerdotal version, written by priests and scribes who were thespiritual successors of Ezekiel, the prophet of the exile to Babylonwriting in the Sixth century B.C. We have already seen how the prieststook the Yahvist and Elohist versions of Genesis and remodelled themafter their own fashion in accordance with their own preoccupations.Father de Vaux has written that the ‘legalist’ character of thesewritings was very essential. An outline of this has already been givenabove.
Whereas the Yahvist text of the Creation, writtenseveral centuries before the Sacerdotal text, makes no mention of God’ssabbath, taken after the fatigue of a week’s labor, the authors of theSacerdotal text bring it into their description. They divide the latterinto separate days, with the very precise indication of the days of theweek. They build it around the sabbatic day of rest which they have tojustify to the faithful by pointing out that God was the first torespect it. Subsequent to this practical necessity, the descriptionthat follows has an apparently logical religious order, but in factscientific data permit us to qualify the latter as being of a whimsicalnature.
The idea that successive phases of the Creation, asseen by the Sacerdotal authors in their desire to incite people toreligious observation, could have been compressed into the space of oneweek is one that cannot be defended from a scientific point of view.Today we are perfectly aware that the formation of the Universe and theEarth took place in stages that lasted for very long periods. (In thethird part of the present work, we shall examine this question when wecome to look at the Qur’anic data concerning the Creation). Even if thedescription came to a close on the evening of the sixth day, withoutmentioning the seventh day, the ‘sabbath’ when God is said to haverested, and even if, as in the Qur’anic description, we were permittedto think that they were in fact undefined periods rather than actualdays, the Sacerdotal description would still not be any moreacceptable. The succession of episodes it contains is an absolutecontradiction with elementary scientific knowledge.
It may be seen therefore that the Sacerdotaldescription of the Creation stands out as an imaginative and ingeniousfabrication. Its purpose was quite different from that of making thetruth known.
Second Description
The second description of the Creation in Genesisfollows immediately upon the first without comment or transitionalpassage. It does not provoke the same objections.
We must remember that this description is roughlythree centuries older and is very short. It allows more space to thecreation of man and earthly paradise than to the creation of the Earthand Heavens. It mentions this very briefly (Chapter2, 4b-7): “In the day that Yahweh God made the earth and theheavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb ofthe field had yet sprung up-for Yahweh God had not caused it to rainupon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground;
but a flood went up from earth and watered the wholeface of the ground-then Yahweh God formed man of dust from the ground,and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became aliving being.”
This is the Yahvist text that appears in the text ofpresent day Bibles. The Sacerdotal text was added to it later on, butone may ask if it was originally so brief. Nobody is in a position tosay whether the Yahvist text has not, in the course of time, been pareddown. We do not know if the few lines we possess represent all that theoldest Biblical text of the Creation had to say.
The Yahvist description does not mention the actualformation of the Earth or the Heavens. It makes it clear that when Godcreated man, there was no vegetation on Earth (it had not yet rained),even though the waters of the Earth had covered its surface. The sequelto the text confirms this: God planted a garden at the same time as manwas created. The vegetable kingdom therefore appears on Earth at thesame time as man. This is scientifically inaccurate; man did not appearon Earth until a long time after vegetation had been growing on it. Wedo not know how many hundreds of millions of years separate the twoevents.
This is the only criticism that one can level at theYahvist text. The fact that it does not place the creation of man intime in relation to the formation of the world and the earth, unlikethe Sacerdotal text, which places them in the same week, frees it fromthe serious objections raised against the latter.
THE DATE OF THE WORLD’S CREATION AND THE DATE OFMAN’S APPEARANCE ON EARTH
The Jewish calendar, which follows the datacontained in the Old Testament, places the dates of the above veryprecisely. The second half of the Christian year 1975 corresponds tothe beginning of the 5, 736th year of the creation of the world. Thecreation of man followed several days later, so that he has the samenumerical age, counted in years, as in the Jewish calendar.
There is probably a correction to be made on accountof the fact that time was originally calculated in lunar years, whilethe calendar used in the West is based on solar years. This correctionwould have to be made if one wanted to be absolutely exact, but as itrepresents only 3%, it is of very little consequence. To simplify ourcalculations, it is easier to disregard it. What matters here is theorder of magnitude. It is therefore of little importance if, over athousand years, our calculations are thirty years out. We are nearerthe truth in following this Hebraic estimate of the creation of theworld if we say that it happened roughly thirty-seven centuries beforeChrist.
What does modern science tell us? It would bedifficult to reply to the question concerning the formation of theUniverse. All we can provide figures for is the era in time when thesolar system was formed. It is possible to arrive at a reasonableapproximation of this. The time between it and the present is estimatedat four and a half billion years. We can therefore measure the marginseparating the firmly established reality we know today and the datataken from the Old Testament. We shall expand on this in the third partof the present work. These facts emerge from a close scrutiny of theBiblical text. Genesis provides very precise information on the timethat elapsed between Adam and Abraham. For the period from the time ofAbraham to the beginnings of Christianity, the information provided isinsufficient. It must be supported by other sources.
1. From Adam to Abraham
Genesis provides extremely precise genealogical datain Chapters 4, 5, 11, 21 and 25. They concern all of Abraham’sancestors in direct line back to Adam. They give the length of timeeach person lived, the father’s age at the birth of the son and thusmake it easily possible to ascertain the dates of birth and death ofeach ancestor in relation to the creation of Adam, as the tableindicates.
All the data used in this table come from theSacerdotal text of Genesis, the only Biblical text that providesinformation of this kind. It may be deduced, according to the Bible,that Abraham was born 1,948 years after Adam.
ABRAHAM’S GENEALOGY
|
date of birth after creation of Adam |
length of life |
date of death |
|
|
Adam |
130 |
930 |
930 |
2. FromAbraham to The Beginnings Of Christianity
The Bible does not provide any numerical informationon this period that might lead to such precise estimates as those foundin Genesis on Abraham’s ancestors. We must look to other sources toestimate the time separating Abraham from Jesus. At present, allowingfor a slight margin of error, the time of Abraham is situated atroughly eighteen centuries before Jesus. Combined with information inGenesis on the interval separating Abraham and Adam, this would placeAdam at roughly thirty-eight centuries before Jesus. This estimate isundeniably wrong: the origins of this inaccuracy arise from themistakes in the Bible on the Adam-Abraham period. The Jewish traditionstill founds its calendar on this. Nowadays, we can challenge thetraditional defenders of Biblical truth with the incompatibilitybetween the whimsical estimates of Jewish priests living in the Sixthcentury B.C. and modern data. For centuries, the events of antiquityrelating to Jesus were situated in time according to information basedon these estimates.
Before modern times, editions of the Biblefrequently provided the reader with a preamble explaining thehistorical sequence of events that had come to pass between thecreation of the world and the time when the books were edited. Thefigures vary slightly according to the time. For example, theClementine Vulgate, 1621, gave this information, although it did placeAbraham a little earlier and the Creation at roughly the 40th centuryB.C. Walton’s polyglot Bible, produced in the 17th century, in additionto Biblical texts in several languages, gave the reader tables similarto the one shown here for Abraham’s ancestors. Almost all the estimatescoincide with the figures given here. With the arrival of modern times,editors were no longer able to maintain such whimsical chronologieswithout going against scientific discovery that placed the Creation ata much earlier date. They were content to abolish these tables andpreambles, but they avoided warning the reader that the Biblical textson which these chronologies were based had become obsolete and could nolonger be considered to express the truth. They preferred to draw amodest veil over them, and invent set-phrases of cunning dialecticsthat would make acceptable the text as it had formerly been, withoutany subtractions from it.
This is why the genealogies contained in theSacerdotal text of the Bible are still honoured, even though in theTwentieth century one cannot reasonably continue to count time on thebasis of such fiction.
Modern scientific data do not allow us to establishthe date of man’s appearance on earth beyond a certain limit. We may becertain that man, with the capacity for action and intelligent thoughtthat distinguishes him from beings that appear to be anatomicallysimilar to him, existed on Earth after a certain estimable date. Nobodyhowever can say at what exact date he appeared. What we can say todayis that remains have been found of a humanity capable of human thoughtand action whose age may be calculated in tens of thousands of years.
This approximate dating refers to the prehistorichuman species, the most recently discovered being the Cro-Magnon Man.There have of course been many other discoveries all over the world ofremains that appear to be human. These relate to less highly evolvedspecies, and their age could be somewhere in the hundreds of thousandsof years. But were they genuine men?
Whatever the answer may be, scientific data aresufficiently precise concerning the prehistoric species like theCro-Magnon Man, to be able to place them much further back than theepoch in which Genesis places the first men. There is therefore anobvious incompatibility between what we can derive from the numericaldata in Genesis about the date of man’s appearance on Earth and thefirmly established facts of modern scientific knowledge.
THE FLOOD
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are devoted to the descriptionof the Flood. In actual fact, there are two descriptions; they have notbeen placed side by side, but are distributed all the way through.Passages are interwoven to give the appearance of a coherent successionof varying episodes. In these three chapters there are, in reality,blatant contradictions; here again the explanation lies in theexistence of two quite distinct sources: the Yahvist and Sacerdotalversions.
It has been shown earlier that they formed adisparate amalgam; each original text has been broken down intoparagraphs or phrases, elements of one source alternating with theother, so that in the course of the complete description, we go fromone to another seventeen times in roughly one hundred lines of Englishtext.
Taken as a whole, the story goes as follows:Man’s corruption had become widespread, so God decided to annihilatehim along with all the other living creatures. He warned Noah and toldhim to construct the Ark into which he was to take his wife, his threesons and their wives, along with other living creatures. The twosources differ for the latter. one passage (Sacerdotal) says that Noahwas to take one pair of each species; then in the passage that follows(Yahvist) it is stated that God ordered him to take seven males andseven females from each of the so-called ‘pure’ animal species, and asingle pair from the ‘impure’ species. Further on, however, it isstated that Noah actually took one pair of each animal. Specialists,such as Father de Vaux, state that the passage in question is from anadaptation of the Yahvist description.
Rainwater is given as the agent of the Flood in one(Yahvist) passage, but in another (Sacerdotal), the Flood is given adouble cause: rainwater and the waters of the Earth.
The Earth was submerged right up to and above themountain peaks. All life perished. After one year, when the waters hadreceded, Noah emerged from the Ark that had come to rest on MountArarat.
One might add that the Flood lasted differinglengths of time according to the source used: forty days for theYahvist version and one hundred and fifty in the Sacerdotal text.
The Yahvist version does not tell us when the eventtook place in Noah’s life, but the Sacerdotal text tells us that he wassix hundred years old. The latter also provides information in itsgenealogies that situates him in relation to Adam and Abraham. If wecalculate according to the information contained in Genesis, Noah wasborn 1,056 years after Adam (see table of Abraham’s Genealogy) and theFlood therefore took place 1,656 years after the creation of Adam. Inrelation to Abraham, Genesis places the Flood 292 years before thebirth of this Patriarch.
According to Genesis, the Flood affected the wholeof the human race and all living creatures created by God on the faceof the Earth were destroyed. Humanity was then reconstituted by Noah’sthree sons and their wives so that when Abraham was born roughly threecenturies later, he found a humanity that Was already re-formed intoseparate communities. How could this reconstruction have taken place insuch a short time? This simple observation deprives the narration ofall verisimilitude.
Furthermore, historical data show itsincompatibility with modern knowledge. Abraham is placed in the period1800-1850 B.C., and if the Flood took place, as Genesis suggests in itsgenealogies, roughly three centuries before Abraham, we would have toplace him somewhere in the Twenty-first to Twenty-second century B.C.Modern historical knowledge confirms that at this period, civilizationshad sprung up in several parts of the world; for their remains havebeen left to posterity.
In the case of Egypt for example, the remainscorrespond to the period preceding the Middle Kingdom (2,100 B.C.) atroughly the date of the First Intermediate Period before the EleventhDynasty. In Babylonia it is the Third Dynasty at Ur. We know forcertain that there was no break in these civilizations, so that therecould have been no destruction affecting the whole of humanity, as itappears in the Bible.
We cannot therefore consider that these threeBiblical narrations provide man with an account of facts thatcorrespond to the truth. We are obliged to admit that, objectivelyspeaking, the texts which have come down to us do not represent theexpression of reality. We may ask ourselves whether it is possible forGod to have revealed anything other than the truth. It is difficult toentertain the idea that God taught to man ideas that were not onlyfictitious, but contradictory. We naturally arrive therefore at thehypothesis that distortions occurred that were made by man or thatarose from traditions passed down from one generation to another byword of mouth, or from the texts of these traditions once they werewritten down. When one knows that a work such as Genesis was adapted atleast twice over a period of not less than three centuries, it ishardly surprising to find improbabilities or descriptions that areincompatible with reality. This is because the progress made in humanknowledge has enabled us to know, if not everything, enough at leastabout certain events to be able to judge the degree of compatibilitybetween our knowledge and the ancient descriptions of them. There isnothing more logical than to maintain this interpretation of Biblicalerrors which only implicates man himself. It is a great pity that themajority of commentators, both Jewish and Christian, do not hold withit. The arguments they use nevertheless deserve careful attention.