The Creation Story Updated by Science

A study partner and I are working our way through a book on how to interpret midrash, the stories in the Talmud and in other old sources that help enlarge upon the meaning of the Bible, which is very succinct. During one session, we talk about a specific type of midrash and learn how to work with it, and the next time, we each find an example of that type of midrash and apply the techniques that we’ve read about to it. It’s really enhanced the stories that we have worked on so far, and I do believe that I will be able to get more out of reading midrash in the future after we complete our studies.

So it was that I was working on a story based on the Creation tale with which Genesis begins. The specific line I was dealing with was “The heavens and the earth were completed and all their host” [Genesis 2:1]. And this brought me back to something that has fascinated me for several years, and that I might even have written about before: How closely the Creation story parallels first the Big Bang theory of physics and then the theory of the development of life on earth from chemistry and biology.

“Let there be light!” Prior to this, we are told that the earth was disorderly and chaotic and darkness was on the face of the deep. (Genesis 1:2-3)

About 13.7 billion years ago, scientists believe that the Big Bang occurred. All of the material that was going to become the entire universe was crammed into a volume that was essentially zero with incredible heat and under equally incredible pressure. For roughly the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was simply too hot for light to be visible. Photons, the particles that transmit light, were trapped in an indescribable soup of elementary particles – protons, electrons, their anti-particles, neutrons, and neutrinos. The photons simply could not make their way through this dense mess. In other words, the universe was disorderly, chaotic, and profoundly dark. Meanwhile, in a manner typical of explosions, the universe was expanding and cooling at the same time. At that 380,000-year mark, it had cooled off enough for the particles to attract one another and coalesce into atoms, thus becoming transparent (photons could make their way through, structure could be seen, there was now light). Let there be light!

Higher temperatures make things jostle around more rapidly, thus making it less likely that they can settle down into structured objects. So as time passed and the universe continued to expand and to cool, clumps of gas finally were able to collapse, and the first stars and galaxies were formed. (Most of what was there in the early universe was hydrogen, the lightest element, which consists of one proton and one electron and is thus easiest to form.)

Similarly, on the second day of Creation, God separated the heaven from the earth (looking at the horizon across the ocean, you can understand this – where does the earth/ocean end and the sky begin?) and now things could be created in each of these realms. This might be equated to the accretion of debris that eventually formed the earth, which ultimately cooled enough to become solid ground (created on the third day) with only a molten core remaining.

Also on the third day of Creation, plants were created. If we look at the timeline of life on earth, it first formed in the oceans. About 3 million years ago, single-celled organisms that derived energy by photosynthesis and excreted oxygen as a waste product evolved. Some scientists call these the first plants. The original atmosphere of earth was largely hydrogen and helium, like everywhere else in the universe, but these gases are very light and could not be held by our gravity. Volcanoes were far more active in the early years and they contributed most of the planet’s early atmosphere – nitrogen, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide. It is due to the activity of plants that our atmosphere gradually started containing oxygen.

On the fourth day of Creation, God created the sun, moon, and stars. This is scientifically inaccurate. The moon did indeed come into existence after the earth was already present; the most recent hypothesis is that an ancient planet crashed into the earth, tearing out part of the earth and also contributing some of its own material to form the moon. But the sun is a probably a third-generation star, formed out of gases and debris from the deaths of earlier stars, which can be determined from its spectral signature, which shows that it contains heavier elements than hydrogen and helium (heavier elements only being synthesized in the violent explosions of earlier stars). So the sun is about the same age as the earth, 4.5 billion years old. The first stars formed about 400 million years after the Big Bang, or over 13 billion years ago, so the sequence given in the Creation story for the fourth day is incorrect. There needs to be some tweaking between the third and the fourth days in Genesis, but that’s still pretty amazing for people who had little or no knowledge of physics.

The fifth day of Creation saw the arrival of birds and sea animals. Sea animals did indeed precede land animals, but there is no evidence of birds until after there were dinosaurs (birds may have evolved from dinosaurs or from a common ancestor).

Then over 400 million years ago, the first creatures dared to come out of the water permanently, and so there were land animals. About 65 million years ago, there was a significant ‘extinction event’ which wiped out about 50% of the life on earth, including larger animals like the dinosaurs. This was believed to have been a huge meteorite/asteroid that crashed into our planet and darkened the sky, blocking the sunlight and rain and probably causing huge tsunamis. The larger animals were less able to withstand these conditions, but the early mammals were much smaller, rather like shrews, so they were able to survive and develop undeterred by the giant predators that had been present before the extinction event. The proto-human lineage split off from the chimps about 6 million years ago, and then there is evidence of proto-humans walking on two legs 200,000 years later. Finally, less than 200,000 years ago, we find the first indication of homo sapiens.

So on the sixth day of Creation, God created first the land animals and then finally man, whereupon God rested on the seventh day. And we can rest now, too, having gone through the evolution first of the universe and then of life on this planet in tandem with the Creation story. How much more beautiful can a story get?