The Story of Creation as Told By Theology and By Science

by T. S. Ackland

This difficulty is sometimes met by the assertion that the Bible was not given to us to teach us Science, but to convey to us certain information which was essential to our moral welfare, and which we could not obtain by any other means; that these discrepancies do not in any way interfere with that portion of those truths which is involved in the History of Creation, but that, however the narrative may be viewed as far as regards its details, the facts that God is the Creator of all things visible and invisible, that He is a Being of infinite Wisdom, Power, and Love, and that He has placed man in a peculiar relation to Himself, remain unaffected. On this ground it is often urged that we may pass over scientific inaccuracies as matters of no great importance.

Theologians are by no means agreed as to the nature and limits of that inspiration by which Holy Scripture was written. There are many who think that in matters purely incidental to its main object, and lying within the reach of human faculties, the sacred writers were left to the ordinary sources of information, and that many alleged difficulties may be removed by this view.

But whatever may be thought of the application of this hypothesis to some parts of the Bible, there are others to which it is plainly inapplicable, and of these the narrative of the Creation is evidently one. No theory of limited inspiration can be admitted to explain any supposed inaccuracies in that narrative. It cannot be liable to those imperfections which are inevitable when men have to obtain knowledge by the ordinary means, because there were no ordinary means by which such information could be obtained. The most carefully preserved records, the oldest traditions could not extend backwards beyond the moment when the first man awoke to conscious existence. For every thing beyond that point the only source of knowledge available was information derived from the Creator Himself. It may be that a revelation of this character was made to Adam in the days of his innocence, that it was carefully handed down to his descendants, and that Moses, under the divine direction, incorporated it into his history; or it may have been directly communicated to Moses by special inspiration—that matters not—but a divine revelation it must have been, or it is nothing; the dream of a poet, or the theory of a philosopher, if we can believe that such a philosopher existed at such a time. But if it be indeed a revelation from the Creator Himself, we cannot imagine that He could fall into any error, or sanction any misrepresentation with reference even to the smallest detail of His own work.

If then there are really any errors in this record—any assertions which the discoveries of science have proved to be untrue, we cannot account for them on any theory of limited inspiration. A single proved error would be fatal to the authority of the whole narrative. But, on the other hand, we are not justified in expecting such an account of the Creation as would commend itself to the scientific intellect of the present day. When we attempt to form a judgment upon it. We must look not only to its alleged author, but also to the purposes for which, the circumstances under which, and the persons to whom it was given. In these we may expect to meet with many limitations. It was not designed for the communication of scientific knowledge, it was necessarily conveyed in human language, and addressed to human intelligence, that language and that intelligence being, not as they are now, but as they were, taking the latest possible date that can be assigned to it, considerably more than three thousand years ago.

This last consideration affects not only the record itself, but also our facilities for understanding and forming a judgment upon it. We have to contend with difficulties of interpretation arising from our inability fully to realize the circumstances under which it was given, and to place ourselves in the mental position of its original recipients. Owing to our want of this power it may well happen, that though we are in possession of vastly increased knowledge, we may be far more liable to fall into error in some directions, in the interpretation of it, than those to whom it was originally addressed.

An additional difficulty arises from the circumstance that our knowledge, wonderfully as it has been increased of late, is yet very far from complete, and is probably in many cases still mixed with error. Hence it may very well happen that where there is complete harmony between the history and the facts, we may suspect discord owing to our misunderstanding of the record, or our misconception of the facts. In order that the harmony may be recognized in its fulness, there must be a perfect understanding of the record, and a perfect knowledge of the facts. But from both of these we are probably at present very far removed.

If a person who was a thorough master of some science undertook to write a treatise for the purpose of teaching children the rudiments of that science, we should expect, and the more strongly if the author were a master of language as well as of science, that his work should contain indications of a master's hand. We should expect that while the book conveyed clearly and simply to the minds of those for whom it was written, the truths which it was intended to teach, it should also convey to the more educated reader some intimations of a deeper knowledge on the part of its author. The choice of a word, the turn of a phrase, the order in which facts were arranged, the occurrence here and there of a sentence which an ordinary reader would pass over as unimportant, would to such a person be indications of trains of thought far more profound than those which appeared on the surface. And this recognition would be proportional to two things—the amount of scientific knowledge possessed by the reader, and his mastery of the language in which the book was written.

Such, then, are the characteristics which we may expect to find in the Record of Creation, if it be indeed, as we believe, a revelation from God, made to men in a very low stage of intellectual development. In order that we may be able to form a satisfactory judgment of it, it will be well for us to consider a little in detail two classes of difficulties. 1. Those which belong to the Revelation itself, arising from the limitations to which it was necessarily subject in its delivery. 2. Those which arise from our imperfect knowledge of the language in which it is written, and from our inability to place ourselves in the intellectual position of those to whom it was originally given.

1. When this record was committed to writing, language was in a very different condition from that in which it is now. We have an account of the first recorded exercise of the faculty of speech in Gen. ii. 19. Adam first used it to give names to all the living creatures as they passed in review before him. In accordance with this statement it appears, from the researches of philologists, that language in its earliest state was entirely, or almost entirely limited to words denoting sensible objects and actions. It seems probable that these names were derived from radicals expressing general ideas [Footnote: Max Muller's Lectures on the Science of Language, First Series Lect. viii. ix.]; but there is reason to doubt whether these radicals ever had a formal existence as words—they seem rather to have been the mental stock out of which words were produced. But the human mind had from the first powers for the exercise of which this limited vocabulary was insufficient. Even in the outer world there was much which was the object of reason and inference rather than of sense, while the whole world of consciousness was entirely unprovided with the means of expression. To meet this difficulty words, which originally denoted objects of sense, were used figuratively to express ideas which bore some resemblance or analogy, real or fancied, to their original significance. As time passed on this difficulty was gradually diminished: synonyms crept into all languages from various sources, and when once adopted, they were in many cases gradually differentiated, the various senses which the original word had borne were portioned off among them, and increased precision was thus obtained.

But in the infancy of mankind the figurative system was in full operation. Hence, all early documents have a strong tinge of the poetic element. Poetry, strictly so called, probably had not as yet a separate existence; but the whole spoken and written language was permeated by that poetic spirit which delights in tracing subtle analogies, and in expressing the invisible by means of the visible. The translation of the Sanscrit Hymns, which has recently appeared [Footnote: Hymns of the Big Veda Sanhita, translated by Max Muller, vol. i.], furnishes a most valuable illustration of this state of thought and of language. These hymns are probably nearly coeval with the Pentateuch. They were the production of a different branch of the human family, and indicate a different tone of thought, but they bring out very clearly the figurative character of primitive language, abounding in fanciful descriptions of natural phenomena, which, when their metaphorical, character was forgotten, passed by an easy transition into the graceful myths and legends of early Greece.