"Bruce Sterling - Creation Science" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Day 1. God created a dark, formless void of deep waters, then
created light and separated light from darkness.

Day 2. God established the vault of Heaven over the formless watery
void.

Day 3. God created dry land amidst the waters and established
vegetation on the land.

Day 4. God created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and set them
into the vault of heaven.

Day 5. God created the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air.

Day 6. God created the beasts of the earth and created one male and
one female human being.

On Day 7, God rested.

Humanity thus began on the sixth day of creation. Mankind is
one day younger than birds, two days younger than plants, and
slightly younger than mammals. How are we to reconcile this with
scientific evidence suggesting that the earth is over 4 billion years
old and that life started as a single-celled ooze some three billion
years ago?

The first method of reconciliation is known as "gap theory."
The very first verse of Genesis declares that God created the heaven
and the earth, but God did not establish "Day" and "Night" until the
fifth verse. This suggests that there may have been an immense
span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life,
and the beginning of the day-night cycle. Perhaps there were
multiple creations and cataclysms during this period, accounting for
the presence of oddities such as trilobites and dinosaurs, before a
standard six-day Edenic "restoration" around 4,000 BC.

"Gap theory" was favored by Biblical scholar Charles Scofield,
prominent '30s barnstorming evangelist Harry Rimmer, and well-
known modern televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, among others.

The second method of reconciliation is "day-age theory." In
this interpretation, the individual "days" of the Bible are considered
not modern twenty-four hour days, but enormous spans of time.
Day-age theorists point out that the sun was not created until Day 4,
more than halfway through the process. It's difficult to understand
how or why the Earth would have a contemporary 24-hour "day"
without a Sun. The Beginning, therefore, likely took place eons ago,
with matter created on the first "day," life emerging on the third
"day," the fossil record forming during the eons of "days" four five