Creation; Genesis; Evolution - An Interview with Dr. Weeks

Interview conducted by Peter Hastie for the February 2011 edition of 'Australian Presbyterian' magazine.


Noel, how authoritative is the Bible when it speaks about the matter of creation? For instance, does it have to provide the same level of detail that we would expect to find in a science textbook before we regard it as infallible and without error?
I understand the Bible to be fully authoritative on any subject with which it deals. However in saying that, I think we need to reflect on what we mean when we say that something is “authoritative”. Let us be aware that often people connect an authoritative work with detail and exhaustiveness.

If we apply this standard to the book of Genesis, then it doesn’t appear to be authoritative, at least in a scientific sense. However, the logical extension of this line of thought is to exclude the Bible from any role in disciplines that have textbooks. If there are more detailed, and more precise textbooks, why consult the Bible at all on these subjects?


The problem with defining authority by whether a book conforms to a “textbook” model is that no human textbook is final and exhaustive. The only person who has exhaustive knowledge is God. If you use the textbook criterion for establishing a book’s authority, then the Bible is exhaustive on nothing. When you com- pare Romans, the great textbook on theology from the Bible, with any modern theological text, then you realise how short and concise Romans is. It seems to me that the same principle applies to the subject of creation. The Bible does not limit its authority on any question; it just lets us know that it has authority on every matter on which it speaks.

Some Christians want to claim that while the Bible is not authoritative in a scientific sense, it is when it speaks on historical and religious matters. The problem is that the Bible does not provide exhaustive information on these issues either. There are many matters in religion and history on which the Bible does not give an absolutely precise and detailed answer. The logical conclusion of this line of thought is that the Bible cannot be an authority in historical, religious or ethical matters either.

How much detail, then, is needed before we can assume that the Bible is speaking authoritatively?
I’m not sure that the level of detail is necessarily relevant to the Bible’s authority. The Bible goes into more detail on some issues than others. We can never assume that if it doesn’t go into detail on some matters then it is not authoritative. We need to recognise that some questions can be dealt with more generally than others and that it’s possible for the Bible to speak in a simple and truth- ful way about these issues without requiring large amounts of detail.


Is it common for Christian scholars to be influenced in their Biblical interpretation by the dominant worldview of their age?
Yes, of course. All of us struggle with the impact of modern views on our thinking. Any Christian who is honest knows that it’s a perpetual struggle to read the Bible without reading modern views into it. The great struggle we face is to conform ourselves to it; our natural inclination is to make it conform to us and our ideas of reality. All Christians face this struggle.


Christians in previous ages have had similar struggles to us in how to deal with the book of Genesis and creation. Augustine is a good example. He faced a serious struggle because many of the prevailing ideas about creation and matter were influenced by Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy. His problem with the Genesis account was that everything didn’t seem to come into being at once. He had difficulty coming to terms with the successive steps of creation in Genesis 1.

Again, Christians who have lived in periods where Deism was a strong influence have had difficulties in understanding Genesis. Deism is the idea that God the creator got everything going at the beginning – that He wound it up like a great clock – but then He withdrew and allowed the universe to proceed on its own. Naturally, that raises issues about the end of the world when the Bible says that the heavens and the earth will be consumed in fire and then remade. Under Deist influence in previous centuries it was argued that at the creation God must have located vast coal seams in the earth so that it would self-combust at the end of the world.


Of course, today there are lots of Christians who feel the pressure of the claims of Darwinism and evolution. Many of them have conceded that evolutionary theories are correct and so they find themselves under constant pressure to accommodate the Bible to the teaching of evolution.


Are many of today’s commentators on the book of Genesis influenced to any significant degree by modern worldviews?
Yes, they are. The most obvious example where they are influenced is in the area of evolution. However, deter- minism is another popular idea that has influenced considerable numbers of them. Quite a few historians today write from the point of view of determinism. They believe that we are totally determined by the influence of our background so that we can never do anything original. They then take this principle and apply it to life in the Ancient Near East and say, “Well, everyone in the Near East was just reproducing what was already there. No one produced anything original. Therefore, the Bible has to reproduce what was already around in the surrounding pagan cultures.” Thus determinism is imposed on the Bible.


How has the idea of evolution impacted upon Bible interpretation?

Well, evolution, because it is so random by nature, requires immense peri- ods of time to work. Scholars are always under pressure to lengthen the time periods in the Bible. They have to stretch out history as far as possible. This creates huge problems with Bible chronology.

There is a further problem as well with evolution. If it occurs spontaneously and is entirely random, God is excluded from the process. The Bible teaches that God upholds everything by His word of power. This means that He sustains the whole universe moment by moment. In that sense, there are no random processes. However, if we adopt a theory of origins that actually excludes God’s involvement from the creative process, then we begin to look at the world from a naturalistic rather than theistic point of view. So evolution creates a range of problems for those who regard it as the mechanism through which the world began.

Is the Genesis creation account time-bound to the age in which it is written? Can it speak meaningfully to people living in the 21st century?
If Scripture is shaped and its concepts supplied by the culture in which it arose, then it is all determined by that culture. Hence, all of it, every idea and concept must be changed to be relevant to another culture. To say that it is time- bound in a scientific sense, but not in a religious one, misses the point.


Scripture rejects the view that it is time-bound simply because God is God. He is not bound and captive within history. Of course, if we exclude Him and His revelation from the world, we open the door to cultural relativism. But the Bible rejects such exclusion. Again, the idea that the message of God changes from age to age is rejected in Scripture. The gospel that is preached on the eve of Christ’s return is the very same gospel that was preached by the Apostles: “Fear God, and give Him the glory” (Rev. 14:7). As Revelation 14:6 says, it is an eternal gospel.

We need to realise that the ideas of a culture are not neutral. They are influenced by the culture’s acceptance of, or rejection of, the truth of God. This was true in Biblical times as well as in our own. The Bible teaches that God is absolutely sovereign over the whole process of creation and that He brought the world into being through His word. The modern scientific view excludes God from the process of creation or simply allows Him the opportunity to kick start it. It doesn’t permit Him an ongoing role. However, if there is no ongoing role of God in the world, then how is it possible on such Deistic assumptions for Jesus to be the Son of God? Again, how is it possible to have the Holy Spirit active in our age?

How dependent are we on the Holy Spirit to gain a true understanding of the book of Genesis?
We are completely dependent upon Him. As the apostle Paul says, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). This means that any scholarship on the book of Genesis that does not rely upon the help of the Holy Spirit will be unable to explain its meaning fully. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the non-Christian scholar cannot draw our atten- tion to issues and other phenomena, but it does mean that he or she has an important limitation on their understanding. They may be able to see certain things, but they won’t be able to explain them.


Do you have any thoughts on guiding principles of how we should approach the text of Genesis?
My advice on reading the book of Genesis is that you must come to it the way the Bible itself comes to it. Look at the rest of Scripture and observe how it approaches Genesis. The early chapters of Genesis are referred to frequently in the rest of Scripture. When the Bible writers refer to it as a foundation for an argument, they treat it in a very straightforward, literal, historical way. There are some instances in the Bible, particularly in Job and the Psalms, where creation is referred to in a more lyrical way. But this is never done in a way that challenges the actual fact of the creation.


Is there any significance in the fact that God’s creation of the world is stated in the very first verse of the Bible?

Yes, there is. I’ve just commented that the Bible builds its message in a cumulative way. It starts with the creation and it builds on that. One of my sons was running a Bible study for some Chinese students and was thinking about the best way to explain the Christian message. So he thought, “we’ll begin with the gospel.” He soon realised that these students didn’t understand some of the basic concepts that were assumed by the gospel. They had no fundamental Christian worldview. He tried to work out how he could best get the message across to them and one of the Chinese students said to him, “Isn’t there anything in the Bible before the message of Jesus?”


When we look at Paul’s method of evangelism with a pagan audience we see that he gives a major place to creation and providence in explaining the gospel. For instance, when he is speaking to the people in Lystra and Athens, Paul reminds his audience of these important truths. One of the problems with evangelism today is that it omits a God-centred approach to creation and providence. However, if people don’t believe that they are made by God and sustained by Him, they won’t have any sense of being accountable to Him.

What impact will there be on evangelism if we try to explain creation in terms of modern ideas such as evolution?

If you look at the history of the church over the last 100 years, you will realise that Protestantism has been seriously weakened in the Western world by challenging such fundamental ideas as the creation in the biblical account. If you undermine the reliability and authority of the Old Testament, you put yourself on a downhill slope. Once you are headed in that direction, it is inevitable that your approach to the New Testament will be affected too. Finally, when you take away the very foundations of the gospel message, preaching will lose its power and the church will decline.

Where did these critical and evolutionary notions first arise in modern Christianity?
This is a complex issue but it’s possible to trace it back to critical German scholarship in the 18th and 19th centuries. As soon as you challenge the authority of the Bible and God’s involvement in the world, you have to come up with another way that explains the origins of Scripture and what is happening in the Biblical story.


What scholars did in the 19th century was to adopt the popular view of the Romantic period that man had begun in a primitive and unsophisticated state and then began to develop and mature. Scholars believed that at a later stage the priestly class took control of Israel’s story. The romantic view that was imposed on the Bible was that civilisation began in a naïve polytheistic environment which then developed into ethical monotheism and then the priesthood dominated and rewrote the history to emphasise their role. That’s been the prevailing theory in modern critical scholarship and has been the underlying assumption of many people’s thinking about the book of Genesis. Obviously Genesis does not begin with polytheism so it cannot be right.


Where do we find a reference in the Scriptures that tells us that creation is one of the primary doctrines upon which there is no room for concession?
One place we find reference to the creation as a primary doctrine in the Scriptures is in the Gospels when Jesus talks about marriage in Matthew 19:4-6. Jesus grounds the institution of mar- riage in the original creation. When Paul explains the role of Christ in redemption in Romans 5 he also refers to the role of Adam at the time of the creation and fall. Again, when Paul preaches to pagan audiences in the book of Acts he goes back to creation. These are the sorts of passages I had in mind.


What should we say to people who claim that Genesis 1 only intends to teach us that God created the world, not how he created it?

I tell them to read the text. As Christians we have to take the text seriously. We stand under the word of God and not over it. Since this is so, we must respect the plain meaning of the text.

So what is your reading of the text?
It seems very clear to me that the writer wants us to understand that God created the world in successive stages. That is certainly a “how”. When you look at the procedure of how it was done, the text tells us that God created the environment before He put living creatures into it. The creation of man is actually the climax of a series of processes and actions that enable him to live in glorious surrounds. This, of course, reminds us of how merciful and kind God is to the human race. In other words, “how” God created is meant to induce in us a sense of gratitude and obligation for God’s goodness.


What do you say to people who look at the literary structure of Genesis 1 and 2 and disagree with your interpretation of it? Some Christians think the “frame-work hypothesis” gives a better reading of the creation account.
The problem with the frame-work hypothesis is that it is not actually built on the structure of the text. For instance, how do scholars who support the frame-work hypothesis know that God didn’t create the world in the structured and ordered way that is set out in Genesis 1? How can they be sure that God didn’t structure the world over the six-day period that is specified in the text? The truth is they can’t be sure. What they are really doing is importing a hypothesis from outside the text itself.


I really think that Bible scholars have to take the text and its structures seriously. Structures are built into the text and there are a stack of them there in Genesis 1. I think it’s fairly obvious that life and reality are structured and this is the clear witness of the text.


Some scholars say that the creation account shouldn’t be taken literally because it’s either poetry or myth. Is that true?

No, it’s not. On a purely technical or linguistic basis, it is untrue to say that Genesis 1 is poetry. It’s a narrative and it reveals all the marks of narrative writing. If people want to know what Hebrew poetry looks like, they should read Psalm 104. Psalm 104 is Genesis 1 in poetry. If you compare the two passages, the differences are fairly obvious.

What are the characteristics of Hebrew poetry?
One of the main features of Hebrew poetry is parallelism. If you look at the psalms, you will see it again and again. There is nothing like this in Genesis 1. We certainly have structure in Genesis 1, but it is nothing like normal Hebrew poetic structure.

Some people suggest that Genesis 1 is actually written in the form of an ancient Hebrew hymn. What do you think?

I think they should read the psalms if they want to know what a hymn would look like in biblical times. As I’ve already mentioned, Genesis 1 is not structured like any psalm. To suggest otherwise is to fail to see the difference between normal Hebrew poetry and narrative.


It’s been popular in some circles to say the Genesis creation account is a fable or a myth. People say that it teaches universal truths through the device of a simple story. It’s not necessary for the story itself to be true even though the truths it conveys are. What’s your response to that?

My response is that the rest of the Bible does not interpret Genesis 1 and 2 as though it were myth. For example, both Moses and Jesus believed that there was an original Sabbath day and it is upon that event that they develop the law of the Sabbath. Neither of them regards it as a legend or myth. Jesus certainly regards marriage as grounded in an actual historical event when God created Eve and gave her to Adam as his wife.

If people want to claim that the events that are recorded in the Bible are actually myths, then why stop with the creation account? Why not also apply it to the Gospels? Why not apply it to the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus? The reason why we shouldn’t is that the Gospels actually tell us when Jesus is using a parable. Clearly, the Gospel writers understood the difference between the historical reality of His deeds and miracles and some of His teaching devices which we call parables.


Again, my problem with this whole approach of calling Genesis 1 and 2 a myth is that what we are doing is that we are making a decision outside of the text as to how we are going to read it. You see, there is no marker in the text that tells us, “Here is a myth.” However, in the case of Jesus telling His parables, we do have a marker in the text. Further, there are no markers in the text of the Gospels that suggest to us that each of the Gospels is a parable, nor is there any marker in the book of Genesis that indicates that we are meant to understand it is a parable.


How would you construe the literary genre of Genesis 1 to 11?
It tells a story in a narrative form. Frankly, I don’t think we should get too hung up on the issue of genre. Genre is one of those fads that everyone loves to talk about today. However, it’s interesting that there are some developments in the field of ancient history, especially in the Mesopotamian field, where scholars are saying, “Hold on a minute. Truly great and ground-breaking literature occurs when an author draws upon a multitude of sources and creates something original.” There’s an interesting paper on the Gilgamesh Epic, the great literary work of ancient Mesopotamia, where Professor Arthur George, an expert on the subject, says, “What is the genre of the Gilgamesh Epic? Well, we can’t find a particular genre for it, simply because it draws on so many different sources. It is a great and original work that stands in its own class.” I think this is true of many works in literature; it’s impossible to pigeon hole them.


You mean it creates itself and then sets a standard for other subsequent works?

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. For example, J. R. Tolkein’s work creates a whole genre of fantasy literature. I’m not saying Tolkein is the first to use fantasy in his writing, but in one sense his work was very original. It had a profound impact on other writers and created its own genre. I believe saying everything fits a genre simply doesn’t work for things like Genesis 1.

What basic indications in the text itself flag that it is an historical narrative?
One of the characteristics of biblical narrative (and there are all sorts of explanations for this) is that a verb form which is normally used for continuing present or future actions is used to describe past action. Further, this is done within a structure that signals to the reader that the past is being described. People have come up with all sorts of explanations from the original Semitic languages to explain this, but the important point is that it is characteristic of narrative within the biblical text. You find it in historical books like Genesis and in Kings and other places. In other words, the use of this verbal form in Genesis 1 to 11 indicates that we are dealing with historical narrative.


Is there any truth in the claim that Genesis 1 has been borrowed from ancient Babylonian or Egyptian creation accounts?

When you read a lot of the modern literature on the subject you get the impression that everyone in the ancient world wrote creation stories that were basically the same. That is simply not true. What is true is that there are three ancient cultures around the Bible for which we have really extensive literature. I’m referring of course to ancient Iraq, ancient Egypt and the Hittite kingdom in what is modern-day Turkey. There are a few other places where we have some literature on the subject, but certainly not enough to say that we have a fair picture of what that culture believed.


The first thing that we need to know is that there are no creation stories from the Hittites. I don’t know why they didn’t have any, but they didn’t. Not everybody felt a need to write creation stories.

The second thing we need to know is that while there are some allusions to creation in Egyptian sources, there is really no detailed account of creation except in an extremely mythological version. To get some idea of what the Egyptians meant by creation, you have to put together a number of texts to produce an Egyptian theology of origins, which might be producing something artificial and un-Egyptian. The important thing to remember is that there is no one complete Egyptian account of creation.

Ancient Iraq, or Mesopotamia, is the place that produced more creation stories. Hence people have tried to find parallels between them and the Bible. Basically, these accounts start with primal elements that are also gods, and they give different versions of how the world came to be. One late version involves a conflict between the gods. This account is called Enuma Elish, or the Babylonian creation story. The earliest Sumerian versions don’t refer to any primal conflict: they just say that initially undifferentiated matter existed and then certain gods took their bit of it and established the universe. 

Why do so many modern Biblical scholars suggest that there may be some dependence of Genesis upon Enuma Elish?
Many of them have naturalistic assumptions in their approach to the text of the Bible and they find it hard to believe in the notion of divine inspiration, that is, that the Bible comes directly from the mind of God. Driven by deistic or deterministic principles they try to find a naturalistic explanation for the Bible, which is a version of what existed in pagan cultures. However, there is not much to choose from as the possible prototype of Genesis 1. So it has to be Enuma Elish, even though it is quite different.


The major difference between the Genesis story of creation and Enuma Elish is that the Babylonian account starts with the assumption that the primal elements are also gods. The Bible takes an entirely different approach and draws a distinction between the created order and the Creator Himself.


Some scholars have said that the Genesis creation account is really just a polemic against idolatry and it really makes no claims about how God created the world in six days. What’s your view?
One of the fascinating characteristics of Genesis is its lack of polemic against idolatry. Of course, the rest of the Old Testament maintains a sustained attack against idolatry. However, Genesis hardly mentions it. It is mentioned in one or two places, such as the idolatry of the people of Shechem or when Rachel steals the teraphim from her father Laban (Gen. 31:9). We’re not exactly sure what the teraphim are. It seems as though they are some form of household god. However, it’s not until you get to the Ten Commandments that the Bible spells out its concern with idolatry. I think there is a purpose in that. The Bible is saying that the first thing that we must understand is that the world originated from the one God. Against this background, it’s hard to say that the central purpose of Genesis 1-11 is to attack idolatry. This only becomes clear when God gives His people the Ten Commandments.


Why do so many evangelical scholars claim that Genesis 1 is a major polemic against the false gods of the ancient world?

My own personal view is that this approach has come about so that many of them can accommodate the theory of evolution into their view of creation. Genesis 1, on the face of it, is a text which contradicts the modern scientific world view. If you want to overcome this collision of world views, then one way of doing it is to assert that Genesis 1 tells us nothing about how God created the world.

Are there any problems with the view that Genesis 1 and 2 represent two different accounts of creation?
The Bible, particularly in the narrative sections of the Old Testament, takes a different approach than us in the way that it writes history. One of the things it does is that when it tells a story it sometimes goes back and retells it in another way to bring out further details. Let me give you a very simple example. Do you remember the story of how Joshua took Jericho? In the first account in the book of Joshua, we’re told that the walls fall down and Israel goes in and takes the city and kills its inhabitants. However, in the following section of the narrative, Joshua says to the spies, “Go in and rescue Rahab and her family.” Now obviously, that is out of order, but the story is told this way to emphasize two different but vital truths. What the biblical text often does is it gives you one narrative and then another that covers the same time period, but which provides a different emphasis. Genesis 1 and 2 are just one example of this way in which the Bible uses historical narrative. There are many other instances in the Old Testament of this feature of Hebrew history writing.


How long are the days of Genesis 1? Could they be the standard day of 24 hours? Or is this just ridiculous in the light of modern science?
It all comes down to the way that the reader wants to approach Genesis. If we approach Genesis 1 as a simple account of Hebrew historical narrative, which incidentally seems to be the approach of the rest of Scripture, then the most nat- ural way to read the term “day” is as a normal simple day of 24 hours. This certainly seems to be the understanding of Moses in the Ten Commandments, where in the fourth commandment in which he mentions the Sabbath he says the creation week is a model of our seven-day week.

Frankly, if we read the text in its natural sense, we are left with the impression that normal days are intended. After all, when the texts says, “there was evening and there was morning – the first day”, and then repeats this refrain for each of the six days, I would have thought that the writer’s intent was to tell us that we are dealing with a normal 24-hour day. In the past some evangelicals have opted for the day-age theory, where days can mean thousands or millions of years. Well, all I can say is that life would have been pretty tough on earth if a night lasted several million years. One of the basic mechanisms of plant life on which animals and humans depend is photosynthesis. If a night lasted a long time, as some suggest, everything would die. This is one of the reasons why the “long day” theory gave way to the framework theory.

Does the Bible tell us how long ago the world was created? Is it true that we have historical records going back 7000 years BC?
The earliest historical records that we have, and here I mean written texts, go back to around 3400BC. (This is on con- ventional dating. There are huge problems in ancient chronology and we cannot be certain about dates that far back.) This earliest evidence comes from southern Iraq. Incidentally, we can’t read the text but it looks like writing. It’s not until about 3000BC or later that we can get anything that we can read, either from Iraq or Egypt. If you want to base evidence on things other than written texts, it gets rather difficult.


Is it possible to work out when the world began from the genealogy in Genesis 5?

It’s hard to say. It could represent a continuous unbroken link between the early generations. It certainly reads that way. However, we need to remember that it’s possible that the way the term “father” is used here leaves the question open. I am reluctant to be dogmatic on this issue, but I doubt, if there are gaps, that they are all that great. If we read the text in the natural sense in which it was written, my best guess is that the world is very young.

I know this doesn’t fit with modern evolutionary views, but we need to remember that all the theories relating to evolution are quite conjectural. I know it’s popular at the moment to read the text of Genesis in the light of theistic evolution, but such a reading of the text contradicts some clear statements in Genesis 1. Theistic evolution does not arise naturally out of a fair reading of the text; it’s based more on the fact that evolution is the dominant theory of our age.


Are there any good reasons to believe that the flood in Noah’s day was worldwide?
Yes, there are. Incidentally the flood is mentioned in the writings and traditions of many different cultures and is not only found in the Bible. One thing about the text in Genesis is clear: it tells us that, “The waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered” (Gen. 7:19). On the face of it, this reads as though it were more than a local flood. The prominent alternative explanation is that the text is referring to a local flood in the Tigris/Euphrates’ valley. However, in both the Mesopotamian flood accounts and the biblical narrative the ark ends up in the north. The problem is that floods always take things downstream. Floods never take objects upstream. If this was a normal flood in the Tigris/Euphrates’ region, the ark would have gone downstream. The fact that it landed in the north in a mountain range goes against any local flood theory.