There were gods of light and darkness, rivers and vegetation, animals and fertility. Everywhere the ancients turned there were divinities to be taken into account, petitioned, appeased, pacified, solicited, avoided. For ancient Jewish faith, this divinized nature posed a fundamental religious problem. In addition, pharaohs, kings, and heroes were often seen as sons of gods, or at least as special mediators between the divine and human spheres. The greatness and vaunted power and glory of the successive waves of empires that impinged on or conquered Israel Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia posed an analogous problem of idolatry in the human sphere.
In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-a-vis polytheism, syncretism, and idolatry. Each day of creation tackles two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day and declares that these are not gods at all, but creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third.
Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order. On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On the second day, the gods of sky and sea.
On the third day, earth gods and gods of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon, and star gods. The fifth and sixth days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity—while at the same time all human beings, from the greatest to the least not just pharaohs, kings, and heroes are granted a divine likeness and mediation. On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed.
These, O Israel, are no gods at all—even the great gods and rulers of conquering superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely habitation.
The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not divine. We are then given a further clue concerning the polemical design of the passage when the final verse a concludes: "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
Now to polytheist and monotheist alike the word generations at this point would immediately call one thing to mind. If we should ask how these various divinities were related to one another in the pantheons of the day, the most common answer would be that they were related as members of a family tree. We would be given a genealogy, as in Hesiod's Theogony, where the great tangle of Greek gods and goddesses were sorted out by generations. Ouranos begat Kronos; Kronos begat Zeus. The Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians all had their "generations of the gods.
Other cosmologies operated, essentially, on an analogy with procreation. A cosmic egg is produced and hatches. A cosmic womb gives birth. Or a god and goddess mate and beget further gods and goddesses. In the priestly account a radical shift has taken place from the imagery of procreation to that of creation , from a genealogy of the gods to a genesis of nature.
When Hesiod entitled his monumental effort at systematizing the complicated web of relationships between the many Greek gods and goddesses a theogony, he was reflecting the fundamental character of such cosmologies. They are theogonies birth of the gods and theo-biographies as well.
They depict the origin, life, and times of the various divinities. And they interpret "nature" in terms of these divine relationships. Procreative, family, social, and political relationships are used to describe the natural order, understood as divine beings and powers. Thus, if there is any sense in which the "creation model" of Genesis stands over against evolutionary models of natural and human history, it is in the sense that it self-consciously and decisively rejects any evolution of cosmic forces presented in terms of an evolution of the gods.
For that, by and large, was what polytheistic cosmologies were: the evolution of natural phenomena read as the emergence of new species of divinity. And their interaction with one another, their ecology, was read as the interaction within and between various families, clans, and armies of gods.
The fundamental question at stake, then, could not have been the scientific question of how things achieved their present form and by what processes nor even the historical question about time periods and chronological order. The issue was idolatry, not science; syncretism, not natural history; theology, not chronology; affirmation of faith in one transcendent God, not empirical or speculative theories of origin.
Attempting to be loyal to the Bible by turning the creation accounts into a kind of science or history is like trying to be loyal to the teachings of Jesus by arguing that his parables are actual historical events and only reliable and trustworthy when taken literally as such. Even among interpreters who do not identify with the literalism of the creationists, one often finds a sense of relief expressed in noting that the sequence of days in Genesis 1 is relatively "modern," and offers a rough approximation to contemporary reconstructions of the evolution of matter and life.
Actually, however, its closest approximation in this regard is to the Babylonian "Genesis," the Enuma elish. This epic mythology exalts Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, as the supreme divinity in the Mesopotamian pantheon. Marduk is extolled for rescuing the cosmos from the threat of the goddess of the watery abyss, Tiamat, out of whose womb the first gods had come.
He then established, out of the two halves of the slain Tiamat, heaven and earth; sun, moon, and stars; vegetation; animals and fish; human beings. It is this order, and this cosmology, that Genesis 1 most directly approximates. It provides a Jewish cosmology to preface the story of Adam and Eve, on a scale equally encompassing to that of other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, yet without the polytheistic mythological dramatics.
The attempt, then, to harmonize Genesis with modern science by reading the days of creation as referring to large epochs of time, rather than literal days, is no more relevant to the issues the Priestly writer was addressing than the literalist interpretation.
At best the days, read as epochs, provide a very rough approximation to recent scientific scenarios. The entire progression actually begins, not with a burst of light, but with watery chaos—as in the Babylonian epic—which hardly corresponds to any modern understanding of origins.
The "formless earth" is also depicted as existing before the light of day one and the sun, moon, and stars of day four. Vegetation is created before the sun, moon, and stars, on the third day, and surely would have wilted awaiting the next epoch. Still, no matter how close the approximations to modem natural histories might be, the entire line of argument is a lapse into a form of literalism, with its assumption that this account is in some way comparable to a scientific, historical one.
If there is a "modern" appearance to the account, it is not because it anticipates modem scientific constructions by presenting a similar sketch of a scientific order but because it anticipates them by preparing the way for them, in purging the cosmic order of all gods and goddesses.
In Genesis the natural order, for the first time, becomes natural rather than supernatural. Nature has been demythologized and de-divinized. What was formerly divine, or a divine region, is now declared to be "creature. Nor could science and natural history become possibilities until nature was thoroughly demythologized. One may have half-way houses, such as astrology and alchemy, but only when nature is no longer a divine sphere can it be probed and studied and organized without fear of trespass or reprisal.
This does not mean that Genesis secularizes or desacrilizes nature; nature is still sacred by virtue of having been created by God, declared to be good, and placed under ultimate divine sovereignty. What it does mean is that Genesis 1 clears the cosmic stage of its mythical scenes and polytheistic dramas, making way for different scenes and dramas, both monotheistic and naturalistic. A related area of confusion is the supposition that the numbering of days is to be understood in an arithmetical sense, whether as literal days or as epochs.
This is certainly the way in which numbers are used in science, history, and mathematics—indeed, in almost all areas of modern life. But the use of numbers in ancient religious texts was often numerological rather than numerical. That is, their symbolic value, not their secular value as counters, was the basis and purpose for their use. The conversion of numerology to arithmetic was essential for the rise of modern science, historiography, and mathematics.
Numbers had to be neutralized, secularized, and completely stripped of any symbolic suggestion in order to be utilized. The principal surviving exception to this is the negative symbolism attached to the number 13, which still holds a strange power over Fridays, and over the listing of floors in hotels and high rises. The creationists, in their literal treatment of the six days of creation, are substituting a modern, arithmetical reading for the original symbolic one.
They are therefore offering, unwittingly, a secular rather than religious interpretation. And in the process, they lose the symbolic associations and meanings of the text while needlessly placing it in conflict with scientific and historical readings of origins. One of the religious considerations involved in numbering is to make certain that any schema used works out numerologically—that it uses, and adds up to, the right numbers symbolically.
An obvious concern of the Priestly account is to correlate the theme of the divine work in creation with the six days of work and seventh day of rest in the Jewish week. If the Hebrews had had a five-day or seven-day work week, the account would have read differently.
Seven was a basic unit of time among West Semitic peoples, and the Sabbath-day was well defined and established by this period. It was important, then, to use a schema of seven days, and to have the work of creation completed on the sixth day.
The word "ceases" is shabat , a cognate of the term shabbat, sabbath. The "creation model" being used here is in no sense a scientific model, but a liturgical-calendrical model based on the Jewish week and observance of sabbath. Its motivation is religious, not scientific: to give ultimate grounding to the meaning of human work and creation, and to the religious significance of the sabbath observance. The seven-day structure is also being used for another, not unrelated, reason.
The number 7 has the numerological meaning of wholeness, plenitude, completeness. This symbolism is derived, in part, from the combination of the three major zones of the cosmos as seen vertically heaven, earth, underworld and the four quarters and directions of the cosmos as seen horizontally.
Both the numbers 3 and 4 in themselves often function as symbols of totality, for these and other reasons. But what would be more "total" would be to combine the vertical and horizontal planes. Thus the number 7 adding 3 and 4 and the number 12 multiplying them are recurrent biblical symbols of fullness and perfection: 7 golden candlesticks, 7 spirits, 7 words of praise, 7 churches, the 7th year, the 49th year, the 70 elders, forgiveness 70 times 7, and so forth.
When Joshua's army took the city of Jericho, they are said to have circumambulated the walls once a day for the first 6 days, and 7 times on the 7th day, preceded by 7 priests blowing 7 trumpets; whereupon the walls collapsed and the city was completely taken. Even Leviathan, the dread dragon of the abyss, was represented in Canaanite myth as having 7 heads—the "complete" monster. The symbolic meaning of the number 7, and of the 7 days, also harks back to the lunar calendar which, in Mesopotamia, had quite early been divided into 4 phases of the moon, of 7 days each, followed beginning with the 28th day by the 3-day disappearance of the moon—thus equally 30 days.
The Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma elish —which itself consists of 7 tablets—has the god Marduk appointing the moon to four 7-day periods: "Thou shalt have luminous horns to signify six days, on the seventh day reaching a half-crown" Pritchard, p.
On the seventh day of these lunar weeks one was counseled to abstain from a variety of ordinary activities because of the dangers involved during the critical transitions of the lunar progression.
According to one ritual text, seers were not to give oracles, physicians to administer to the sick, or the king to change clothing, ride in a chariot, hold court, eat cooked meat, or offer sacrifices Barton, p. The day of the full moon was known as shapattu , which has a probable relation to the Hebrew term for sabbath, shabbat , and shabat, "stop working. In the Hebrew tradition the seventh day, while associated with cessation of normal activity, is separated from the lunar week and looked upon more positively as a day of blessing, celebration, and rest.
This day does not suggest an atmosphere of anxiety or transition, but of relaxation and completion. Such positive meanings are now being applied by the author of Genesis 1 to a celebration of the whole of creation and of the parenthesis of sabbath rest. The liturgically repeated phrase "And God saw that it was good," which appears after each day of creation, and the final capping phrase "And behold it was very good," are paralleled and underlined by being placed in a structure that is climaxed by a seventh day.
The Priestly account also makes use of the symbolism of the corresponding number for wholeness and totality: The six days of creation are actually two sets of three days each, with two types of phenomena assigned to each day. The second set of days fills in the details provided by the backdrop of the first set of days. The light and darkness of day one are populated by the greater and lesser lights of day four; the firmament and waters of day two are populated by the birds and fish of day five; and the earth and vegetation of day three are populated by the land animals and humans of day six.
In this manner all the major regions of the cosmos are covered in six days, with two zones included each day, equalling Thus the symbolism of completion and fulfillment is associated with the work of creation as well as the rest from it on the seventh day.
The totality of nature is created by God, is good, and is to be celebrated both daily and in special acts of worship and praise on the sabbath day. Uses of the numerology of 12, like 7, abound throughout the Bible: the 12 tribes of Israel, as well as the 12 tribes of Ishmael, the 12 districts of Solomon, and Jesus' selection of 12 disciples, along with a miscellany of references to 12 pillars, 12 springs, 12 precious stones, 12 gates, 12 fruits, 12 pearls, and so forth.
We, of course, continue the biblical and ancient Near Eastern division of the day and night into 12 hours and the year into 12 months. And the grouping of stars into 12 constellations and signs of the zodiac into 12 periods also derives from ancient Mesopotamia, along with the belief that the body was composed of 12 parts or regions.
Though in the modern world numbers have become almost completely secularized, in antiquity they could function as significant vehicles of meaning and power. It was important to associate the right numbers with one's life and activity and to avoid the wrong numbers.
To do so was to surround and fill one's existence with the positive meanings and powers which numbers such as 3, 4, 7 and 12 conveyed. In this way one gave religious significance to life and placed one's existence in harmony with the divine order of the cosmos.
By aligning and synchronizing the microcosm of one's individual and family life and the mesocosm of one's society and state with the macrocosm itself, life was tuned to the larger rhythms of this sacred order. For us the overriding consideration in the use of numbers is their secular value in arithmetic. We must therefore have numbers that are completely devoid of all symbolic associations.
Numbers such as 7 and 12 do not make our calculators or computers function any better, nor does the number 13 make them any less efficient. Our numbers are uniform, value-neutral-meaningless and powerless.
What is critical to modern consciousness is having the right numbers in the sense of having the right figures and right count. This sense, of course, was also present in the ancient world: in commerce, in construction, in military affairs, in taxation. But there was also a higher, symbolic use of numbers. And in a religious context, it was more important to have the right numbers in a sacred rather than profane sense. While we give the highest value, and nearly exclusive value, to numbers as carriers of "facts," in religious texts and rituals the highest value was given to numbers as carriers of ultimate truth and reality.
Those, therefore, who would attempt to impose a literal reading of numbers upon Genesis, as if the sequence of days were of the same order as counting sheep or merchandise or money, are offering a modern, secular interpretation of a sacred text—in the name of religion.
And, as if this were not distortion enough, they proceed to place this secular reading of origins in competition with other secular readings and secular literatures: scientific, historical, mathematical, technological. Extended footnotes are appended to the biblical texts on such extraneous subjects as the second law of thermodynamics, radiometric dating, paleontology, sedimentation, hydrology, and so forth.
These are hardly the issues with which Genesis is concerning itself, or is exercised over. The attempt to do a literal reading of Genesis cannot, in fact, be consistently pursued. And it is not, in actual practice. Creationists are literalists up to a point, but when their particular line of interpretation runs into an insurmountable difficulty they take that particular item "metaphorically," or concoct some fanciful explanation which is far more symbolic than the interpretation they are attempting to avoid.
The rule of thumb seems to be to take everything as literally as possible: give in only as a last resort. Thus the assumption is that religious truth equals literal meaning, when in most contexts the opposite is the case: religious truth equals symbolic meaning. The first questions in interpreting the text are never clearly asked: What kind of literature and linguistic usage is involved, what did the author intend, and what issues are being addressed?
In the case of the Priestly account, a literal reading is, at several critical points, impossible, contradictory, or simply unwanted. For instance, the imagery of days is used in the main body of the text, but the account concludes with the very different imagery of generations. The same word is used again in Genesis to apply to the genealogy of Adam, and these generations are calculated as being in the neighborhood of years per generation—obviously not the equivalent of single days.
Clearly both the term days and the term generations cannot be taken literally. If one moves on to the Yahwist account in Genesis b, the literalist encounters greater problems. If the two creation accounts are interpreted chronologically, they hardly agree in details or sequences. In Genesis 1 the order given is vegetation day three ; sun, moon, and stars day four ; birds and fish day five ; land animals first half of day six.
In Genesis 2 the order is quite different. Sun, moon, and stars are already presupposed, and therefore are before vegetation rather than after: "when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up.
Adam is created also before any of the animals, rather than after as in Genesis 1. Eve, on the other hand, is created after vegetation and animals, not at the same time as Adam, as in Genesis 1.
One would think that these glaring differences would be a sufficient indication that literal historical sequences could not be the original concern or intent. The treatment of water in the two accounts is also quite different. As the creature that occupies the shell outgrows one chamber, it builds another, larger chamber next to it, creating a growing spiral pattern. Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well.
Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection.
Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.
Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community.
In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants and, of course, fossils do not breed. Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.
Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R.
Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.
Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx , which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs.
A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. An amazing fossil creature from million years ago named Tiktaalik embodies the predicted and long-sought transition of certain fishes to life on land. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition.
Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominins not all of them our ancestors fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.
Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds—it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two.
These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record. Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.
Living things have fantastically intricate features—at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution. In theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there.
By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures. Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved.
The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution—what good is half an eye?
Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently. Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different.
They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.
As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap—a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor.
The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design.
He makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems. Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work.
The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis , the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells. The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution.
The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California, San Diego.
So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce.
The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life. Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences.
Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally.
Only methodological naturalism can determine how all life came to be. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions experimentally.
Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover—their definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the existing framework of physics.
In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?
Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones?
Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion—that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.
Some theories are so broad or vague that they predict just about anything. They can't be refuted, even in principle. Everything is consistent with them, even apparent contradictions and contraries! Other theories allow definite predictions to be made from them; they can, in principle, be refuted.
They can be tested by experience and observation. A religious cosmology, such as that offered in Genesis and accepted as a literal account of the origin of the universe by fundamentalist Jews and Christians, is of the former type of theory. No scientific theory is ever airtight. A cosmology held by a religious group may be scientific, however. For example, if a theory says that the world was created in B.
But if, for example, the ad hoc hypothesis is made that God created the world in B. If the age or dating techniques of fossil evidence is disputed, but considered relevant to the truth of the religious theory and is prejudged to be consistent with the theory, then the theory is a metaphysical one. If the religious cosmologist denies that the earth is billions of years old on the grounds that scientific tests prove the earth is very young, rather than very old, then the burden of proof is on the religious cosmologist to demonstrate that the standard scientific methods and techniques of dating fossils, etc.
Otherwise, no reasonable person should consider such an unsupported claim which would require us to believe that the entire scientific community is in error. The unscientific nature of pseudoscientific religious cosmologists is evident not just in their overriding concern to make facts fit a preconceived theory. This is a human tendency which affects scientists, too.
To the pseudoscientific mind, truth is not something which must be constantly open to question, refinement, and, possibly, rejection. To the pseudoscientific mind, truth seems to be something that is considered to be given only to special people who are entrusted to keep and guard it forever.
There are many believers in a religious cosmology such as that given in Genesis who do not claim that their beliefs are scientific. They do not believe that the Bible is to be taken as a science text.
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