Rethinking Concordism
“Concordism” is the belief that the Genesis creation accounts, and the other texts in the Bible which recount the Genesis stories (e.g., Psalm 104, Job 38), are not only historical but can be reconciled with modern scientific knowledge.
For young-earth creationists (YECs), this means that one attempts to explain the events of the six 24-hour days in scientific terms. For example, on the first day of creation light, day, and night are created. Because the account begins with a formless and empty Earth, the usual YEC description of this is to place a source of light and gravity at the position of the Sun, with exactly the same brightness and gravitational attraction as the Sun, but this is most definitely not the Sun, since it is created on the fourth day of creation. On the second day of creation, God separates the “waters below” from the “waters above.” The “waters above” are usually interpreted to be a canopy of vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere, which produces a beneficial greenhouse effect making the entire planet a lush paradise. This canopy is said to collapse at Noah’s flood, making up a portion of the floodwaters.
For many old-earth creationists (OECs) and some evolutionary creationists (ECs), each day of creation is said to mark a geological epoch, and the events of each day are matched to events in Earth’s history. For example, the light on the first day of creation producing day and night is from the Sun in this scheme, since the Earth formed from the same protoplanetary disk as the Sun 4.5 billion years ago, but the Earth’s atmosphere is thick enough to prevent the Sun itself from being identified. On the fourth day of creation, the creation of the Sun, Moon, and stars are said to be their first appearing. This is attributed either to the transformation of Earth’s atmosphere to be transparent (Hugh Ross’s view), or to the evolution of the first creatures with eyes (evolutionary biologist Andrew Parker’s view in his book The Genesis Enigma).
These are two wildly different ways of approaching the text, but there is a common thread here: explain the events of each day in terms of modern science. In other words, modern science and the Genesis account are in “concord.” For this to work, one has to assume that either the writer of the Genesis creation accounts had these modern scientific details revealed to them by God, or that God simply revealed the sequence of events without revealing these details, only to be discovered millenia later by moderns.
Many Hebrew Bible scholars instead argue that the Genesis creation accounts are characteristic of ancient Near Eastern (ANE) creation accounts in general. In this case, the meanings of the words in the accounts would have corresponded to their understanding of the structure of the world: the Earth would have been a flat plate supported by foundations, with land surrounded by water around and below it. The sky would have been a solid dome structure with the Sun, Moon, and stars fixed on it, holding back water which could be let in for rain (or a worldwide flood). Since this is obviously not in accord with the structure of the universe as we know it today, this view is not concordist. Proponents of this view argue that by adopting a concordist position we are projecting back onto an ancient text meanings which are entirely foreign to the culture from which it was written.
This view tends to emphasize that the writers and editors of the Genesis creation accounts was not even trying to give us an account of the physical origins of the universe, but rather the origins of order, function, and purpose for everything in the cosmos. The creation is a cosmic temple which God builds to dwell in with his creatures. God creates the Garden of Eden and places the first humans there to exercise priestly functions, summoning all of creation to God’s praise by ordering, ruling, and subduing it. Of course, the fall of humanity into sin means that these powers of ordering, ruling, and subduing, instead of extending God’s dominion over creation, result in the exploitation and distortion of creation as humans seek their dominion. Christians believe the Bible is a story of how God worked in human history to eventually become human himself, forgiving sin and working towards the restoration of God’s creation project in the person of Jesus Christ.
There is a tendency in these discussions to stop here and say that since Genesis is talking about one thing from the ANE perspective and that modern science is doing an entirely different thing from another perspective, then we can keep them nice and separate and not try to make everything fit. To a point, this is correct. No one today (well, almost no one) actually believes that the world is flat, that the sky is a solid dome, etc., and we recognize that the message of the Scriptures about the origins of order, function, and purpose for the cosmos are being expressed by the ancient Hebrew culture through a “world-picture” (i.e., what the world is like in a physical sense, as opposed to a “world-view” which tells us why the world is the way it is and what its purpose is) that we now know does not actually describe the physical cosmos in which we live.
But as Christians, and especially as Christians who take both the Scripture and science seriously, we cannot help but seek to find out if and how these different perspectives speak to each other. They are both part of God’s one world, after all. As a scientist, I am not going to be doing astrophysical research any differently from any of my colleagues, regardless of our religious differences. If I did that, I’d be making the same error as the YECs. But when it comes to the questions which are about science but are not scientific, such as those questions about purpose, order, and function, Christians ought to be thinking Biblically.
There is such a thing as philosophy of science, and philosophers of science have many arguments about how and why science works, how the presuppositions of scientists influence the way research is carried out, and the underlying philosophical views of nature which we often take for granted as part of science but are actually heavily influenced by cultural perspectives. Science usually gets along quite well without worrying about these questions, but the fact of the matter is that philosophers of science (or scientists themselves doing philosophy) have made important impacts on scientific discovery by pointing research in certain directions. Scientists still have to do the hard work of testing hypotheses against empirical data, but inspiration often comes from the most unusual of places (one famous example being the discovery of the shape of benzene molecules).
So what would come of a conversation between the Genesis 1 view of the cosmos as a cosmic temple designed for and the discoveries of modern science? I don’t have any idea. But it’s something I’m curious about. For example, how would that affect our view of evolution from a philosophical perspective? Or the vastness of the cosmos? Or the potential for extraterrestrial life? Or the randomness inherent in many parts of nature? There is potential here for lots of fruitful interaction (some of which I have seen already), but I have a feeling that we are only just beginning to let ourselves go of the temptation to read our own views back into the Genesis text, trying to make it into a primitive version of a scientific textbook, and instead let it speak for itself, giving it the chance to weigh in on this topic in its own way. What we may find in the course of the conversation is a new kind of “concordism,” which lets the Bible and science speak their own languages, but nevertheless enables them to speak together to the one world in which we live and move and have our being.