Jesus also spoke of Abel (Matt 23:35) and Noah (Matt 24:37-39) not as myths but as real people. “The fact that Jesus was well acquainted with the actual words of Genesis and knew them to be real history is why it is such a powerful statement.”⁴ I have never wavered in my embrace of a literal interpretation of Genesis. 

“And God said, ‘Let there be light’: And there was light” (Genesis 1:3 KJV)

As a professor teaching at a Christ-first university, it comes as no surprise that some of my students are from conservative, traditional, evangelical denominations. I even have several “PKs” and “MKs” who take their faith seriously, although not all wear their faith on their sleeve.

When I first applied to teach at Palm Beach Atlantic University, I was required to submit a statement that described how I would integrate a Christian Worldview in the classroom. In that statement, I shared that in “whatever discipline I have taught, my goal has always been to create a sense of awe for the creation (general revelation) and for its pinnacle—man—as expressed through the Scriptures (special revelation) through an understanding of a biblical world view, i.e., that each of us carries the image of God within, although marred and broken by sin and in need of redemption.”

I was also required to author a “Christian Theistic Worldview Statement”:

I believe that “God created the heavens and the Earth,” (Genesis 1:1) and that “In the beginning was the Word,” (John 1:1) and that the one, true, triune God existed before matter, energy or time. Truth by its very nature is of God and profitable for “doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness.” (2Timothy 3:16) Teaching with the goal of imparting knowledge with eternal merit as well as helping to shape morals and ethics can only be accomplished by the integration of biblical truths with academic content. God has designed a world that, although marred by sin, is a precise machine revealing its Designer through many disciplines. It is the highest calling of a professor at a Christian university to guide his students along the path to embrace a biblical worldview as their own, for the betterment of their spiritual, academic and social well- being.

This spirit is perpetuated every year when all members of the faculty are required to sign a statement reaffirming the university’s Guiding Principles,¹  among them that we believe “in principle and practice, the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; [and] that man and woman were directly created by God. …”

I am both a scientist and one of those members of the university’s diverse faith community that hails from a conservative, evangelical (Baptistic) belief system. And I am one of those who does wear his faith on his sleeve.

I have always believed in a literal account of creation as written in the Book of Genesis and re-iterated in some 57 other places² by one accounting in both Old and New Testaments, including perhaps the most evocative, found in Exodus 20:11 when in the middle of giving the Ten Commandments to Moses, God inserts this apparent non sequitur: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.”

Jesus Himself had no problem referring to the sixth day of creation or to Adam and Eve as literal people.

“In talking about divorce, Jesus asks: ‘Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? (Matthew 19:4-5) Jesus obviously had read Genesis 1 and 2 because He’s quoting it.  We don’t often think about Jesus reading the Old Testament, but He did.  As a well-taught Jewish boy in the first century, He would have gone through the normal Torah instruction all boys His age did. He knew that Genesis says Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day of creation.  According to Jesus, that sixth day of creation was ‘from the beginning,’ a phrase we hear a number of times in the New Testament.  It refers to the beginning of creation as recorded in Genesis 1.”³

Jesus also spoke of Abel (Matt 23:35) and Noah (Matt 24:37-39) not as myths but as real people. “The fact that Jesus was well acquainted with the actual words of Genesis and knew them to be real history is why it is such a powerful statement.”⁴

I have never wavered in my embrace of a literal interpretation of Genesis. But several things have changed along the way since coming to Christ as a 19-year-old.

The first is the realization that there is far more about the universe that I don’t understand than what I do understand. Writing in “Amazing Truths, How Science and the Bible Agree,” Dr. Michael Guillen explains that “astronomers have concluded that dark energy comprises some 68 percent of the total universe and dark matter about 27 percent. That means only 5 percent of the entire universe is visible to us! That astonishing revelation bears emphasizing. Everything we call scientific knowledge is based on a pittance of what there is to know about our world. Ninety-five percent of it is hidden from us.”⁵

Second, my attitude has undergone a radical shift towards those who do not hold to a literal interpretation of Genesis, among them the folks at Reasons to Believe,⁶ Professor John Lennox, who address this issue in a YouTube video⁷ entitled “Seven Days that Divide the World,” and Visiting Scholar of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University,  William Lane Craig.⁸

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