15 REASONS TO TAKE GENESIS AS HISTORY
By D. Batten and J. Sarfati
Creation Ministries International. 32 pages. £1.25. ISBN 0-94990-632-8
Available from http://www.creationontheweb.com or 0845 680 0264.
The world was created in six 24-hour days and the flood covered the whole globe, producing most of the fossils, the authors, Australian scientists, maintain, for ‘abandoning the historicity of Genesis leads to heresy and apostasy’.
Their arguments, presented briefly, range from Jesus’s attitude to Scripture, through Hebrew grammar to a coherent worldview, emphasising the negative impact of naturalism and evolutionary theories on Christianity. The authors claim that the sequence of days in Numbers 7.10-84 shows that the creation days are ordinary days: ‘the first day’, etc., as the Israelites would have understood. However, Genesis 1 has ‘a first day’ etc. until ‘the sixth day’ and ‘the seventh day’, the Sabbath, which apparently continues, and does not imply each day followed immediately, in a week. To support reading Genesis 1 as a literal account, Batten and Sarfati state, ‘Hebrew uses special grammatical structures’ for historical narrative, failing to observe that they are used in every form of narrative, including dreams and parables. The authors’ literalism fails to recognise the metaphoric language of the text.
