Last week I summarized the argument of John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate and promised to explain exactly what I take to be problematic about it.  This week, I fulfill my promise.

I would like to begin by playing with an intuition that I think most people share about the creation account in Genesis.  The intuition is this – that the creation account in Genesis is intended to convey something nontrivial and relevant.  By nontrivial, I mean that whatever it is intended to convey isn’t the sort of thing we knew already.  I leave the definition of “relevant to us” vague in the hope that we already have an understanding of the sort of things that are relevant to us.

Many reports are both nontrivial and relevant.  For example, the news that a family member is gravely ill is (usually) nontrivial because we could not have guessed it on our own, and it is relevant because it will (hopefully) change the way we act in the future.  Perhaps we will send flowers, or even go and visit.

Now consider the material origins interpretation of the Genesis creation account, according to which we interpret every instance of “God created x” as a claim that God physically created x.  This account of creation is neither trivial nor irrelevant.  It is not trivial because it provides an answer to the question “How did x come to be?” and it is not irrelevant because the fact that God created the heavens and the earth impacts the way we think about God.  Since the material origins interpretation of the Genesis creation account is relevant and nontrivial, it is compatible with our intuition concerning the intention of the account.

Now, let’s consider Walton’s functional account of the creation narrative.  To reiterate, the functional account of the creation narrative makes the following claims:

-The creation narrative in Genesis one does not in any respect concern the material origin of things in the universe.
-The creation narrative in Genesis tells the story of God proclaiming the functions of things in his “cosmic temple” and then entering into a state of rest in said temple.
-God physically created all the things in the universe, and he did so by an extended process that was in all relevant respects complete before the beginning of this proclamatory process.

According to Walton, every material thing that could be said to have existed at the end of the creation account on a material origins interpretation already existed before the beginning of the creation account.  Birds already existed at the time that God “created” birds; similarly, humans already existed at the time that God “created” humans.  In fact, it is difficult to see how, on Walton’s view, there could be any material difference between the state of affairs at the beginning of the creation narrative and that at the end.  Walton acknowledges this.  So, what exactly was different after the creation account, according to Walton?  The difference was that things in the universe had been assigned their functions in God’s greater plan and God had assumed his rest in his cosmic temple.

But what is the significance of assigning objects and beings their functions?  Structure and function are so intimately related that it cannot be that objects like the sun and moon had been materially created but were not performing their functions in the cosmos until those functions were proclaimed over them.  It is hard to see how the whole cosmos could have existed materially in the way Walton suggests it did before the creation narrative without each part of it already performing the function that God would later proclaim over it.  To see what I mean, try to imagine a complete physical replicate of the atmosphere, including all the typical weather patterns, that would not function to provide water to crops (watering crops is the function Walton assigns to the weather).  It seems that if we believe that the atmosphere existed before the creation account, and crops existed before the creation account, then the function of the atmosphere was already being carried out before the creation account.  The same reasoning can be applied to every entity over which God proclaims a function on Walton’s account.

Again, what is the significance of assigning objects and beings their functions?  It seems like we can’t look to any objective significance; from the outside, the universe looked exactly the same before Walton’s Genesis one as it did after.  So we are left with seeking some sort of subjective significance.  Perhaps the significance of God’s functional proclamations is that they highlight the ways in which the cosmos was designed with man in mind (there are other possibilities here, but none that are stronger than this one).  When God proclaims the function of the weather, then, perhaps we are meant to say “Look how the function of the weather is conducive to human flourishing!  Praise God!”  If this in the impact of the functional creation account, we can hardly deny its relevance; it inspires in us thankfulness and praise.

Yet at the same time, we remain unsatisfied.  We might wonder why we needed this reminder of the function of the weather in the first place.  Indeed, assuming that we know a) how the weather functions (which everyone knows) and b) that God materially created everything (which Walton takes for granted), we know that God is responsible for how the weather functions.  God’s weather-proclamation doesn’t tell us anything new.  In other words, God’s weather-proclamation, along with all of God’s other function-proclamations, is trivial.

This is my criticism of Walton’s functional account of creation: that it trivializes Genesis one to such an extent that it no longer communicates to us anything we didn’t already know.  As I already pointed out, I anticipate that such triviality is incompatible with most people’s intuition concerning the type of information Genesis one should communicate.  Perhaps some will be content with a vacuous Genesis, a Genesis that leaves us asking “So what?”.  Perhaps their easily satisfied disposition is commendable.  But I think Genesis has a story to tell, and not just any story – a story we didn’t already know.

In conclusion, I’d like to lay out the factors that I believe have driven Walton to such a strange and unsatisfying view.  First of all, I believe he has been more than a little impacted by the convincing nature of the evidence that the universe, the earth, and the organism called man are very, very old and arrived at their present conditions through a combination of gradual processes.  This is thoroughly laudable.  Second, Walton believes strongly that the word “day” in Genesis one designates a period of exactly twenty-four hours.  Third, I think Walton is overly committed to a historical reading of the creation account, in which the creation account is supposed to be intended to present the most accurate possible facts about the details of the creation process.  Now Walton sees a problem, namely that the Genesis account asserts that the cosmos was materially created in six days and planetary science suggests that it was created over the course of billions of years.  Something, he realizes, has to go.  Either our planetary science, or our literal reading of Genesis, or our six-day material creation.  Not wanting to give up the science or the literal reading for practical reasons of credibility, he chooses the third.  But now he has a further problem.  He can’t deny the six-day material creation by giving up his literal reading.  So he cleverly changes the definition of “create” so that he can be both literal and scientific.

Of course, Walton vigorously and repeatedly denies that this is his tactic.  He claims to have been motivated entirely by the Hebrew text.  It is left up to the reader to decide whose explanation for the genesis of Walton’s theory is more plausible.

P.S.  Walton argues that the existence of a thing depends on its functional significance.  For example, he says, Solomon’s temple did not properly exist until God came and dwelt in it and it became his habitation.  So one might argue that Walton is justified in saying that God was creating the universe by assigning the material objects their functions.  I have two objections to make here.

First, it is not the case that we judge the existence of objects in terms of their functional significance.  When I come across a pebble in the park, I am very certain that it exists, but at the same time I really can’t imagine what function it could be performing.  It is not even the case in terms of temples, as Walton suggests.  As evidence, I present the Athenian Parthenon, which any reasonable person would call a temple.  The parthenon has no priests.  It has no worshippers.  In fact, it is the product of a now completely nonexistent religion.  But it remains a temple in virtue of the fact that it was built to be a place of worship.  Likewise, Solomon’s temple was a temple as soon as it was built.  That is why we have license to talk about building the temple.  If a temple were merely a functional arrangement, it would be impossible to build a temple.

Second, as we have already seen, everything in the cosmos must have behaved (read: functioned) in exactly the same way before Walton’s Genesis one as it did after.  Things come into being functionally as soon as they come into being materially.  So even on a functional account of existence, the existence of every material thing began at the same time as its material creation, and it is not accurate to say that the cosmos came into existence in a period of 144 hours.