Although most Christians believe there is only one biblical account of the creation of the earth, there are actually two and they differ to an irreconcilable extent. Most people see the first (Genesis 1:1-2:4a) as a broad account of creation, with the second (Genesis 2:4b-2:20) as a more detailed story of the creation of man, but Leon R. Kass (
The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis) says that the second creation story departs from the first not only in content but also in tone, mood and orientation. He emphasises the independence of each story from the other and says we must scrupulously avoid reading into the second story any facts or notions taken from the first, and vice versa.
That leaves us with two biblical creation stories that are so different that, at most, only one can be true. The first story begins with the creation of daylight on the first day, although the sun is not created until the fourth day. The creation of a very unscientific 'firmament' takes a whole day, and it separates the waters above from the waters below. The sun, moon and stars are lights set into the firmament above the earth, with the role of the sun being to rule the day and that of the moon to rule the night. It seems that man and all living creatures were created just as they are today. The contribution of the second creation story to modern Christian thinking is mainly to place creation at the beginning of the biblical genealogies, or around four thousand BCE.
Science says that, far from being tiny lights placed in earth's 'firmament' in the recent past, the stars are billions of years older than the earth and are massive, hot bodies so far away from earth that the distances can only be measured in the number of years it would take for light to travel from them - light years. Not only is the sun older than earth, it is the centre of our solar system, not the earth.
Although the Bible is actually silent on the creation of the earth itself, which appears to be pre-existing in both creation stories, science says that it was created from the debris of an exploding supernova star in our celestial neighbourhood. A small part of that debris, a hot gas consisting of heavy elements, was captured in orbit around the sun and eventually coalesced into the earth and the other planets.
The early Church Father, Origen had this to say (
On First Principles, 3.1.1) about the biblical account:
"Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, "planted a paradise eastward in Eden", and set in it a visible and palpable "tree of life", of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life: and again that one could partake of "good and evil" by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events."