# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

70 The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation.

a receding of the waters, which had flooded the dry land, into the seas, and as a reappearance of the heavenly bodies that had for a time been darkened. An interpretation that, from the present standpoint of exegesis, could hardly still meet with approval. If, then, one does not wish to give up the biblical history of creation — whether by twisting the works of the first four days of creation into the opposite of a creation, or by explaining the account of them as the erroneous notion of an ancient sage of limited insight into the nature of things, and reducing the whole work of creation of the six days to a mere renewal of plants and animals — then one must abandon the attempt to place the creation and destruction of the fossil organisms brought to light by geognosy before the six days' work.

"Just as little, however, can the geological periods, with their plant and animal formations, be forced into the biblical days of creation." For, in the first place, "the six days of creation are, according to the biblical account, real days, since they are formed not only by the alternation of light and darkness, of day and night, but are also counted according to the recurrence of evening and morning." "This alternation could of course occur for the earth even without the sun, in the first three days of creation, if God, when He separated the light from the darkness, had also separated it spatially from the dark body of the earth and concentrated it at some place in space outside or above it, from where its shining fell upon the earth — that the days of creation, as the biblical text requires, are real days must also be assumed in keeping with the very concept of creation. For creation is a work of divine omnipotence, not a process taking place according to the forces and laws of the natural order that operate within the created world and condition and regulate its preservation. What, in the natural course of things, requires long periods of time for its gradual formation and development, the creative omnipotence of God can bring forth in a single moment. Almighty God had no need of years, still less of centuries or millennia, in order to create light out of darkness, to form the atmosphere, to divide land and water upon the earth, and to make grass and herbs, shrubs and trees, grow. He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast. Ps. 33:9." Furthermore, "according to the Bible, the plants were created on the third day, the water animals and birds on the fifth, and the land animals on the sixth day; according to the tenets of geology, animals appear just as early as plants. The Bible knows only of a single creation of plants and animals, whereas geology, by contrast, demands repeated creations of plants and animals, occurring many times over. Thus contradiction is piled upon contradiction, and the geological theories of periods of creation and of repeated creations stand in exclusive opposition to the biblical history of creation. The opinion that, by one or another of the ways discussed, a reconciliation between the Bible and geology