The Christian Old Testament tells beautiful stories. It is poetic, rich in morals, and well-written. The beginning of the world, as described by Genesis 1, creates a haze whereby from nothing, God creates something.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” the Bible reads. “On the first day, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light, ‘day’ and the darkness, he called ‘night.’”
According to the BBC, Earth was formed by accretion (the coming together of matter due to gravitational force to form larger bodies) from a solar nebula creating an incredibly hot mass, covered in toxic volcanic gases. Though the Bible does not acknowledge the empirical creation of the world, and the /BBC/ does not acknowledge the Biblical explanation, the two are not mutually exclusive.
Before being pummeled by meteor impacts and cooling down enough to form a crust, the Earth did look like the formless, empty, and dark Earth described in the Bible. According to some scientists, however, the Bible’s later claims that God made everything from birds, the moon, and trees—creationism—are false. But the Bible is not a scientific paper, written to stake claims about the world and our surroundings. Rather, it is a book—a very old book—compiled of historical texts and sources from different authors and civilizations.
“The Bible speaks a language that’s over 2,000 years old [and] when some people try reading it as if it scientific fact, you start to distort what is actually meant,” my brother, Alex Nevitt, a seminarian at the Gregorian University in Rome, explained. “You need to speak theology to understand what’s written in the Bible.”
I, like many others, do not speak theology. I am a scientist and an atheist. Though my mother is agnostic, my father is an extremely devout and practicing Catholic and my brother is studying to become a priest. Admittedly, dinner is weird.
“I don’t believe in creationism, I don’t think it’s a truth,” my brother continued. “That is something that’s happened in modern times where the Bible has been read as if it is speaking in scientific language [….] However, the Bible doesn’t speak that way.”
When I was younger, I had a hard time reconciling the Bible with my education because all stories and explanations were always inexplicably tied to God, and my public school never mentioned Him. But my devout father always tried to keep Him in my heart.
“I was brought up in the faith since I was a baby,” my father, Bill Nevitt, explained. “I went to Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school […] and finished and graduated from a Catholic college.”