Christianity's 7 Day Creation Myth

The Christian creation story can be found in the book of Genesis in the Bible. The story describes the creation of light and darkness, the Earth, plants and animals, and finally, of humankind. This all occurs in 6 days, and on the 7th, the all-powerful creator had a rest day (a big hint that this is a mythological story). By counting Kings and generations of ancestors in the Bible, it can be calculated that creation occurred approximately 4,004 years ago. In the modern world, it is accepted by most Christians and Jews that the story is mythical and should be taken simply as a story that demonstrates that God is all-powerful and that it was written by human beings, and not dictated by God. But many fundamentalist Christians still argue that the Universe really was created as described in Genesis (such people are called Creationists).

The difficulties with the story are insurmountable. The evidence from archaeology, palaeontology, human history, the fossil record, evolutionary biology, geology and physics all show us very clearly that the Earth, the Solar System and the rest of the Universe was created billions of years ago and not at all in accordance with the events listed in Genesis1. Not only that, but there are two Genesis creation stories - one at Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 and another in Genesis 2:4-25. Although they are similar to each other in scale, they manage to contradict each other in nearly all of their details. Some have attempted to extend what is meant by "a day" in the story to mean 1,000 years or even a billion years in order to harmonize the Genesis account with scientific evidence, but even then the stories still contradict reality in the sequence of events they describe and in the logic they use. The Genesis creation story has been used as an excuse to suppress and punish scientists who have contradicted it throughout the Christian era, and as such, has been an instrument in dementing human understanding of the world.

1. The Two Contradictory Genesis Creation Stories 2

[ + An Introduction to Genesis + ]

Genesis contains a creation story of the Earth and the first 2 people, Adam and Eve, and their incestuous (and murderous) family. It describes a version of the ancient Flood story where God, or the Gods, flood the Earth or at least a large portion of it, drowning all living creatures including all animals, men, women, children, infants, but saving Noah and his immediate family. Another period of incestuous family relations afterwards ensues. Genesis then tells the story of the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, each of which acted sometimes as immoral tyrant and sometimes as holy spokesperson. They all end up, according to these stories, in Egypt, although historical evidence is clear that most Hebrews continued to live in their homeland. Genesis was written and edited by various authors from between the 10th and 6th century BCE, and some scholars believe it wasn't completely written until as late as the 2nd century BCE3.

"Bereishit / Genesis" by Vexen Crabtree (2012)

The two creation stories in Genesis were written by different people, each retelling Mesopotamian myth from a slightly different point of view as to what "god" was, and each features different elements, different symbolism and uses a different writing style. The first story (Genesis 1:1 to 2:3) says that "the gods" were responsible, and, uses that phrase (Elohim) 34 times4. The second story (Genesis 2:4-25) has a specific God in mind and names it as YHVH 20 times, although 3 times it does too name the creators as Elohim, "the gods". "YHVH is the tribal God of ancient Israel; and it is said in this second narrative that this god confers with two others (Genesis 3:22) about the danger of mankind acquiring immortality"4.

The order of creation is different in each story, and are in both cases written into the plot, so that it makes no sense to imagine that one story is told in a haphazard sequence - both tie the order of creation to the narrative, therefore, it is necessary that one (or both) arrangements were simply invented by someone who didn't know the true progression of events.

OrderElohim VersionYHVH Version
1Water (Gen. 1:6)Land (Gen. 2:4)
2Land (1:9)Water (2:5-6)
3Vegetation (1:11-12)Male man only (2:7)
4Animals (1:20-25)Vegetation (2:8)
5Mankind (male and female) (1:26-27)Animals (2:19-20)
6Woman (2:21-22)

2. How Long is Each of the 7 "Days"?

Biblical literalists for over a thousand years argued, violently and aggressively, that the 7-day creation story of Genesis was indeed conducted in 6 periods of 24-hrs plus a rest day. The scientific evidence accumulated decade by decade against this view, from biology, ecology, genetics, biogeography, evolution, the fossil record and many other data sources, but the church fought on, excommunicating advocates of science, punishing them, torturing them, ejecting them from positions of influence wherever possible, and in all ways possible, trying its best to retard the advancement of knowledge5.

Because of the problems with a 7-day creation, many Christians have been convinced that a way out exists in Psalm 90:4, which reveals that for God "a thousand years in Thy sight are like yesterday". Therefore Genesis' creation account took part over 6000 years, not 6 days. However the Psalms were written hundreds of years apart from Genesis under different cultural auspices, and therefore the author of Psalms cannot tell us what the author of Genesis really meant. Therefore, a day means a day. Or if it means something else, the author(s) of the Psalms wouldn't have known what, and, they probably were not talking about the "days" of Genesis anyway. The link is only tenuous.

Some modern liberal Christians try to harmonize Genesis and history by saying that the "days" represent geological eras or astronomical periods of billions of years. Although no historical culture had a concept of such long periods of time so it is a rather dubious piece of exegesis to say that the authors of Genesis meant it like that. Many Christians believe that the last day of Creation is "the present", i.e., the period of time after creation during which God is "resting". So this clearly means that a "day" is not a simple, literal, or historical, period of time with a set length. It seems that it is impossible to find a Biblical basis to make the 7-day creation make any literal sense - it instead has to be subjectively cultural and symbolic.

The historian William Draper summarizes some of the new problems with the idea of the 7-day creation being drawn out over indefinite periods of "day": "The six ages, with their six special creations, could no longer be maintained, when it was discovered that species, slowly emerged in one age, reached a culmination in a second, and gradually died out in a third: this overlapping from age to age would not only have demanded creations, but re-creations also"6. Draper doesn't mention other arguments against this view - the facts of geology, tectonics, biology, ecology and many other sciences have built up an insurmountable body of evidence that the creation of the Earth does not fit at all into the series of events listed in Genesis. The Christian creation story is simply a fable, invented by a people with no knowledge, and with no insight into God's knowledge, of how the Earth was made.

3. Chronological Mistakes

Evolution and the
Myths of Creationism

Aside from the period meant by a "day", there are problems with the order in which the Genesis account says things were created. The evidence is insurmountable that the sciences of astronomy, geology, physics, evolutionary biology and genetics all contradict the sequence of events found in Genesis 1:1-2:3.

The table below highlights some of the more important astronomical and paleontological events pertinent to our current study.

EventYears ago
Big Bang15,000 million
Birth of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon4600 million
Emergence of Life (Pre-cellular Life)3800 million
Inorganic Release of Trace Amount of Oxygen3700 million
Origin of Photo-synthetic Bacteria3200 million
Advent of Oxygen-rich Atmosphere2000 million
Development of Sexual Reproduction1100 million
Spread of Jawless Fishes505 million
First Amphibians408 million
First Reptiles360 million
First Dinosaurs and Mammal-like Reptiles; Origin of Mammals248 million
First Birds213 million
Australopithecus4 million
Homo Habilis2.2 million
Homo Erectus1.5 million
Homo Sapiens200 thousand
Modern Humans35 thousand

On the other hand, if we now construct a table on the Creation of the Universe and of life on Earth, based on Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 and the Liberal Interpretation thereof, then it would display the following results:

Creation of Day and Night"Day" 1
Creation of Heaven"Day" 2
Creation of the Earth, the Seas, and the Plants"Day" 3
Creation of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars"Day" 4
Creation of Fishes and Birds [Beginning of Sexual Reproduction]"Day" 5
Creation of Land Animals (Cattle, Insects, Reptiles, Man)"Day" 6
No Further Emergence of Life Forms on Earth"Day" 7

"Is a Liberal Interpretation of the Creation Story Compatible with Science?" by Eugene Y. C. Ho.

Several illogical and impossible contradictions occur when trying to fit Genesis' separation of creation into 7 periods no matter how long you say those periods are. In particular I will examine the problems arising from the time at which the Sun was created.

4. The Creation of the Sun

According to the writers of Genesis, God created the Sun half way through the creation week. They also explain what God did during the first "days". But without a sun, there were no actual days. Without a sun to rotate around there were no "mornings" or changes in the time of day. Likewise, without natural sunlight, plants could not have grown and survived. Plants were created, however, before the Sun. If the length of time is billions of years per day, then it is very much impossible that plants could survive before the Sun was created.

The Genesis writer(s) didn't understand the nature of darkness either. He said that God created light (somehow before the sun and stars were made) and then "divided the light from the darkness" (1:3-4). Light, however, is not something that can be separated from darkness. Light is an electromagnetic radiation from an energy source like the sun or stars, and darkness is merely the absence of light. Without light, there will automatically be darkness. No god is needed to separate or divide light from darkness. We know that today; the prescientific Genesis writer(s) didn't.

[Source lost]

We know, and would assume, that the writer(s) of Genesis clearly did not know that the Earth revolves around the sun, that days and nights are effects of the Earth's spin, that light is electromagnetic radiation, and that darkness is the absence of light. Whoever wrote the text of Genesis were clearly fallible, pre-scientific Human beings. If God had inspired these texts, although it could not have inspired a technical liturgy because the words did not yet exist, it surely would have dictated or inspired text that wasn't out and out erroneous.

5. The Day of Rest: Is God Really All-Powerful?

Why would an infinitely powerful God even need six days? Wouldn't he have the ability to create everything in an instant? And, why would he have to rest when he was all done?


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The seventh day is a sign of the mythical assumptions of those who wrote the Genesis account. God is omnipotent and omniscient. Yet, it took the seventh day resting? And working out if its creation was good? It is not true that an omnipotent (all-powerful) being ever needs to rest. It is also untrue that an omniscient (all-knowing) being ever needs to wonder, ponder or think: It simply knows, and instantly. So, we immediately arrive at the conclusion that the seventh day is allegorical, symbolic and mythical, based on human imagination, and not on divine truth.

The Holy Day
A common defence of the Genesis account of the seventh day is that the reason for the strange "resting" is that God wanted the seventh day to be holy; therefore it rested on it to make it a day of rest. However. God is the absolute truth, and it would not be necessary for God to rest in order to make the seventh day holy. To make the seventh day holy it could have had Moses inspired to preach "Take one day in 7, the Saturday, to rest" rather than using a non-logical seventh day of rest in Genesis. As an omniscient being it cannot be illogical, and therefore the Genesis seven-day creation must be false, or at least, non-literal.

A long seventh day
Some say that the first 6 days are metaphors for the first 15 billion years of the Universe's history and that the seventh day, where God is resting, is the present era. This would then account for why God is so silent and absent from world affairs - because it is resting. Resting would then be a polite word for 'hiding' or 'concealing' itself. The reason for this concealment, in my mind, is that God does not exist, and the myth is designed to explain why God isn't around.


The Qur'an avoids some of these problems by limiting the precise statements it makes about the period of creation. Qur'an 7:54, 10:3, 50:38 and 57:4 all just say that God created the heavens and the Earth "in 6 days".

6. Unintelligent Design



Paul Kurtz (2006)8

7. God Planted Fake Evidence to Confuse Us?

Given the mass of evidence from geology, physics, archaeology, etc, that the Earth is very old and the universe somewhat older, even some creationists have been convinced by the evidence. If you ever want proof that creationists are driven by some weird psychological factors rather than any sense of realism, it can be seen in the following book, described by Martin Gardner:

Book CoverThousands of books were published in the nineteenth century, most of them in England, attempting to harmonize geology and Genesis. In this dreary and pathetic literature, one books stands out from all the others as so delightful and fantastic that it deserves special mention. It was called Omphalos (the Greek word for navel), and was written by zoologist Philip Gosse, father of the eminent British poet and critic, Edmune Gosse. [... He] admitted geology had established beyond any doubt that the earth had a long geological history in which plants and animals flourished before the time of Adam. He was also convinced that the earth was created about 4,000 B.C., in six days, exactly as described in Genesis. How did he reconcile these apparently contradictory opinions? Very simple. Just as Adam was created with a navel, the relic of a birth which never occurred, so the entire earth was created with all the fossils relics of a past which had no existence except in the mind of God!

"Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Martin Gardner (1957)9

Despite this, there is a final argument that should put an end to such silliness:

8. Conclusions

The seven day creation is not literal, there are illogical and unscientific errors that would not have been apparent to the authors but which are highlighted on this page and by science. The shape of the Earth is not flat. The Sun does not revolve around the Earth. The creation of light and the sun happened independent of each other, and there were 'days' before the sun was created for the Earth to rotate around. The order in which animals, plants and other elements of life appear in Genesis contradict the order that appears in the fossil record and the order of creation of the stars, the sun, etc, also contradict what we know scientifically. The logic is flawed behind the 'day of rest', an all-powerful God does not need rest. In short, the separation of creation into a seven day period is a useless and outdated creation story riddled with errors. Such beliefs, now called creationism and fundamentalism, have set us back as a species through the (often violent) suppression of basic science.

Scientists had to suffer torture, silencing, imprisonment and death at the hands of Christians who didn't agree with newly discovered facts about the world. Christianity lost the first battle with astronomers who realized that, contrary to what Christians asserted, the Sun did not orbit the Earth, and that the Universe doesn't seem to be designed specifically for humankind. Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), Newton (1643-1727) and Laplace (1749-1827) all fought battles against the Church when they published scientific papers challenging religious orthodoxy. Bible verses were all the theories Christians needed; and Joshua 10:12-13, 2 Kings 20:11, Psalms 93:1, 104:5, Ecclesiastes 1:5, Isaiah 30:26, Isaiah 38:8, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18 and Habakkuk 3:10-11 all contradicted astronomers. But through intelligence and clever politics, truth gradually won out over dogma, and the Church retreated... only to go on to fight similar ignorant battles, and violently impose dogmatic errors, in the arenas of physics, biology and philosophy.


Genesis was written by fallible Human beings, not God, and is proven to be a false record of creation. It also shows many symptoms of being a piecemeal, fragmented myth that has been edited and rewritten over time so that it hardly even makes internal sense. It contains no moral teachings and nothing educational. It is an irredeemable anachronism that we ever teach our children its pointless myths. It should be purged and forgotten.

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By Vexen Crabtree 2015 Apr 1910
Second edition 2003 Apr 06
Originally published 1998
Parent page: Christianity

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References: (What's this?)

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Draper, John William. (1811-1882)

Gardner, Martin. Died 2010 May 22 aged 95.

Stanton, Elizabeth C.. (1815-1902)

Stenger, Prof. Victor J.


  1. Gardner (1957) p129.^
  2. Added to this page on 2015 Apr 19.^
  3. Ontario Consultants for Religious Tolerance article "Archaeology and the Hebrew Scriptures". Accessed 2001.^
  4. Stanton (1898) p19-20.^
  5. Draper (1881) p212-213. Added to this page on 2015 Apr 05.^
  6. Draper (1881) p212-213.^
  7. Stenger (2007) ch 5 "The Uncongenial Universe" p157. Added to this page on 2010 Feb 14.^
  9. Gardner (1957) ch11 "Geology versus Genesis" p124.^
  10. 2015 Apr 19: Added two new introductory paragraphs, new sections, removed some old text, and edited most of the remainder of the page.^

© 2015 Vexen Crabtree. All rights reserved.