There is more than meets the eye when it comes to understanding the debate over the meaning of Genesis 1. The debate is taking place in the midst of a war which Satan’s offspring are waging against God by attacking His subjects (Eve’s offspring) with deceit to convince them that Scripture is not true and that God is not who He says He is. The church should be mindful of the battle lines of this war as it discusses—and sometimes changes—its historic understanding of the meaning of Scripture.

The Washington Post recently published a book review of Reading the Rocks by Brenda Maddox. The review’s title, “When the earth’s story defies religious belief,” expresses the reviewer’s assumption that the earth’s story is not always in accordance with Scripture.

As we are fallen people in a fallen world, such an assumption is not a surprise. Human thought is naturally anthropocentric rather than theocentric. This creates a lot of problems for Christians; we struggle with turning our thoughts away from ourselves and toward God.

Unbelievers, though, do not share this struggle. They have no desire to have theocentric thoughts. Every thought they have, every proposition they put forth, seeks to deny God. Their denial of God taints the truthfulness of their every pronouncement. In fact, unbelievers hate truth because they hate the Source of all truth.

To be sure, this is not a one-sided affair; absent Divine intervention, sin also taints every pronouncement from believers. The difference is that the Holy Spirit opens the hearts and minds of believers so that they may better desire and know Truth: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

Even without the Spirit, though, common grace allows unbelievers to provide many truthful insights about the world. After all, they are created by God in His image and can use their God-given gifts to discover many things about His creation. Unbelieving scientist, then, can be a blessing to all seeking to better understand the world God has given us.

As noted, though, there are limits to this blessing.

In her book, Maddox describes the discoveries of scientists in the early 19th century—dinosaurs, the Ice Age, rock formations—that “led them to a bigger truth than they had been looking for.” Perhaps.

Whether they were looking for it or not, “the Victorians launched the first great broadside against young-Earth creationism,” falling in step with unbelievers who had been for centuries seeking some way to wiggle out from under the authority of Scripture to deny Colossians 1:16: “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” This was a tough sell, however, in church-dominated Europe where falling away from orthodoxy could cost professors and other scientists their livelihoods.

But the Enlightenment provided some wiggle room of which deists like Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology) and Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species) took advantage. They proposed naturalistic processes under the concept of uniformitarianism—the idea that the Earth was shaped by the same scientific processes still in operation today—that required at least millions (later expanded to hundreds of billions) of years to bring to us the world we live in now. The six days of creation were no longer enough.

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