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 20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. — Genesis 1:20-23

Day 5 was not straightforward to date.  As described in A Geo-Creationist View of Genesis 1, the first 4 days occurred during the following time periods:

Day 1 - Ended 3.9 billion years ago, when meteor strikes ceased, allowing an atmosphere to form.  There was torrential rain.
Day 2 - Less than 3.9 billion years ago, when torrential rains ended, leaving an ocean-covered earth, and clouds.
Day 3 - 3.8 to 3.85 billion years ago, when plate tectonics created land, and plant-life transitioned from sea to land.  During this time, there was an atmospheric haze forming. CO2 was a primary component.
Day 4 - 2.3 to 1.9 billion years ago, when there were enough plants to start clearing up the haze, allowing the sun, moon, and stars to be seen clearly from the earth.

Until this point, the natural sequence of earth’s development nicely maps to the Genesis 1 account.  You would think then that Day 5 would easily follow suite, but it does not.  You would think that just as Day 3 removed the hindrances to the first appearance of plants, that Day 5 would remove the hindrances to the first appearance of animals.  To be specific, it would remove the hindrance to sea life and birds.  But frankly, those hindrances were removed when plant life first appeared, providing the beginnings of an oceanic ecosystem before Day 3 was over.

So let us take another approach.  Looking closer to the end of Day 4, we see another milestone for sea life and birds… the appearance of multi-celled oxygen-consuming life.  So, might Day 5 date to around that time?  Well, if it does then Day 6 dates to then, too.  This implies an overlap between Days 5 and 6, which contradicts the scripture. 

Let us try again, but this time looking further ahead, to the actual appearance of fish and birds.  Hmmmm.  It likes we do no better… Days 5 and 6 still overlap.  In fact, combining The Evolution of Mammals and a PBS article entitled Birds Arrived Comparatively Late (hint, hint), the overlap looks something like this:

• 510 million years ago –> fish
• 400 million years ago –> insects
• 285 million years ago –> mammal-like reptiles
• 245 million years ago –> most life wiped out… dinosaurs began
• 225 million years ago –> mammals
• 150 million years ago –> birds

Now, one attempt at dealing with this is to include insects as part of Day 5.  This approach doesn’t work however, because birds did not evolve from insects.  Therefore, Day 5 would still have to extend long enough to include the appearance of birds.  This would be acceptable to many Day-Age Theorists (including Progressive Creationists), but it just is not scriptural.  Genesis 1 is pretty clear that Days 5 and 6 do not overlap.

Part of the answer lies in our original approach, to interpret “let” as a command by God to remove an otherwise insurmountable hindrance to something.  In this case, Day 5’s command is to remove a hindrance to sea life and birds, and it would need to be a hindrance that logically precedes God’s actions on Day 6.

Another part of the answer requires us to abandon looking back before the first appearance of fish and birds.  The reason is that there are so many evolutionary hindrances that were overcome that a sequential dating of Days 5 and 6 become unavoidably arbitrary, assuming it’s even possible.  For example, if birds evolved from mammals (which appears to be so), then clearly the appearance of mammals removed a hindrance to the evolution of birds… which forces an overlap of Days 5 and 6 again.  Furthermore, going back to a time before mammals appeared only leads us to events that removed the hindrances of mammals and birds both.  There are no events before the appearance of mammals that are unique to the requirements of birds.

So, where do we go?  Well, the science is clearly not getting us anywhere, so let us go back to the scripture!  Look again at what the scripture actually says about the appearance of sea life and birds:

20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”

If you read God’s statement carefully, it is not a statement for sea life and birds to appear, but to “teem” and to “fly across the expanse of the sky.”  To support this action, Moses reiterated:

21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

“Hey, wait a minute,” you might be thinking, “It says ‘God created,’ right there in verse 21.  What are you trying to pull?”  Well, nothing.  If you parse the verse, you will see that Moses qualified the scope of his “creation” statement with the phrase, “according to their kinds”.  What a peculiar statement!  In his own essay entitled Why I Believe Genesis is Historically Accurate, Glenn R. Morton writes the following on this verse, as follows (emphasis mine):

Genesis 1:21 says “God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds.” Look at the object of this sentence and the modifying phrase, “Creatures… according to their kind.” God created creatures according to their kind. They were not commanded to reproduce according to their kind. Once again, a very different situation. Why Christians misread this I really don’t know.

In other words, the phrase “according to their kind” is a qualifier on God’s actions, not the sea life’s and not the birds’. Otherwise, Moses might have written, “So God created them, and commanded them to reproduce according their kind.”  But, Moses didn’t write that.  Conclusion? The initial creation of sea life and birds is not what happened on Day 5, but rather the flourishing of sea life and birds that already existed.  With this insight, we can now attempt dating Day 5!

Here is the question: was there a time when there was some sea life and some birds, and then all of a sudden (relatively speaking), there were a whole lot of both, relative to mammal life on earth?  And can we find a significant event that removed any hindrance to this happening?  The answer it turns out is a resounding yes.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 11:40 am and is filed under Bible Commentary, The Science, Creationism, Evolution, Day 5. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.