Day 5 - And God Blessed Evolution
As discussed in Day 5 - Determining a Date (Part 2), God commanded the birds to fill the air a little less than 65 million years ago. Shortly after (geologically speaking), the fossil record shows an immense explosion in the quantity and variety of birds that existed. According the fossil record, this happened within the era in which small to large sea life evolved, but before the majority of modern land mammals evolved… conveniently in line with scripture.
I now want to look at the creation of birds a little more closely, just to make sure the scriptures really say what I think do. Here are the key sections of Genesis 1:20-22 (I have cut out anything about sea life):
20b And God said, “…let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”
21 So God created… every winged bird according to its kind.
22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number… and let the birds increase on the earth.”
When I look at verse 22, I notice something peculiar. God blessed the birds’ fruitfulness after the fulfillment of His actions of Day 5. This means that at least logically and grammatically, Day 5 could have ended before the bird population actually increased. If this is the case, then what did God do on Day 5, regards to the birds?
In verse 21, Moses writes that God created every winged bird according to its kind. As noted in other posts, “according to its kind” logically implies there was a “kind” to create birds “according to.” In other words, birds already existed, and God used those birds to create more birds that were like (but not necessarily identical to) them. Really? Is it possible that God was commanding evolution of birds in these verses?
Look back at God’s statements, without Moses’s interjections: “Let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. Be fruitful and increase in number, and let the birds increase on the earth.”
Did you notice God’s actual verbal statements say nothing of creating the first birds? For God’s statements to make sense, there need only be few enough birds in the world, that the sky was not full of them. As stated other times on this blog, science records that the KT impact 65 million years ago blew away the majority of bird life that existed… and blew away natural predators of birds as well. If there was ever a time when there were few birds in the world, and no natural predators to stop them from taking over the air, well, this was it.
But back to verse 22. God’s blessing was given after God’s creative action… so then, what was the action? Well, as discussed elsewhere on this blog, every Creation Day consists of an action to remove any hindrance to the object of Day’s statement. Stated simply, for Day 5, God merely removed any hindrance to the birds taking over the sky. Part of that hindrance was removed by the KT Impact itself. Another part was God’s permission for birds to evolve to the survivors of the KT Impact. Once the hindrance was removed, the main Creative action for that day could end. Hence, the peculiar placement of God’s blessing in verse 22… He was blessing the Evolutionary process!