The Evolving Face of God as Creator

Abstract

"From the early Reformation through the early 1800s, Gen 1-11 was consensually understood as providing a perspicacious, historical account of how God brought the world into being. Tenets of belief included six literal 24hour days of creation and a catastrophic global Flood, and most often the conviction that Gen 1:31 implies that no evil of any type existed prior to the Fall. New geological interpretations in the early nineteenth century, however, pointed toward an earth history that seemed anything but very good, instead suggesting a harsh concatenaion of deeptirne prelapsarian pain, struggle, destruction of the weak, predation, diseases, plagues, catastrophic mass extinctions, and death in the subrational creation"