In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

It’s fair, I think, to suggest that most people in even remotely Christian countries will recognise this line as Genesis 1:1 – the very start of the Bible. As most probably also know, almost as if it were ingrained into their collective consciousness, God goes on to create all that exists in six days.

Now, I don’t want to contest this in a factual sense; that isn’t the point. Instead, I want to look at the usual criticism.

The scientifically in-the-know deride this claim as ridiculous: the Earth (let alone the Universe) is billions of years old! Anything resembling modern Earth – as in, the Earth of the past few thousand years – took billions of years to form, not a matter of days. To claim that all that exists was created in six days, therefore, is patently ridiculous. Six days is an infinitesimally small amount of time on the scale of the age of everything.

However… I would like to suggest that six days is, in fact, a monumentally huge amount of time for God to create anything.

Let’s remember that we are talking about a being truly beyond our comprehension in terms of sheer power. God can do anything which is logically possible. That scale of power is beyond comparison to our ephemeral, corporeal existence. God could have conjured the Earth into being in a nanosecond, without an ounce of effort.

Surely the suggestion that an all powerful God felt the need to conform to the very human time scale of a convenient week shows us, more simply than the force and reality of scientific evidence, that this is no more than a story.

Sadly, though it seems wasteful, it still remains important to argue the scientist’s line – even against those who can’t see the internal illogic of their own text.

But I’m not sure that it’s a useful argument to pursue: this isn’t about the strong (yet too often ignored) evidence, but instead about the refusal to accept what is obviously a story for what it is. I don’t personally see sense in the story; like I say, the overly anthropocentric portrayal of God taking a week, including rest, doesn’t convey the true sense of power which he is said to possess. Nonetheless, that doesn’t discredit the point: criticism of literal Creationism doesn’t need to reference Science to be obviously false – it shows that it is a story all on its own.