Andrew Parker is no creationist, and he has little patience for intelligent design. Yet he thinks that Genesis 1’s account of the origin of the universe is scientifically accurate. He asks “Could it be that the creation account on page one of Genesis was written as it is because that is how the sequence of events really happened?” (The Genesis Enigma, xiii). By the end of the book, he is answering that question affirmatively.
What impressed Parker were the parallels between the sequence of events as told by contemporary science and the sequence of divine creative actions in Genesis 1. He links light with the formation of the sun and the gathering of waters with the formation of seas and land (around 4 billion years ago, by his estimate). Two parallels especially intrigued him: He correlated the creation of heavenly lights on Day 4 with the evolution of the eye, which Parker has previously argued (In the Blink of an Eye) was the foundation for the Cambrian explosion (Parker’s “light-switch theory” of evolutionary development. He was also struck by the fact that Genesis claims that the earliest forms of life emerge in the ocean rather than on land: “Why would the writer record such a thing? It goes against all he knows. In fact, it portrays what he does not know” (121). But ignorant as the writer must have been, he got this right.
