Literal Interpretation of Genesis (All of it!)

My wonderful wife has encouraged myself and her other blog readers to write on environmentalism from a Christian perspective/worldview. She has "encouraged" me a little more than most, I suppose, but I needed the "encouragement."

I'd like to point out that the Christian responsibility to care for the world we live in is directly related to God's initial commands to Adam and Eve in the garden, right after He created the world. There are those who would say that modern science has proven conclusively that the world is billions of years old and that mankind exists now as a result of the forces of evolution acting throughout those billions of years. I respectfully disagree. Modern science has become a worldview all its own, rather than a method for detecting truth, which is what science really is. As such, it has made conclusions about the world that fit with its materialistic view that there is no God and no such thing as a spiritual world at all. Thus, forces like evolution, which requires vast amounts of time to be mathematically plausible, are postulated to explain how everything that does exist got here.

There are many problems with all of the above thinking, but, as it relates to the environment, the problem at hand is that such thinking undercuts the heart of why we must care for the world. The primary reason is that God made both us and the world and He gave charge of it to us. Caring for the world is an outworking of a holy life and cannot be honestly done by those who deny that there is even such a thing as holiness. At best, those who deny God's existence and His creation of the world as it is written in the Bible, worship the material that they claim is all that exists.

Genesis is where the entire story of the world begins. It is where the world is made and every important institution finds its origins (family, marriage, government). It is also where the central problem of man begins - sin - and God's response to sin is foretold. This cannot be an allegory or myth. It must be truth or our whole reason for being turns to chance encounters of atoms bouncing around the galaxy, at the very best.