Unraveling God’s Creation Takes Almost No Time at All

THE NOTION THAT the world was created in six days has, for a long time now, been understood as a metaphor. The science is clear that creation takes a very long time, measured in eons and epochs — but creation is no less wonderful for that, nor any less God-tinged. We just need to underscore patience as one of God’s attributes.

But this understanding sometimes makes us think everything happens slowly, and that’s not the case. It turns out we can de-create things in the geological blink of an eye. A nuclear exchange — the milliseconds as an atomic reaction goes critical — is the most obvious example, but the climate crisis is in second place. And since we can (thanks to the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) picture the horror of nuclear weapons, we’ve since held off; not so much with the billion daily fires that add up to global heating.

In fact, it’s only for the last 200 years that we’ve been pouring carbon into the air through large-scale burning of fossil fuel — and most of it has come in the last 35 years. Come, that is, since scientist James Hansen offered up his powerful warnings to Congress in the late 1980s that we were on an apocalyptic track. We’re not going to stop climate change at this point, but even stopping it short of the point where it curtails civilization is a time-bound task. The best numbers we have come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose scientists told us not long ago that to have any chance of hitting the temperature targets we’d all agreed to at the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. Which is to say, in the next six years.

That puts us at the bleeding edge of the technically possible. Engineering expertise has dropped the price of renewable energy so fast that we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, a water-into-wine miracle that would allow us to move with great speed. But the fossil fuel industry, with its immense political power, stands in the way. Earlier this winter its mightiest baron, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, explained that he couldn’t endorse renewable energy because it didn’t offer “above-average returns,” a phrase that may condemn creation, at least on Earth.

Or perhaps not, if we rise up powerfully enough to demand change. But rising up means shaking off inertia. It means reckoning fully with the fact that we don’t have plenty of time — and that we must move with far more speed than our institutions are set up to attain.

Genesis took a long, long time, and the beauty of the world we were born into reminds us every day of the glory attached to that patience. But unraveling God’s creation takes almost no time at all.

Six years.