Book Review: Seven Glorious Days by Karl W. Giberson

Seven Glorious Days: A Scientist Retells the Genesis Creation Story by Karl W. Giberson

The creation account given in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis were written thousands of years ago by an author with a very different world view and a very different knowledge base than anyone could have now. The style is poetic and sparse, giving only the broadest outlines of unseen times. Reading it as a scientific text, or indeed a literal text, is perilous and ill-advised. But is it far from the scientific understanding of today?

Author Karl Giberson teaches both science and religion and has grappled with the relationship between the two throughout his career. In this book, he reformulates the text of the seven days of creation. He retains the poetic sense while adding in more contemporary expressions of what happens each day, or "epoch of creation" as Giberson calls them. The revision respects the religion in the text. God creates according to "the Logos of creation," a term Giberson uses to emphasize the order and rationality (i.e. the understandability, especially in a scientific sense) of the origin of the material universe.

The main body of the book goes through each epoch and discusses the scientific understanding of those times. He starts naturally with the Big Bang, summarizing not only the technicalities of what happened as science has come to understand it, but also the controversies scientists went through to come to that understanding. He recounts the attempts to rename the Big Bang with a more scientifically respectable name. Compared to "quantum mechanics" and "general relativity," "Big Bang" sound like something that happens after a superhero punches someone. Giberson goes through the story of how the primordial gases slowly condensed into stars that turned the omnipresent hydrogen atoms into heavier, more diverse matter. Such stars exploded, casting out new elements that would recondense into other stars and planets. He discusses the importance and impact of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force) in the formation of the universe. And that's just the first day/epoch.

The book is very informative and does a very convincing job weaving together the ancient Genesis account with the modern scientific account of the development of the universe. The text doesn't get too deep into the details of either the theology or the science which would probably make the book ten times as long and only comprehensible to academics. At 190 pages, it is readable and engaging and well worth the reader's time.

Highly recommended.