The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible is Scientifically Accurate
by Andrew Parker

Dutton – Penguin Group (USA) Inc, 2009
294 pages

Reviewed by Woolf Abrahams 

While wandering through a Waterstones bookshop recently, I came across this book written by Andrew Parker in 2009. Online, I read that Professor Andrew Parker was born in England in 1967 and moved to Australia in 1990 where he spent ten years studying marine biology and physics. On returning to the UK as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford University in 1999, he worked on color, vision, biometrics and evolution. In 2000, based on his ‘Light Switch Theory’ for the cause of the Big Bang in evolution, he was selected as one of the top eight scientists in the UK as a ‘Scientist for the New Century’ by The Royal Institution (London). Today he works at Green College (University of Oxford). He is also Research Leader at The Natural History Museum, London and a Professor at the University of Sydney. 'Genesis Enigma' is an interesting if not fascinating read although it is perhaps a bit on the heavy side.

In 1998, Parker wrote a popular science book entitled In the Blink of an Eye. As a result, he received numerous letters suggesting that there were parallels between his description of the scientifically generated history of life on earth and the Creation account given in the first chapter of Genesis. He says that, as a scientist, he would never entertain the ‘seven-day’ Creation story but the reaction of his readers made him wonder what they had in mind.

Without expecting to find anything, he did some reading and discovered a whole series of parallels between the Creation story in the Bible and the modern scientific account of life’s history. It made him think. He carried out further research and asked himself, "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?"

He argued that if that were true what would it mean? Since he knew the scientific account of the history of life to be correct, through repeated proven experiments, it surely follows that Genesis must be correct too. But, he continues, "The astonishing point is that the Genesis account has no right to be correct." Considering the identity of the writer of Genesis and when and where he lived, there is no way that he could have guessed this thesis as it stands. The best guess available at the time would have been something very different, since no one had access to the information or the technique needed to deduce the scientific account. So why and how were those words of Genesis written and how and why do they conform so closely to the scientific account?  And the answer is what the book is all about. It suggests that ancient Hebrew writers of the book of Genesis somehow may have known all about evolution 3,000 years before Darwin.    

Prof. Parker compares the contents of the first page of the book of Genesis with the evolutionary theory in which he strongly believes.  He writes that the descriptions in the Bible of the stages of Creation on days 1,2,3,4,5,6, correspond remarkably closely, almost exactly, with the stages of the evolutionary development of the universe over hundreds of millions of years, and also with archeological findings. He argues that such a result could not have happened by accident or coincidence. How could it have happened? Somehow he sees and feels the hand of a Divinity in creation. He believes in a God. This is unusual for a scientist who also believes in evolution that occurred over hundreds of millions of years.

He writes that atheists have the same kind of blind faith in evolution as the creationists' blind faith in the seven days only of the Creation theory, and finds them both unacceptable.

The book ends in an unusual way. Prof. Parker quotes at length from a book by Richard Elliot Friedman, a professor of Hebrew at the University of California, in his discussion on the origins of the Bible.

If you read the book, I would be pleased to learn your reaction to it.