The Soft Gap Theory: Evolution and the Bible Reconciled?

The long-age timescale for earth history is so dominant in our culture today that it is somewhat understandable that Christians, even those with a high view of Scripture, want to reconcile the Bible with long ages.

One of the biggest problems with millions of years of history is that it requires death, disease, and other bad things long before any possible date for a historical Adam. But the Bible tells us that these things are the result of Adam’s sin. In a millions-of-years scenario, God would have had to declare death “very good”!

Some people try to sidestep this problem by saying that there was a gap of time in between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3 that didn’t contain the fall of Satan, death, disease, and everything else—it just contained time. This is called the “soft” or “modified” gap theory. It putatively allows an explanation for certain things that are said to need millions of years. But there are just two problems: It isn’t consistent with the relevant biblical texts, and it is still in conflict with science.

No Gaps in the Bible, Not Even Soft Ones

The grammar of Genesis 1:1–3 does not allow for a long gap of time; and the problems are the same for any gap theory, regardless of precisely where one wants a gap or what one thinks might fit in there.

Genesis 1:1 is a straightforward statement of the absolute beginning, whether in Hebrew or English:

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָֽרֶץ

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim w’et haeretz

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

There are two places where gap theorists, whether modified or ruin/reconstruction, reinterpret the grammar of this verse to insert millions of years. The first word, bereshit, is a combination of the prefix b, meaning “in,” and reshit, meaning “beginning.” One argument is that the article, the Hebrew word meaning “the,” is not there, so the beginning being referenced isn’t necessarily the absolute beginning but could have been “a beginning.” In technical terms, gap theorists use the lack of an article to argue that bereshit is in a construct state and a dependent temporal clause. However, Isaiah 46:10 uses reshit with the Hebrew prefix m, meaning “from the beginning.”1 The article isn’t present there either—in some cases, the Hebrew article doesn’t have to be present because the context itself indicates that it refers to the absolute beginning.

Young also argues that the context favors taking this as an absolute, not relative, phrase. He notes that the alliteration of the first two words is significant:

The sequence ברא of בראשׁית appears again in the verb בָּרָא. This would seem to tie up the concept expressed by בְּרֵאשִׁית with that of בָּרָא. What then is the significance of בָּרָא? . . . The subject of the verb is always God and never man. The idea of novelty or extraordinariness of result seems frequently to be implied. . . . If in Genesis 1:1 Moses desired to express the thought of absolute creation there was no more suitable word in the Hebrew language at his disposal. And when this word is taken in close conjunction with בְּרֵאשִׁית we may paraphrase the thought, “The beginning was by means of a creative act.” The beginning and unique creation—namely, that of heaven and earth—are here joinced together. Hence, we may understand the writer as asserting that the heaven and earth had a beginning and that this beginning is to be found in the fact that God had created them.2

So when the grammar and context are both considered, it makes more sense to take Genesis 1:1 as depicting the first creative act that constituted the beginning of time, space, and matter.

No Gap Between 1:1 and 1:2

Gap theorists most commonly insert a period of time in between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. However, the grammar of Genesis does not allow a gap of time. The waw that begins Genesis 1:2 does not indicate something happening after Genesis 1:1, but the state of creation at that point in time, directly preceding God’s creation of light in 1:3.3

Gap theorists believe that the phrase “formless and void” indicate something happened to the initial Genesis 1:1 creation to cause it to be “formless and void.” The Hebrew phrase translated “formless and void” is תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ tohu wabohu. The word tohu is used throughout the Old Testament to indicate a wasteland, emptiness, or vanity. The word bohu is only used alongside tohu, and the two terms occur together outside of this passage in Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 34:11. Jeremiah 4 is describing a judgment of Judah so severe that it is depicted as an “uncreation” with several reversals of Genesis 1 and 2. Isaiah 34:11 likewise uses tohu and bohu in a context of uncreation judgment with other Genesis 1–3 language. Those terms are being used to evoke judgment so complete that it reverses creation, but it doesn’t indicate the initial state of tohu wabohu similarly arose as a result of judgment.

In addition, gap theory proponents often point to Isaiah 45:18 to show that tohu wabohu does not describe the initial state of the universe, but an unnamed event caused creation to be in that state: “For thus says Yahweh, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it; He established it and did not create it a formless place, but formed it to be inhabited), ‘I am Yahweh, and there is no one else.’” The word translated “a formless place” is tohu. But this isn’t a contradiction because tohu wabohu describes the initial state of creation, not a point of completion.

No Gap Between 1:2 and 1:3

The modified gap theory places a gap of undetermined time between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3. Proponents allow for millions of years for distant starlight travel and cosmological evolution before God’s creation of light in Genesis 1:3. However, this contradicts both the biblical account and the long-age scientific story of origins, as we will explain below.

Biblical Problems with Modified Gap Theory

Genesis 1:1 commences the beginning of day one of creation week (which is the beginning of time!) with God’s creation of the heavens and earth. Genesis 1:2 does not move the narrative beyond day one but describes the state of creation prior to God’s creation of light. Genesis 1:2 does allow for some short passage of time within day one because of the Holy Spirit’s activity hovering over the waters.

Genesis 1:3 begins with וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים wayyomer Elohim, “And God said.” The initial waw in this verse functions differently from the waw disjunctive in Genesis 1:2. The waw here is a waw consecutive, which moves the narrative forward directly from the previous point in time.4 So soon after (the same day) God created the heavens and earth, God said, “Let there be light.” This locates Genesis 1:1 in day one of creation week. Grammatically, there is simply no room for vast periods of time, whether before Genesis 1:1, in between 1:1 and 1:2, or immediately preceding 1:3.

This is consistent with the testimony of the rest of Scripture that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh (Exodus 20:11).

Modified Gap Theory Does Not Satisfy Long Ages

Cosmological evolutionists do not accept a universe that existed for billions of years as just a mass of water, perhaps with earth under it, as this reading would imply. Remember, the heavens were not even separated from the seas until day two. In reality, most modified gap interpretations also rearrange events in creation to allow for the big bang, star formation, and solar system formation far before any possible biblical date for day one of creation week.

Also, modified gap theorists would presumably agree that the fossil record is a record of Noah’s Flood. But evolutionists see the fossil record as a record of billions of years of evolutionary history.

Since the modified gap theory fails so spectacularly at reconciling the Bible with “mainstream” evolutionary science, and more importantly, the Bible’s grammar does not allow for it, it should be discarded.

No Need for a Gap!

The modified gap does not resolve the conflict between biblical creation and long ages.

The modified gap also calls into question the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Consider that He said in Mark 10:5–8 that mankind was made from the beginning of creation, not billions of years later:

But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote for you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh.

The modified gap attempts to blend secular long ages with the Bible, but there is no need for a gap. The modified gap does not resolve the conflict between biblical creation and long ages. Instead, it is an arbitrary attempt to compromise with secular interpretations of the age of the earth and universe.