Dinesh D'Souza On Genesis Chapter One

Dinesh D'Souza in his bestselling book, What's So Great About Christianity? offers a simplistic answer to the problem of Genesis chapter one. This is what he wrote:

The Big Bang resolves one of the apparent contradictions in the book of Genesis. For more than two centuries, critics of the Bible have pointed out that in the beginning--on the first day--God created light. Then on the fourth day God separated the night from the day. The problem is pointed out by philosopher Leo Strauss: "Light is presented as preceding the sun." Christians have long struggled to explain this anomaly but without much success. The writer of Genesis seemed to have made an obvious mistake.

Dinesh offers the solution Christians everywhere have been waiting for:

But it turns out there is no mistake. The universe was created in a burst of light fifteen years ago. Our sun and our planet came into existence billions of years later. So light did indeed precede the sun. The first reference to light in Genesis 1:3 can be seen to refer to the Big Bang itself. The separation of the day and the night described in Genesis 1:4 clearly refers to the formation of the sun and the earth...The Genesis enigma is solved..." (p. 123)

But Dinesh is badly mistaken for many reasons. Let me merely mention just one of them. On Day One God created light, which, Dinesh says represents the Big Bang. Then on Day Two God is doing something on earth, he creates the firmament and separates the waters on earth from those in the heavens. On Day Three God again is doing something on earth. He makes dry land appear. When we finally get to Day Four God already has an earth, a firmament, and dry land. But on Day Four we see God creating the universe of sun, moon and stars. This "solution" of his is no solution at all, for if Dinesh wants to harmonize the Big Bang with Genesis then he must try to harmonize all of it. And according to modern astronomy there were already stars and galaxies before there was an earth, or at least, they were all formed at the same time. If the earth existed before the universe of stars and galaxies, which were supposedly created on the fourth day, this contradicts what we know from the evidence of the Big Bang itself.