Richard Fortey in the TLS reviews Andrew Parker’s The Genesis Engima, which offers the thesis that the Bible is scientifically accurate because the opening of Genesis, with some rough and ready shoe-horning, offers a totally precise (but of course highly poetic) analogy to future scientific discoveries.Richard Fortey is not altogether convinced…

De Luc’s was a perfectly respectable intellectual position for his time (he also coined the word “geology”), but it comes as something of a shock to find Andrew Parker making comparable claims nearly a quarter of a millennium after de Luc. I suspect he has never heard of his intellectual forebear; certainly, his grasp of the history of geology is sketchy.

I should perhaps explain the programme of The Genesis Enigma, so that the basis of the argument can be examined properly. After a revelatory moment in the Sistine Chapel, Parker realized that the sequence of “events” described verse by verse in Genesis corresponded to real events in the history of the solar system and of life on earth. Such was the one-to-one correspondence between the “latest” scientific discoveries and the Authorized Version of the Bible – the relevant page of which provides the only illustration in the book – that the likelihood of the ancient sources arriving at the right sequence of events by chance alone was very small indeed, or so he claims. Therefore, the account in Genesis is, to use the subtitle of the book, “scientifically accurate”. Of course, some allowance must be made for the limitations of understanding that pertained in biblical times.

… The reviewer has a difficult choice when faced with a book like The Genesis Enigma. Should it be given the oxygen of publicity? Or should it be ignored? To treat such a book at length in the TLS is to award it a seriousness it does not really deserve, but what has propelled me to do so is the invocation of science and scientists in support of Parker’s dodgy thesis. It is important that scientific evidence be honestly treated. There is an alarming tendency today to regard science as “just an opinion”. I do think it possible that some anti-rationalists might welcome Parker’s book to show how much a matter of opinion science can be. It is not, of course; it stands or falls on evidence.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6981314.ece