Genesis 1:11

1:11 And God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

This is a very generic text. However it does follow very closely the geologic record which we can see.

God speaks and these thing come into being. Literally it says - Let the earth green with green plants, vegetation yielding offspring (non seed bearing plants), and fruiting trees (trees which bear some sort of a seed-properly called spermatophytes or seed plants) creating fruit (seed pods), according to its species with its offspring in them, upon the earth and it was so.

We have first green, slimy plants called blue green algaes in the geologic record. Fossilized filamentous algae from the Vindhya basin have been dated back to 1.6 to 1.7 billion years ago. We then follow in progression to other plants on land such as ferns, fossils of isolated land plant spores suggest land plants such as ferns may have been around as long as 475 million years ago. You then progress on to seed bearing plants somewhere in the Devonian period about 400 million years ago.

This doesn't contradict in any way the Hebrew rendering of the text. Only when you read the text in English is the text unclear and confusing and this in turn leads to confusion in how we interpret the geologic record. You don't have to force interpretations upon the text in order to make science not contradict the Bible.

© 2009 Roy Blizzard III