So in returning to Day 2, where this Great Oxygenation Event started, scientists theorize that when those early prokaryotes began putting out all that oxygen, it reacted with and depleted all the methane present in the early atmosphere, converting it to carbon dioxide (CO2: a much weaker greenhouse gas). And this had an extremely deleterious effect on global temperatures. The resultant cooling left the planet completely covered from pole to pole with ice (a half a mile thick in some places). [50] They call it the “Snowball Earth” event, and there were three of them over a period of about a billion years. [51] The first time it happened it nearly wiped out all life on the planet. But life, as they say, found a way. It diversified, which helped enormously. And its chief diversification at the end of Day 2 was the advent of the nucleated (eukaryote) cell.

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As to the next two global glaciations, which took place in stage 4 of the Great Oxygenation, life was plunged, once again, into darkness. But there is no evidence of mass exterminations going on this time. Eukaryotes, being much more versatile, seem to have weathered the storm with comparative ease. They too diversified. And their greatest diversification, while under the ice, was the innovation of sexual reproduction. Producing offspring this way, as opposed to mitosis, allowed for diversification at a much higher rate. And by the end of Day 3 the fruit of that innovation was seen on the earth with life becoming multicellular, finally, and huge. The earliest undisputed fossil representatives of the animal and plant kingdoms are found right around this time. [52] And with all the O2 the plants were now cranking out, together with the massive amounts of CO2 the air breathers were now capable of producing. the world's climate was now in the steady hands of life, itself, and would never again go into a deep freeze. [53] The land and the water were forever separated, just as the Bible proclaimed. 

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The verses for this Day are not a perfect fit with science, however. The first seedbearing plants (as we understand them) do not show up in the fossil record until Creation Day 4. And fruit trees are not seen until Day 5. Their grandparents, the first macroscopic plants, do show up here. So that part of Scripture is intact. But everything after the colon in those verses (the seedbearing plants and the fruit tree references) remain a mystery, to be discussed further on in the anomalies section (Appendix A). Other than that, though, Day 3 shows another rather remarkable coordination between science and Scripture. And given that at the end of this Day the earth was freed of ice and the sky was sufficiently filled with oxygen (which included a now fully functional ozone layer) even the most hardened skeptic has to acknowledge how uncannily convenient it was that two new and higher forms of life were poised and ready to populate this newly dried sphere from the moment it became hospitable.

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And so with Days 1, 2 and 3 showing excellent compatibility with science, their issues being minor and now mostly resolved, it is reasonable to assume that an examination of the remaining Days will yield similar results. Those more familiar with the Days of Creation have cause to be wary, however, as we have now come to what is easily the most problematic of the Days, Day 4. Running seemingly contrary not only with science but with logic, itself, Day 4 has been the source of severe indigestion for theologians since the early days of Christendom. [54] It reads … 

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Then God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to separate day from night.

Let them mark the seasons, the days and the years,

and serve as lights in the dome of the sky, to illuminate the earth.”

And so it happened: God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day,

and the lesser one to govern the night, and the stars.

God set them in the dome of the sky, to illuminate the earth,

to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.

God saw that it was good. Evening came, and morning followed—the fourth day. [55]

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So what is going on here? Shouldn't the sun have been created on the 1st Day? How else could the day and the night have been created, if there was no sun to do it? That is the common objection that has led many to reject completely the notion that the 6 Days can be taken as a true historical record. But this is another case (and maybe the most dramatic example) where the 2/3rds Rule comes to our aid to provide us with one very plausible resolution. And it comes again from knowing the timing of the events.

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Prior to this Day, life resided entirely underwater and had zero interest in the source of the energy that was irradiating the planet. Life was microscopic and so rudimentary it did not yet even possess the eyes needed to see it. and if that is not enough, for much of the time life was also completely separated from the sky by ice. But with the end of the deep freeze (which brought with it the sun, the moon and the stars into full view) and the advent of animal life at the start of Day 4, the senses were also soon crafted and refined to their greatest extent by the end of that Day, proposed to have occurred around 195 Ma (585 Ma ÷ 3 = 195 Ma) and coincidentally with the arrival of the first mammals. [56] So this entire Day can be defined as the period where life evolved from basically senseless microscopic organisms to fully sensate mammals.

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And it needs to also be noted that those lights were created for a purpose - to govern the day and the night. Until life had eyes and brains, and the global ice sheet had receded that it could see above the earth’s surface, there is no way it could be governed by any specific astronomical entity. So from life’s perspective anyway, the light from those heavenly bodies was created on the 4th Day, for this is when life first became aware of it and incorporated the machinations of that light into its own cycles and biorhythms.

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To those, however, who continue to insist that the Bible is saying the light's sources (the sun and the moon) were created on Day 4, it needs to be recalled that he Bible specifically avoids using the words sun and moon, referring, rather, to the greater and lesser lights. And it calls to mind the ancient philosophical question, if a tree falls in the woods, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer depends on your definition of sound. Is sound merely a shockwave of atoms flowing through an atom rich medium? Or does it require someone, or something, to hear it before it can actually be called sound? The same question applies here. The sun was, of course, created on Day 1. But do the photons it's emitted since that 1st Day to irradiate the earth deserve to be called light (from life's perspective) until some entity on earth can see it? The Bible would appear to be saying no. It doesn’t get that promotion until Day 4.

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Now whether or not this take on Day 4 can be viewed as a reasonable reconciliation of science with Scripture, in Day 5 things settle back down and we again see a remarkable fit with the scientific record, for this is the Day, according to Genesis, that the birds and the great sea monsters were created. The Bible puts it this way …

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Then God said, “Let the water teem with an abundance of living creatures,

and on the earth let birds fly beneath the dome of the sky.”

God created the great sea monsters

and all kinds of crawling living creatures with which the water teems,

and all kinds of winged birds.

God saw that it was good, and God blessed them, saying, 

"Be fertile, multiply, and fill the water of the seas; and let the birds multiply on the earth."

Evening came, and morning followed—the fifth day. [57]

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And yes, after the great Permian/Triassic extinction event that wiped out upwards of 81% of marine species near the end of Day 4 (around 252 Ma) there was a rebound. It took place, as the Bible says, throughout Day 5, filling the earth again with all manner of aquatic creatures. The birds, too, were first seen on the planet around this time, but what about these great sea monsters? If the writer is speaking of whales (as some have proposed) that seems to be a very odd thing for the Bible to put its emphasis on. And it doesn’t fit the timeframe either. Whales don't show up in the fossil record until well into the next Day. Looking deeper, the original Hebrew word that is being translated here is tanninim. But in later Scriptures tanninim is also commonly translated as dragons, or great serpents. And ancient Hebrew folklore identifies the tanninim as fabulous mythological beasts. [58] So what might the Holy Spirit be saying to us now, that this is the Day some creatures of fiction were created?! That can't be right.

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Looking at the timeframe for the Day a resolution to the puzzle readily appears. According to our formula, Day 4 ran from 195 to 65 Ma (195 Ma ÷ 3 = 65 Ma). And that span is what science is prone to call the Age of the Dinosaurs! [59] So, given how mighty and defining their presence on earth was to all life of that age, of course, the Bible is going to make mention of their creation, using the closest word available at the time to do so. And although they were mostly wiped out 65 Ma due to a celestial impact event of some sort, [60] it was not for nought. A few lived on, [61] as did their main progeny, the birds.

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So that’s 5 Days of Creation complying quite well with the empirical record. But the 6th is the most striking of all, since Scripture declares this is where all the beasts (wild and tame), and Man were created. It reads ...

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Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature:

tame animals, crawling things, and every kind of wild animal.” And so it happened.

God made every kind of wild animal, every kind of tame animal,

and every kind of thing that crawls on the ground. God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness.

Let them have dominion over [all the living creatures of] the earth.”

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God created mankind in his image;

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

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God blessed them and God said to them, "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.

Have dominion over [all the living creatures of] the earth."

God also said: “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth

and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food;

and to [all the living creatures of] the earth, I give all the green plants for food.”

And so it happened. God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good.

Evening came, and morning followed—the sixth day. [62]

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And science concurs on all counts, [63] collectively referring to this 6th Day, which began 65 million years ago, as the Cenozoic Era (the Era where mammals and eventually Man took dominion of the globe). But it doesn’t stop there. The algorithm can still be used to churn out dates. And the remarkable thing about those it predicts from here on is that they match, with uncanny precision, the major milestones science gives us for the evolution of Man.

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So let's recap. The 1st Day gave us Life, the 2nd Day: nucleated Life, the 3rd Day: multicellular Life, the 4th Day: fully sensate mammalian Life. And in accepting, as many scientists believe, that the first primates originated around the same time as the K-T extinction event, [64] that would appear to be the 5th Day's primary contribution to the cause. In continuing this theme, then, the next date predicted, 21.7 Ma (65 Ma ÷ 3 = 21.7 Ma) fits quite well with where the fossil record reports the first hominoids (apes) evolved. [65] Division by 3 again takes us to 7.2 Ma (21.7 Ma ÷ 3 = 7.2 Ma) and this is roughly where science tells us the first hominids (bipedal apes) originated. [66] It is also where we’re told that Man’s ancestors split off from the ancestor of his closest living nonhuman relatives – the chimpanzees. [67] Taking it a step further, the next date, 2.4 Ma (7.2 Ma ÷ 3 = 2.4 Ma) is a very close match for when it's been determined the first members of the genus Homo (our genus) show up on the planet. [68]

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From this point on, however, we enter a time period anthropologists have nicknamed, the muddle in the middle, because the science is still very fluid, with opinions changing seemingly every year as to what constitutes a truly new species of hominin, what should be relegated as transitional and what is and is not in the direct line of modern man. The scientific dating is understandably, therefore, a little fuzzy. But the 2/3rds Rule is, nevertheless, aligned quite well with current majority opinion on the origins of those archaic human species it seems to single out. The exact roles these species played in the evolution of Man and their placement in the family tree is, however, still being debated.  

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That said, the next big step in human evolution takes us to 800,000 years ago (2.4 Ma ÷ 3 = 0.8 Ma), where the human brain has doubled in size, and some have estimated Man and Neanderthals split from one common ancestral species. [69] As to the name of that species, the first two editions of this book gave that honor to Homo antecesssor. But since that time the majority scientific opinion for that role seems to have shifted to another recipient of that increase in brain power, Homo heidelbergensis. He also hails from roughly the same time period. [70] So the timing still works, it is only the name of the species that is yet to be determined.

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Regardless, however, of the name, the next important stage in human evolution saw the brain size doubling once again to roughly where it is today. And this is seen to have occurred right around where the 2/3rds Rule estimates, at 269,000 years ago, in two representative species, Homo neandethalensis [71] and Homo sapiens (us). [72] But there is one more stage to go to get to modern man, because although these early Homo sapiens were physically indistinguishable from people living today, they seem to have been lacking in one vital area, that divine spark we might call real human ingenuity. In fact, the behavioral differences are so pronounced, some anthropologists have proposed dividing our species into two subspecies: the early humans being designated Homo sapiens idaltu and the later "modern" humans, Homo sapiens sapiens. And this later subspecies of humans arrives on the scene, by their estimation, around 90,000 years ago, [73] which (as should, by now, be expected) is also where the 2/3rds Rule predicts. The claim being made, then, is that this is when God (in accord with Genesis 2:7) endowed His new creation, Man (the culmination of 15 billion years of labor) with free will and a human soul. [74] The findings thus far, are summarized in Figure 2.3.​

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