Richard Fortey reviews The Genesis Enigma in The Times Literary Supplement:

The reader will search in vain for a reference to Jean-André de Luc (1727–1817) in this eccentric book by Andrew Parker. Martin Rudwick described in Bursting the Limits of Time (2005) how de Luc treated the Bible as a historical resource that might be taken into account alongside the evidence of fieldwork to discern the history of the earth; the Good Book provided a narrative to be taken seriously and often literally. 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.

Parker uses a tried and true method: pick some ambiguous or extremely symbolic verse in the Bible, and match it up with some scientific finding, then express amazement at how the Biblical authors got so much science right, without knowing anything about geology or evolution:

“Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years” (Genesis 1: 14) is the passage in question. I am astonished to learn from Parker that this verse refers to the appearance of sight in fossil animals. Especially since “God made two great lights: the greatest to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night”, to most readers of common sense might rather suggest the Sun and the Moon. But no, says Parker, we have already made the Sun in verse 3, so it cannot be that. I am unsure whether he is using Genesis to support his Cambrian sight hypothesis, or is attempting to use the latter to vindicate Moses. In either case, this has little to do with science as “the disinterested pursuit of truth”.

I can't understand why people like Parker go through this hopeless exercise, unless you think God took his inspiration for the Bible from someone like Dan Brown. Read the feed: