Are the days of creation real or are they periods?

Faith & Science Conversation
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If you a concordist or literalist, it says: in the beginning God created the heavens And In the beginning God created the earth. I am not a concordist, so it doesn’t matter to me, but I don’t understand how you are separating them

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I understand what you’re saying here. My interpretation is that the scripture simply doesn’t mention all the other galaxies and maybe even universes, in a similar way it doesn’t mention awful lot of other things, probably for the best when one thinks about it. I read carefully what you said, but we cannot say that Bible states that absolutely everything there **ever ** was got created in the genesis narrative. Just my interpretation as a non-scholar.

Me neither, and I don’t really understand why some Christians get hecked up about it.

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It’s “who’s doing the heckling” and the spirit it’s done in. If there is any whiff of anti-theism about it (and that is enthusiastically provided by some) - then boatloads of primed Christians are poised to pick up the bait and play the game for yet another round. It’s the only song and dance they and their counterparts know.

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Ahh! Do you mean it’s the anti-theists who get Christians hecked up, rather than Christians doing it for themselves? If so, then I agree. I was actually going to say that myself, but then there was time for lunch and I didn’t finish my thoughts :laughing:. Usually trying to dismantle the fine tuning argument with multiverse, but then it’s not very good argument and I’m not buying it anyway, so…

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I’ve skated past this thread numerous times but only just peeked in to see Merv and Marta speculating on the origins of the hecking. I think the Bible’s creation story is true. But I also think what Whitman wrote is true in his Song of My Self:

There was never any more inception than there is now , Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world.

So I find myself wondering whether yesterday, today and tomorrow are not also days of creation? Could Whitman’s world not also be God’s world? Not looking to raise any hackles though.

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Oh - you don’t have to look. Hackles are always on bulk clearance - and many Christians have put themselves on permanent standby duty to see that they get raised.

While there may be depth to be pondered in that thought, I think there is also something Christian about holding to hope. Hope of a future where everything is made right. Ever a fool’s dream according to the world. But without such necessary hope - such vision to work toward - there is nothing to do but perish [or worse]. …Perish the thought.

Whitman must have been quite the profound thinker. And though I don’t consider myself much of a poetry reader, I have to respect the profound influence some of these religious “outsiders” had on people. I seem to recall that it was Whitman’s work that kept one certain young man in the depths of despair from committing suicide. His name was G.K. Chesterton.

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I guess I see hope even in an endless story. To stand in the river and keep my balance against the current and help others to do the same is something I shall get up to do again morning after mornings until I don’t and then I’ll happily yield my spot to another. What is there to resent? There is much to appreciate and celebrate. Life is good and so amazing I’d willingly miss and grieve its loss if I could. But of course it won’t be lost when my turn is over.

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I think the Bible very specifically says “Adam named all the animals” in Genesis ch 2.

I would find that a very difficult statement for any Christian to ignore. If evolved over millions of years…then Adam could not possibly have named each one. This would make Moses a liar…and I don’t believe he is telling porkies.
The parallel universe idea I agree could explain a lot of things about the creation story and intelligent life we don’t seem to be able to find.
This doesn’t help the evolutionary model though. I think it’s apart from that.

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Nobody else can notice what isn’t there. The ‘rest of the universe’ is meaningless to the ANE.

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The reason theists rally against evolutionary based theology is because in all honesty, in order to reconcile Darwinian theory with Christian theology, one must make some woefully innadequite statements about what are very definately, self evident Bible concepts.
These concepts really are foundational to all Christian belief.
For example, in the Darwinian based religious model, sin did not bring death. In fact death already existed before Adam and Eve.

That is a woeful understanding of the Gospel and indeed the entire reason for the crucifixion. Jesus very definately died to save us from the eternal death that sin brought to this world. There is simply no way to reconcile the literal death part of this narrative with that which is being put forward here. A saviour who dies literally says something very important about the nature of death in Genesis ch 3.
Unlike the 7day creation account, death was not stated as instantaneous. I think if one was to think logically about it…if God killed Adam and Eve instantly, how would that allow for a compassionate creator to enact a plan of salvation? Also, when we consider why sin came to this world, we know it was because of the charge Lucifer made against God in heaven prior to the fall of Adam and Eve. Lucifer claimed God was selfish. If God had of simply killed Adam and Eve, it would have given Lucifer adequate justification for that charge against God to the rest of creation (intelligent life on other worlds). I think this is well illustrated and indeed explained in the book of Job.

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I agree, as there are thousands of animals all over the world that Adam could not possibly have come in contact with, so a literal reading give’s insurmountable problems that leads one to conclude that something else is going on here.

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And on today’s episode of “I can’t believe an atheist said that”… :laughing:
I also think it’s true. Just not in scientific way, and it’s not telling us full story because why should it?

100% they are. There are new beginnings everyday.

I’m not ignoring it, I just think it’s symbolical rather than literal. Naming things could be perceived as a symbol of having power over it.

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What on Earth has that got to do with God in Christ?

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It almost makes you wonder what I think being true means. :wink:

Some might think both the Bible and Whitman are true with the Bible being somewhat more so. For my personal use the Whitman quote moves the needle a little further.

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The “self-evident” descriptor has become notorious, I think. As in, we usually don’t say something like “Obviously this is the way it is…” unless it apparently was in fact not obvious enough, because here we are needing to say it. I suspect that what “self-evident” really means is “I’ve becomed so accustomed to thinking this way, and this is such a well-worn path or groove in my mind, that I am no longer able to even conceive of any other way of thinking about it.” I know I do that as a teacher who has taught the same subjects for many years now. But every fresh batch of students I face can remind me that my confidence about the self-evident nature of something does not necessarily translate into ‘self-evident’ for them.

The fact that many Christians do just fine basing their faith on Christ rather than on a particular understanding of the Genesis creation accounts indicates to me that they don’t find some of these same things to be ‘self-evident’ that you do.

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  • Gen 1: 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was invisible and empty; there was darkness on the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God moved over the waters. 3 God said, "Let there be light! And there was light… that was the first day.

  • The fossil radiation, or cosmic microwave background, is scientifically recognised as the first light in the universe. It is the fossil record of the decoupling of matter and radiation in the early universe. It was discovered in 1964 by two American engineers who were awarded the Nobel Prize.

What is the connection between the biblical phrase ‘God said, Let there be light’ and ‘the light was’? And there was light’ and ‘fossil radiation’? Is it the same light? I think that the answer to this question will leave no one indifferent, neither in the scientific world nor among theologians. And it is on the basis of this answer that the biblical scheme of creation will now have to be published as well founded.

This article is part of the Universal Cosmological Model. What I publish as part of the Universal Cosmological Model is neither sermons, nor biblical interpretations, nor concordisms. I explain the origin and development of the universe based on the biblical scheme of creation. My articles are part of theology and cosmology, which is defined as the science that studies the origin and evolution of the universe.

The cosmological schemes that scientists offer us have many limitations. It was in the Bible, where the creation story is contained, that I discovered a complete scheme. The author of the biblical diagram of creation was not scientifically literate, but he described the origin of the universe in terms that could be understood in his time. For this author, it was not about science. He was telling the origin of the universe and its evolution to demonstrate the greatness of God. Now that physics has made a science of it (cosmology), I have come to submit to them this scheme restored in the Universal Cosmological Model so that astrophysicists can validate it.

Until then, I am still focused on the events that took place in the pre-Big Bang as I discovered them in the biblical scheme of creation. For science, mathematical calculation has shown that this sphere never existed. The fact that I discovered this in the Bible is a great revolution and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century, because from now on it will encourage scientists to push the limits of their reasoning.

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Until then, scholarly attention has been focused on the origin of the biblical scheme of creation. It is for the first time, through the Universal Cosmological Model, that the public is actually receiving the true explanations of the content of this scheme since it was discovered in papyri.

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For non-cosmologists, I would like to point out that this first light has nothing to do with the light that the Sun brought to us. Here we are discussing a light that appeared before the creation of all the stars.

In the first cosmological account from antiquity, namely the biblical scheme of creation, we find that the first light appeared when “God said let there be light and there was light”. Whereas science says that the first light appeared, for some, or reappeared, for others, after 380,000 years after the Big Bang. What is the link between the appearance of the first light of the universe on the first biblical day and the fossil radiation that is scientifically recognised as being the first light of the universe that appeared or reappeared 380,000 years after the Big Bang?

I know that before reading the following, the majority of those who read me have answered inwardly that there is no connection with one slogan, “the Bible is not a scientific book”. But I ask them to read with objective judgment what follows and to put aside their erroneous consideration of the origin of the biblical scheme of creation as taught in universities and as transcribed in encyclopedias.

In the verse “God said let there be light and there was light”, even if a fictional witness was there, he would never have seen God at work dictating the appearance of light. God being invisible, the fictional witness would have simply seen a set of physical phenomena making light appear. This is why the English scientist Stephen Hawking said “the Universe did not need God to appear”. The reason is that God is always a hero in the shadows and only those who believe in Him can see His power in the accomplishment of an event.

Thus, even if in this publication we demonstrate the physical origin of this light in the verse “God said let there be light and there was light”, this does not exclude divine intervention in the shadows. Indeed, if the author of these writings, who for us is Moses, attributed this appearance by a divine word to God, it was to demonstrate that it was not a chance of nature or only a physical consequence, but that the process of the formation of the universe followed a divine plan. This is why the appearance of all the great entities was preceded by the words “God said, God was, God created”.

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Whereas it was the real physical basis for light to appear as written in the verse " God said, ‘Let there be light’" And the light was ?

The key phenomena for us to get to the appearance of light begins with the first verse that says that “in the beginning God created… an invisible and empty earth” according to the Septuagint Bible. The earth representing a physical sphere, but the Bible tells us that this sphere was invisible, so that it was empty for a fictitious witness. This is the state of the universe at its beginning which the Bible is the only one to issue this description that went unnoticed for centuries and centuries. In fact, an invisible thing is something that exists but that we cannot see so that it seems to be empty and non-existent. So, we were only in a universe filled with energy and particles.

In fact, scientifically the vacuum in space has always been a quantum vacuum, that is, there is always the presence of energy and particles, virtual though they may be. Since these scientific terms were INEXISTENT at the time the biblical scheme of creation was written, the author of the biblical scheme of creation had to use the following words:

  • Invisible and empty earth signifying the universe at its beginning; a sphere filled with invisible matter so that it appeared to be empty to a fictitious witness.

  • The spirit, the breath, a wind from God signifying the energy of the void, a force that the author attributed to God. Scientific research is underway to determine this energy that binds the particles.

- To move on the waters means that this breath, this wind, this spirit of God on the water was not static but dynamic, that is, in action . This covers all the phenomena that are part of quantum mechanics, which seeks to elucidate how matter appeared from the vacuum and how it evolved from virtual to real.

  • The waters that simply represented the particles (from virtual to real) or the invisible matter contained in an invisible earth (universe) and empty at the beginning. In ancient times, the terms “particles and matter” did not even exist. Hence the use of the word “hydro” in the original Hebrew version, which the translators translated as waters. In the 18th century, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier , (1743-1794), a French chemist considered the founder of modern chemistry, gave the name of hydrogen , which means what generates water, to the most abundant element in the universe, without knowing that he had just confirmed the Bible. It should also be known that according to nucleosynthesis, it is hydrogen that is the basis of the creation of all elements and all matter.

I. The appearance of the first light

So, in the verse " a wind of God moved on the waters", we are in the process of phenomena that took place in the pre-big-bang. This means that on the basis of the energy of the vacuum (God’s wind), all particles were in agitation.

In this interaction or fusion, particle-antiparticle, there was annihilation and creation and this led to the formation of an axis where everything took place. This concentration compressed the universe until making a kind of black hole called “abyss” in the Bible according to that it is written “there was darkness in the surface of the abyss”. In practice, the zones where it is hottest in the Universe are those where the matter is concentrated and very agitated as it is written biblically " a wind of God moved on the waters", causing the cosmic deflation of the matter qualified by the waters in the Bible. By confining itself more, it caused the increase of the temperature generating heat in the form of plasma which was the source of the first light of the Universe in the pre-Big-Bang described biblically in the verse "God said: Let there be light! And there was light".

If we link this verse that was thought to be independent of the previous verses, it becomes "the earth being invisible and empty, the spirit of God moving over the waters… (there appeared) light ". (Gen 1:1-3). I repeat, this discovery is made within the framework of cosmology, which tries to penetrate the mysteries that are hidden in the biblical scheme of creation, which is the first cosmological scheme from the papyri.

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This quotation from scientific observations and experiments is the best among all that I have discovered. First of all, it answers the question why on the first biblical day, it was not written anywhere that God created the waters. Scientifically the answer was "Matter ( waters according to the Bible) is a product of … emptiness (invisible and empty earth according to the Bible). In addition, this quotation also answers the question why light comes in third position compared to the void and waters and why all these three phenomena are linked in one day by the following sentences: "Matter (waters according to the Bible), light and void interpenetrate… matter (waters according to the Bible) emits photons (light: And there was light! according to the Bible) which are couples particle/antiparticle contained in the void.

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II. Proof that the “light is” is the cosmic radiation

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The other proofs also do not hold when we know that the expansion of the universe is carried out at a speed more than that of light and that this should mark a shift in space between the extension of the latter and the fossil radiation. However, we notice that the fossil radiation in the Universe appears homogeneous, on a large scale, in all directions.

For the cosmos to have the same appearance at all points, some form of interaction must have been established between the distant regions of space so that their properties were homogenized. This could only be possible if the fossil radiation was already present in the condensed universe (remnant of the pre-Big-bang era) and, where all the extremes met and had the same temperature.

This hypothesis supports my prediction that the cosmic microwave background appeared as the universe was condensing and heating up in the pre-big-bang period and also justifies why these properties are part of the nature of the universe in the post-big-bang period.

There are also several hypotheses of great cosmologists such as the British scientist Roger Penrose (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020) who claim that the Fossil Radiation is a remnant of the Pre-Big Bang. But, I am the first to predict its origin by being inspired by the Bible (Let there be light!). Thus, the link between the two lights, biblical and scientific and their origin are personal discoveries and, every time we see the image of the Cosmic Microwave Background, we can say that it is the image to which it is described in the Bible " Let there be light! and, the light was".

Flavien PHANZU MWAKA

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My objection is whole idea of God accomplishing things by giving commands like a despot. It works as a metaphor for human beings according to our own limited understanding and experience of power. The Bible uses other metaphors such as God shaping Adam from the earth like a sculptor/potter or the idea that features of the world could be added like painter adding things to a blank canvas. But to think these are literal descriptions of how God created the universe as if the Bible were some “how to creation for dummies” book is not only ludicrous but simply doesn’t work logically, scientifically, or even theologically.

Despots accomplish things by giving commands because that is the nature of the depot’s power in the support of other people who have all the knowledge, tools, and abilities to accomplish what the ruler wants. But clearly this is pure nonsense when we are talking about God, who not only has all of the knowledge and ability to do things Himself but is the creator of everything (which is the real point of Genesis 1).

To be sure God certainly can and likely did create tools and subjects to which He could give commands – the angels. It is a natural and efficient way of doing things. But in that case, the story doesn’t really begin with a command of “Let there be light” – it would begin with the creation of those servants who can follow such commands.

And everything we learn shows us that the universe is not the product of a painter, or sculptor, because of the way it is all connected and interrelated. Life and free will is not a magic added at the end but a part of how everything works.

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Flavien, you’d been asked to refrain from further long posting. I left this last one in - but with any paragraphs with links removed. And I merged it with an already established thread you’ve already started. From now on, we’ll probably keep channeling your posts into the same thread so that we don’t have a proliferation of different threads of your stuff.

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That plain reading of scripture is that Adam named the animals which were familiar to the Hebrews and which populated the ark. This contradicts the compromising YEC organizations which advocate hyper-evolution and maintain that there a were a host of animals known by name, such as horse and mule, dog and jackal, lion and leopard, that Adam did not name.

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You have said many things to demonstrate your objection. But the most important is this sentence: "But in this case, the story doesn’t really begin with a command like “Let there be light” - it would begin with the creation of those servants who can follow such commands.
In fact, if you started following my publications from the beginning, you will see that things started in the vacuum, in nothingness, and started to evolve from particles until we arrived at the appearance of light on the basis of physical phenomena. This is what I said:

Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)
For those who have not yet followed the thread of my publications in this forum, in our previous publications, I had developed the following themes which are very important to understand the biblical pattern of creation, namely: