How would you illustrate Genesis 1:1 and 1:2

Faith & Science Conversation
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True if we think of life on Earth. It is possible that other forms of life could develop in environments that are hostile to earth-style life.

If we look from the viewpoint of creation, God seems to have created different kinds of life, including the heavenly creatures. Such creatures could possibly live in environments where humans cannot.

There appears to be enough of planets in the universe to ensure that at least some are suitable for life but a suitable environment does not mean that such a planet hosts life. If there is life, it might be in another sector of the universe, so that we will never know about it.
Personally, I think that it is likely that there is some form of life outside Earth, somewhere in the universe. Yet, it is as you wrote, scientifically there’s insufficient data.

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22

Yes I think this highly likely since this doesn’t even require the evolution of complex life. But that we will find some primitive life somewhere seems very likely to me – and probably not that far away either. But the evolution of more complex life is likely to be much more rare.

I think it is likely intelligent life exists elsewhere, but not impossible that we are the only (or earliest) ones because I don’t think 13.7 billion years is enough to guarantee this. On the other hand, the size of the universe makes this likely intelligent life exists elsewhere. Furthermore, because of AI, I am thinking intelligence is not so remarkable (given the evolution of complex life). Though perhaps it is language rather than intelligence which is the greater development here.

What I don’t believe in is UFOs. I would not go so far to say that going to another star is completely impossible. But it is difficult enough that star empires are not possible. And the argument from the size of the universe is a two edged sword, for while it makes other life more likely it also makes it less likely they would ever encounter each other.

Whoa! That is an extremely far fetched connection! By that jump Mormonism existed long before Joseph Smith! For example Jewish commentators on scriptures in the 11th and 12th centuries. So… don’t be preposterous! Thinking other worlds were created before ours does not equal Mormonism! Not even close!

This is a good deal closer to Mormonism. …but still not quite there yet. The real peculiarity of Mormonism is the notion that God Himself is enough like us, that one day we will be the same. It makes it difficult for me to even classify them as theists.

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Space has nothing to do with this – there is no “space” in the opening of Genesis! Until God inserts the raqiya it’s nothing but t’hom, darkness and water.

Of course it doesn’t. You’re bumping up against the fact that the Genesis worldview is not the same as yours: it doesn’t include space, it doesn’t include gravity, it doesn’t include geometry, so trying to impose those on the text is futile.

An ancient near eastern person would hear this and see a battle taking shape: YHWH in the person of His Spirit is facing off with the “great deep”, the t’hom. He would have known that it took all of his gods to battle the t’hom and keep it from swallowing up all of existence. He would have been perhaps amused; here was a single deity facing off all that power of watery darkness.
BTW, the fact that the t’hom was endless yet the Spirit of YHWH was facing it would have presented no problem at all; this was not earthly reality so earthly parameters did not apply.
An Israelite would hear this and be expectant. He knew YHWH was above all gods, so how was this going to play out? If “above all gods” meant above each one individually, was YHWH up to this? but if “above all gods” meant above them all standing together, well in that case YHWH was going to win this battle, and the only question was how.

Of course the next verse isn’t what either one would have expected, but that’s a different verse.

Reading it from the point of view of the ANE worldview within which it was written makes this so much more rich in meaning that reading it from a modern worldview. That should be obvious; when you drag a piece of literature out of its context you lose everything that was unique to that worldview!
The difference in richness alone would make me go with the ANE viewpoint reading without knowing anything about what kind of literature it is: it isn’t dry facts to look at scientifically, it’s a showdown between YHWH-Elohim and all the force(s) of chaos. It’s like the opening of a boxing match’ “In this corner, the mighty t’hom! And in the other corner, the . . . <Who? YHWH? Okay → incomparable YHWH!” I suspect that in reading this there would be a pause to let the anticipation build before announcing YHWH’s move.

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24

Which as my astronomy professor noted are outside of any possible calculation by us. But he also noted that when you delve into the chemistry it turns out that carbon is the only candidate for any kind of complex life (not sure how he was defining “complex” – multicellular? eukaryotic?), and carbon chemistry, from what we see in the universe, means amino acids and the other stuff found in interstellar clouds.

There was a debate over this (not in theological terms) in the biology study room once: is there an alternative to DNA for storing genetic information? I went with the bunch who said we had enough trouble figuring out DNA; do we really expect we can imagine such a complex molecule from scratch?

But they’re in an entirely different realm, though they can interface with or even enter this one where they take on the material form appropriate to this realm. So there are just two kinds of life: material and organic, and spirit. I don’t see an extrapolation to more kinds being valid since each was/is appropriate to its realm and there are only two realms.
(Okay, one could argue God made other realms, but that goes beyond the text).

I read an analysis recently that the universe as we see it is just the right size to guarantee the appearance of life – I think “at least once” was unstated. Plainly the author had in mind stricter parameters than even my list!

“My personal heresy”, as we used to say in grad school, is that God put one intelligent race in each galaxy; as a corollary, in the new heavens and Earth we will be able to spread to the stars and eventually to other galaxies.

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25

I’m reminded of the idea that if we find life on Mars it will be like Earth life in the basics for the reason that whichever planet developed life first, primitive forms would almost certainly have been carried to the other via severe impacts tossing chunks large enough to host primitive life into space and impacting the other world.

I recall one speculative article saying that there are spiders that live in the air, spinning webs that “ride the wind”, and suggesting that spider eggs could survive the vacuum and get wafted to Mars if a solar event rarified the atmosphere enough that some sloughed off and carried such a spider along.

I don’t expect we’ll be encountering spiders on Mars, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some kind of mold made it there from Earth and propagated; that would have had to have happened while Mars was still wet, I think, even though scientists have found some lichens that could survive on Mars as it is today (“survive” being the key word; not “thrive and spread widely”).

Dang – now I’m going to have to find that article again! I don’t remember if the author took time into account. Maybe another billion years would be enough for another race or two to arise?
[If I wrote theological science fiction, I’d say we’ve been generating a lot of story ideas lately!]

My view at the moment – and quite subject to change – is that the only viable FLT possibility is the one of gravitic focal points between stars that make it possible to jump from one of those points to another. It would be a tricky method since those focal points would wander slightly as the large planets shifted the balance of mass in a system ever so slightly, and it might be that – as in a couple of novels I read – the largest item that could survive a transit might be no bigger than a coffin (which in the novels they learned the hard way as after the first ship attempting to use such a point shredded into confetti when it tried to make the jump they made smaller and smaller ships until finally, after losing hundreds of lives, they built a probe that would fit in a coffin). In science fiction in some versions greater masses can transit but only at the expense of much more energy, the mass being linear while the energy increases exponentially.

At any rate, if that’s possible my explanation of UFOs would be that some advanced race had a program where they sent probes along the lines they could find, and then along the lines from other stars they thus reached, and when one probe reported back that there was a planet with tool-making life the news leaked and what we are seeing are sensationalist media folks exploiting our existence for their audiences.

= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =

Sloppy thinking for a scientist; I didn’t say “equals”. And the primary connection isn’t that other worlds were created before us, it’s that people on those worlds are watching us.

“As man is now, God once was; as God is now, so man may become.” Brigham Young, IIRC. It’s also a line from the original Battlestar Galactica, slightly altered for the situation. We used to call it “Mormons in Space” due to a great deal of dialogue being lifted from Mormon writings.

Interesting view. In that line, I’d be hard put to say just what they are!

Though they must love the multiverse idea; millions of Mormons becoming gods and getting their own worlds to fill with offspring to make more Mormons quickly runs out of planets in this universe!

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If it has no intention of telling us how God created, why does it tell us the order in which he created things, which things he created, how he brought things into existence (speaking), etc.? Sounds to me like this is how God created. Very important.

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Yes. Mitchellmckain is right here.

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I have to say, there is no reason not to see a literal view of Gen 1 as working quite well with the text and with modern cosmology. If you can’t see it, you may not know enough about modern cosmology or don’t have much imagination. In verse 1, nothing is made, nothing is created, it is a statement of what the coming paragraphs are going to be about. Verse 2 is still happening in God’s realm, wherever, whatever, that is. God does not live in this physical universe, though he permeates it with ease. I would illustrate verse 2 with total blackness. The first thing created (in our universe) is light. That’s one of the things created in the big bang. The first things created that we can still see today are light and matter. Doesn’t that ring any bells out there?

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Yes, it does, Marg, and there is a part of me that wants to see that and the subsequent verses referring to the “bringing forth” as being concordant with observed scientific findings, but ultimately that has to be resolved with the various non-concordant issues, such as the order of emergence of species, the various cosmology problems etc. and I find it more consistent with accepting the whole as being non-concordant, and the happy coincidences that resonate with us being reassuring, but not part of the inspired message of the passage.

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I made the burritos at 5pm, the tacos at 6pm, and the quesadillas at 7pm.

NO, this does not tell you HOW I made them, only when.

Why? Good question. The only reason I can see, is simply to turn it into a story. And perhaps to lend support to the Jewish celebration of the Sabbath. But it is demonstrably WRONG about this being the order in which things came into the world. Sometimes focusing on details like this only ends up turning the Bible into idiotic nonsense. So two choices: deposit the Bible in the garbage can or stop looking at it with a microscope to turn into some kind of pseudo-science text.

The idea that this is somehow God teaching us how to create the earth is frankly ludicrous. Nothing in the Bible supports the idea that God has done any such thing. Where is that Psalm “Oh God, you have told us how you created the world so that we can know and understand how you did it” Oh yeah… no such thing. The predominant message is the complete opposite, that this is something we do not know or understand. At least that was true of the people of the ancient world. Now we have the means to see and understand a lot more than they did.

Yeah… sorry… But no this is not one of the accomplishments we can credit to religion. And putting religion in this role only caters to the atheist notion that religion is nothing but failed primitive attempts at science.

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Four meanings of nothing

I think you are envisioning the last meaning of “nothing” here. At that point all our thought and language breaks down. The act of creating something for us generally assumes molding pre-existing materials, requires space and is temporal (there is a time before you created and a time after). The problem is when we talk about God as creator of “space”, “time” and the “stuff” we mold into new materials or creations, we end up hitting a conceptual or knowledge wall. Statements just stop making sense and we are at a dead end. We can. accept Revelation in Scripture or we don’t at this point.

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33

Thank you for considering my point of view. What are the problems you see in the order of emergence of species?
And what are the various cosmology problems that you see?
Please tell me. I am concerned about these, because I have not found them and I need to understand them.

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It does tell me part of how you made all the food you had last night. First you made the tacos …. and so on. I don’t need to know the details of how you made the tacos or the burritos – you’re such a good cook and I don’t cook much at all, so I don’t need the details; I probably wouldn’t understand them anyway.

“It is demonstrably WRONG about this being the order in which things came into the world.” ???

It seems to me Genesis 1 gets it right. Energy and matter first at the opening of the big bang - that’s day one with light and it’s separation from darkness. The expansion of the universe to make what we see when we look at the sky on day two. (The ancients thought this was a solid, inverted bowl, but, well, it isn’t. The Hebrew word there doesn’t mean a bowl, it means something beaten out very thin, like space maybe.) The continents rising over the water on day three along with the first life on earth both of which happened about 3.5 billion years ago. That’s day three. Nothing is out of order yet. Then those blue green algae or bacteria or whatever produced enough oxygen to clear the air so that the sun moon and stars could be seen on day four. Then with all that oxygen and sunlight we get the seas teeming with living creatures (the Cambrian explosion) along with …birds? no, flying things, insects, on day five. After a while animal life moved onto land and we have all the wild animals and live stock as well as the late arriving humans on day six. What is out of order?

The bible isn’t a science book, as you say so many times, so it doesn’t give a lot of details. But it gives us enough that we can trace what God says he did and see that it is the very same sequence of events that we have discovered by our efforts.

Now, everyone gets excited about the time involved. I think that the lovely, poetic, insistence on the days that we see in the text is to ensure that we remember that God did these things in a particular order, not all at once. I don’t think he is telling us that it was all done in what we call a week today. A week today, a week on earth, a week in orbit far from the earth’s surface are all different periods of time. Time runs faster or slower in different locations, depending on the gravity that is operating on the system. So there is no reason to believe that God’s 6 days at the beginning of time are the same as ours now. Check with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This is so real and relevant that his equations are needed to run our GPS system.

I have thought about all of this for a long, long, time. I am certain this is how it works (Genesis and reality). We need for more people to see it. I hope at least you do. Please let me know what specific problems you see with it.

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Only if you ignore what it says and don’t take literally which is the whole point.

Plants before sun and stars? No. That is wrong.

Whales (which are the largest creatures in the oceans – and certainly among the living creatures which swarm in the seas) before the creatures on land? No. That is wrong.

So according to you, God is telling us how He created but He lied. According to me Genesis 1 isn’t about how God created and such details are irrelevant to what the text is telling us. I can understand that some want a magical story of creation because they want a magical God and magical Christianity. But if I want such things then I read fantasy novels knowing full well these have nothing to do with reality.

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No, I don’t want a magical God or magical Christianity. Genesis 1 isn’t a magical story. I started out knowing a bit about modern cosmology and knowing that the Bible was supposed to tell the truth. How could this story of creation be true if things went the way people said they went? Well, popular interpretation was wrong. For instance, the sun, moon, and stars weren’t created on the 4th day. They were created with the sky, the heavens, on the second day. The word for make in day 4 is not the word for create in the beginning of Gen 1. God made the sun, moon, and stars show through the atmosphere on the 4th day. Do you find that upsetting? Whales? Genesis doesn’t mention whales. It mentions the “great creatures of the sea.” Over time there have been a lot of great creatures in the sea. Whales started in the sea like everything else, went to the land, went back to the sea. So what?
It’s there if you want to see it. But if you have your mind made up, like a procrustean bed and chop off your version of the truth so that it fits what you’ve decided, then I guess that’s what you will do.

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The author of Genesis had a three tiered creation understanding, and that is what they described, with a firmament above seperating waters above and land below, and waters below. They described mornings and evenings before the sun was in the sky (or seen in the sky by your thoughts) They had no concept of a global earth where there is a continuous morning and continuous evening as the globe rotates in relation to the sun. Birds came along before land animals.
Certainly, we can see some broad correlations, but when we look at the details, things seem to get off pretty quick. The broad correlations seem to be more logical progressions rather than a blueprint of creation. You have to have a sea before you can have a fish, you have to have dry land before you have a tree, and you have to have a sky before a bird can fly in it.

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There are stories of the Bible which I do very much want to be taken seriously historical. The story of Noah and the flood leads the list of those. I don’t think it was a global flood – that is a very poor reading of the text. But this is just a detail really, and hardly of any great significance to the story.

Genesis 6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

The implications of this are far reaching and profound. So I think not taking this seriously misses out on some important things. For instance… consider these questions.

What kind of world is described by “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his hear was only evil continually?”

And God said He was sorry that He made us (and it grieved Him to His heart). That more anything is something I have seen is something people don’t want to take seriously, and so they make excuses to dismiss what it says.

And while I think much of the story of the garden employed a great deal of symbolism, as indicated by the Bible itself. No, not a talking snake but an angel we call Lucifer. Nevertheless, I think Adam and Eve are real people.

But the greatest meaning I have seen in Genesis 1, is the idea that sun, moon, stars, plants, and animals are not gods but creations of one God. That is a meaning that lights up this passage for me, while these attempts to make into some kind of pseudo-science text (supposedly explaining how God created everything) only drags it down into the mirk. You are convinced of the effectiveness of these explanations for the discrepancies, but I don’t see how they help to understand anything. The fact remains is that science is the best way to understand how things happened, and not the Bible.

From this, you can perhaps see that the understanding of the text which I go for is one which maximizes its meaning and conflict with science and reality is something which can only detract from its meaningfulness.

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Because that’s the kind of literature it is. Though I would dispute the claim “it has no intention of telling us how God created”; part of the point is to tell us He creates by mere command – no fighting chaos monsters, no wrestling other gods into submission, or any of the other things that abounded in ANE mythology. YHWH just commands and it is so.

But the order and descriptions are literary structure for the messages – three of them, one from each of the two literary types woven together, and the third from the fact that the writer took the Egyptian story of Creation and inverted it to demote every important Egyptian deity to beings God made (I especially like what was done with the sun and the moon, two hugely important Egyptian deities: he didn’t even name them, just described functions, in essence saying, “You think those are gods? Sorry, they’re YHWH-Elohim’s tools”.

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40

Past Christians thought it resonated with their science of four elements that made up everything – air, earth, fire, water. I see that as a good reason to avoid attaching our science to the text!

That said, there’s also a vocabulary problem, the big one being that “raqiya” indicates something hammered out round and smooth and thus indicates a solid dome over the earth, which tells us that the Hebrews did indeed share the ANE flat earth-disk cosmology. Then there’s the word “earth” itself, which in the first Creation account means “land” – it does not and cannot mean a planet!
But it’s hard to shed baggage that has come from the ancient text arriving to us via two intervening languages and the way those changed concepts altered the original meaning of the text: Greek, which did have the concept of a planet (partly due to sailing the whole Mediterranean and grasping just how big the world was), and then Latin, which did as well and dominated western thinking for over a millennium. By the time anyone thought of translating the scriptures into English no one even questioned that “land” in Genesis 1 might not mean “the planet”.

Like “Bring forth!” to get living things on land and in sea, a phrase some of the biology students in our informal “intelligent design” club noticed and decided to investigate the Old Testament as possibly being revelation from the Designer they saw in evolution. It was interesting to see someone latch onto that phrase and then grow past it, knowing it didn’t actually point to evolution but accepting that if it hadn’t looked like it did they would likely not have investigated the Hebrew scriptures as possibly communications from the Designer.

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No but when I look into your explanations, they don’t work. There is no evidence of the text that God simply made sun and moon shine through on day 4. That isn’t what the text says at all.

But the biggest problem is the more we look the more problems we find. The text says plants appeared on land before fish in the sea, which is wrong. Plants on dry land came 460 million years ago and fish were 530 million years ago. And if that isn’t bad enough, it describes those plants as fruit bearing plants and trees which didn’t appear until 146 million years ago.

As St.Roymond explains the description is according to ancient near east cosmology (solid dome over a disk shaped earth). So since this was entirely made up by people according to their understanding of the world, you have two choices. 1) This didn’t come from God, or 2) Such details had NOTHING to do with what God was communicating.

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