Is the bible inerrant?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Well Hitler doesn’t agree with you so to me that kind of blows your theory out of the water. In his own words.

Hitler was motived by a desire for ethnic cleansing not by any belief in evolution.

I thought you said you knew evolution better than I and here you show you don’t. Examples of where you get it wrong:

  • directed or random natural selection: natural selection is neither

  • weed out the weak, the sick, the infirm: Nope it works on the level of the population, not individuals

  • that in time will become fixed: Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally

  • make the specie stronger, healthier and better: The result of natural selection is a slightly higher reproduction rate. Evolution can actually result in altruistic behaviors if you didn’t know.

Just like the theory of gravity, the germ theory, etc. Plus it is supported by mounds of evidence which I am sure you don’t agree with.

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Gravity is, We have just measured and defined it.

Evolution?

It is very much a man understanding. There is no good reason why things should “improve” that is a human concept. In terms of simple Perfection, everything would be automated and synchronous. As soon as you introduce independent thought you have an unknown variable. Humanity is the worse thing to happen in terms of benefit to the ecosystem, although we seem to be trying to reverse it before its too late.
Evolution talks as if nature could somehow identify a void or niche and knew how to fill it, The old chestnut of Bird “development” why? How does nature know to create anything that flies, and having got flying insects, why should it “know” that the best way to catch the is to fly,
As soon as you have intelligent prey you need intelligent predator (and vice versa) otherwise the balance is lost. It is all so convenient that the right change occurs at the right time. Why should fish suddenly go on land? Who told them it was a good idea? Curiosity? That is a human construct. Is diversity or “improvement” obvious or a human notion. We impose our understanding onto Nature as if Nature actually has an intelligence and / or purpose. In terms of status quo there is no reason to get beyond an amoeba and hydra.

Just some wild musings to be ignored

Richard

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Dear Richard,
thank you for your thoughts, and I apologise is this seems gruff or argumentative, but please understand, I hope my feeble explanation will be expressed clearly enough to accurately communicate my understanding, please forgive me if I misunderstand you.

No, evolution is NOT anything like gravity.

It is abundantly clear that Bill has it wrong here.
To explain:
Gravity is an empirically measurable reality , whereas evolution is a man-made religion that requires faith. Evolution cannot be measured, and belief in it is in truth really nothing more than:
1.) a misunderstanding about what ‘natural selection’ is capable of doing, and
2.) a misunderstanding about the actual probability of blindly increasing useful information on the genome that codes for the ‘believed’ upward progression of diverse life forms from single cell to man.

Whereas, gravity can be measured in m/s² or N/kg, and the measurement is infinitely repeatable,. Gravity is clearly constant and is one of the four fundamental constants of the universe that modern physics is based upon.

Evolution and Gravity are NOT comparable in any way whatsoever!

Yes, Evolution is very much a 'man-made understanding and it is a false understanding at that!
You state, “There is no good reason why things should “improve” that is a human concept.”, and I agree with you totally.

The stark reality is the precise opposite!
Natural Selection probably acts to slow the degradation but it cannot prevent it.

Ever since the fall of Adam, the curse God put upon the creation has seen the perfection that originally existed unraveling, genetic errors are incessantly accumulating in ALL genomes, diseases and genetic disorders are increasing, the Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, thus more harmful solar radiation is reaching the biosphere,etc… almost all is downhill, NOT uphill as evolution posits!

But evolution is a faith based religious belief, (there is nothing scientific about evolution whatsoever, despite the cries and claims to the contrary that will no doubt ensue), in effect that means that one must believe that after the first cell mysteriously sprang to life, there’s been an ever increasing quantity of complex specified information on the genome of ALL evolving organisms that directly corresponds to the newly formed structures, systems and processes of the diverse forms of life we now see on Earth.

The observed reality that faithful believers of evolution are misunderstanding here is that for every new organism to come about, there first needs to be NEW heritable information on its genome.

Information of the complexity and type we see written in DNA is NOT a property of the sugar ribose strands, nor the Hydrogen bridges upon which the nucleotides are written (the letters) any more than the information I am typing that appears on your monitor as intelligible text is not a property of the LCD’s or pixels or polycarbonate cover; new complex specified information ALWAYS must have an author, that is, there must be a sender as Professor Werner Gitt has eloquently stated.

The widespread belief that natural selection CREATES NEW information, and thus is evolution in action is false!

It is an empirical fact that ‘Natural Selection’ cannot create new complex specified information, it can ONLY ever select from the information that is already present on the genome of an individual organism.

When natural selection selects a trait, it then takes an immense amount of time for it to be inherited throughout an entire population of a specie.
Thus eons of time are required to make evolution even remotely plausible to those that don’t comprehend that ‘Natural Selection’ CANNOT CREATE new complex specified information.

Evolution is falsified! What we observe is DEVOLUTION not Evolution!
That is the train is going in the WRONG DIRECTION!

However, Evolution persists not because of any scientific merit, but because the alternative is untenable to the atheist, humanist, materialist, naturalistic philosophy that rules the education system and academia in general and that philosophy won’t tolerate any dissent of any kind, and is quick to pounce and mock anyone who is brave enough to point out the absurdity of evolutionary belief!

If you stay within the rules of the ruling paradigm, (evolution), you will get the funding grant for more research, your work will be published in the prestigious journals, you will keep your job etc… but if you shed even a little light on the reality that evolution is a falsified belief, a mere house of cards, then you will be cast out of the academic circle, and scorned and mocked or worse.

And after that there is the immense hurdle of getting life in the first place, Abiogenesis, that underpins evolution in mainstream academic circles.

The problem with the Abiogenesis belief (i.e.,chemical evolution) is as British scientist, astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (who was for many years the director of Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy), so aptly put it after calculating the odds against a simple functioning protein molecule originating by chance in some primordial soup as being the same as if you filled the whole solar system shoulder-to-shoulder with blind men and their Rubik’s cubes, then expected them all to get the right solution at the same time.
In other words, it is an impossibility for life to spontaneously happen naturalistically.

By believing in evolution is science, it is my view that TEC’s are uncomfortably close to the insane faith held belief that life came about by chemical evolution.

Yes, Richard, I would have perhaps worded your thoughts a tad differently, but the thrust of what you are saying is spot on and I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I have observed there appears to be a propensity for the loyal followers of evolution to 'just’ explain away anything that contradicts evolution with yet another explanatory story.
This fact is so common, that the 'Theory of Evolution’ is to all intents and purposes an unfalsifiable Theory, that as a consequence means that it is not even science in the formal sense.

And I would add that evolution is a religious position, held by faith, not by evidence or empirical measurement. though many of its adherents appear to be so thoroughly indoctrinated into seeing the world through evolutionary glasses they will not tolerate any dissent, and usually attack the messenger, or as on this particular site the venom is usually reserved for people like myself once I have been given the YEC label, rather than the reality that I am a Bible believing Christian who Loves God and only wishes that all be freed from the shackles of the false teaching of evolution, theistic or otherwise.

May God Bless you Richard, and be with you always,
jon

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Amen to that Jon!

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I am pleased that you both follow and agree with my crit of ToE., but

We cannot just ignore the evidence.

My crit is that there is not intelligence in Nature to drive Evolution and that “Progress” is a human notion, but, if you superimpose an intelligence AKA God then Evolution does work. Therefore I cannot support your rejection of TE .God is the unknown (or at least unseen) element that makes Evolution work.

In all honesty I cannot take Genesis 1-11 as literal history. I do not see the need for a 6 day creation (7th being the Sabbath). And I will not accept the fairytale of the garden, especially the corruption of God’s creation by man. It makes man more powerful than God.(and God to be incompetent and vindictive)

The world is cruel, it is unjust, it is almost barbaric, but it is not corrupted by sin. Sin does not have that power. Sin is as much a concept as ToE.

Humanity was created by God (using evolution) to do His work of looking after This world (and we have failed up to now).Any notion of physical similarity (Physical image) is human vanity. Jesus cam in the form of man, not the form of God.

You can quote what Scripture you like. It will not change my view or reality

Richard

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As usual you get it backwards. If there is a change in the environment and some members of a population will reproduce at a slightly greater rate in that changed environment then the population will shift over time to include more members with that genetic difference. If the population doesn’t contain any variation that would be as successful then it dies out. Evolution is not trying to reach some goal.

OK, will do.

The biologists will disagree with you. The outcome of evolution is “measurable” in the fossil record and our own DNA.

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But not the journey.

Or the precise methodology

Richard

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What Day of creation did the earth rise from the waters?
What kind of vegetation springs from that ground for Adam to eat and live off? What can be made from those plants? What do clean animals (split hoof specifically eat and ruminate)

once you see it you cannot ever not see it.

blessings

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That may cover a fraction of the change, but by no means all. There is no logical “need” for feathers except in flight. The secondary functions of insulation and display are amply covered by other methods.
Leaving the water is not strictly an environmental change in the form that you suggest. it is just another ecosystem.
Both endothermic and ectothermic systems are perfectly viable. There is no logical reason to switch or even “invent” the other one.

Diversity is primarily adapting to different situations, but not necesarily just caused by the climate. Some of it , like water to land is just moving. And there is no “logical” reason to move unless it is overcrowding. The difference between overcrowding and stability can be very small indeed.

That is the sort of comment I would expect from a literalist not a scientist.

Richard

PS there really should be some way to write sarcasm without having to label it or broadcast it.

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As feathers are used for display and insulation, that suggests that they are useful for display and insulation, and thus that they are superior to something at making an impressive display and/or insulating, that something potentially including what was used for display and/or insulation by taxa ancestral to those with feathers.

The opening of a new possible niche into existence (e.g., being an herbivore on land), is an environmental change.

Endothermic systems work much better in cold environments if any sustained rapid movement is needed, or a fast metabolism is useful.

There is also undercrowding, i.e., an unused niche (like a new body of water, the novelty of food being present on land, or burrowing). Or avoiding predators by going somewhere that the predators can’t follow (this would apply to flying as well). Or greater food availability on the other side of a barrier, etc., etc.

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Everything you have said involves diagnosis. Evolution cannot respond to something. it does not have any intelligence. It cannt identify a need, or an opening, or an adaption…

This what I mean by imposing human values onto ToE.

There is no intelligence in ToE, only in TE.

Richard

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Richard did.

It’s more useful than projecting your own imagination onto the text and claiming that is what the Bible teaches.

My only worldview is the text. It took years to learn how to shed preconceptions and just let the Bible be what it is, and I’m not going to surrender what the text says nor add to it just because you think that reading it from a modern scientific worldview makes you correct.

Exactly – so stop adding to it, stop reading your cultural traditions into it, and stop trying to force it to speak in a modern scientific worldview.

Nothing in the scriptures – not a single line – was written with any of today’s concerns in mind, and so none of its texts address modern concerns. None of it cares in the least about your desire to have it speak in modern scientific terms; scientific truth was not and thus is not part of the scriptures’ definition of truth.

Again you want the text to speak in modern scientific terms – but it speaks in the terms of its original audience. Some facts: the opening Creation story uses the pattern and order of the Egyptian creation story; it turns that story into two kinds of literature at once, ‘royal chronicle’ and temple inauguration; and in so doing it carries three heavy-duty messages – and all of those messages are tossed in the shredder by forcing it, as you do, into modern scientific terms.

That first section of Genesis is not about anything that anyone would have seen if they had been there; that is a modern concern that would have made people stare at you in pity because it is so very not that and is so very much more than that. It is about Who commands the forces of dark chaos, about Who brings order to make a place for life to flourish, about how much greater YHWH-Elohim is than all the gods of Egypt, about who humans are and why they/we are here in a world that YHWH-Elohim made as His temple as He conquered all chaos and darkness.

I’m not avoiding anything, I’m sticking to the text and insisting that sticking to the text is the only way to read it.
And you constantly try to make the scriptures talk in a modern scientific worldview. I know you don’t see that, but it oozes from everything you say about Genesis. Claiming that Genesis 1 is a report on what humans could have seen if any had been there is forcing it into a modern scientific worldview, and it’s blatant that you read the Flood stories according to a modern scientific worldview.
Yes, it’s hard to ditch the worldview you grew up in and the expectation that ancient literature to talk in terms of what can be measured and recorded on a data sheet, but that’s exactly what is necessary to understand what the scriptures are talking about.

No, that’s your question. THE question is what the original writer and audience would have understood the text to say, and so far there’s no evidence that you’ve even asked that question, let alone tried to answer it. That actual question breaks down into several others: what worldview did the writer and his audience have? what kind of lessons did they expect such an account to carry? what kind of literature is it? why was it important to tell that story? and more, and unless you’re working with those questions you’re not reading the text, you’re reading your conceptions into it.

You keep belittling what the text says: in context (historical-grammatical) the account is about the known world, i.e. that portion of the flat earth-disk known to Noah (or perhaps to the writer, though the difference between those is likely nil) under the solid sky-dome called “heavens”. The known world stretched from the Persian Gulf all the way up the Tigris-Euphrates valley – which is a fact crucial to understanding the text because that’s what the words mean. Calling that a “local flood” makes it sound like you’re thinking of a river overflowing and inundating perhaps a hundred square kilometers.
That this description of the known world fits at least one known flood should make anyone who takes the Bible sit up and go, “Whoa!” There’s not a shred of evidence of a worldwide flood regardless of the lies AiG and Creation_com pass off, but in those floods uncovered by geologists we have an actual match to what the text really says, and that should make Christians look up and say, “Wow – there it is!”

That’s not in the text. I know you don’t like hearing that, but unless you’re determined to stick to the text,what it says and what it doesn’t, you’re not taking the Bible seriously. Your approach is like treating the text as a selection from a friend’s great-grandfather’s journal in English of things he observed and recorded objectively – i.e. fitting a modern scientific worldview – and to be blunt that’s just lazy as well as arrogant: lazy because it excuses you from the hard work of figuring out what the writer meant and his audience understood, arrogant because it demotes all believers not in this generation to second- or even third-class status by tossing aside their worldview and understanding, indeed even more arrogant because it assumes that God wrote especially for your generation and only incidentally for the people to whom the various portions were actually addressed.

No, that’s reading into the text. When the King James version was translated there was some excuse for rendering obscure terms the way they did – they were, after all, doing their best – but God has allowed us to know so much more and get a better picture of many things, including what עֲצֵי־גֹ֔פֶר (ah-tsey go-feyr) means, though to be fair the KJV team were humble enough to not even translate the word “gopher/gofer”. When I say that a likely translation is “pitched reeds”, reeds covered with pitch, I’m not interested in making the text conform to anything, I’m asking what the text says and setting out what scholarship has learned. And when I point out that a craft made that way would have been capable of surviving what the text describes, and that fairly large craft (up to 35m long IIRC) were built that way in the right period of time, I’m not forcing science on the text, I’m observing that what the text likely means fits what archaeology knows.
And even making it out of pitch-covered reeds would have been a lot of work!

So says Pope Burrawang.
The “known world” ‘belief’ is just saying what the text actually says – and what the text says is “the truth of the scriptures”, not what human tradition insists on.

Repeating a human tradition doesn’t make it correct. What the Hebrew says is that the flood covered the known world on the flat earth-disk under the solid sky-dome.

And you keep saying you’re not imposing a modern scientific worldview! “Globe” comes from a modern scientific worldview, as does “the only other part of the Earth”, and most certainly “planet”.

Go study Hebrew for five years in university and grad school level and get back to me. I don’t care what you think the scripture means on the basis of you imposing tradition and a scientific worldview onto it, I care about what the Hebrew, in its original setting, means.
It baffles me how YECers not only reject textual criticism, they reject the historical-grammatical method of understanding! Your assertion does not fit either the historical or the grammatical part of that – which reduces your understanding to, “I like this version better”.

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Timeless concerns that continue today (“Why do I exist?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What ought to be my moral guidance in life?”, etc.) could be considered a subset of “today’s concerns” or “modern concerns”, so perhaps “uniquely modern concerns” or similar would be a clearer phrasing for this specific case.

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In what manner? Each simply requires a shift in conditions that promotes a change in survival rates among individuals with different phenotypes in a population.

But it can happen in response to something.

No, but it usually happens in response to a need or opening or adaptation.

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It’s an elegant concept, but as I learned in college philosophy class, be very careful fitting the scripture text to any philosophical system. The early church did it carefully and with trepidation knowing that using any human system of thought to explain the scriptures is to potentially trap the scriptures in a system that doesn’t come from them.

Amen!

Let all the people say, “Amen!”

And yet again, Amen!

What’s “unclear” is what that means when you accept that it was written:

  1. millennia ago
  2. in an ancient language
  3. with an ancient (and radically different) worldview
  4. in an ancient literary type
  5. with ancient understandings of how to tell a story
  6. to address questions from an ancient culture

It wasn’t written in modern times, in modern English, with a modern worldview, in a modern literary type, with modern ideas of how to tell a story, to address modern concerns – and when you think even one of those applies you’re guaranteed to get it wrong.

To get the sense from that original context, the verse should read like this:
“I am going to bring floodwaters on this land / to destroy all life under the heavens you see . . . everything on the world you know will perish”.

Where is the evidence that a writer four millennia ago would have even conceived of such a thing? That idea comes from a modern scientific worldview, not from the worldview of the original context, and thus mangles the meaning.

Careful there – it’s evident from his post that he takes the scriptures seriously.
In contrast, you won’t even study them!

You are. Adam is. Every YECer is demanding that God have written Genesis under a modern scientific worldview (MSWV). It’s the MSWV that insists that Genesis 1 is a scientifically reliable account (and not the ancient literature it actually is) and does the same repeatedly. It is the MSWV that changes the meaning of a Hebrew word from “known world” to “globe” (which is ludicrous anyway because they didn’t know anything about a glob-world and didn’t have a word for it). It is the MSWV that ignores how grammar works and thus misinterprets the word “all” in a way that is unlikely at best in Genesis. In short, is it the MSWV that sets aside the text of the scriptures and acts as though the Bible is a friend’s great-grandfather’s journal of things he observed, written in English.

Only if you ignore the actual text and force it to speak MSWV English.
Making “earth” into “Earth” is just shoving science into the text where it doesn’t belong. Making “all” into “ALL” mangles Hebrew grammar by forcing it to fit the MSWV.
You protest that you don’t use that worldview but it’s what every paragraph you write shows.

Isaiah was talking about the flat earth-disk under the solid sky-dome. The prophet was not speaking in MSWV terms, he was speaking in Hebrew poetic terms with reference to the worldview of his time.

Do you not know? Do you not hear?
Has it not been told from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
He who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to dwell;
who brings princes to not[hing],
and makes the judges of the earth as desolation.

(translation mine)
[note: anyone see the link to John 1:14?]

It’s poetry, not a set of scientific proposals.

Yes it is – it’s changing the meanings of terms and ignoring its historical, cultural, and literary context. It’s little different than a paper written in the 1960s that argued that “Puff the Magic Dragon” was a song about drugs – an attempt to make poetry talk “objective reality”, i.e. to speak in the MSWV.

Only to the scientifically ignorant. In all my years at college level and above I never once saw someone do other than turn from Christ when presented with the YEC view – but I did see people come when what the text actually says was explained. I think that the idea that YEC brings people to Christ is a myth YECers tell themselves because I have never seen that happen in the real world.
I don’t think it’s an accident that what the text actually says fits what science has learned. When we strip away the human traditions that have grown up around the text and just let it be what it was written as, barriers fall.

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Why should it?

Why should just the right adaption occur at just the right time?

Richard

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For the same reason that rain drops land in a tiny bowl outside in a rainstorm. Such a small target to hit and yet, amazingly the bowl has water in it afterwards!

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Maybe because he’s paying attention to the text itself and not human traditions about it and/or a MSWV misrepresentation

Then stop doing it. Stick with the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. (The last on is the hard part because it’s natural to impose our own worldviews on everything we encounter.)

Nice excuse for ignoring the text: you’ve picked an enemy, and against that enemy you set tradition and ignorance. The text doesn’t know anything about either the view you set up as your straw man or the one you propose.

And there is no need and no justification whatsoever to support YEC beliefs.

But to get that you have to read the scriptures historically an grammatically, letting them be the ancient literature they are and as addressed to the original audience.
We are reading other people’s mail. We can learn from it, but we have to understand what it meant to them.

To be picky, it never means “entire globe”.

Were there Aztecs then? I know the Olmecs were, and I think that the Nuatl founded Tenochtitlan much later, so if there were any Aztecs already they probably ate each other.

Foxgloves, digitalis purpurea, has seeds smaller than a mustard seed, as does the California poppy, eschscholzia californica, both of which I harvest for use in conservation work.
As a thought experiment, think about Jesus taking the time to explain that there are plants in a place that will someday be called Brazil that grow in a jungle, then having to explain what a jungle is . . . it quickly becomes evident that it is absurd to expect even the Incarnate Word to speak in scientifically correct terms.

Or that Christ had common sense. What person will stop and explain that a common phrase is wrong when it’s the meaning of the phrase that counts?

I think its dangerous because I’ve seen it over and over and over drive people from hearing the Gospel. Oh – also because it encourages people to not actually learn about scripture! It’s a perfect tool to get people’s minds off Christ and onto unfruitful imaginings.

In the English, with a modern worldview, it’s easy to say that. But finding a global flood here:

וַאֲנִ֗י הִנְנִי֩ מֵבִ֨יא אֶת־הַמַּבּ֥וּל מַ֙יִם֙ עַל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לְשַׁחֵ֣ת כָּל־בָּשָׂ֗ר אֲשֶׁר־בּוֹ֙ ר֣וּחַ חַיִּ֔ים מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם כֹּ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־בָּאָ֖רֶץ יִגְוָֽע׃

is impossible.

Fine, but know that this is contrary to the use of the term in Genesis, and in fact in every book right up into the prophets.

There’s not really evidence that Hitler even understood evolution. He had friends who were obsessed with it and tried to twist it to justify some “master race” notion and he welcomed that right along with bringing back devotion to ancient Norse gods and anything else that he could claim to support his ideas – he even tried to show that Germany had true Christianity and no one else did, even while his minions persecuted the church.

Yeah – a vestige of the Nordic religion that Hitler liked.

They used it as an excuse for being barbarous, the same as they used occultism, Nordic religion, and Christianity. If you want to blame evolution for the Nazis, you have to blame the others, too.

Yeah, and I had history professors who said that Christianity is a belief system tailor-mad for evil people to excuse their evil atrocities as a supposed future benefit for mankind – but an even better one than anything else, because the church didn’t have to produce any benefits in the here and now!

It isn’t Christianity, and it isn’t evolution, nor was it the Nordic gods, that produce evil, it’s ideology where whatever is handy becomes the justification for seeking and maintaining power. Guilt by association is fallacious no matter the underlying system claimed by ideologues. It’s little different from claiming that “the white race” is superior to “the black race” because white is the color of purity and black the color of death and evil.

I did a brief paper for an honors class on “Form and Function” where I argued that the nature of evil regardless of the justifying philosophy is so nearly identical that it cannot be the differing justifications that are the cause; their forms do not fit the function. What fits the function is ideology; it’s scary how much ideologues sound alike if you take out the specific terminology ( which is why the “blame evolution” argument" is just as lame as the “blame Christianity” argument). Where there’s no ideology, the evil does not emerge (even in Islam, which is an inherently violent belief system, that holds true).

Throughout history, there have been powerful evil people who used their wholehearted belief in the Bible as an excuse to murder, sterilise and oppress millions upon millions of vulnerable people.

So what?

Watch the video:

She always uses verifiable information, unlike the lying humanoid bag of protoplasm in the video she was commenting on.

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I’m cringing at the horrid rendition of the Hebrew letters there! For starters almost half of the letters are missing, then there’s a mathematical sign in the middle . . .

It should look like this: תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ

It’s interesting to read the phrase as one, tohu wabohu wakoshek, chaos and desolation and darkness. It might even work except the way the next clause begins (“And [the] Spirit”) makes koshek go with the final clause in the verse, thus “darkness was upon the face of the deep”. On the other hand the two are linked; “the deep” is where “the earth” existed, though the focus is actually on “the deep”: that is what the Spirit is meditating on/over. There’s a parallel to this in some ANE literature where the creator-god(s) regard the “great deep”, the t’hom (t-home), thinking on how to begin. The link was more obvious to the first audience since darkness and chaos were aspects of the “great deep”, so this verse is saying that at the start the earth belonged to that category.
Of course the Genesis writer, having set up the expectation of the hearer that this is going to be another tale of gods battling the deep in order to bring forth a world of order, totally dives off the accustomed story line by not even presenting a battle; instead YHWH-Elohim speaks to something that to the ancient audience would have been pre-existent and commands it to exist – “Light, BE!” is a great rendition of the force of the Hebrew – thus indicating that the audience had it wrong, that light isn’t something that gods came and put to use, it’s a creature (created thing) of YHWH-Elohim (with the implication that those gods are a bunch of losers).

It was the opposite of all that is orderly and thus of all that is good. The text seems to present this as already existing, as all the other ANE creatiin stories did, but that’s contradicted by the use of the phrase הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ (ha-sha-mai-eem w’et ha-a-retz), “the heavens and the earth”, which was a euphemism for "everything that exists. There’s an unstated implication that the chaos and darkness don’t exist on their own, either, that they’re reliant on YHWH-Elohim, but since the text addresses the matter of darkness directly later that’s not really the emphasis here.

Good observation! But in a serious sense it was good, in modern terms, because this is the stuff He starts with to make everything else – in the terms of the time “good” indicated something that worked the way it was intended to, and by their measure chaos and darkness didn’t work (function) in any way, it just was and was a destroyer. The writer is addressing this as well, showing that chaos and darkness are only destroyers if YHWH-Elohim allows them to be; He has them moved aside out of the way just by deciding it should be that way – He makes a separation in the darkness without even having to give an order!
And BTW, “very good” is a kind of weak translation; to catch the idea as part of the story I’d render it as “magnificently good”. The idea is that all the things called “good” because they worked as intended also all work together with each other almost as though they were a single thing, which makes the whole thing a “good of good (things)” – magnificently good, with no flaws or malfunctions or anything missing.

You’re not alone in that. Don’t forget that “in Him was everything made, and apart from Him was nothing made that was made”. This is part of the idea in the word πρωτότοκος (pro-TOH-toh-kos) in the Hymn of the Firstborn: philosophically, a firstborn was an “opener of the way” who by making that opening caused everything that came after to take on the “shape” of the Opener – so everything from the first moment of Creation is going to echo and mirror and foreshadow Jesus because it all, not just items but events, hold His “shape”.

He is all, and in all.

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