The word that is translated here as expanse is also translated as firmament or dome. The Hebrew word is raqia. Here’s a very good article from the BioLogos archives:
The Firmament is solid but that’s not the point
It was written in 2010 by Pete Enns, I believe.
What you are trying to do is called concordism – but that has never worked. It’s like pounding a square peg into a round hole.
No, this is not modern science. Besides, how did anything grow before the sun became observable by humans?
@Miekhie I know you think highly of Dr. Strauss, but here is a quote from Chapter 12
Yes it wasn’t dark throughout the universe, but then he assumes the writer of Genesis would know there is a universe that is out there. Since they didn’t know the universe existed that makes this “detail” meaningless. He falls into the trap of assuming the author knows what he knows.
God’s perspective would be universal. The story is told from the perspective of a human on the surface of the earth. It also includes the limitations of that human, sight for example.
I do like this article by Strauss, however, when addressing YECishness:
if you read it carefully, Dr. Strauss did not assume that. He assumes that we the modern readers to whom he is addressing would know that it wasn’t a dark universe at that period.
on this, I agree with you. Dr Strauss did not think it was from Moses’ perspective. I did ask him and he did not agree and I couldn’t see why not.
Just before what I quoted is
He is saying God didn’t give Moses any information about the universe. Since Moses didn’t know anything about the universe this still makes the detail meaningless. To be meaningful Genesis would have to say it was dark on the earth but not above the troposphere. Which Moses would really not understand.
And moving on to Chapter 13 he really gets the actual order of creation wrong. I suggest you take a look at his order of 1 - 10 and see if you can tell where he gets it wrong.
You might be right about this. Since Dr. Strauss himself believe it is God’s perspective, then he might assume that the writer of Gen 1 (God) knew that the universe wasn’t dark. On this point, I differ from him.
Maybe if you can just point it out, so to make the discussion shorter instead of me having a guessing game trying to see your view.
His list
My rough outline is
His biggest problem is putting plants before sea life and implying sea mammals evolved in the sea. He accepts the great age of the earth but not evolution. But he should be aware of the sequence for the development of life even if it is by special creation. The order we see in the fossil record isn’t a result of accepting evolution. The book is basically apologetics and he is preaching to the choir.
Half of the world’s oxygen is produced via phytoplankton photosynthesis . The other half is produced via photosynthesis on land by trees, shrubs, grasses, and other plants.
Now to be honest, I am not the expert here and reply to you just based on my common sense and my limited knowledge of chemical reaction.
from my reading of his book, I believe it was the oxygen level that cause the atmosphere to be transparent afterward. Now the oxygen came fromphytoplankton photosynthesis and also from plants. Animals need oxygen to survive. Thus plants came first. Now, phytoplankton had existed then, but it couldn’t be seen or known by Moses at the time till they evolved to be bigger. Sea creatures, fish, bird appear afterword. Was the problem that you have is because he listed sea mammalian to arrive first?
You might want to read up on the Great Oxidation Event. The atmosphere at the time was nitrogen and carbon dioxide and there is no indication light couldn’t reach the surface. The oxygen is thought to come from blue-green algae which would need light to grow. Before the GOE life was based on anaerobic metabolism.
No, he has plants coming first and that isn’t what the fossil record says. But it fits better with Genesis.
This is what our modern science understanding of evolution , correct? But from the point of view of the observer (Moses), he could not see what is happening at the deep. He was not trying to be scientific, he was just writing what he could observe with his naked eyes.
I read the article and could not get any conclusive study on this matter. I am not the expert here, and you might have to chat with Dr. Strauss about this. He is the one that present the argument. It is compelling if it is right.
I search the internet, and found this article that might be helpful to our discussion.
there were apparently haze atmosphere before great oxidation era
It is what the fossil record shows. Evolution would explain why we see it. But my comment was about how Dr. Strauss added to Genesis to reinforce his theory that Genesis is correct scientifically. Which if he correctly summarized Genesis shows it isn’t correct.
Which says
So God must have shown Moses this during the hazy (which doesn’t mean no light reaches the surface) and clear skies. And I looked up the original paper and it says nothing about a haze producing total darkness.
His book is really about Genesis and the Big Bang. If he had limited it to that the only counter argument is the audience for Genesis wouldn’t have understood Genesis 1:1 in that manner. Which to me is sufficient reason to not try to tie Genesis to science.
The darkness should occur even earlier before the haze when the earth started cooling down and water filled the earth and dust still filled the atmosphere. I don’t think it was total darkness as it was still observable. It might be like a cloudy night time where you could not see anything on the sky and yet still had the night vision to observe things black and gray.
I have read a lot about Genesis and Big bang. However my particular interest with his writing is his approach on the 7 days of creation. I don’t remember much of what he wrote about big bang. I think it should be in the similar lines with Hugh Ross.
OK. I’ve been reading this discussion on Gen1, and I find all the confusions that generally appear on this subject.
For one thing the first majestic sentence of Gen 1 is not part of the narrative. (Yes, I know that there is a lot of theological discussion about this and that I am being rather arrogant to assert it so boldly, but so be it.) It is the title of the narrative, and as in many titles, it tells us what will be spoken of in that narrative. It does not follow that after the words “the heavens and the earth” that now everything exists. No. After the title we are ready to see how exactly the heavens and the earth, that is, the universe was made. We are given steps by which this all was accomplished, day 1, day 2, etc. If the narrator (whoever he was) described the making of the heavens and the earth in six steps, would he skip over the creation of the actual heavens and earth before the days begin? This would certainly be odd. If there are six days of creation, then everything is created within those six days. Otherwise we’re getting sloppy, and I don’t perceive anything sloppy about Gen 1.
Next, where is this “deep” that the Spirit was hovering over? We are not told. People assume that because the earth has just been mentioned, that it must be on earth. But this is a very special deep, not just some deep hole somewhere. The word in Hebrew is tahom, and it refers to primordial waters. Their location is vague, but perhaps somewhere below the foundations of the earth. The one thing we can be sure of is that the tahom was there wherever God was before he created the universe.
When the earth is mentioned, it is said to be empty and formless, the famous tohu and bohu. In other places in scripture where these two words are used, they are referring back to their use here in Gen 1. So looking for their meaning in these other references isn’t much help. Here they mean having no substance, empty, and having no shape, formless. If something has no substance and no shape, it doesn’t exist except as a concept. Thus at this point the earth is an idea in God’s mind. We are really at the beginning; before the big bang, before there was anything—anything in the visible world, that is.
Then God said, “Let there be light.” If that isn’t the Big Bang, what is it? The Big Bang is when light and energy came into being. It is also when matter came into being. In fact, energy and matter were, as Einstein later alerted us, the same thing. This is why God had to separate light (energy) from darkness (matter). This isn’t bending science to fit scripture; it isn’t bending scripture to fit science. It’s just the obvious meaning of words.
But oh, we mustn’t think that there is concordance between scripture and science! That would be terrible. Everyone knows this can’t happen. We’ve all decided that Gen 1 is ancient myth. Peter Enns is a smart man (I had him as a teacher once), but he isn’t always right. The bible isn’t a science book, so it can’t talk about anything that science has taught us. If you believe that you’re closing your eyes. And don’t hang onto it because you’re afraid that the YEC crowd will start using scripture to argue against evolution. Scripture actually supports evolution.
More on that later, perhaps.
And was the earth once a water-world? Yes, apparently so. See When Earth's continents rose above its oceans | Earth | EarthSky for details.
But before the earth was a water-world it wasn’t covered with water. The water accumulated from several proposed sources over time. Depending on the point that you want to define as “the creation of the earth” it may or may not have been covered with water. It may or may not have had a hazy atmosphere.
If you cherry pick the data you can make Genesis and science match. So what makes the cherry picked data the correct data? And more importantly what makes you think they should match.
Yep. Attempts at concordism always fail. It’s like pounding a square peg into a round hole.
I wasn’t talking about how the water got there, just that it was there.
And I’m hardly cherry-picking the data. That comment makes no sense to me.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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