Scientists claim that the Sun is older than the Earth. However, the Bile teaches that the sun was created on Day 4. When God said " let there be light", he meant ’ Light, exist". God is light because in Revelation 21, it says that the new Earth won’t need light because God provides light, so Genesis 1:3 is referring to God’s light. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Bible seems to teach that the Earth is older than the sun. Are the scient9fic methods reliable? Should we interpret the Bible this way?
I am having major doubts and I need help immediately
Hello? are you there?
Sometimes doubts are not a bad thing. It could well be (and it seems you’ve already discerned it to be so) that your understanding of what scriptures are - or how we are to understand them might benefit from being questioned, and perhaps in many points reconsidered. Scriptures can be considered inspired and even infallible, but that doesn’t mean what you or I think about those scriptures (and how we read them, and all the modern baggage you and I both bring to our reading) - it doesn’t mean that any of that is necessarily infallible or even inspired.
I’m sorry if you’re feeling a crisis of faith about some of this. Many here have also agonized over many similar struggles as they/we inherit many convictions from our cultures of origin. Some of those convictions may not be faithful readings of scripture, much less faithful hearing of the Spirit or obedience to God. It can feel like our very faith itself is being shaken apart if some cherished teaching is questioned. But when we are shaken, that is often so that the “shakeable” things that we think we are so certain about may be removed so that what is not shaken then remains and perhaps we can begin to see that better. I do pray that the seed in your faith - the part that God would have to be there, will remain and bring its fruit, while the many parts that would hinder that true seed may fall away. That process is never pleasant, but you are not the only one who has faced such growth and transition.
Yes.
That is up to you, but allowing science to inform how you interpret Scripture shouldn’t be a problem.
It may be that God was invoking a different kind of light than what we think of – that’s very possible. I’m glad you’re thinking through all this, but hope you won’t let it worry you too much – the Christian faith is not dependent on us getting our interpretation of Genesis exactly right.
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Science says they pretty much came into existence at the same time. And in both cases you are drawing lines in the sand. In both case you have dust floating in space coalescing over a considerable amount of time into into the celestial bodies, sun and all the planets.
Science is correct, of course. Taking the Bible as a source of an accurate timeline for when these came into existence is wrong.
If God wrote the Bible, and I believe He did, then human beings were his writing instruments. And as the flaws in our paper and ink distort the written or printed texts so does the flaws in the functionality of God’s instruments including the limitations of our minds. It is a question what magnification are we going to examine the text at, because under a microscope the letters of even the printed text are far from straight. The inaccuracy of the Genesis 1 account sets the stage and tells us what sort of magnification we should be using in reading this text.
Your “seems to suggest” is incorrect to me. The Bible does not provide us a chronological, fact-literal model of creation. That completely misinterprets the purpose and context of Genesis 1. The story comes ~3000 years ago and has no intestate in the some of the things we are preoccupied with. So when you ask who is right, your question presents an “either or” based on a false premise. Genesis 1 must be interpreted in context. That is the third option in what is often presented as a false dilemma.
The sun before the earth is not is not the only issue of where a literal interpretation of Genesis leads to errors. I wrote a piece outlining a lot of science errors in Genesis:
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God creates the heavens and the earth together “in the beginning” but we now know that roughly 9 billion years separates the origin of our universe and the formation of the earth.
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The earth is incorrectly described as being created before the sun. The earth and sun formed out of the same cloud of dust and gas (solar nebula) and that order should be reversed as the sun proper probably existed before the earth proper fully accreted.
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The text describes there being evening and morning without a sun!
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Describing the sun and moon as being created at the same time is also incorrect as the moon is thought to be the result of the coalescence of debris caused by the collision of a massive body with the early earth. This means the moon was formed after the earth.
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It describes plants and fruit trees existing before the sun and the moon. Obviously sunlight is needed for photosynthesis and the sun must predate plants. Ancient authors would presumably understand the importance of sunlight for growing things which is probably a hint this is not meant to be a historical-scientific narrative. Though many other creation myths also do something similar in having night and day before the sun!
I went on to to describe 6 more errors in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 contradicts Genesis 2 when taken literally, there are many indications the creation stories are not meant to be taken literally and lots of parallels to ancient near east mythology. The problem is not that Genesis 1 is incompatible with science, the problem is not understanding its ancient context and purpose. Genesis has no interest in the questions modern readers impose upon it. Genesis is thematically formed and is interested in the form and function of things.
The true beauty of the creation accounts are diminished if we strip them from their ancient contexts and impose modern questions upon them they never intended to address. As Derek Kidner wrote in his commentary on Genesis, “The main point of Genesis 1 is about God. It is no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible, for this word dominates the whole chapter and catches the eye at every point of the page: it is used some thirty-five times in as many verses of the story. The passage, indeed the Book, is about him first of all; to read it with any other primary interest (which is all too possible) is to misread it.”7 The Bible is not at all interested in the specifics of how God created the earth and the universe. The Bible is interested in teaching us correct theology about God amidst a polytheistic sea of rival suitors. It dumps them all on their heads and this is why the charge of lying is inapplicable. Bill T. Arnold captured the profound meaning of Genesis 1:1-3 in his commentary:
“We fail to appreciate the profundity of vv. 1–3 for two primary reasons, among several others. First, it is exceedingly familiar to those of us in the West, who still benefit from the long years of Judeo–Christian education and influence. Second, we have overemphasized the similarities between Gen 1 and the other ancient cosmogonies without fully appreciating the differences. This text soars above them in such a way as to deny implicitly any possibility of the theologies expressed in the Egyptian or Mesopotamian accounts. If we consider it an ideological polemic, we must admit it is not specifically so and only indirectly. It contains no theomachy, or cosmic conflict among the gods, or victory enthronement motif. Both are excluded by “in the beginning when God created . . . ”! Israel’s God has no rivals. There can be no struggle with forces opposed to his actions or corresponding to his power. There can be no victory enthronement motif because God’s victory was never in doubt; rather, God has never not been enthroned. There can be no enthronement portrait here because God has not become sovereign; he has simply never been less than sovereign.”8
You can glean a lot of information about Genesis from this thread I created:
Also, if interested I can link you to pdfs I put online of the same material. Neither Genesis 1 or 2 care about modern literal readings.
Vinnie
Ok, but remember Revelation 21. It says that the new Earth won’t need the sun because god gives it light. Genesis 1 says he was hovering over the waters. If God( who provides light) was hovering over the waters, that would suggest that God is the light. So when God said " let there be light", the best translation is " let light exist". So it must have been God who was providing that light. No?
Percentage wise they formed similarly in time but I think the sun proper beats it by millions of years which is significant if we are talking “days” in Genesis. Earth formed out of the spinning bulge slightly after the sun proper. Much more importantly, the moon comes later than both as it formed out of the coalescence of material ejected by another massive planet colliding with the earth. Also, granted our sun is a third generation, stars were formed way before the earth even though many certainly formed after it was created. There is nothing remotely plausible about Genesis 1 chronologically speaking.
Vinnie
Waters means primordial chaos. We need to understand ancient conflict mythology in the Bible to truly sense what is going on in this passage. But again, if we want to talk about water and light, scientific errors abound as I pointed out in bullet point 8 in a writing outlining the errors:
- The earth (in a formless void state) and waters predate the creation of light itself. Light formed shortly (seconds) after the big bang (photon epoch) many billions of years ago. The majority of the elements on earth, including all the oxygen in H2O, formed via nucleosynthesis in now deceased stars over billions of years. Water simply did not exist in the beginning of our universe and it most certainly does not predate light.
Revelation was written a thousand of years after Genesis 1 which comes amidst creation mythology thousands of years older than it. The former is dependent on on traditions shaped by the latter and has no bearing whatsoever on how to interpret it properly. That some might try to force fit all scripture to say the exact same thing is an incorrect hermeneutic and one I do not share. That is part of the same type of faulty thinking that leads us to “Genesis or science” false dilemmas. Not to mention, how literal one should take anything in Revelation, a book of questionable canonicity that has extravagant imagery, is an open question.
Vinnie
It also teaches that the city of God placed on the earth is going to be a cube 1500 miles on each edge. That means it either punches through the earth’s crust, or sticks way out into space or both, and furthermore, it would have to be made of unheard of materials (since neither jasper nor gold could hold up its own weight that high). So do you accept that this must be an actual description of physical architecture? Or is it possible that we aren’t supposed to be trying to reduce these sacred teachings to mere instruction about cosmology and architecture, but instead should be attending to far more significant lessons instead?
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Science and Faith Forum. Fossils and Apostles, if you will. BioLogos was founded to teach science to Evangelicals. First about evolution, then about climate change, and now vaccines. Denying these gets progressively deadlier.
Your statement is an extreme oversimplification of the issue. There wasn’t even a New Testament when “God breathed” was written nor does it imply the necessity of modern inerrancy! Don’t confuse your interpretation of what “God breathed” means and what it applies to with the actual range of meanings it could have. I for one support Biblical inspiration but unequivocally reject inerrancy. The Bible wasn’t written in heaven. If God sat down and decided to give us a completely accurate scientific statement of the universe’s creation we could expect God to get it right. This is not at all what happened with Genesis or the rest of the Bible. Verbal plenary inspiration and divine dictation theories are dead in the water.
Vinnie
No. In my opinion. Saying the sun was created after the earth is part of what is called a concordist interpretation, one that says God is speaking to science and history in these verses, and I feel it is non-concordant, that is, God is not addressing science, but rather using the reader’s understanding of the universe to communicate truths regarding God and his relationship with creation, something also involving a tool called divine accommodation.
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The Bible says that God fixed the earth on its foundation so that it never can be moved.
Is that what you believe?
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Science makes it very clear that there was no Flood.
Guess its up to a individual how they want to handle that.
Ha. 44.2 kg of Microchicomette Warrior fears naught!
Depends how you define “formed”. If the sun is only considered formed when it begins fusion, then the gap (~30 MY) in within the error bars on our measurements. If one means “there is a big mass clump, and it’s starting to warm”, then more like a hundred of million.
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Well since I think Genesis is geocentric and filled with a large number of scientific errors by modern standards, including this one. I don’t feel the need to emasculate proto-stars and strip them of their stellar designation because some ancient creation myth 3,000 years ago thinks the earth comes before the sun. Was earth “earth” before the collision with Thea? Should we not all it “earth” until the moon starts forming? I doubt the author of Genesis was distinguishing between main sequence stars with nuclear fusion and proto-stars. Stars were those pretty dots in what was an amazing looking nighttime sky before light pollution. They sat up there in the solid firmament. A concordist Genesis gets it all wrong. Its Stars → Sun → Earth → moon (which is not a light). That is the correct order though yes, they all formed in very close proximity to one another percentage wise. Genesis knows NOTHING of this.
Vinnie