God's False Mirror
Genesis 1-11 and their theological consequences
Chapter 2: An absurd Order of Creation - Effects before Causes (26)
God's False Mirror | Creation of the earth and of the solar system
Written by Gabriel Baicu  |
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From the primeval sea to the creation of the earth, there is another step in the process of creation. There is a biblical text in Job 38; 4-7 in which certain words are attributed to God which reminds us of the primeval sea from which the earth would have been extracted. In the text, God asks on what are the bases of the earth sunk? Such words couldn’t have been said by God, because the earth doesn’t have any bases sunk on anything. Nevertheless, such bases can be linked with the primeval sea from which the earth would have been extracted.
At the beginning, everything was under water, flooded, no terrestrial atmosphere, no stars, no sun or moon and very importantly, no sky. It is an error to try to imagine the earth, as it is today, a spherical planet covered by water, rather one should imagine the whole sky covered by water, earth included. A very interesting image about the beginning is depicted in the book of Genesis. On one side, we have God, and on the other side we have an immense ocean, which engulfed even the sky. One should notice that the dome of the sky was created only in the second day and without sky the image about the beginning of the creation from the Bible describes an impossible situation, no light, no morning and evening, no sun, no moon, no stars, hence no “heavens”.
From the Almighty Creator of the universe another order of creation was expected, a rational one. Why did God need water at the beginning as a raw material, for the creation of the universe? There wouldn’t be any reason for that. The existence of a primeval ocean encompassing the entire universe doesn’t have any scientific support. According to the book of Genesis, not only the stars and other celestial bodies were not created in the first day, but even the place for them wasn’t there.
How would God have possibly created the sun, the source of the daylight, from the first day, if the sky, the suitable place for the sun, was not in place? In the book of Genesis, the daylight was created on the first day and the sun only on the fourth day. There wouldn’t have been any place for sun on the first day of the creation; there was no sky, in the biblical story of the creation on that day. How could daylight have been created without the sky and how was the first morning and evening, described by the Bible, possible? A morning and an evening under the waters of the primeval sea would have been impossible in spite of what the book of Genesis states. The entire story is an incredible mixture of inconsistent details.
The order of creation, from the book of Genesis, doesn’t have anything to do with the factual reality. On the first day, even if on paper we have the heavens and the earth we don’t really have the basic conditions for the existence of neither the heavens nor of the earth.
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We have an immense surface of water instead, a primordial universal sea. The earth in the form of dry land appears only on the third day, after the separation of the waters.
“6 And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7 So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8 God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1; 1-10 NRSV)
Many speak of an intelligent design, in the creation of the universe, but this intelligent design cannot refer to the biblical account, which is not intelligent at all. An intelligent design excludes absurd or impossible situations. Daylight under water, before the creation of the sky, morning, and evening without sky and sun, and the earth a solo planet, created under a universal primeval sea, is not at all an intelligent design is an absurd and naive design. A more intelligent design, it seems to me, is the generation of all that is from an initial state of almost infinite density and temperature, a singularity, which expanded and became our universe. This Big Bang theory can explain much more intelligently the apparition of the universe, because it is the expression of a rational and intelligent chain of events. Adding to that, this Big Bang theory is based on direct observations of cosmic past events, which left traces until today.
For me, the main problem with the creation of the earth is the separation of its creation from the creation of the whole material cosmos, from the stars and all celestial bodies. This partition in the process of creation brings us to numerous contradictions and even absurdities. We can see and the sciences confirm that the earth is a part of a much bigger reality which is the universe, and the two must be seen together and having the same origin. The universe and the earth followed the same process of creation in a certain order; they didn’t appear randomly in a chaotic way. The whole universe and the earth are indestructibly linked in the same process of their apparition and development based on the natural laws and not on mythological storytelling.
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They are connected as the whole and its parts and the latter cannot exist without the former, not even for a split second, but even less for three days.
In the book of Genesis, the earth is seen as being prior in existence and detached from the other celestial bodies, and that is strongly contradicted by modern cosmology with numerous solid arguments. Without the universe, the earth cannot exist because our planet is a product of the evolution of the entire cosmos. First it was the beginning of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and only after that one of its by-products, our planet, formed to be what we know today, starting around 4.5 billion years ago. To place the creation of the earth before the apparition of the universe is an irrational and inaccurate thing. This is another contradiction of the book of Genesis.
The planet Earth and the vegetal life on it couldn’t have appeared before the stars as the book of Genesis says, because many material elements found on Earth would have been initially produced in the stars. Cosmos was made originally from hydrogen and helium, hence all heavy materials were produced in stars which had to be much older than the earth. This idea was initially advanced by Carl Sagan who famously said that “we are made of star stuff”.[1] The following quotation explains in few details this idea:
“His statement sums up the fact that the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies, as well as atoms of all other heavy elements, were created in previous generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago. Because humans and every other animal as well as most of the matter on Earth contain these elements, we are literally made of star stuff, said Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.”[2]
As Chris Impey competently said, “all organic matter containing carbon was produced originally in stars”.[3] Plants are constituted from organic matter and they use CO2 for their nutrition.
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Plants cannot live without CO2 hence they couldn’t have survived the third day of creation without an element which is produced in stars, but stars would have been created only on the fourth day. Science explains very well how the heavy elements are created inside stars using the laws of nature, so the narratives of the creation of plants and even of the animals from the book of Genesis are an absurd description. This quotation explains why the earth, the plants and animals and the human beings couldn’t have been created as the book of Genesis says:
“Once the universe was created by the Big Bang, the only abundant elements present were hydrogen (H) and helium (He). These elements were not evenly distributed throughout space, and under the influence of gravity they began to “clump” to form more concentrated volumes. Evidence of this uneven distribution can be found in the anisotropies detected in the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB) by the COBE satellite in the early 90’s. These clumps would eventually form galaxies and stars, and through the internal processes by which a star “shines” higher mass elements were formed inside the stars. Upon the death of a star (in a nova or a supernova) these high mass elements, along with even more massive nuclei created during the nova or supernova, were thrown out into space to eventually become incorporated into another star or celestial body.”[4]
In order for the planet Earth, or for the plants which would have been created before the creation of stars, to contain some elements, or in the case of plants to feed with carbon dioxide, the stars would have needed to be created before the earth, but also some of them had to become nova or supernova, and should have thrown out into space elements with a higher mass. This is a reason why we need long periods of time for the evolution of nature.
The creation of stars on the fourth day and their explosion in the same day is something preposterous. Even so, it would have been too late for the formation of the earth or for the constitution of the plants.
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It is also contrary to the story of the creation of the stars from the book of Genesis because the creation of the celestial bodies was considered by God to be good. How good could the creation of the stars have been if they were created to illuminate the nights together with the moon and to be signs for the inhabitants of the earth, but some of them would have exploded the day in which they were created? The creation of the stars wouldn’t have been really good.
Even if some stars exploded in the same day they were created, the cosmic distances being huge, the heavy elements couldn’t have reached the earth in order to become components of the marine animals and birds which were created on the fifth day.
There is also another aspect which shows that the earth wasn’t created apart from the solar system. The earth and all the other planets from the solar system orbit in the same direction around the sun, all of them being made from the same gases and cosmic debris.
“There are two outliers in the solar system which seem to break the rules about conserving momentum — Uranus and Venus. Uranus spins on an axis of almost 90-degrees (on its side). Venus meanwhile spins the opposite direction as Earth and the other planets. In both cases there is strong evidence that these planets were struck by large objects at some point in the distant past. The impacts were large enough to overcome the angular momentum of the bodies, and give them a different spin.”[5]
Creation in two stages, first the earth and after that, on the fourth day, the universe, is extremely problematic because it seems like a double creation or a repetition of the creation of the earth on another level, where many other planets, similar to our planet, were created. Why would our planet have appeared on another day of creation than countless other planets in the universe, if all planets have the same way of taking shape? There isn’t any reason for that. It was the same processes that determined the apparition of all planets in the universe; planet Earth was generated by the same mechanisms as other planets were.
At the same time, the creation of the cosmos in two stages would have meant two different steps in the creation of the basic material from which the cosmos had been made. Matter had appeared, in a certain moment of the history of the universe, and that moment is a part of a chain of events which didn’t happen twice in the same way in the same universe.
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Matter overcame antimatter after the Big Bang and this process of creation of matter happened once, not twice.
Many planets were created in the same stage of the evolution of the solar system, and not only the earth. All planets from our solar system passed through the same cosmic process and have the same origin. There is also the opinion that the earth belongs to a group of planets from our solar system which are the youngest in comparison with other planets from the system, hence other planets were formed before earth. All planets were formed from the same nebula of gases, not simultaneously but at different times over millions of years.[6]
There are other strong reasons for the dismissal of the account of the creation of the earth from the book of Genesis. Our sun is a second-generation star, meaning that other stars had formed before it. The sun formed before the earth, being at the centre at the nebula of gases and other materials from which our solar system was constituted.
“Our sun is at least a second-generation star. How do we know? We know because the sun and Earth and everything around us on Earth, including our own bodies, contain chemical elements heavier (more complex) than hydrogen and helium. All chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are thought to have formed inside stars, via the process of thermonuclear fusion that enables stars to shine. These elements or metals were released into space via supernova eruptions.”[7]
If the earth was created after the creation of our sun, and our sun is a second-generation star, it is obvious that the creation of the stars didn’t happen after the creation of the earth as the book of Genesis declares. Creation of the stars after the earth is in sharp contrast to scientific data. We have to discard either almost all cosmological science or the description of the creation of the earth, sun, moon and stars, from the book of Genesis because they don’t go together.
The sun from our solar system not only gives us light and heat but also was a catalyst for the formation of the earth, hence the existence of the sun was a condition for the apparition of the earth. The following quotation explains how things happened:
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“Basically, scientists have ascertained that several billion years ago our Solar System was nothing but a cloud of cold dust particles swirling through empty space. This cloud of gas and dust was disturbed, perhaps by the explosion of a nearby star (a supernova), and the cloud of gas and dust started to collapse as gravity pulled everything together, forming a solar nebula — a huge spinning disk. As it spun, the disk separated into rings and the furious motion made the particles white-hot. The center of the disk accreted to become the Sun, and the particles in the outer rings turned into large fiery balls of gas and molten-liquid that cooled and condensed to take on solid form. About 4.5 billion years ago, they began to turn into the planets that we know today as Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the outer planets.”[8]
The apparition of the earth before the sun is an absurdity as big as the creation of daylight before the sun, and both are stated by the book of Genesis. The earth is so inextricably linked with the solar system that they cannot be seen as being created in “two different days of creation” or two stages of creation disconnected between them or connected in a reverse order, as the book of Genesis says. Again, we face a disruption in the order of creation. The entire biblical mythology aimed to explain how earth appeared and only secondly how the universe emerged, as if what was closer to the writer was more important than what was farther from him. In other words, the attention was concentrated on Earth, seen as the most important, and only after that all celestial bodies found a place in the whole picture, subservient to the earth.
Nevertheless, besides the sun, the moon and the stars there are many other celestial bodies about which the book of Genesis doesn’t say anything, for example, other planets similar to the earth. They are not stars because they are not massive enough and for this reason the pressure inside of them couldn’t cause a nuclear reaction. On the other side, according to a definition given by a scientist “a star is usually defined as a body of gas which is large enough and dense enough that the heat and crushing pressure at its centre can produce nuclear fusion.”[9]
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Let us imagine what happened with the earth in the first three days of the creation following the stories from the book of Genesis. It was alone, surrounded by water, for one day. After that the earth, for another two days, was surrounded by the empty dome of the sky and over the sky, again, water. On the fourth day, suddenly, a huge universe was created around the earth in order to illuminate it and to serve as signs for it. When reading those stories one may understand that the earth is so important that an entire universe was made only for it.
In the real world, the planet Earth is so small compared with the universe that one may ask why such a huge universe was needed only to illuminate and show the seasons for Earth. There is a disproportion which gives a contradiction. Comparing the earth with the universe, one can understand that the latter is more important than the former on the cosmic scale and also from the point of view of origins or duration.
Billions and billions of celestial bodies are too many only for the use of the planet Earth. There must be something more in the explanation of the existence of such a quantity of celestial bodies besides their utility for the planet Earth. It seems that the book of Genesis doesn’t give us the correct story. If the universe is so big the reason for its existence isn’t only to serve the earth. Moreover, the universe is expanding. Why is this expansion necessary from the point of view of the earth? The expansion of the universe doesn’t make any sense if the earth and the universe were created as the book of Genesis says.
How about the alleged daylight from the first day, where was it on the second day? It would have to come out from the water and be placed on the dome of the sky, created in that day, but unfortunately without a source. How would the light have come out from the water and be placed in the sky on the second day of creation? The story looks very absurd but that is what the book of Genesis presents and what many commentators wrongfully pretend to be inspired by God. The light would have been created on the first day of the creation but the sky only on the second day.
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Moreover, the sun would have been created on the fourth day. Someone just switched on and off the light, for three days, until the source of it was created, the sun. In the first day of creation the created light was under waters because there wasn’t yet sky.
The earth being alone in space couldn’t have allowed its illumination from an artificial light. At least one other celestial body would be needed in order to illuminate a planet like earth and to generate mornings and evenings, and also two rotation movements of the earth – one around the source of the light and another one around its own axis – are also necessary, to light the whole planet. That presupposes a mechanic of two physical entities attracting each other by gravitational forces.
A very improbable artificial light created on the first day of creation would have had to be orbited by the earth, while the planet also spun around its axis in order to illuminate its entire surface, but the sky wouldn’t have been there in order to make possible such a trajectory. A light illuminating the earth under the waters of the primeval sea and generating morning and evening is the most absurd proposition about the origins of the planet Earth.
One can be sympathetic with the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis only until one looks at the sky and compares it with what the book says. When one does that, he or she understands that the earth is only a very tiny part of the visible universe and it is impossible to accept that such immensity would have been created only in service of the earth. If there is such a thing as the centre of the universe it is very hard to identify. The earth doesn’t rotate only around the sun, but also it spins at the same time as the solar system around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy to which it belongs.
The motivation for the creation of the stars given by the Bible must be wrong because there are many invisible celestial bodies which couldn’t have been created for the illumination of the earth or as signs, because they cannot be seen from the earth. Their light cannot be seen with our eyes, without technical means, and such technical means were available starting only with the recent past. More than 99% of the celestial bodies we can see with our eyes are stars in our galaxy (or planets).[10]
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This is a good analogy:
“Without telescope or binoculars, filters or crystal balls, what are we seeing when we look at a night sky full of stars? How far into space are we seeing? Put into an analogy, if the entire surface of the earth represents the expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, then the region encompassing the stars visible to our unaided human eyes would be roughly the size of California–with most of them contained in an even smaller area. In short, most of the celestial bodies that we see in the sky are not only the closest things to us in the universe; they’re pretty much the closest things to us merely in our own galaxy!”[11]
Why would God have created such a huge universe which doesn’t correspond to its declared purpose? The earth uses only a very tiny part for its lighting and astronomic signs. In this way, it is obvious that the function attributed to the stars in the book of Genesis is wrong. This is what the Bible says about this function:
“14 And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1; 14-19 NRSV)
Many stars are not in the firmament only to illuminate the earth, because the lights of many stars aren’t seen from the earth, or they have to travel a long period of time in order to reach it. The purpose of the creation of stars presented by the book of Genesis, is not in accord with the astronomic facts, is a naive invention, and is bound to generate confusion. To illuminate the earth and to be useful as signs for the earth, the universe wouldn’t have to be constituted of billions of stars and countless planets.
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If someone believes that the lights from the stars, which were created on the fourth day, according to the Bible, reached the earth in the same day, they must think again, because the light from the closest star, Proxima Centauri, travels to the earth in 4.22 light years.[12]
If God created the stars on the fourth day, their light didn’t reach the earth on the same day but long after their creation. The creation of the stars was unfit for the purpose allocated to them, by the biblical texts, for a very long period of time and for the majority of them was not suitable at all. The stars invisible to our eyes cannot lighten the earth at all and cannot constitute signs in any way, hence they haven’t been created by God to illuminate the earth as the book of Genesis maintains. If they were created to illuminate the earth and to constitute signs they have been placed too far from the earth, so there was a mistake in their design when comparing with the purpose of their creation declared by the Bible.
Why would God have created so many stars which were meant to illuminate the earth, stars not seen from it, or visible stars which were seen only after a very long period of time? To me, there is one convincing answer. God didn’t create the stars for the illumination of the earth, as the book of Genesis declares, but He acted as the theory of Big Bang predicts. God is the force behind the Big Bang who organises the matter and uses it as the fabric of what he wants to create.
One part of the universe is visible from the earth with unaided eyes and another part isn’t. Not even the most sophisticated instruments available to humankind can bring us to the edge of the universe which extends much further than we can see.
“Galaxies extend as far as we can detect... with no sign of diminishing. There is no evidence that the universe has an edge. The part of the universe we can observe from Earth is filled more or less uniformly with galaxies extending in every direction as far as we can see - more than 10 billion light-years, or about 6 billion trillion miles. We know that the galaxies must extend much further than we can see, but we do not know whether the universe is infinite or not. When astronomers sometimes refer (carelessly!) to galaxies “near the edge of the universe,” they are referring only to the edge of the OBSERVABLE universe - i.e., the part we can see.”[13]
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The stars had been created on the fourth day according to the book of Genesis but became visible much later and long after the sixth day, when the creation was over. Strangely enough the biblical texts say that the creation was finished but the light from the stars didn’t yet appear on the firmament. Much more rational and credible are the scientific explanations in which the creation of stars is a continuous process and not only a one-day job. Stars are generated during our days as well as in the past so their creation wouldn’t have been achieved at only one stage in the evolution of the universe.
Earth is a part of a whole, of a complex system, in which it completes the structure to which belongs. Earth cannot be conceived isolated from its cosmic environment, existing on its own, without other celestial bodies. Earth cannot be seen as the first, and the most important cosmic body, like a sort of centre of the material universe, its most essential part. Understanding earth in this manner is motivated by a religious purpose but doesn’t have anything to do with facts.
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[1] www.livescience.com › Space
[2] www.livescience.com › Space
[3] www.livescience.com › Space
[4] aether.lbl.gov/www/tour/elements/stellar/stellar_a.html
[5] www.geek.com/.../geek-answers-why-do-all-planets-rotate-and-orbit-in-t...
[6] www.universetoday.com/.../planets-in-our-solar-system-may-have-formed-in-fits-and...
[7] earthsky.org/.../how-and-when-did-the-first-planets-form-in-our-univers...did the first planets form in our universe...
[8] www.universetoday.com/76509/how-was-the earth-formed/-
[9] scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=223
[10] www.physicsforums.com › ... › Astronomy and Astrophysics
[11] science.kqed.org/quest/2007/09/28/the-unaided-eye/
[12] www.universetoday.com/.../how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-to-the-near
[13] https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/faq.htm
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God's False Mirror | The two stories of creation
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
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Many critics of the Bible assert that the book of Genesis contains two accounts of the creation of the earth and mankind. Liberal or not, any reading of the book of Genesis will invite the reader to answer to many inconsistencies generated by the juxtaposition of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. It seems that these two accounts are the work of different authors writing in different time periods. It is also obvious that the narratives contradict each other in many particular details. The two different records involve Genesis 1; 1-31; 2; 1- 3 and Genesis 2; 4-25. One of the foundational assumptions of this viewpoint is that the Pentateuch was not authored by Moses. Presumably, several ancient writers contributed to this collection. These authors are referred to as J, E, P, and D. It is the view of the critics that all of these writings were collected by a “redactor”.
This theory, known as the Documentary Hypothesis, started to take central stage in the 19th century when Jean Astruc, a French physician, claimed that he had isolated certain “source” authors in the Pentateuch. The view was expanded by many others and by the end of the century numerous biblical commentators had adhered to this concept. Genesis 1 is said to be a “P” document dating from the Babylonian or post-Babylonian captivity period, while Genesis 2 is supposed to be a “J” narrative from the 9th century B.C. The arguments in support of this viewpoint are twofold. Firstly, it is the claim that the two creation stories show evidence of different styles of writing. Secondly, it is argued that the accounts conflict because they reflect divergent concepts of deity and a mixed order of creation.[1]
In this work I do not insist on certain differences coming from names such as the use of a different name for God, Elohim or Yahweh Elohim, in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, or considerations regarding stylistic problems. Even if they are important details I only acknowledge them and leave these discussions for the numerous specialists in this domain.
I am mainly interested in what are real contradictions from the point of view of an internal logical coherence which is required by any story in order to gain its credibility. There are basic irreconcilable contradictions and differences which come from the logical consequences of the assertions contained by the texts.
While I don’t minimise the importance of an exhaustive analysis of all types of stylistic differences or textual divergences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, I also consider that the logical inconsistencies are very important and they plead the case against the existence of only one story of creation contained by the Bible.
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Things which are presented as facts by the Bible don’t correspond with each other and are incongruous to the point that they annihilate one another when trying to harmonise them. Probably the most disqualifying aspect in the attempt to realise a harmonisation of the two stories is their sequence of time. In Genesis 1 all happened in seven days but in Genesis 2, in one unique period of time. Genesis 2 cannot be seen as a synthesis of Genesis 1 because the latter reverses almost every detailed presented by the former. If one tries to harmonise the narratives from Genesis 1 and 2 in the way in which so many harmonists do, he or she has to be able to assemble them in one single story with a unique sequence of time. I try to do that in this study in order to see if such unification is possible or not.
I will use the sequence of time offered by Genesis 1 in which I will try to insert the story told by Genesis 2. If this endeavour is not possible given the inconsistencies contained by the texts there is a problem which cannot be ignored.
Some critics of the unity of the biblical account of creation maintain that it is a useless attempt to try to harmonise the two stories of creation from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, because they cannot stand together.
James writes:
“Any artificial attempt to reconcile these marked differences of style, outlook and subject-matter is bound to fail. The recognition that they belong to different periods, the second story being obviously the older and looking back to a still earlier time, is a sufficient and natural explanation of their inconsistency.”[2]
In spite of this conclusion I wanted to do what certain readers do in their minds when they read the book of Genesis. They combine the two stories in one. Is there any chance to see only one creation story when reading the conflicting materials from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? I was hoping that it is an easy task and the two stories can be read as one, until I tried to assemble the particular details of both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. It was impossible to synchronise all details from Genesis chapters 1 and 2 in a way in which they will not contradict each other – it doesn’t matter how hard I tried.
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To the beautiful and brimming with poetry legend of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 2, was later added a very empiric cosmology only to demonstrate that Jahveh was a universal God who created the entire universe and that He isn’t only the Jewish divinity.
Contrary to Harrison’s opinion, I would say that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not a general and a more particular view of the same history of creation; they are two different stories unrelated to each other, written by two different writers in two different periods of time. Harrison writes:
“It is a mistake to assume that the two Genesis narratives are duplicates, for they actually complement one another. The first outlined the broad process of creation and showed how all things emerged from the creative power of God, while the second paid greater attention to the creation of man and set him with his mate in a specific geographical location.”[3]
It is true that Genesis chapter 1 is a story which is full of contradictions and absurdities but, at the same time, the results of the attempt to gather in the same package Genesis chapter 2 make the offense to rationality even worse. I will take few examples of contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2.
What was the first thing created by God according to the Bible? The biblical texts present the following order of creation in the first day:
Genesis chapter 1:
“In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1; 1-2 NRSV)
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Genesis chapter 2:
“…In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6 but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— (Genesis 2; 4-5 NRSV)
Was there any water on Earth or not at the beginning? Genesis 1 says that the earth was covered with water but Genesis 2 maintains that a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground.
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In Genesis 2 the primeval sea present in Genesis 1 is replaced by a stream of water which would have watered the whole face of the ground, but being only a stream, wouldn’t have been able to cover the entire earth. The contradiction is obvious because in Genesis 1 only on the third day would the land have been liberated from under water by God, but in Genesis 2 the fields, hence the dry land, had existed from the beginning.
This period can be contextualised in the first day of creation because both texts refer to the creation of heavens and earth, and that would have been realised in the beginning, meaning the first day of creation. We have to bear in mind that according to the Bible the entire creation was done in six days and no previous period of time before the six days is allowed by the texts.
Both stories agree that heavens and earth were created in the beginning of the creation, but the order of their creation is reversed between Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis 1 heavens would have been created first and in Genesis 2 earth was the first one to be created. Where they don’t agree is the state of the earth on the day of this beginning, and about what happened immediately after this commencement. In Genesis 2, even if the stream allegedly had watered the whole face of the ground, the herb of the field wouldn’t have had enough water for their existence. This assertion is nonsensical. The rain would have been replaced with a stream of water so the lack of rain wasn’t a good reason for the absence of uncultivated vegetation. Verse 6 in Genesis 2 contradicts verse 5.
In Genesis 2, in contradiction with Genesis 1 we have dry land from the beginning and not an earth covered with water. The stream of water cannot be equated with the water which had been separated by God through the dome of the sky, because in Genesis 1 the water would also have been located above the sky, not only on Earth as it was in Genesis 2.
“7 So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.” (Genesis 1; 7 NRSV)
Unlike Genesis 1, in Genesis 2 the sky was present from the first day, making the existence of the dry land possible from the beginning. The stream of water without the dome of the sky doesn’t make any sense.
In order to erase this contradiction one must show that in Genesis 2 the story starts at a different moment in the process of creation than the first day in Genesis 1. Nevertheless, they both indicate the immediate instances after the creation of heavens and the earth. What meanings can these phrases from Genesis, chapter 1 and chapter 2 have, “in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” and “in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” if not to establish the beginning of the sequence of time? The details given by the texts cannot be overlooked. They say when the actions happened. It was either water covering all the earth, including the place for the future sky, or it was dry land and a stream which watered the whole face of the ground. Both options don’t go together in the beginning of creation.
What is the meaning of the expression the stream of water in Genesis chapter 2? There are two possibilities. Either it was a river going all over the earth or it was a kind of mist covering the whole earth. The stream of water has to be linked with the following text from Genesis chapter 2:
“10 A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.” (Genesis 2; 10 NRSV)
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The stream of water which would have watered the entire surface of the earth couldn’t have been identical with the river which would have flown out of Eden to water the garden. Genesis 2 texts are in contradiction in this regard. We know that Tigris and Euphrates, two of the branches which have flown out of the Eden mentioned by the book of Genesis, don’t water the entire surface of the earth. The other two were Pishon, which would have flown around the land of Havilah, and Gihon which would have flown around Cush. Neither the main river nor its four branches would have watered the entire surface of the earth or the whole face of the ground as the Bible says it.
What is the definition of a stream of water? It is mainly defined as “a body of water flowing in a channel or watercourse, as a river, rivulet, or brook”. What isn’t clear is how the stream of water could have watered the whole face of the ground. With the extent of the whole face of the ground and the impossibility of one stream of water covering it, another interpretation has to be taken into consideration. Here are a few different translations of the word “stream” in Genesis 2:
“New International Version – but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.
New Living Translation – Instead, springs came up from the ground and watered all the land.
English Standard Version – and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground.
New American Standard Bible – But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
King James Bible – But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
Holman Christian Standard Bible – But water would come out of the ground and water the entire surface of the land.
International Standard Version – Instead, an underground stream would arise out of the earth and water the surface of the ground.
NET Bible – Springs would well up from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
Jubilee Bible 2000 – But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.
King James 2000 Bible – But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.”[4]
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We can see modern efforts to give a sense to the expression “stream of water”, and some translations speak of a kind of mist coming out from the ground, which is different from the deep layer of water depicted in Genesis 1. In Genesis 2 the earth was not a formless void covered by water but was constituted of forms of geographical relief including fields. I would infer that in Genesis 2 we already have the light in place because total darkness is not enumerated amongst the conditions which stopped the plants growing.
At the same time, it is wrong to assert that Genesis chapter 2 doesn’t contain references to cosmology because doubtlessly it does. The proposition “in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” is enough cosmology and has almost the same cosmological extent as Genesis 1; 1-2 which is also very concise. In a sense, Genesis 2 is less nonsensical than Genesis 1 from a cosmological point of view because it asserts that heavens were made at the beginning, including sky and celestial bodies, but is absurd in the way in which it describes the creation of nature. Genesis 2 does not add new steps after the creation of heavens such as the creation of sky or of the celestial bodies, but describes man who would have been created alone, without a partner, in spite of the fact that all animals would have been created in pairs. Despite the existence of animals in pairs, man would have tried to find a helper for him amongst animals, as if animals wouldn’t already have help.
In Genesis 1 we have the expression “face of the deep” but in Genesis 2 we have the formula “face of the ground”. That also makes a difference and shows the incompatibility of the story from Genesis 2 to Genesis 1. The two metaphors express two different things. The deep from Genesis 1 means something different than the ground from Genesis 2. The deep means deep waters but the ground is dry land.
The absence of rain in Genesis chapter 2 should count for nothing because the stream would have watered the entire earth anyway, replacing rain if it were a mist. The problem remaining is the absence of man, but even this is a superfluous problem because many plants don’t need man for their growth. In the fields don’t grow only cultivated plants, but all sorts of plants.
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The plants cultivated by man were initially uncultivated or wild plants. They were selected for cultivation by humankind according to their needs but previously to that they didn’t need man for their growth. The book of Genesis is wrong when saying that the absence of man would have influenced the existence of plants. Genesis chapter 2 presupposes that waters were already separated on the first day of creation and the earth waited for man to till the ground, but this contradicts what chapter 1 says.
According to the book of Genesis rain would have come to Earth only after the Flood when the rainbow also would have appeared for the first time on our planet. If the existence of rain conditioned the existence of plants, as Genesis chapter 2 says, without plants there couldn’t have been animals and humankind, because both of them would have had the green plants for food. Without rain there can be no plants, and no plants means no animals and no humankind, and with rain coming on Earth only after the Flood, the result would have been that in the absence of rain humankind wouldn’t have thrived on our planet before the Flood. In this case, the Flood wouldn’t have been necessary at all because no human beings would have disobeyed God. The equations which can be constructed on the basis of data provided by the book of Genesis, cannot give but a false result.
Following the logic of the book of Genesis, from the moment when man was created nothing would have stopped the apparition of cultivated plants except the rain. We have a text from which we can see that rain would have come on Earth only after the alleged Flood and that refers to the apparition of a rainbow on Earth for the first time after the Flood.
“13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” (Genesis 9; 13-15 NRSV)
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The clouds aren’t brought by God every time they appear in the sky as the book of Genesis states but by the dynamic of the atmosphere, and rainbows aren’t always present when it rains. Rainbows have a scientific explanation they aren’t a supernatural phenomenon as is wrongfully mentioned in the Bible.
“A rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon that is caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky.”[5]
The text of Genesis 2; 5 says that plants and in a narrow interpretation only the cultivated plants couldn’t have arisen on Earth in the absence of rain but they should if animals and humankind used green plants for food. Before the cultivation of plants human beings and animals would have needed to find comestible plants in nature. The absence of man on Earth didn’t stop herbivorous animals finding nutrients in nature. The science tells us that plants and animals were present on Earth before humankind but the book of Genesis, chapter 2, contradicts that.
According to Genesis chapter 1, plants were created on the third day of creation before the creation of man, hence the absence of human beings wouldn’t have influenced the existence of plants as Genesis chapter 2 incorrectly declares. At the same time, the cultivated plants, being before their cultivation plants which grew spontaneously from the ground, the presence or absence of man couldn’t have determined their existence on Earth but only their cultivation. When were the plants created? Here are the two relevant biblical texts:
Genesis chapter 1:
“11 Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.” (Genesis 1; 11-13 NRSV)
Genesis chapter 2:
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“8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; andthere he put the man whom he had formed. 9 Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Genesis 2; 8-9 NRSV)
In Genesis chapter 2 the plants would have been created only in the Garden of Eden and not on the entire surface of the earth contrary to Genesis chapter 1. Before Eden, no plants would have been created on Earth by God in the absence of rain and because there was no one to till the ground. In Eden, it was the river which would have watered the Garden and also the man who was placed there. Only in the Garden of Eden would both conditions necessary for the existence of plants, required by the book of Genesis chapter 2, have been gathered – the source of water replacing the rain and the presence of man.
It is true that the existence of a river in the absence of rain is a very problematic proposition but the idea is that the lack of conditions for the existence of plants from Genesis 2; 5 was compensated only in the Garden of Eden, hence one cannot justifiably assume that there were plants, inclusively fruit trees, all over the earth in the context of Genesis 2. Those two images, from Genesis 2; 5 and Genesis 2; 8-9, had to be understood together as the two facets of the same coin.
Let’s reiterate the text from Genesis chapter 2:
“In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; …” (Genesis 2; 4-5 NRSV)
In Genesis chapter 2, plants would have been created after the creation of man contrary to Genesis chapter 1. This anomaly is explained by the absence of man on Earth. All plants can be divided into two major categories, plants which grow naturally and plants which are cultivated by man. To what category does Genesis chapter 2 refer in verse 5?
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From the point of view of their creation both categories are in fact one. All plants have appeared on Earth in the form of uncultivated plants containing the same biological material. Cultivation doesn’t mean creation. Some kinds or species of plants were used for cultivation by human beings but all kinds would have been created by God on the third day of the creation, according to Genesis chapter 1. We have here an obvious contradiction between Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. In Genesis 1 plants were created before humankind and in Genesis 2 plants were created after the creation of man.
Much confusion is generated by people who want to harmonise the two stories of creation and to demonstrate that there are no contradictions between Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. They say that cultivated plants are plant species whose existence depends on the presence of man. The cultivation of plants obviously appeared only after the creation of man, but the existence of all plants doesn’t depend in any way on the existence of man.
It is wrong, however, to accept that before the creation of human beings there couldn’t have been plants in the fields of the sort which were later cultivated, only because man would have been absent. To me, the text in Genesis chapter 2 does not say that before the creation of man there weren’t cultivated plants, but it literally says that there weren’t plants at all in the fields, cultivated or not, and that not only because of the absence of man but also because of the lack of rain. Of course, the lack of rain would have affected all plants cultivated or not, but the stream of water would have replaced the rain. For this reason, in my opinion, by the stream of water from Genesis chapter 2, verse 6, we have to understand the river from the Garden of Eden, which couldn’t have solved the watering of plants all over the earth.
Even when man had been created the absence of rain would have prevented the existence of cultivated plants anyway. The stream which would have risen from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground couldn’t have replaced the absence of rain on the entire surface of the earth if it was a kind of river. The expression which refers to the stream when applicable to the river from the Garden of Eden “watered the whole face of the ground” is an exaggeration and is contradicted by the context, according to which such a river couldn’t have replaced the rain.
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“Plant of the field” is a generic expression. At the same time, about the herbs of the field, it is said that they wouldn’t have sprung up. The verb usually generates the image of spontaneity, growing without cultivation, in a natural way. The text refers to plants and herbs which may be cultivated or not and regardless of their cultivation they would have grown in the field if there was rain. I reckon that the text of Genesis 2 refers to all plants cultivated and uncultivated because beside cultivated plants, on the same fields, uncultivated plants always emerge, for example weeds, hence never would only cultivated plants grow in a field.
There weren’t cultivated plants before the creation of man, according to the story of Genesis chapter 2, but there also weren’t weeds or other plants which grow without being cultivated by man, because no plants could have grown in the absence of rain. The book of Genesis doesn’t speak about other rivers on Earth besides the one streaming through the Garden of Eden.
In Genesis chapter 1, we are informed that humankind ate from the beginning “every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit.” There isn’t any word about the cultivation of plants in Genesis chapter 1, and humankind before starting to cultivate plants would have eaten plants found in nature.
Are the categories of plants mentioned in Genesis 2 circumscribing all possible plants on Earth? I would answer negatively. They surely don’t comprise the plants from the seas where the presence of humankind and the absence of rain wouldn’t have had any consequences.
It is plain that Genesis chapter 2 proposes the creation of plants after the creation of man, contrary to Genesis chapter 1, and in a reductionist manner not taking into consideration what would have happened into the sea.
There are of course attempts to justify the viability of Genesis chapter 2 but these attempts often maintain inconsistent principles with the Bible. The book of Genesis tells us that God created all plants on the third day but some people propose that suitable plants for cultivation or plants with thorns were not in that category. The following quotation is an example of those attempts:
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“Many mistakenly believe that Genesis 2: 5-6 refers to the third day (Genesis 1: 11-13) of the creation week because of the plants mentioned. However, these two specific plant categories mentioned in verses 5 and 6 (i.e., shrub of the field, plant of the field) are very different than the plants created on day three (fruit trees, grass, plants yielding seed). The shrubs of the field were plants with thorns, which only came about after man sinned. The plant of the field refers to cultivated plants. These were not in existence on the third day, because man had not been created, and obviously had not fallen yet to bring about thorns.”[6]
The assertion that plants which were cultivated by humankind weren’t created on the third day because man hadn’t been created at that time, is contrary to the Bible. This assertion contradicts the book of Genesis chapter 1, which says that all plants were created on the third day and does not leave another time for the creation of cultivated plants. Only plants created on the third day could have been cultivated after the creation of man. Those plants had to be in the fields before the creation of man, according to Genesis chapter 1. If plants with thorns were created after Adam and Eve’s alleged Fall, Genesis chapter 1 in which all plants were created in the third day, is wrong.
There are obvious contradictions between Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2 which shouldn’t happen if both were the record of the same historical facts. In Genesis chapter 2 plants had been created only in the Garden of Eden, but in Genesis chapter 1 they had been created on the entire surface of the earth. This is a problem because in the Garden was created only “tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” How about the other trees, which are not good for food? Where and when were they created? The Bible doesn’t say in Genesis chapter 2. If God had created plants before man on the whole surface of the earth as Genesis chapter 1 says, and if He only replanted some of them in the Garden of Eden, some plants also had to grow and some herbs had to spring up in the fields on the day of the creation of man, contrary to Genesis chapter 2.
Genesis chapter 2 underlines the idea that everything was created for man, plants and animals alike. In this logic, nothing on Earth could have been created before the creation of man. Contrary to that, in Genesis chapter 1 plants and animals were created before humankind. This is an obvious contradiction between Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2.
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God would have created man from the dust of the earth. The message is that humankind unlike God is perishable and formed from destructible matter. Man is unlike God in Genesis chapter 2 and in opposition with Him. In Genesis chapter 1, man is like God and together with woman is the pinnacle of His creation. In Genesis chapter 2, creation does not finish with man but starts with him. As a matter of fact, the order of the creation does not follow any historical facts but a theological message.
The situation in Genesis chapter 1 where humans are created at the end of the creation is highly significant. In Genesis chapter 2 man is created at the beginning of the creation of nature on Earth because it is seen as less important, and not the dominant factor of all that was on Earth.
In Genesis 2, God seems to be more terrestrial or more directly implicated in relation to humankind. The missing element of man’s dominion over the earth is an important difference between Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. In Genesis 1, human beings are the substitutes of God on Earth but in Genesis 2 they are only servants with the task of tilling the earth, gardeners of the Garden of Eden. As servants, human beings would have had a limited knowledge about the world; some knowledge would have been kept only for God. Genesis 1 and 2 don’t carry the same theological message.
The attempt to place Genesis 2 within the limits of the first day of creation in Genesis 1 is failing even if Genesis 2 uses a similar opening formula as the first chapter of the book of Genesis but reversing it. If Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are one story of creation and not two, the proof for that would be their perfect synchronisation. In one way or another they must fit, one with the other, their scope doesn’t matter. If they don’t fit, the conclusion is that they contradict each other and are not one but two different stories. The endeavour to combine Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is rational and legitimate because some people are pretending that all those texts have the same author and that they say the same things.
What day other than the first day in Genesis chapter 1 could describe the starting point of Genesis chapter 2?
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I don’t see it, but it must be established in order to open the possibility that Genesis is one story of creation contained in two different descriptions, one general and the other one more detailed. For this reason, I will try different options. Let’s admit for the sake of the demonstration that the starting point of Genesis chapter 2 is inserted in the third day of the creation after the separation of waters and before the creation of plants, when there was already dry land.
Let’s say that on day three, after the separation of the waters, but before the creation of plants, God created man and after that He planted a Garden in which He placed the created man. In this setting God planted the Garden, as Genesis chapter 2 declares, creating the plants after the creation of man. God also created animals and on day six He created woman.
What is the major contradiction regarding this point? Genesis chapter 1 clearly states that mankind, male and female alike, were created on the sixth day after the creation of plants and animals. Man cannot be understood to have been created on the third day of creation because the Bible says that male and female were both created on the sixth day.
One can also investigate another possibility. Let’s see if Genesis chapter 2 could be a detailed description of the sixth day from Genesis chapter 1. If we want to establish a place in the sixth day of creation for Genesis 2, we have to choose the moment either before or after the creation of the animals. According to Genesis chapter 2, man was created before the animals. That is doubtless, it doesn’t matter how one speculates with the tenses of the verb “make”. After the creation of man, in Genesis chapter 2, God tried to find a helper for man and that is the reason for the creation of animals. In relation to man’s creation, the creation of animals was in the future in Genesis chapter 2, as an intention expressed by God. None can deny that. God didn’t say that at the moment of the creation of man He had tried already to make a helper, but He said that He will find a helper.
In Genesis chapter 2, animals were created by God for the purpose of finding a helper for man. If the correct tense here would be past and not future, as many harmonists try to demonstrate, “had made” instead of “will make”, God was in the situation to try finding a helper for man even before man’s creation. This is an absurd proposition. Genesis chapter 2 says that God first created man and only after that He tried to find a helper for him in the ranks of animals.
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“18 Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ 19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man* there was not found a helper as his partner.” (Genesis 2; 18-20 NRSV)
Why would God have tried to find a helper for man before man’s creation? It doesn’t make any sense. The conclusion that a helper for man couldn’t have been found amongst the animals was detached only after all animals were presented to man, and that clearly situates the creation of animals after the creation of man in Genesis chapter 2. This is in contradiction with Genesis chapter 1 in which animals had been created before humankind.
Man not only assisted in the presentation of all animals but he named each one of them. This method of naming of animals would have been very defective because it would have left many animals unnamed. Adam couldn’t have named the marine animals without entering deep water for them and such marine animals couldn’t have left their environment in order to be named without losing their lives.
In Genesis chapter 1 man and woman both have dominion over the animals, but in Genesis chapter 2, man didn’t get any dominion over the animals, he tried to find a helper as a partner amongst them. Why would man have tried to find a partner amongst animals if man and woman were created in the image of God, according to Genesis chapter 1? A helper as partner for man in no way could have been found amongst animals or looked for in that place in the context of Genesis chapter 1, because if man was made after God’s image his partner would have needed to be in God’s image also.
The book of Genesis chapter 1 clearly states that both man and woman would have been created in the image of God. Animals hadn’t been made in God’s image, only humankind, according to the book of Genesis. It would have been offensive to try to find the image of God in the ranks of animals as Genesis chapter 2 says. It is evident that Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 do not have the same author and are not the expression of the same theology.
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If God created the animals before man in the way in which Genesis chapter 1 describes, He would have known that a helper for man couldn’t have been found there. In such a case the creation of man alone without a wife after the creation of animals would have been pointless. In Genesis chapter 1 because animals were already created before the creation of man, humankind has been created in one pair because a helper for man amongst them couldn’t have been contemplated. In other words, the creation of humankind is also contradictory between Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. In Genesis chapter 1, we have the creation of animals and after that of humankind in one pair, but in Genesis chapter 2 we have the creation of man, looking for a helper amongst animals, not finding a helper amongst animals and finally the creation of woman.
There are two stories of creation and not just one in the book of Genesis, and there are very important differences between them about the creation of animals and humankind also. Which story of creation from the Bible is inspired by God and which isn’t inspired? They cannot be both inspired by God if they contradict each other. Being both absurd in the way in which they present their details, it is more likely that none of these stories of creation from the Bible are inspired by God. Even their metaphorical messages are not the same therefore most probably they weren’t inspired by God as parables with spiritual signification.
If God created plants on the third day, as Genesis chapter 1 states, on the whole surface of the earth, when did He plant the Garden of Eden? There is a single answer, if we consider Genesis chapter 2; God would have planted the Garden of Eden on the sixth day after the creation of man. Nevertheless, in Genesis chapter 2, man was created “in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” and not at the end of creation. The order of creation is different between Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 and that makes the insertion of Genesis chapter 2 in chapter 1 impossible.
The point is that if Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 were the same story looked at from different perspectives, the Garden of Eden would have been a special place with vegetation on an earth already filled with plants before the creation of man, a Garden in a garden.
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If the nature of the entire earth wasn’t yet affected by Adam and Eve’s sins, the whole planet would have been a garden according to Genesis chapter 1, and the building of the Garden of Eden in chapter 2 would have been useless.
If plants were created before the creation of humankind, according to Genesis chapter 1, there isn’t any reason for Genesis chapter 2 to declare that there weren’t any plants in the fields before the creation of man. Regarding the creation of plants, Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 are totally incongruent.
In Genesis chapter 2, God didn’t rest after His work as He did in Genesis chapter 1. He continued to work after the creation of man and woman by overseeing His creation and throwing humans out of the Garden of Eden. In Genesis chapter 1 the creation of mankind was the last act in the process of creation but in Genesis chapter 2 the last act was the punishment of humankind after Adam’s Fall.
When would God have rested in Genesis chapter 1 when we compare the story with Genesis chapter 2? Was it after the creation of woman or after Adam’s Fall? When did God say that all His creation was very good, after the creation of Eve or after the humans’ Fall? The creation was not that good if in it the seed of evil was already present and if mankind fell immediately after it. After the creation of human beings God had no reason to rest because they would have been in a situation to fail Him.
The question of when God would have rested in the context of Genesis chapter 2 is important if one wants to synchronise Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. Before the creation of woman, the work had been incomplete and the adjective “good” was unsuitable. Satan could have used God’s resting day in order to tempt humankind but this raises the question, why would God have left His creation without protection even for a day? These are only speculations because God didn’t create the world in six days and didn’t rest the seventh day as the Bible says. If He made the world in this way He wouldn’t have had any reason to rest knowing that Satan was interested in disrupting His creation. At the same time the creation of humankind wouldn’t have been good as Genesis chapter 1 states if immediately after its creation they disobeyed God.
The existence of God’s statement at the end of Genesis chapter 1 that the creation would have been very good while Satan was free to influence that creation is an undeniable contradiction of the book of Genesis.
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Satan was a part of God’s creation and his rebellion would have been enough reason to prevent the evaluation of creation as very good. God’s creation would have been flawed by the presence of Satan in its midst, and in the end the entire edifice would have been affected by this presence.
Notwithstanding, not everyone recognises two stories of creation in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. The following quotation explains very well that view:
“The question also stems from the wrong assumption that the second chapter of Genesis is just a different account of creation to that in chapter 1. It should be evident that chapter 2 is not just ‘another’ account of creation because chapter 2 says nothing about the creation of the heavens and the earth, the atmosphere, the seas, the land, the sun, the stars, the moon, the sea creatures, etc. Chapter 2 mentions only things directly relevant to the creation of Adam and Eve and their life in the garden God prepared specially for them. Chapter 1 may be understood as creation from God’s perspective; it is ‘the big picture’, an overview of the whole. Chapter 2 views the more important aspects from man’s perspective … Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are not therefore separate contradictory accounts of creation. Chapter 1 is the ‘big picture’ and Chapter 2 is a more detailed account of the creation of Adam and Eve and day six of creation.”[7]
First of all, it is not true that “chapter 2 says nothing about the creation of the heavens and the earth, the atmosphere, the seas, the land, the sun, the stars, the moon, the sea creatures, etc.” As I already have shown, Genesis chapter 2 refers to the earth and heavens and that is a clear cosmology. Heavens entails sun, stars and moon, and the atmosphere. It is also a reference to the land. The omission of sea animals doesn’t mean that Genesis chapter 2 did not refer to the creation of animals because it doubtlessly does. In point of fact, Genesis chapter 2 uses the creation of the earth and the heavens as a temporal indicator in order to clarify the sequences of creation.
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“4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens …” (Genesis 2; 4 NRSV)
The narration from Genesis chapter 2; 4 cannot be placed on the sixth day of Genesis 1, and it places itself in the day one. I agree with Tyler Francke, the author of the following quotation, who expresses a substantial view on the problem of contradictions in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2:
“The second creation story opens with an introduction (Genesis 2:4) that closely mirrors Genesis 1:1: ‘This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.’ The verse in no way indicates that what follows is simply a more detailed look at creation from a different perspective, as YECs claim; it says, This is the account.”[8]
Francke also remarks quite pertinently that the effort of using grammar in justifying some absurdities is pointless because Genesis chapter 2 presents God’s intention to create a helper for man in future tense. The two myths of creation from the Bible aren’t meant to be harmonised; they are two different ideas about the creation of the world.[9]
I also agree that the two myths of creation from the book of Genesis cannot be harmonized in order to set them together as one story. This observation bears important consequences regarding the inspiration of their texts. Two texts, contradicting each other, cannot both be inspired by God. None of them is inspired by God if each of them is inconsistent in what it declares and is far from what scientific discoveries show.
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[1] apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=6&article=1131
[2] www.josh.org › ... › Study & Research › Answers to Skeptic’s Questions
[3] www.josh.org › ... › Study & Research › Answers to Skeptic’s Questions
[4] biblehub.com/genesis/2-6.htm
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow
[6] https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions.../do-genesis-1-and-2-contrad...
[7] creation.com/genesis-contradictions
[8] www.godofevolution.com/as-different-as-morning-and-evening-genesis-...
[9] www.godofevolution.com/as-different-as-morning-and-evening-genesis-...
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God's False Mirror | God the Creator and the beginning of creation
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
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The Bible says that the Earth was created by God. In its own words, it actually affirms that:
“In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1; 1-2 NRSV)
The earth was created together with heavens in the beginning. The Bible doesn’t say explicitly what “heavens” mean and what exactly had been created in “heavens”. Whilst for Earth, very few details are given, for heavens, there isn’t any description. Complete secrecy or lack of imagination? According to the Bible, God didn’t see fit to disclose anything about His world, and its population, in the book of Genesis. That brought humanity to countless speculations about angels, Satan’s revolt, and so on. A whole religion is created on the approximations about what “heavens” really means, because the book of Genesis doesn’t give us any clue about the issue. The religious imagination is based on the extreme scarcity of the texts of the book of Genesis.
The lack of information about “heavens” can bring one to the conclusion that by “heavens” the writer of Genesis chapter 1 meant something much simpler than is commonly believed, no angels or the Kingdom of God, but only the cosmic space.
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If “heavens” meant something more complicated such as the Kingdom of God, some more information about it would be expected to be found in the stories of creation. But even if that were true and “heavens” was understood to mean the cosmic space and nothing else, the creation of a space for cosmic bodies without the existence of the dome of the sky is absurd, it is a blatant contradiction which by itself disqualifies any truthfulness in the stories of creation. When the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, “heavens” would have existed, according to the book of Genesis, in the lack of the dome of the sky which separated the waters from above from the waters from the earth.
At the beginning everything had been under waters, including the atmosphere of the earth, and there hadn’t been any sky, therefore no “heavens”. There couldn’t have been any “heavens” at the outset of creation because God had created the dome of the sky only on the second day of creation, according to the book of Genesis, and without sky no “heavens” would have been possible regardless of what we mean by “heavens”. The Bible literally says that at the beginning it was “heavens” without the dome of the sky and all that existed had been covered by the waters of a primeval sea.
The whole complexity of cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology etc. is concentrated on two pages of the Bible. In this case lack of information is equals to no real information. What could be the cause of this poorness of information? Lack of information contained by the book of Genesis could have one main cause. The authors of the texts didn’t have any information about the origins of the earth and universe. Keeping to a very general level, an author or an editor could have diminished the danger of giving some imaginary details which could contradict each other and make the stories inconsistent. Nevertheless, the authors or the editors of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis have fallen into this trap in spite of the very few details which are given. As a matter of fact, little details which can be found in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis don’t harmonise well with one another and are of a peripheral importance.
In the book of Genesis the creation of the universe is only the stage for the main drama, the relation between God and His children. When the drama ends the earth will also disappear and a new earth will replace it. (Revelation 21; 1)
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Neither the creation of “heavens” and the earth nor the apparition of humankind has anything to do with real facts, but it has a logic in which true cosmology doesn’t find any place.
In the book of Genesis, God is presented like a craftsman happy with His work. At the end of a specific activity He found that His work was good and at the final of the entire development the results of His work were even very good. Even if God declared His creation to be very good He wanted to destroy the most important part of it through the waters of the Flood. Looking to our world, we can conclude that something was wrong with the creation from the beginning, at least from a moral point of view, and we cannot attribute all sufferings on the earth to humankind. Sufferings and death existed before the apparition of humankind on Earth generated by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes generated by the movements of the tectonic plates, illnesses, or others. To see the earth as an idyllic place without destructive natural events or illnesses before the apparition of the first human beings is a hypothesis contradicted even by the Bible, because before the creation of humankind other biological beings were created.
After ending His task God took a rest and His rest is a commemoration of His creation. The book of Genesis doesn’t tell us what God was doing after His rest, after the Sabbath. Did He start a new creation in another universe? Was the creation of our universe God’s first work, was it the last? Did God work only once in His entire eternal existence, for six days? In order to correctly evaluate the importance of our universe we should know if God had created only us or if He creates new universes all the time. It is also important to know how other universes, if they exist, resolved the problem of good and evil. Such knowledge would help humankind to see our universe in a much broader context and also to understand God much better. Isn’t the knowledge of God the sense of human salvation? The Bible says that it is. At the same time it must be said that the book of Genesis doesn’t contain such information which would be a true revelation for humankind.
Can God be the Almighty Creator of the universe and, at the same time, can He, as a Creator, cease to create anything else? A Creator who doesn’t create is not a Creator anymore. It is very difficult to accept that the Creator, with incredible creative powers, had created only once, a creation which, in a way, betrayed Him, and after that He stopped creating.
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God is presented as the Creator of a single creation or process of creation. An infinite God would be an eternal Creator who would generate new creations continuously. The quality of God as a Creator and the uniqueness of His creation which proved to be imperfect seems to contradict one with the other. There are so many questions to which the Bible doesn’t give us any answer. These are important questions if one really wants to understand God and the process of creation of our universe.
The real world is a very dynamic one in which new worlds including new universes are likely to appear all the time; it isn’t a static existence in which only one universe was created once and for all as the book of Genesis seems to imply. The Bible induces the opinion that God would have created only our universe, which is unique in the entirety of existence, but this is contrary to what the modern sciences theorise. This aspect is important if we want to understand how unique our world is, and how unique is our story in the cosmos. At the same time, Jesus said that God still works. (John 5; 17 NRSV)
If God works all the time, having only periods of rest, what is He doing? Is He sustaining only the work that He already did in our universe? What does it really mean that God sustains the universe and what is the scientific implication of such a fact? Where do we find in the mechanisms of the functioning of the universe, following scientific research, the principle of God’s sustenance? If this principle is real there must be an element, exterior to the nature of things, which is required for all reality to function, the principle of God’s sustenance. A modern scientist, Steven Hawking, affirmed that there isn’t such an element and God’s existence is not necessary for the universe in order for it to be as it is.
Does God continuously support or survey the universe and does He really intervene for the prevention of any cosmic catastrophe? Cosmic catastrophes happen all the time. The stars die, they explode and create heavier elementary particles, such as iron, without which even man could not exist. In other words, a certain amount of destruction in the cosmos was necessary for the existence of our civilization. New stars are created all the time so the expression “end of creation” implied by the book of Genesis is not exact.
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The universe changes all the time, it is not destined to be forever in the same configuration as the Bible implies. The universe expands, is evolving, it is not static, and it is not created around the earth in order to be at its service. The universe wasn’t “ready” at the end of sixth day of creation and the rest taken by God at the end of His creation doesn’t make any sense, if it is compared with the dynamic of the universe.
The problem is that despite of what the book of Genesis maintains the creation of the universe doesn’t have any end, it is a continuous creation which contains also moments of destruction. For the human beings, a rest day makes sense, but for God such a pause is absurd. How would the creation have been supported during the Sabbath if God rested for one day? If the entire creation is reliant on God for its continuous sustenance, one day off for Him would have been a disastrous event for the creation. If God really sustains in existence His creation all the time, He couldn’t have taken a day off from this activity. At the same time, if the world wasn’t created in six days but it appeared and evolved in a much longer period of time and still continues to evolve, the Sabbath day doesn’t have any realistic support.
Some religious people say that God created on the fourth day all matter for the stars which assured the conditions for them to be continuously generated, but this isn’t what the Bible says. The stars would have been created in the fourth day to be signs and to illuminate the nights, and that wouldn’t have been possible if only the matter for stars was created then. Either all stars were created by God on the fourth day as the texts from the book of Genesis assert, or they are generated by the laws of physics all the time. One version contradicts the other. We can see what the truth is by studying the cosmos with technical means. Moreover, when God created the earth He had to create at the same time the matter for the constitution of the earth, but earth and stars are created from the same matter, which would have been created on the first day and not in the fourth day. If God created the matter of the earth on the first day, why did He create the stars only on the fourth day, if the matter was already there, three days earlier? There is no logic for that. The daylight, therefore the sun, was needed for the process of creation from the first day and the rough material would have been there. Why didn’t God use that existing matter and create all that was needed from the beginning? The book of Genesis doesn’t answer to that question.
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God's False Mirror | Tohu vav bohu (Tohu Wabohu)
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
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According to the book of Genesis the earth was in the begging a formless void and it was created by God in this way, and that formless void is expressed in the Bible through the formula “Tohu vav bohu”. Why would God have created the earth as a formless void first instead of an organised planet ready to receive life? At first glance it doesn’t make any sense. I try to answer this question using the established solutions in the religious literature.
What meaning can the affirmation that planet Earth was without form when it was created by God have? Was it not spherical? Was it like a pile of cosmic material thrown randomly into space and looking like an asteroid but with the difference that it was submerged under water? Did God in the beginning create a pile of matter in the middle of water? It is what the Bible says about the initial creation of the earth. In cosmos, all planets and stars are naturally organised into spherical bodies. Before reaching a mature stage, in the solar system, planets were rotating piles of gases which cooled and solidified. Nevertheless, being in the stage of floating gases, the earth couldn’t have been submerged in liquid water because in those conditions the rotating gases which later generated the planets of the solar system, couldn’t have taken the form of spherical celestial bodies.
Was the earth a kind of strange asteroid in the middle of a primeval ocean or was it a spherical planet from the beginning of its creation by God? From the way in which the book of Genesis describes the creation of the earth, under the primeval sea, the planet couldn’t have followed the usual course to become a spherical celestial body being shapeless and submerged in water.
Why are the planets spherical? The following text explains why celestial bodies having a certain dimension become spherical:
“One of the effects of mass is that it attracts other mass. When you have millions, and even trillions of tonnes of mass, the effect of the gravity really builds up. All of the mass pulls on all the other mass, and it tries to create the most efficient shape… a sphere. For smaller objects, like asteroids, the force of gravity trying to pull the object into a sphere isn’t enough to overcome the strength of the rock keeping it in shape. But once you get above a certain mass and size, the strength of the object can’t stop the force of gravity from pulling it into a sphere. Objects larger than about 1,000 km in size are able to pull themselves into a sphere.”
[1]
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The earth couldn’t have first been a pile of matter similar to an asteroid, and from this matter became a spherical planet, because an asteroid is much smaller than a planet and asteroids don’t become planets. The quantity of matter formed by dust and gases had to be of sufficient dimension from the beginning so as to constitute the future planet. In its solid form planet Earth was never a formless void in the sense of a shapeless pile of matter as the book of Genesis says.
Why would God have created a heap of formless matter as a planet, such as the book of Genesis says that He did? Planets are big enough to determine by gravity their spherical shape. Under the action of gravity such a big quantity of matter, as was that of the earth, would have been made into a sphere even if at the beginning it was only a formless pile of gas.
If God created in the beginning a pile of gas and dust and this is the meaning of the expression “formless void” used by the book of Genesis, this gathering of matter couldn’t have evolved into a spherical planet because that compound would have been under the waters of the primeval sea, according to the Bible. A rotating pile of gas under water doesn’t make sense. Whoever says that science and religion don’t diverge about the creation of the earth is wrong, they are very far from one another. Only on the third day did the dry land appear from under the waters of the primeval sea in the book of Genesis.
“9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1; 9-10 NRSV)
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In the Bible the initial heap of cosmic matter was covered by the waters of the primeval sea and the book of Genesis doesn’t say when and how it became a spherical planet. How could the earth have transformed itself from a heap of matter into a spherical planet under water? The alleged phenomenon would have needed to happen before the separation of the waters and the creation of plants. If that was correct it would mean that in the first two days of creation when the earth was still under water it would have been transformed from a pile of matter in a spherical planet. This is very unlikely, it is an absurd scenario imposed by the narratives from the book of Genesis.
When someone thinks of the earth at the beginning of its existence, in the biblical perspective, he or she must not think to a sphere but to a heap of matter, regardless of how deformed, covered by water. Why would God have created all other planets and stars spherical and only created the earth formless at the beginning? On the fourth day of creation the sun, moon and stars would have been created as functional spherical celestial bodies, if not they couldn’t have given light which was the purpose of their creation. If the creation of sun, moon and stars had begun and ended in that day there wasn’t enough time for their evolution from piles of gases to solid celestial bodies. This again is a contradiction between science and the book of Genesis, the former postulating a long process in the formation of the stars and planets but the latter proposing that they were created from the beginning in the form that they are today. We can find at this point a discrepancy in the stories of creation from the Bible which say that the earth wasn’t created from the beginning as a spherical planet as it is in our time but a shapeless pile of matter unlike the sun, moon, stars and all other planets in our solar system. Why would the earth have been created as a less complete celestial body in comparison with other planets if from the beginning it was destined by God for a higher mission? It is what the Bible says but it doesn’t make sense.
When speaking about evolution one shouldn’t think only to the biological evolution which allowed the human species to emerge from less evolved biological beings, because evolution is a general concept which speaks about phenomena within the perspective of their dynamic in time. Time is of the essence for evolution. Things didn’t come to be what they are at once from a process of divine creation, but they evolved from less developed to more sophisticated beings.
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The stars and planets followed the same rule. They didn’t come to be what they are in a so-called ready-to-go manner from one day to another but they followed many stages before being what they are at the present time. This ready-made manner of creation is contrary to the way in which the study of cosmos shows us that the universe works.
Evolution cannot be negated as a process and is visible all around us. Even an individual human being evolves in his or her lifetime from a baby to an adult and finally rolls downward toward physical decay. Stars also continue to evolve all the time from piles of gases to celestial bodies and after a long period of time they die. This evolution is real and visible, it isn’t a trick of the sciences in order to trap faithful people and the solution isn’t to be blind to it and to deny the evidence. Today, different stages of the formation of stars can be observed in the sky, starting with piles of gases on their way to becoming stars and ending with stars which have exploded, changing dramatically their form.
In another interpretation, the place occupied by the earth would have appeared to be a formless void because it would have been covered by water, and the water would have been like a universal formless void. In other words, the primeval sea would have had no boundaries and would have covered everything, and for this reason the earth also would have looked like a formless void. Everything was a formless void, a sea without a form or without a defined contour covering everything, earth, and the place for the sky.
If we want to get an image of what the Bible says about the beginning of creation, that picture is totally confused and the only point of reference is a mythological one which is contained by the alleged presence of the primeval sea at the time.
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That primeval sea is a common element for Jewish mythology and for other mythologies of other nations in that epoch. It means that God would have created the life on Earth fighting against the authority of a mythological personage symbolised by the primeval sea, the latter being the symbol of evil in many cultures.
Tohu va bohu shouldn’t be seen as referring exclusively to the physical form but also to the function of the earth at that stage. Being formless or shapeless, the earth would have also been empty, unpopulated. There are two elements in the expression tohu va bohu, used by the book of Genesis in order to emphasise the degree of the decay in which the earth would have been at that time.
There is also the opinion that by formless it should be understood that the earth was insufficiently organised to be a suitable environment for life. This of course cannot change the clear reference to the lack of physical shape of the earth at that date of creation..[2]
This is another way of avoiding what the Bible says. The spherical form isn’t sufficient for the existence of life, consequently the two conditions mustn’t be confounded. All planets are spherical; they aren’t formless but nevertheless many are insufficiently organised to be a suitable environment for life. One condition refers to the physical form and the other to other necessary conditions for the existence of life.
The word “tohu” refers firstly and fore mostly to the physical shape and not to the deficient functions of a certain planetary environment, and recognises that the first condition for matter to be able to host more evolved life is to be organised as a spherical planet. “Bohu” would refer mainly to the functional characteristics such as emptiness or desolation.
The origins of the Jewish people are in Mesopotamia and Abraham came from Ur, a city situated on the banks of Euphrates. For this reason, one shouldn’t be amazed by the closest relations between Mesopotamian culture and Jewish culture, including their mythologies. The words “tohu” and “bohu” are not Hebrew but most likely they are Sumerian words. In the Sumerian language nouns commonly end in -u but in the Hebrew language -u is a verb ending.
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Tohu and bohu are nouns, not verbs, therefore their origin is rather Sumerian, showing the influence of that mythology on the book of Genesis.[3]
“The Gap Theory”, suggests the angels were created “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1), rather than during or after the creation week, and that Satan and his demonic followers had fell prior to Genesis 1:2. Chalmers grounds this theory in the reinterpretation of words used in Genesis 1:2, and their relationship with other passages of scripture.” In this understanding, Genesis 1:2 could, or should read: “But the earth became or “had become” without form and void.” The expression “without form and void” has been translated from the Hebrew phrase “tohu vav bohu.” The words tohu and bohu are also found in Isaiah 34; 11, but they are interpreted in the sense of confusion (tohu) and emptiness (bohu). Thus “tohu” can also mean “confused”, and “bohu” can mean “empty”. “Confused” and “without form” share in common a lack of order, in a place where there should be order. Perhaps, then, the text could be read as follows; “But the earth wasin disarray, andempty.”[4]
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Jeremiah 4:23-26 also uses the phrase “tohu va bohu”. This is the biblical text:
23 I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. 24 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. 25 I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. 26 I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger. (Jeremiah 4; 23-26 NRSV)
What is interesting, though, is that it refers to cities, and what’s more it seems that these cities had received judgment from The Lord – “all the cities thereof were broken down (in disarray) at the presence of the Lord, and by his fierce anger”.
In the eyes of those who spiritualise the expression “tohu va bohu”, perhaps these cities represented the homes of the angels who had fallen. The word “choshek” has been interpreted, in most translations of the Bible, as “darkness”, and when we read it we assume this is a natural darkness (i.e. before the creation of natural light), but the word “choshek” is also used in Exodus 10:21 to describe the darkness The Lord brought upon Egypt, which was so dark it could be felt. Thus, again, in this kind of spiritualised interpretation, Genesis 1:2 could be read: “Butthe earth was in disarray, and empty; and spiritual darknesswas upon the face of the demonic realm.”[5]
Allegedly, according to the Gap Theory, Satan brought in disarray a previous order of the earth, about which we know nothing. God came on the first day of creation and started to restore it. If the darkness brought by Satan was physical and not only spiritual it means that there had already been a physical light on Earth previous to that darkness, and before the creation of the light on the first day, according to the book of Genesis chapter 1.
The Gap Theory implies that before darkness was light on Earth, but the book of Genesis doesn’t say that and doesn’t allow us to infer that. In order for Satan to bring disorder a previous order had to exist, but that order necessarily entails the existence of physical light.
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Spiritually speaking, light means order and darkness means decay. At the same time, a physical light, not only a spiritual one, was needed for the existence of a previous order. Such a light would have been created by God and would have been mentioned by the Bible.
Spiritual light and material light are two very different things and they mustn’t be confounded. If physical darkness and disorder came together, nothing like that is actually said by the Bible. But what is darkness? It is the absence of light, no more and no less. Satan couldn’t have annihilated the alleged physical light which God would have created in the beginning before the first day of creation. Spiritual darkness can be generated by the absence of God but physical darkness must be related to a physical light.
In the process of biblical creation, the sun wasn’t in place until the fourth day according to the book of Genesis and a previous order, presumed by the Gap Theory, had to be realised in a physical darkness or under a provisional light. Another provisional light without sun would have been needed; one that would have been switched off by Satan, but such a hypothesis looks very improbable. Two provisional lights, one before the earth, would have been brought to chaos by Satan, and the other one from the first day of creation until the fourth day when the sun would have been created is an absurd theory. Nevertheless, a physical light created by God couldn’t have been switched off by Satan, but He didn’t create such provisional lights.
As a matter of fact, the order in the creation couldn’t have been completed before the sixth day. The creation couldn’t have been finalised at the beginning of it and the order couldn’t have been fully in place from the beginning. What order would have been brought in disarray by Satan? It would have been only a partial, incomplete order and without human beings who were created on the sixth day of creation.
The Gap Theory is in contradiction with the creation in six days. In the economy of the Bible, the state of “tohu va bohu” was God’s creation, and not Satan’s creation. Satan couldn’t have destroyed something which the Bible doesn’t allow us to presume would have existed, an order before the first day of creation.
The representatives of a spiritual interpretation of the expression “tohu va bohu” maintain that:
“It is clear, then, that the angels were created before ‘the beginning’, and that Genesis 1 is not a history of the origins of the entire cosmos, but just of our world – the ‘physical realm.’ If Satan and his followers have rebelled against The Lord, then they have sinned. They can no longer be in his presence and thus they have ‘fallen from the sky like lightning.’ Where did they land when they fell? The Lord cast Satan and his followers into a hell from which he withdrew his presence. The earth was in disarray, and empty; and spiritual darkness was upon the face of the [demonic realm] The Lord created Earth and withdrew his presence from it, but then upon this he created the Earth we know, as is described in Days one to six. Thus Satan and his followers live in the deep, the abyss, the demonic realm, ‘underneath’ the good but fallen creation we inhabit.”[6]
The Bible doesn’t contain any information about what happened in the “heavens” in the beginning and how and why Satan succeeded in upsetting God, and why he was cast out from heaven. At the same time, we really don’t know, from the narrative of creation, exactly in what moment Satan was thrown out from the sky. Was it before or after the creation of light? Satan fell from the sky like lightning so he probably fell after the creation of light because it is improbable that he had been the first light of the creation. That would set Satan’s fall after the creation of light in the first day and not before it.
“18 He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” (Luke 10; 18 NRSV)
I don’t find merits in the theory by which the expression “tohu va bohu” would mean a void and an emptiness brought to the earth by the evil angels. The Gap Theory must completely disregard the text from Exodus 20; 11 in order to become sustainable. At the same time, this theory doesn’t have enough support in other biblical texts.
The narratives from the book of Genesis tried to describe literally the origins of the universe and there isn’t anything which must be read beyond the written text.
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All creation including the creation of heavens was made in six days, according to the Bible. For this reason, it is difficult to maintain that anything at all was created before the six-day period of time.
“For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” (Exodus 20; 11 NRSV)
“It is vital to believe in six literal days for many reasons. The foremost reason is that allowing these days to be long periods of time undermines the foundations of the message of the Cross.”[7]
Ken Ham also argues that the second part of the text contained by 2 Peter 3; 8 cancel the first part and the provision that for God one day is like one thousand years is annihilated by the assertion that one thousand years are also like a day..[8]
“8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” (2 Peter 3; 8 NRSV)
How can one know if the seven days are to be considered literally or not? One argument is about the regular successions of evenings and of the mornings. As long as we don’t have another option for the interpretation of the words “morning” and “evening” we cannot give but a literal interpretation of the days of creation. Another argument is based on the meaning of the Hebrew word used for “day” in Genesis chapter 1 which is “;yom”. The meaning of the words, in the Bible depends on the context in which they are used. Every time the word “yom” is used with a number or with the phrase “evening and morning”, everywhere in the Old Testament, it always means an ordinary day. In Genesis chapter 1, for each of the six days of creation, the Hebrew word “yom” is used with a number and also with the phrase, “evening and morning”. The most reasonable conclusion is to say that “yom” in Genesis chapter 1 means ordinary days.
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[1] www.universetoday.com/26782/why-is-the-earth-round/
[2] www.wordexplain.com/Word_Study_tohu_wa_bohu.html
[3] www.shirhadash-ma.org/.../2007-10_breishit_DavidGoodson.pdf
[4] www.plaintruth.com/the.../the-earth-became-formless-and-void
[5] www.plaintruth.com/the.../the-earth-became-formless-and-void
[6] www.plaintruth.com/the.../the-earth-became-formless-and-void
[7] https://answersingenesis.org/.../the-necessity-for-believing-in-six-literal-d...
[8] https://answersingenesis.org/.../the-necessity-for-believing-in-six-literal-d...
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