Creation - the Light and the Firmament/Part 3
Contents
Creation: the Light and the Firmament (Part 3)
This article, Creation: the Light and the Firmament reflects my personal journey to understand and believe the Biblical account of Creation in Genesis Chapter 1.
The scope is only the first few verses of Genesis, to the separation of waters by an expanse called a firmament. These are the verses I found most challenging.
This article is in four parts: the text of the Creation account in Part 1; several issues, which arise from the way the story was traditionally published, are expanded in Part 2; some thoughts about the Light which preceded the sun, moon and stars, explained below; and in Part 4, a suggestion that the waters (verse 6) is a metaphor and the firmament separates the temporal from the atemporal or eternal.
Summary of my Journey so far
Around forty years ago I faced a challenge:- could I believe the whole Bible? How could I believe the account of Creation in Genesis?
I made a decision: I chose to believe in Creation and asked God for help to believe.
Over time I began to see Genesis Chapter 1 differently. I believe that verses 1 and 2 should never have been separated and together form Moses' own introduction to the Creation narrative. As a consequence, God's first creative act of would be to create light. But there is an anomaly - the sun and the stars were created later. Commentators referred to this light as 'illumination'. So what really happened and how could I understand it?
To introduce this section, and consistent with my journey thus far, I have quoted Genesis 1:1-5 below from a modern but literal translation - the English Standard Version (ESV). There is no preamble and I have also a) removed the verse numbers and b) combined verses 1 and 2, formatted as an introduction, so the creation narrative begins at verse 3 with "Let there be light".
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:1-5 (ESV)
The Light
Why would God create light before anything else? Wouldn't He create the stars, including our sun, from which light radiates? According to Genesis, God created lights in the firmament or heavens on the fourth day. This puzzled me for a long time until one day I had an epiphany, some insight or a revelation.
In my second career I worked for a government department which managed the radio-frequency spectrum. My role was humble:- issuing licences to government departments and companies to use radio for two-way communications by police and emergency services or a company base station and mobile workers; for microwave links used by telecommunications companies; marine radios on fishing boats and yachts; radios on aircraft; and other uses of radio for communications or data transmission. I was surrounded by, and learnt from, technical people who had been radio operators; some had been in the military, some had been on ships or aircraft, others were amateur radio enthusiasts or ham radio operators. I also learnt about satellite communications and deep space communications. Radio waves are propagated as electromagnetic energy with a wavelength and a frequency, forming just part of an electromagnetic spectrum which includes light - the visible portion of this spectrum. Unlike sound waves, electromagnetic radiation can pass through a vacuum, through space. Light and other electromagnetic radiation from the Sun reaches us through space. Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light. X-rays, microwaves, gamma waves, radio waves, and light are all examples of electromagnetic radiation.
Forty years ago when I was thinking about these things there was no Internet. Our office didn't even have computers. No WiFi. No Bluetooth. No mobile phones, tablets or laptops.
Four hundred years ago may be after Galileo but pre-dates Newton, Maxwell, Marconi, Tesla, and Einstein.
Four thousand years ago there were sophisticated civilizations but all that we take for granted was yet to come. So then, and earlier, there would be no language to describe the phenomena which today we know as electricity and magnetism, electric fields and magnetic fields, radiation and its' uses for radio and television, mobile phones, and computer networks.
There was, however, one word which Moses and all his readers would know - Light. And light is the only visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. What if God created electromagnetic radiation, electrical and magnetic forces, a whole spectrum of waves and energy, and for simplicity just called it 'light'.
What if 'energy' was created before 'matter'? We are all familiar with Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 but in all of history it was only my father's generation that saw the raw destructive power of allowing a critical mass of uranium[1] to be converted into energy. My father went through Hiroshima as a member of the occupation forces in Japan and saw the effects of the first atom bomb. Nagasaki had also been destroyed. During a nuclear reaction there is a release of high-energy particles as well as high levels of electromagnetic energy. The creation of matter from energy would be the opposite process. So which came first - energy or matter?
As I read it, the Bible says energy was first - electromagnetic energy described simply as light.
My Journey, continued
I shared this thought about light and energy and the electromagnetic spectrum with one of Australia's leading creationists when he visited my city on a tour, and was discouraged[2]. But, as he had said during his lecture, everyone is biased and "it is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased". So I didn't even write my journey down, until now (2023). To me the insight meant that the Genesis account of Creation was credible and I moved on with life.
In the past 50 years I have noticed a societal shift away from Christianity, Bible-based morals and values, and sound Christian faith. The secular world has transformed education; few people are critical thinkers; evolution has been mainstreamed; and before a person can accept the Gospel of Jesus there are now so many more obstacles to remove than just pride and self-confidence. In writing this article about the Light I wanted to offer a solution to just one of the barriers preventing a belief in Creation. It is clear, however, that I should not leave this dialog at the creation of 'light'. So I have written a new section about the firmament.
But before this page ends, and just for fun, let me show you a quote from a physicist:-
In the beginning, there was not yet any matter. However, there was a lot of energy in the form of light, which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the corresponding particle--for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive particles such as protons (remember, E=mc2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.
Source: Where did the matter in the universe come from? - one of several articles by Sarah Slater, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, where she works on cosmology and particle physics.
The choice of words for the opening sentence is topical!
Notes and References
- ↑ Uranium 235 (U235) to be precise. See Designs of Two Bombs . Most of the east coast of Japan had been devastated by conventional bombing. To my father at first it just seemed more of the same - until he realised that Hiroshima had been flattened by just one bomb. He never spoke about it until I asked him to describe what he saw.
- ↑
A current article on the Answers in Genesis website titled Light Before the Sun provides an overview of various theories or interpretations of Genesis 1:3-5 and concludes thus:-
Conclusion
So the light in Genesis 1:3–5 is light as the Scripture says—everyone agrees on that, but what was the source? As shown above, there are many different thoughts on this subject. But ultimately, we are simply not told. Throughout history people have speculated and continue to do so, but always test these proposals against the Scriptures.
Not having a sun before day 4 of creation is not a problem for biblical creationists. The temporary light source—whatever it was—by God’s design and purpose served to function as light and heat for the earth for three days.
Source: Lacey, Troy Lacey and Hodge, Bodie (2019) last featured in Answers in Depth, September 1, 2020 Answers In Genesis
When creationism becomes mainstream and bias becomes dogma it is best to hold a [different] personal view to oneself. Which I have done for about 40 years. But now I don't care - people need to read the Bible afresh, to hear the Christian Gospel, to understand the truth about Jesus, sin, salvation, eternity and the apocalyptic future ahead. I think this referenced article fails to add any substantial understanding and shows that confirmation bias is just another bias to be biased with. By contrast, anything useful that I can share from my own understanding or experience which may help someone overcome any doubt about the credibility and authenticity of the Bible is time well spent.
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock, and it will be opened to you." Matt 7:7 (ESV)
Or, as one of my mentors used to say, "keep on asking, keep on seeking, and keep on knocking" (until you get the answers).
Grant