This opening question is not at all an issue unless you are an extreme
literalist, or a rather naive materialist hoping to score a rhetorical point
against an extreme literalist. But the “answer” piled up by the Answers in
Genesis author(s) is ridiculous. They have failed to respond meaningfully to
the question, made trivially false statements, and conflated several separate
sciences.
The
Jewish Publication Society's Study Bible has an interesting analysis of Genesis
1-2:3. The structure of these verses in Hebrew prose forms a repeated
pattern. First there is a creation of
general powers or domains; light, sky+sea (separation of "waters"),
and land (+plants). This is followed by
objects of light (sun, moon, stars), life in the sea and air (fish and birds),
and then land animals and humans.
Schematically,
we have the following;
Light
Lights (sun, moon, stars)
(Yom
1) (Yom 4)
Sky
separating "waters"
Fish and Birds
(Yom
2)
(Yom 5)
Land
and Plants Land
Animals and Humans (male and female)
(Yom
3)
(Yom 6)
It should
be obvious that this creation narrative is highly abstract, which I presented
in “The Origin of the Seven Day Week.” The days represent the major deities
associated with the planets, sun and moon. They must be ordinary days because
it was ordinary days that were used to reverence those gods. The seventh day is
taken outside the structure of the creation and is given a new significance as
the Shabbat.
But this is not enough for AiG- they must have an exact
materialistic conformance between the Bible and the physical creation. They
first invent a unidirectional “light” that is not the sun and a spinning earth.
Why not just invent an on or off universal light that worked on a 24 hour
timer? It would be no less absurd. The ancient Mesopotamian cosmology imagined
that the earth was suspended between two realms; the underworld and the
heavens. These supernatural realms were the abode of various gods, and both
were depicted as “waters.” The biblical parallels are many and obvious. An immediate
example is Gen 7:11 in which Yahweh broke open the “fountains of the deep” and
opened the “windows of heaven” to release the "waters" to cause the Noachian flood.
But AiG didn’t totally jump the rails until they tried
to present what “evolutionary theories” say. Neither of the scientific areas
referred to by AiG, cosmology and the study of abiogenesis or the origin of
life, are strictly speaking evolutionary theories. Biological
evolution would
still be the best explanation of the observed diversity and distribution of
life regardless of how the universe or life originated. None the less, AiG
cannot even get the few basics correctly presented. The “big bang” theory has
nothing to say about the sun being created before the earth. In fact, the
nebular theory first proposed by Immanuel Kant and now generally accepted scientifically
shows that the sun and the various planets and moons essentially formed about
the same time. The sun has shone on all the planets and moons orbiting it these
last 4.5 billion years, and so far as we know, the earth is the only place with
life. There is no substance to the silly argument made by AiG that scientists credit
the sun with the origin of life, or the “wonder of creation.”
Expert Verified
