The Cosmos

WeberHome

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Rev 14:6-7 . . And I saw another angel flying through the sky, carrying the everlasting gospel to preach to the people who dwell on the earth-- to every nation, tribe, language, and people. Fear God! he shouted. Give glory to Him! For the time has come when He will sit as judge. Worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all the springs of water!

Although most Christians readily agree that the cosmos is the result of intelligent design; they're divided over the very first two verses of Genesis which read like this:

1. In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth. 2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Some sincerely believe the second verse indicates that the cosmos pre-existed its current form. In other words: a great cataclysm wrecked the Earth so that God had to reconstruct it. Thus; we today live on a renovated Earth. This posit is the so-called Gap Theory; which is explained pretty well on Wikipedia.

Others, just as sincere, believe that the six days of creation shouldn't be taken as 24-hour events; rather, as epochs of indeterminate length. This posit is based upon Genesis 2:4, which reads like this:

"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven."

The Hebrew word for "day" in that verse is yowm (yome) which is the very same word for each of the six days of God's creation labors. Since yowm in Gen 2:4 refers to a period of time obviously much longer than 24 hours; it justifies suggesting that each of the six Days of creation were longer than 24 hours too. In other words: yowm is ambiguous and not all that easy to interpret sometimes.
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WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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Well; for sure we have to buy some time somewhere, lots of time-- either with the gap theory or the yowm/epoch theory --in order to account for the 4.5 billion-year age of the earth, and factor in the various eras, e.g. Triassic, Jurassic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, and Cretaceous, etc, plus the ice ages and the mass extinction events.

There are some serious geological issues too. For example: the discovery of fossilized sea lilies near the summit of Mt Everest proves that the Himalayan land mass hasn't always been mountainous; but at one time was the floor of an ancient sea bed. This is confirmed by the "yellow band" below Everest's summit consisting of limestone: a type of rock made from calcite sediments containing the skeletal remains of countless trillions of organisms who lived, not on dry land, but in an ocean.

Everest and its yellow band got up high like that by means of tectonic plate buckling and/or subduction; which are very slow processes requiring thousands of years.

And there are hominid issues. For example: in 1992, Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, discovered the fossilized skeleton of a woman (nicknamed Ardi) in Ethiopia's Afar Rift who lived 4.4 million years ago. His forty-seven member team, over a period of 17 years, discovered portions of the skeletons of thirty-seven more individuals from the same era.

(Tim White's discovery sent evolutionists into a tail spin because the woman’s age, combined with her physical design, proves that apes and humans are separate and distinct species rather than sharing a common ancestor in an evolutionary chain.)

Personally, I prefer the yowm/epoch theory, but at the same time readily agree that the gap theory is equally possible.
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eleos

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Rev 14:6-7 . . And I saw another angel flying through the sky, carrying the everlasting gospel to preach to the people who dwell on the earth-- to every nation, tribe, language, and people. Fear God! he shouted. Give glory to Him! For the time has come when He will sit as judge. Worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all the springs of water!

Although most Christians readily agree that the cosmos is the result of intelligent design; they're divided over the very first two verses of Genesis which read like this:

1. In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth. 2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Some sincerely believe the second verse indicates that the cosmos pre-existed its current form. In other words: a great cataclysm wrecked the Earth so that God had to reconstruct it. Thus; we today live on a renovated Earth. This posit is the so-called Gap Theory; which is explained pretty well on Wikipedia.

Others, just as sincere, believe that the six days of creation shouldn't be taken as 24-hour events; rather, as epochs of indeterminate length. This posit is based upon Genesis 2:4, which reads like this:

"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven."

The Hebrew word for "day" in that verse is yowm (yome) which is the very same word for each of the six days of God's creation labors. Since yowm in Gen 2:4 refers to a period of time obviously much longer than 24 hours; it justifies suggesting that each of the six Days of creation were longer than 24 hours too. In other words: yowm is ambiguous and not all that easy to interpret sometimes.
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Seems pretty clear: (earth time) (heaven in relation to earth - the earths heaven) not including the cosmos

The Bible is for mankind and to know how we were created and who created us, why we were created and how we should live.

It's not intended for the "detailed tell all" of the creation of everything in the universe by our awesome God. It is impossible for us to comprehend .... although many try to explain it ..... NOBODY knows.



Genesis 1:1

1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

and then further clarified
Genesis: 1

14Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; 15and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. 17God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. 19There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
 

WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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What caused the darkness?


It's difficult to imagine a cataclysm so great that it could snuff out every bit of light in the entire cosmos; even the CMB (cosmic microwave background). There's one described in 2Pet 3:10, but that one is so destructive that it leaves nothing with which to reconstruct the Earth.
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WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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Ps 104:5-9 . . He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.

Psalm 104 is stunning; and clearly way ahead of its time. Mountains rising, and valleys sinking speaks of tectonic plates, magma pressure, and the forces of subduction.

It's doubtful the Psalmist knew about those sciences but he was clearly somehow aware that the Earth's crust is malleable. And that's true. With just the right combination of time, temperature, and pressure; solid rock can be made to bend, even forced to hairpin back upon itself like taffy.
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WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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Gen 1:5b . . And the evening and the morning were the first day.

When we think about it; a strict chronology of evening and morning doesn't define day, it defines overnight; viz: darkness. In order to obtain a full 24 hour day, we'd have to define a creation Day as a day and a night rather than an evening and a morning.

It was God himself who made sure that people understand that creation's days were not 24-hour amalgams of light and dark.

Gen 1:4b-5a . . God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

According to that verse; the days of creation were periods of light with no darkness in them whatsoever.

John 11:9-10 . . Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.

According to Jesus' statement, day is a 12-hour period of light only rather than a 24-hour amalgam of light and dark. Which corroborates God's testimony that day is light and night is dark.

In my mind's eye, Jesus and his Father easily qualify as expert witnesses who know what they're talking about so I really think people should listen to them.

NOTE: Gen 1:24-31 says that God created humans and all terra critters on the sixth Day; which has to include dinosaurs because on no other day did God create beasts but the sixth. However; the fossil record, in combination with scientific dating methods, strongly suggests that dinosaurs preceded humans by several million years. Either those ancient critters' remains are left-overs from a previous cosmos, or the days of creation are epochs because 24-hour days don't really tell the story.

This "evening and morning" thing has been a stone in the shoe for just about everybody who takes Genesis seriously. But if we reckon those terms to simply represent endings and beginnings instead of physical hours; then the wrinkles in the first chapter of Genesis smooth right on out.
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WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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Gen 1:2c . . and Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

When that verse is considered with Gen 1:9; it's readily deduced that that the Earth's surface was completely submerged at first; so that the planet has been flooded twice in the past; but that was it.

Gen 9:11 . . I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

Noah needed to hear that so he wouldn't get jumpy the next time it started to rain really hard in his neighborhood. There is still flooding going on in the world, but certainly not on the same scale as the Flood.

Gen 1:6-8 . . And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

We can easily guess what is meant by water that's below the sky. But is there really water that's above it? Yes, and it's a lot! According to an article in the Sept 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine, Earth's atmosphere holds roughly 3,095 cubic miles of water in the form of vapor. That may seem like a preposterous number of cubic miles of water; but not really when it's considered that Lake Superior's volume alone is estimated at nearly 3,000.

Our home planet is really big; a whole lot bigger than people sometimes realize. It's surface area, in square miles, is 196,940,000. To give an idea of just how many square miles that is: if somebody were to wrap a belt around the equator made of one-mile squares; it would only take 24,902 squares to complete the distance; which is a mere .00012644 the surface area.

Some of the more familiar global warming gases are carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons, methane, and ozone. But as popular as those gases are with the media, they're bit players in comparison to the role that ordinary water vapor plays in global warming. By some estimates; atmospheric water vapor accounts for more than 90% of global warming; which is not a bad thing because without atmospheric water vapor, the earth would be so cold that the only life that could exist here would be extremophiles.

How much water is below the expanse? Well; according to the same article; the amount contained in swamp water, lakes and rivers, ground water, and oceans, seas, and bays adds up to something like 326.6 million cubic miles; and that's not counting the 5.85 million cubic miles tied up in living organisms, soil moisture, ground ice and permafrost, ice sheets, glaciers, and permanent snow.

To put that in perspective: a tower 326.6 million miles high would exceed the Sun's distance better than 3½ times.

Gen 1:9 . . And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

Shaping the earth's mantle in order to form low spots for the seas and high spots for dry ground was a colossal feat of magma convection and volcanism combined with the titanic forces of tectonic plate subduction.

At the ocean's deepest surveyed point-- the Challenger Deep; located in the Mariana Islands group, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench --the water's depth is over 11,000 meters; which is about 6.8 statute miles (36,000 feet). That depth corresponds to the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. At that altitude, probably about all you're going to see of the airliner without straining your eyes is its contrail.

Africa's Mt Kilimanjaro is the tallest free-standing mountain on earth at 19,341 feet above its land base. If Kilimanjaro were placed in the Challenger Deep, it would have about 16,659 feet of water over its peak. Were the tallest point of the Himalayan range-- Mt Everest --to be submerged in the Challenger Deep, it would have about 7,000 feet of water over its peak.
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6days

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WeberHome said:
1. In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth. 2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Some sincerely believe the second verse indicates that the cosmos pre-existed its current form.
The world is filled with people who sincerely believe things.…. But sincerity does not determine truth.

On day 4 of The Creation week God made the Sun, the moon and the stars. It was not a redo.

Exodus 20:11 "For in six days the LORD made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them
WeberHome said:
The Hebrew word for "day" in that verse (Gen.2:4) isyowm (yome) which is the very same word for each of the six days of God's creation labors. Since yowm in Gen 2:4 refers to a period of time obviously much longer than 24 hours; it justifies suggesting that each of the six Days of creation were longer than 24 hours too.
No... Your 'argument' is silly and actually destroys the Gospel.

The reason your argument is silly is that you ignore rules of grammar and exegetical interpretation of scripture. The word 'day' in English / 'yom' in Hebrew have a variety of meanings which is ALWAYS understood by the context. (It can be a short period of time, a 24-hour day, a long period of time and more) The author of Genesis 1 seemed to take extra precautions to make clear that creation occurred over the course of six literal day and night periods. For example..... In the Old Testament and number is associated with the word 'day' hundreds of times.... It always is clearly referring to a normal 24-hour day. (Or do you think that Jonah was in the belly of the fish for 3 epochs?). There are other indicators also which prevent the addition of deep time into Genesis 1.... For example you could look through scripture and see what a day means whenever it is associated with the word 'evening' or 'morning'.

The reason the 6 epoch of time, belief destroys the gospel, is that it places thorrn's, suffering and death before sin. If death did not enter the world because of one man sin... Then why the cross?
 

WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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Gen 1:3 . . Then God said "Let there be light" and there was light.

The creation of light was a very, very intricate process. First God had to create particulate matter, and along with those particles their specific properties, including mass; if any. Then He had to invent the laws of nature to govern how matter behaves in combination with and/or in the presence of, other kinds of matter in order to generate electromagnetic radiation.

Light's properties are curious. It propagates as waves in a variety of lengths and frequencies, and also as quantum bits called photons. And though light has no mass; it's influenced by gravity. Light is also quite invisible to the naked eye. For example: you can see the Sun when you look at it, and you can see the Moon when sunlight reflects from its surface. But none of the Sun's light is visible to you in the void between them and that's because light isn't matter; it's energy; and there is really a lot of it.

Space was at time thought to contain absolutely nothing until radio astronomers discovered something called cosmic microwave background. In a nutshell: CMB fills the universe with light that apparently radiates from no detectable source. The popular notion is that CMB is energy left over from the Big Bang.

The same laws that make it possible for matter to generate electromagnetic radiation also make other conditions possible too; e.g. fire, wind, water, ice, soil, rain, life, centrifugal force, thermodynamics, fusion, dark energy, gravity, atoms, organic molecules, magnetism, color, radiation, refraction, reflection, high energy X-rays and gamma rays, temperature, pressure, force, inertia, sound, friction, and electricity; et al. So the creation of light was a pretty big deal; yet Genesis scarcely gives its origin passing mention.

2Cor 4:6 verifies that light wasn't introduced into the cosmos from outside in order to dispel the darkness and brighten things up a bit; but rather, it radiated out of the cosmos from inside-- from itself --indicating that the cosmos was created to be self-illuminating by means of the various interactions of the matter that God made for it; including, but not limited to, the Higgs Boson.

You know it's curious to me that most people have no trouble readily conceding that everything else in the first chapter of Genesis is natural, e.g. the cosmos, the earth, the atmosphere, water, dry land, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, aqua life, winged life, terra life, flora life, and human life.

But when it comes to light they choke; finding it impossible within themselves to believe that Genesis just might be consistent in its description of the creative process. I mean, if all those other things are natural, why wouldn't light be natural too? In point of fact, without natural light, planet Earth would become a cold dead world right quick.

NOTE: An interesting thing about the laws of nature is that they're not absolute laws. No; they are created laws-- created as a companion to the created cosmos to regulate how the cosmos, with all of its forms of life, matter, and energy, behaves. Seeing as how God designed and created those laws, then He knows the secrets to manipulating them in order to make things in our world behave quite contrary to common sense.

Take for example the floating axe head in 2Kgs 6:5-6. Solid chunks of iron don't float. That's unnatural. Another example is the fire-proof bush of Ex 3:2. A bush that's impervious to fire is unnatural. It should have flared up and Moses knew it too but it didn't because God can easily modify the natural behavior of everything He ever created.
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6days

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Jamie said:
The darkness was caused by clouds.
That isn't what God's Word says. The darkness existed because light did not yet exist.

God created light on day 1
Clouds and the atmosphere, seem to have been created on day 2. (The expanse between waters above and below)
The sun, moon and stars were created on day 4.
 

WeberHome

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Re: The Cosmos

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According to Gen 1:15-18, God set stars in the sky for illumination.

Well; the only stars whose shine is of any practical use as illumination on the Earth are those of the Milky Way: in point of fact, every star in the sky visible to the naked eye is a Milky Way star. Stars in other galaxies are too far away to be seen without a telescope; which is actually a relatively recent invention. Jesus and the apostles didn't have telescopes, nor did anyone before them, including Abraham.

Gen 15:4-5 . .The word of The Lord came to him in reply: That one shall not be your heir; none but your very own issue shall be your heir. He took him outside and said: Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. And He added: So shall your offspring be.

In Abraham's day, prior to the invention of optics, the only stars that people could see with their own eyes were those in our home galaxy; the Milky Way; which consists of an estimated 100-400 billion stars. But many of those estimated billions of stars appear to the naked eye not as stars but as glowing clouds; viz: they cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye so those didn't matter to Abraham when it came to actually tallying the heavens.

The entire global sky contains roughly five or six thousand stars visible to the naked eye. However, they can't all be seen at once; only the ones out after dark. So then; Abraham could see maybe three thousand discernable stars from dark till dawn.

God had said "if you are able to count them". Well; even at only three thousand, the task would be difficult; and for Abraham to count all six thousand would be nigh unto impossible without losing track of where he left off.
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Stripe

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Looks like Weber has a class to teach. :idunno:

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6days

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Weber said:
According to Gen 1:15-18, God set stars in the sky for illumination.
This is what Gods Word actually says..."Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth.” And that is what happened. God made two great lights—the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And evening passed and morning came, marking the fourth day."

Besides the 'lights' in the sky serving as light, and signs; Gods Word also tell us another purpose, worship... "The heavens declare the glory of God".
 
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