Darwin versus Genesis One verse Four - Viking addition
Am I a Bible Literalist? Yes, where it is written as history and wisdom. But parts of the Bible are prophetic and use poetic language. Ordinary Bible students have no trouble figuring out which is which and often God makes a point of cluing us in to what is poetic language and what is simply narrative or teaching. I do not mind discussing the Bible with anyone who seriously wants to discuss a portion of scripture. If you don't know the scripture very well kindly respect the fact that it is a big (66 books) bite of information and you do not have a shot at knowing very well if you have spent a half hour flipping through it!
Recently, as I told a commenter:
Supernatural evidence is evidence of supernatural activity. If there is no natural cause or coherent natural explanation and there is a supernatural explanation we have come to Occam's Razor.
Here are five examples of supernatural evidence:
Information
Life
Design
Existence
A Bible that explains how and where and by Who the first four happened to be.
Now five examples of falsifiable creationist suppositions shown to be true:
Magnetic field rate of decay shows Earth must be less than 20,000 years and likely around six thousand asserted Dr. Russell Humphreys in 1984.
(Confirmed by Voyager II measurements of Neptune and Uranus fields that echo those of Earth)
RATE conference asserted that too much Helium would be found in rocks for an old earth.
(Fenton Hill, NM drill site into crystal agreed with the theory)
Polonium radiohalos will be found in sedimentary rocks since they were formed by the massive Noahic Flood.
(Confirmed by Dr. Andrew Snelling's study of Smoky Mountain sandstone.)
John Baumgartner proposed the subduction theory of tectonic plate movements during the Flood, which would result in the cold surface of the crust being completely subducted.
(Recent technological advances have allowed scientists to "see" the edge of the Earth's mantle and detect the presence of relatively cold former crust as predicted by an event less than 4500 years ago.)
Noahic Flood turmoil would have caused Earth's magnetic field to reverse, probably several times.
(Steen's Mountain 1988 basaltic flows were first confirmation of this anomaly.)
There are so many examples of science falsifying Darwinist theory I cannot keep up with them all. The orthodox paradigm is going to fall hard when it finally falls. Now back to our movie:
Genesis 1:4
וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָא֖וֹר כִּי־ט֑וֹב וַיַּבְדֵּ֣ל אֱלֹהִ֔ים בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ׃
courtesy of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.
You recall that in verse three, God created the light without any sources for the light. Let's look at what we have so far:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.
So God has taken credit for creating the Universe, which naturalistic materialistic atheists have no explanation for beyond nothing became something by some chance. Ah, atheistic science. No answers, lots of fairy tales. God has created elements, obviously, since there are waters. But He creates light after the very first creative act. Now he says it is good.
So light is created before the source of the light and God says the light is good. Much hue and cry has been raised by atheists and Christians alike about the vast distances between Earth and the stars and how many stars are so many millions of light years away, thus making a six day creation event some six thousand years or so ago impossible. Then again, nothing is impossible with God.
There have been all sorts of theories introduced about how God may have created the Earth recently while allowing for the problem of the apparent age of light. Hmm, did God create Adam and Eve with apparent age? If not, who nursed them and raised them and taught them their alphabet? Did God make baby animals, helplessly squirming or did He make them full grown at the start? I mean, chicken and the egg, right? The idea that God created light with an appearance of age makes sense.
For instance, the creation of Earth could have been at the event horizon of a white hole, thus 6 days on earth could pass and 6 billion years would happen elsewhere. But allow me to ask you a question. If you were God, how would you do it? How would you make this massive, wondrous, exciting and dangerous Universe and then populate it with your people? Just think on it for a minute. How WOULD you do it? Would you, who invented and has dominion over all natural laws, confine yourself to those laws after you begin putting the Universe together? Or would you just do the elegant and direct thing, the most simple thing as you do your creative work?
Now, if God makes a very small Universe with nothing much more than a solar system, that does not capture the imagination and bring on the profound wonder that the awesome expanse of the Universe does to the heart and mind of mankind. He cannot have all sorts of stars near the Earth, as the heat and radiation thereof would be deadly. He wants a big, huge, impressive Universe to help man to understand that He is an impressive God.
God makes the light first and says it is good. I have come to believe that God made the light, with events like stars exploding revealed by the light, and then stretched it out to link up with the various stars and other heavenly formations afterwards. Thus man would have the stars to navigate by, to light the evening sky, to give him a sense of perspective, to give him a sense of wonder. Thus man could see in detail how stars are formed and destroyed and be able to discover much more about the nature of all material things. He would even be able to hypothesize how he might begin traveling from the Earth outwards into space.
I maintain that God is not a liar because He states plainly that:
1. He made the light before He made any sources of light.
2. He investigated that light and proclaimed it good.
At the end of the verse God separates the light from the darkness. This is symbolic as all men will also be separated as either belonging to light or darkness. The next verse will reveal that He also had another practical purpose in separating light and darkness but we are not there yet. So we will save that subject until later.
My primary point at this juncture is to reiterate God's wisdom. He did not intend to have a Universe percolate for a few billion years before He made the Earth. He didn't need to have multiple millions of years of evolution with all the pain and grief and death involved. God is just. God made a just creation. He made a Universe with an appearance of age, yes, but anyone who sticks their nose in the Bible can plainly see that He made the light first and figure it out!
If God had made all those stars and galaxies and formations and nebulas six thousand odd years ago and started their light, we would still be waiting to see them. The vast majority of anything outside our solar system would be mysterious and unseen to us. Why would that be wise?
But instead God made the light first, made it good so that it illustrated the way the Universe works so that an observant man could study and learn and apply that knowledge to benefit mankind and fulfill the need to create and discover.
God used the Bible to explain to mankind where the Universe came from and life and mankind and the Earth and why there was the problem of sin and how to deal with it. The Bible explains the billions of tons of sedimentary rock and the countless fossils, the wealth of oil and natural gas found underground and under pressure to this day, how information has entered the world and to those who accept the obvious DNA is not a surprise at all.
Applied scientists study the way God created and seek to copy His designs to incorporate them into machines and systems. Man has always learned by copying things seen in creation. God made us to be bright and inquisitive and gave us the aptitude to study and succeed. He also gave us free will.
Christian, as this series moves along I will demonstrate why a person who trusts Christ as His Savior must also understand that the Genesis account of creation must come along with that belief. I will show that Jesus quoted from or mentioned many of the Old Testament books including Genesis and gave credit to the five books of the Law as being given by God.
Darwinist, you may persist in your beliefs, but know this; God has a rational explanation for your existence and without God, you do not have one. Even proponents of the Big Bang admit that it must have been a controlled explosion for the Universe to have resulted from it, and who controls it? Duh. There is no need for billions of years for the Universe nor for millions of years for life. That is just the means by which Darwinists continue to convince the gullible, for the unexplained and unobserved events they depend upon can never be observed and thus cannot be completely disproven.
I cannot prove that there is not one particular cow on the face of the planet that can moo Tchaikovsky's seven symphonies note for note. I can show that such a suggestion is preposterous by the study of known cows and I can be sure you will not find one. But your evolutionary hypotheses are based on less evidence than we could find for a Tchaikovsky-bellowing cow. Therefore you can merrily go along with your hypotheses, which cannot be tested (and when they are they fail) or observed, happy in the knowledge that there are millions of uniformed, ignorant or indoctrinated people who believe what you say.
A commenter asked me about the Vikings and whether they could not prove the existence of Odin and Thor because of lightning and thunder. Their mythology told them that Thor makes the thunder and therefore thunder must prove Thor.
Vikings are descended from Japheth, the son of Noah. Ancient Viking lineage documentation shows that the Vikings trace their line back to him and their "gods" like Odin and Thor are simply the names of ancestors who they incorporated into myth as they Chinese-telephoned the creation story into a comic book theme. Plenty of tribes and races around the planet have evidence of tracing themselves back to Ham, Shem or Japheth or even to Adam. But only the Jews kept a careful written account. Moses culled and preserved it by the grace of God so that we would have the creation account in Genesis to this day.
The fathers of the Vikings knew about God and Adam and the Flood and the Tower of Babel but walked away from that knowledge and perverted it, much as the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Chinese and so on. So the Vikings should have known that thunder was a natural occurrence and that God does not live in clouds, He is supernatural and the Creator of all things. And so should you!