He Also Made the Stars

"God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars."— Genesis 1:16, WEB

The biblical account of creation adds a phrase like "He also made the stars", or "...and the stars", or similar (depending on the translation you use), reading almost like a "by the way" remark. It's like, "Yeah, he done that, too, Pilgrim, no big deal".

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
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Secularists will tell you that they're ancient, except the ones that don't act their age. Then we're told that they're forming, even though nobody has actually seen a star form (they're speculating through their paradigm). The vague term "stellar evolution" covers some things that creationists agree with, but atheistic cosmogony and cosmology are products of philosophy, not observable science. There is a large variety of stars (and an astounding number of them) in size, brightness, and so on. And yet, our Creator cares for us.

The Hebrew word for ‘star’ is kôkāb (כוכב). When trying to understand the Bible, the goal is to work out how the original readers would have understood it. In this case, we should work out what the ancient Hebrews meant by kôkāb, which is not identical to the meaning that modern astronomers give to the word ‘star’.

The biblical meaning of kôkāb ‘star’ is any small bright heavenly object, so it would include meteors (‘shooting stars’). It would also include what the ancient Greek astronomers called an astēr planētēs (αστήρ πλανήτης), meaning ‘wandering star’, which of course we now call a ‘planet’. Logically, this would include planets around other stars, which have proved a headache for evolutionary theories of planetary origin.

However, modern astronomers classify stars as gigantic luminous balls of plasma in hydrostatic equilibrium, where the outward radiation pressure balances inward gravity. Thus in the modern definition, but not the biblical one, our sun is a star. This means that we can use the sun as a point of comparison for the other stars.

To read the rest of the article in context, click on this overly-long title: "Stars".