The moon can be an absentee ruler: Problems with reading Genesis 1 and 2 as history.

Some Christians believe that Genesis 1 was meant to be read as history, and sets forth events in sequence. (See my previous post for further discussion of interpreting Genesis 1.) 

There are some problems with reading Genesis 1 as history, setting forth events in sequence. Here are some of them:

1) Light appears on the first day, but the sun and moon (which are not named, probably as a warning against worshiping them) are not mentioned until the fourth day.

2) The sun is described as ruling the day, and the moon as ruling the night. Surely the ancient Hebrews (and God!) knew full well that the moon appears during the day on most days, for periods up to almost the entire length of that day, and is not always present during the night. How can the moon rule the night on nights when it doesn't appear?

The above photo, taken in daylight, shows that the moon was clearly visible, and the sun was clearly shining. That means that, on the other side of the earth, neither the moon nor the sun was visible in the sky, at that time. Photo from Laura Suarez (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu).

3) Genesis 1 describes a firmament (or expanse) as being created on the second day. The problem with that is that there is no firmament. Ancient peoples believed that there was one, and supposed that various celestial objects, and clouds, were held up by this structure. There is no firmament. The moon, the sun, the stars, galaxies, planets, comets and asteroids are not held up by any sort of glass sphere, or invisible framework (unless you count gravity as such). They are at distances that vary by orders of magnitude -- the moon is relatively close to us, the Magellanic Clouds much further away, so that there is no way that both of these could be held up by one structure surrounding the earth. The earth is not the center of the solar system.

How do I explain these problems? Is the Bible wrong?

I would argue that the Bible is not wrong. It was not meant to be a textbook of astronomy, or geology, or biology. It was meant to tell us about God, the single wonderful, wise creator, and His sovereignty over the creation. God used the language and ideas of the culture of the time. People of that day believed that there was a firmament, so God allowed the description of the creation to include this. Today, we say "sunset" and "sunrise," even though the sun doesn't really rise, or set -- the earth's rotation makes it seem that it rises and sets. If, for example, a news reporter or a novelist says that an event happened at sunrise, we don't accuse her of ignorance or deception.* These ideas are part of our culture, and communicate within that culture, whereas saying "the earth rotated so that the sun appeared on the horizon in Central Africa," is unnecessarily cumbersome and confusing. The idea of a firmament, in Bible times, communicated with others.

Added Dec 13, 2021: For more on the firmament and the Hebrews, see here.

Thank you for reading!

*There are other examples of this sort of thing, such as acting as if or communicating that gravity is an attractive force, because it's ingrained in our culture. If I understand Einstein, gravity is because of space being warped, so that two objects travel toward each other in space-time, and it isn't really an attractive force. The more up-to-date Einsteinian explanation of gravity was used frequently in Star Trek. ("warp speed") But we write and talk about falling downstairs, for example.

Another example of how culture makes communication unscientific is the use of heart for the seat of the emotions.

It is likely that some current ideas about how things work, from the submicroscopic to the galactic, will seem foolish to people in the future centuries. (If there are to be future centuries.)

Sunspots 679

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: (and politics) Unfortunately, evangelical Christians are the least likely group to believe that the US should accept refugees, according to a poll reported in Sojourners.

Conversely, Relevant discusses reasons, including economic ones, why Christians (and others) should be more accepting of refugees.

Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength examines the nature of the Trinity.


Education: National Public Radio reports that some public school teachers, who thought they had received a grant to pay for their education, have discovered that it is being treated as a loan, that they have to pay back.

Health: Scientific American discusses the seriousness of losing a long-time pet.

Philosophy: Henry Kissinger (yes, that Henry Kissinger), writing in The Atlantic, tells us that we need to think carefully about the implications of artificial intelligence.

Politics: Michael Gerson on the intolerance of Donald Trump, and some other politicians.

NPR on how the Environmental Protection Agency's actions to give manufacturers more stability by rolling back regulations is actually causing unpredictability.

FiveThirtyEight on what might happen if Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress.

Several leading Christians are not at all happy with President Trump's statements about certain immigrants being "animals," according to Relevant.

Science: National Public Radio reports that some satellites measure changes in local gravity, and this can be used to study water flow, especially from melting ice.

FiveThirtyEight on the effects of e-cigarettes.


Thanks for looking!

Image source (public domain)

A century of General Relativity, proposed by Einstein

November, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's presentation of his General Theory of Relativity. This theory gave impetus to other ideas, including an expanding universe, black holes. As the Wikipedia says, this theory is still the best current description of how gravity works, 100 years after its proposal. (However, most of us, including some scientists, don't talk about gravity that way. We speak of it as if Isaac Newton had explained it. He was almost right.)

New Scientist has a timeline of the most important events related to this theory, since that time. We are not yet certain about what is going on with dark matter, and we have no "theory of everything" relating General Relativity with sub-atomic structure, but some amazing discoveries have occurred, in the century following 2015. The Atlantic also celebrates, pointing out that GPS satellites wouldn't work correctly if they weren't corrected for the effects of General Relativity.

See this post on the Big Bang, which is by no means necessarily a disproof of God's creativity.

Thanks for reading.

Dembski and Falk: Is Darwin Theologically Neutral? Falk's position

There has recently been an exchange of views between some Southern Baptist theologians, and members of the BioLogos Foundation, on the question posed by the title. I have posted on the views of William Dembski, a Southern Baptist theologian, and a prominent member of the Intelligent Design movement (ID), expressed in two posts, which was published on the BioLogos blog, and on responses to those views, from Todd C. Wood, a young-earth creationist whose views I admire and respect, which were published independently on his own blog. The last post in this series was here. It has links to the previous posts, and related matters.

I now turn to the response of Darrel Falk, president of the BioLogos Foundation, whose views on origins are often called evolutionary creationism. Like Dembski, Falk first puts forth his own position. There is a second part to Falk's response, in which he sets forth some disagreement with Dembski, and I hope to muse about that at a later date.

Falk shares considerable common ground with Dembski. But he parts ways with him on the matter of God's activity. ID advocates argue that God's activity, in the development of living things, including humans, must have involved a number of supernatural, miraculous acts, and that, furthermore, in principle, it is possible for scientific analysis to show that such miraculous acts were necessary. Falk disagrees, in at least two important ways.

First, Falk does believe in the miraculous, events which are not explicable by science, not ordinary natural activity. (Christ's incarnation and resurrection are two such.) But he claims that God's activity is not usually what we would call miraculous, and, furthermore, that God's ordinary activity is necessary for the maintenance of the universe. He writes:

The Law of Gravity, for example, is not something that God set up in the beginning, thereafter recusing himself from further involvement and exiting from the scene. Instead, the Law of Gravity works as it does because of the ongoing activity of God’s Spirit in the universe. So consistent is that activity that it can be described mathematically through scientific analysis. If God ceased to be active, however, then not only would the matter of this universe no longer function in a way which enables a mathematical description of gravity, matter itself would cease to exist.

Falk goes on to say this:

Put another way, the activity of God is not restricted to that which we call the supernatural; it is all God’s activity. It is just that some aspects of God’s activity are so consistently repeatable that we can develop laws which describe the regularity of the divine activity which “holds” and “sustains” the universe. This latter type of activity is no less magnificent just because God does it continuously.

He cites Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:17 in support of his position. (Unfortunately, he gives the reference as Colossians 1:16, not 1:17, but he quotes 1:17)

Second, Falk says that we are too prone to think miracles were necessary, when perhaps they weren't:

Given the many examples of supernatural activity in Scripture, we human beings tend to expect that for something as special as creation of stars or new species, supernatural activity would have been required. But we cannot derive this from the scriptural account and, therefore, it is wise not to second-guess how God might have worked based on the Scriptures. . . . When the Psalmist describes the heavens as being the work of his fingers (Psalm 8:3), this does not negate astronomy’s description of the regular and ongoing processes that give rise to stars in God’s universe. Those processes are natural, but they are every bit as much God’s activity as if he were to take huge balls of matter and miraculously fashion sparkling stars with his hands.

I believe that Falk is correct on these two points, and that I have been guilty of confusing miracles with ordinary activity at times. I wish that Dembski had responded to this post, but, as far as I know, he has not.

Thanks for reading. Read Falk.

Stephen Hawking and God

Stephen Hawking may be the most well-known living scientist. Confined to a wheelchair, and unable to speak, Hawking still communicates effectively. He has had an interesting life, it seems. Among other things, he has experienced free fall training with US astronauts, and had a bit role in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, playing himself. He also wrote a best-selling book. Hawking shares a birthday with Galileo, and, until his retirement, he held the professorial chair that was once held by Isaac Newton.

Here are two quotations from Hawking, on the subject of the existence of God:
In an interview with Reuters last year, Hawking said he was "not religious in the normal sense."
"I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science," he said. "The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws." "Pope sees physicist Hawking at evolution gathering," Reuters, October 31, 2008.

Diane Sawyer asked Hawking what question he would ask the universe, if given the opportunity. He responded "I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something rather than nothing."
He also said, "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works."
Sawyer said, in commenting on the interview, that Hawking once said that "God not only plays dice with the world, but sometimes throws the dice where they can't be seen."
- ABC World News with Diane Sawyer: "Conversation with Stephen Hawking," June 7, 2010. (My original source for this has been removed by YouTube. Here is a source for the first quotation in the above paragraph.)

Hawking's thinking can be described as bold. This is obvious in his book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes . (Bantam Books, 1988, pp. 173-4)

Brief History is a discussion of the implications of quantum gravity. See the Wikipedia article on the subject, which indicates that there are several competing theories of quantum gravity. It also says (version of July 28, 2010) that all these theories ". . . face the common problem that, as yet, there is no way to put quantum gravity predictions to experimental tests. . ." Hawking's view belongs to the Sum Over Histories group of theories, according to the book, and also according to a history (as of 2000, published in 2001, but the on-line verson has a 2008 date) of theories in quantum gravity, by Rovelli. (See here.) So, although Hawking may be right, he may also be wrong, and currently there isn't any way to prove that he is right. He is understandably enthusiastic about his own approach, but does not dogmatically state that he is right.

The book is only 175 pages long, with only one equation, and minimal scholarly apparatus. It sold very well. Hawking's point is to let it be known that his theory of quantum gravity may indicate that the universe, rather than having had a definite beginning, is eternal. (I'm don't know if the other theories also do this) Hawking makes clear that he thinks such a truth would profoundly change our view of God's activity, in fact meaning that there is no God. Kitty Ferguson, author of The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion & the Search for God. says, I believe correctly, that Hawking writes as if the possibility that his theory ". . . erases our need for a God is far more reason for celebrating than the fact that the theory makes a new part of this mysterious universe accessible to human beings." (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. See here for my most recent post on the book. p. 76. Ferguson's title is a quotation from Brief History, and she indicates that Hawking read at least part of her manuscript before her book was published. See below.)

There have been past occasions where scientific understanding has led to a re-thinking of our role in the universe. Two of the most important are the astronomical findings that show that the earth is a small planet, orbiting a rather mediocre star, in an ordinary galaxy, and that living things on earth seem to have arisen from one, or at most a few, common ancestors, over a very long period of time. These both caused, and, to some degree are still causing, theological upheavals. But I don't think that they necessarily destroy, or even diminish, belief in an omnipotent divine Creator, and I'm not alone in such belief. In fact, these scientific revolutions make many believers more confident of God's power.

Suppose Hawking is correct about quantum gravity and the universe -- bearing in mind that we don't know that. What are the possibilities?
First, it is possible that there is no God, and there doesn't need to be one, because the universe is eternal, and did not have a beginning.
Second, God, much as Christians believe in Him, is part of the universe, co-existent, and, perhaps, playing an important creative part in its development.
Third, God created the universe at some point in time, and created it with an appearance of age, so that there is evidence that supports Hawking's ideas, but that evidence is misleading.

All of these would, of course, have profound implications for theology, and Hawking says just that, on his pages 173 and 174.

But, as indicated above, Hawking at least entertains the idea that God started things:

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in them. But how did he choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? What were the "boundary conditions" at the beginning of time?

One possible answer is to say that God chose the initial configuration of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. This would certainly have been within the power of an omnipotent being, but if he had started it off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand? The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. (page 122. The color used indicates a block quotation.)

On page 125, Hawking tells us that "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron." He goes on to say that the values of these various physical constants "seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life," and indicates that values that were much different would have made life, as we know it, impossible, and, in fact, the stars, as we know them, impossible, also. He also says that, so far, there is no theory which would have predicted these particular values for these constants. This may be taken as evidence for a Creator, or as evidence for the Strong Anthropic Principle.

On pages 126-7, he writes about the initial conditions of the universe, which, he says, must have been in a narrow range of temperatures, so as to allow the cosmic background radiation to be so uniform. There must have also been a constricted rate of expansion, because if it were much different, the universe would have collapsed. "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us." (p. 127)

On pages 136-7, Hawking says this: "I'd like to emphasize that this idea that time and space should be finite without boundary is just a proposal: it cannot be deduced from some other principle. Like any other scientific theory, it may initially be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons, but the real test is whether it makes predictions that agree with observation." (emphasis in original) He goes on to say that it will be difficult to even make predictions, let alone test them.

On page 160, the author sets forth three possibilities:
1) There really is a unified theory, which will tie all the forces of nature, the elementary particles into an explanation that ties them together, and also explains the constants referred to previously in the book.
2) No such theory exists, but we may be able to explain the phenomena indicated with better and better theories, as time passes.
3) There is no such theory, and there is an underlying randomness and unpredictability to the universe.
He goes on to say that some would argue for the 3rd possibility, because it allows God freedom to act. But, says Hawking, God is said to exist outside of time, so there is no reason that He couldn't intervene by making laws in a certain way initially, and, also act sub-atomically, operating through the events which the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle doesn't let us predict, or even measure. Hawking says that current experience seems to indicate that the second possibility is the one we are experiencing.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? (page 174)

Thanks for reading.

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As indicated above, I added a source to replace one that is no longer available. I did this on April 13, 2012.

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As of July 22, 2012, I am disabling comments on this post, because I have gotten dozens of spam comments on it. Feel free to comment on a different post, and refer to something in this one, not to politics, etc., if you are a real person. Thanks.

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On September 23, I made three minor editorial changes.

Sunspots 226

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science:
Wired reports on a study that says that the tails of Ankylosaurus, a dinosaur, could be used as powerful weapons.

Wired also reports that establishing long-term colonies in spaceships may be difficult. Mice can conceive in space, but the embryos seem to need earth's gravity for normal development. This may also be true of humans.

(Or something) The American Heart Association has recently recommended that many of us cut back on our sugar intake.

Christianity:
Kerry I am makes a suggestion on how to pray.

Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist, on what really killed Michael Jackson. Pitts doesn't speak of Christianity, or any other religion, but the implications are pretty obvious.


Image source (public domain)