The first day of creation: things we are never going to understand

Genesis 1:2 The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters. 3 God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw the light, and saw that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day”, and the darkness he called “night”. There was evening and there was morning, the first day. (World English Bible, public domain)

There are plenty of possible questions about this passage, such as about how literally to take it, but I’d rather not explore the questions of what “day” means, and other such matters, important as they might be. I have some other questions in mind, questions that we will never understand in this life, and maybe not in the next one. We can, and may, have opinions about them, but the opinions are not strongly backed by the Scripture, or are not covered at all in the Bible, and Genesis 1 is interpreted in different ways by different people. For more on scriptural interpretation, see this post.

Questions:
If God spoke light into existence, what language did He use?
Does God, in this passage, mean God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, or some combination of them?
Who did God speak to?
If He/They spoke to some other entity, who was it, and why was this said?
Did angels, or some other entity, actually create the light, at God’s command?
Was the creation of light preceded (whatever preceded  means to an eternal God!) by planning?
Was the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which light is only a small part, created at once?
Did the creation of light cost God effort or resources of some sort?
Does this passage actually refer to the creation of the sun, or was that created later?
Was there light elsewhere in the universe, but not on earth, or, on the other hand, was the light created for the earth, or perhaps for the solar system, spread throughout the universe somehow, after this initial creation?
Was light created from something else?

Interesting questions. (There are more questions about origins in this post -- toward the end.) I have no answers. Thanks for reading.

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 59

"Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete."

Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right. But if we particularly want to make them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong.

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Attributes and qualities of God

Attributes and Qualities of God

About a year ago, I posted a chart, illustrating an ideal pattern for prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. Adoration, or praising God for who and what He is, is perhaps the most difficult of these for me to get a grip on. So I have attempted, and it is a feeble attempt, for sure, to set forth ten of God's special attributes. Some of these attributes, especially numbers 7 and 10, are shared, in a measure, by humans, and, I believe, make up part of the image of God in us.

No chart, however complex, or sophisticated, or clear, can capture who and what God is. This doesn't. But it's an attempt.

As with all my charts, you may use this freely, without restrictions, except that you are not to use it for commercial purposes. I would hope that you would credit me when you use any of my materials. Also, if you want a larger size, with better resolution, the chart, itself, is a link to the picture on my Flickr photostream

You may want to see this post, listing the the ways God reveals Himself to humans.

Thanks for reading and looking. 

December 30, 2016: On December 9, 2015, Jim Stump listed these attributes of God: mercy, forgiveness, tender affection, humility, mildness, compassion, loving-kindness, etc., which he calls gracious attributes, as opposed to glorious attributes, such as the ones in the chart above. Stump argues that God is mostly hidden so that He can be known for the gracious attributes, rather than the glorious attributes. 

Sunspots 310

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

Computing: A robot sportswriter has done a good job of reporting a sports event.

Christianity: A fine post on what the Atonement does. (It does several things.)

Another good post, from the same blogger, on why thinking of God's omnipotence, omnipresence, etc., is not always the right focus.

Image source (public domain)

Numbering the stars

How many stars are there? Good question.

The Bible makes a few references to counting the stars, or to their number. Some of these are Genesis 15:5 (there are similar passages) wherein God promises as many offspring to Abraham as the stars, Deuteronomy 28:62, in which Moses reminds the offspring of Abraham of this promise, and points out that it was achieved, in Egypt, but that the number has declined, because of disobedience. In Isaiah 40:25-6, God asks who created the stars, and says that He has them all numbered and named, and under His control.

So, how many stars are there? The short, and correct, answer, is that we don't know. However, there are estimates, based, as they must be, on various assumptions. Here's what the European Space Agency says about this question. Their estimate is on the order of 10 to the 22nd to 24th power. In other words, a 1 with from 22 to 24 zeros after it. The Cornell Astronomy Department has proposed a similar number. These numbers are obtained by estimating the number of stars in our galaxy, and multiplying that by the estimated number of galaxies. (Both numbers are estimated to be about 10 to the 11th power.) CNN reports a similar estimate, by a different method.

The Cornell Astronomy Department says that we can see (on a clear night, with no air pollution) a few thousand stars. Thinkquest gives a similar number. (Bear in mind that we can only see, at most, half of the sky from any single location -- there are stars visible from the Southern Hemisphere that I have never seen, and a person from, say, New Zealand, who has never traveled above the equator, must experience the same phenomenon in reverse.)

Did God mean to tell Abraham that he would have 10 to the 24th power offspring, or only a few thousand? I doubt if He meant either. My guess is that He was trying to say the sort of thing that we might say, and understand, namely the Abraham was going to have a lot of descendants. That has come true!

I'd like to muse a little about God having all the stars numbered and named. Wow!

We are so finite. We have only detected two hundred or so planets beyond our own solar system. One of the planets we thought we had has been downgraded to a "dwarf planet" in this century. In other words, we aren't even sure how many planets there are in our own solar system. We don't know for sure if any of them, or their moons, have living things on them, or used to. (Except, of course, for earth. I suppose that it is possible that there is some yet to be discovered life form on our own moon. Not probable, possible.) We surely don't know exactly how many stars are in our galaxy, or how many galaxies there are. We don't know how large the universe is. We don't know if it has a boundary or if it just goes on forever. Some scientists (I am not making this up!) speculate that there are a large, maybe infinite, number of universes that are parallel to ours, and that the entire group of such parallel universes makes up a multiverse. (See this Wikipedia article.) It may comfort your sanity to understand that these ideas are far from universally (sorry!) accepted. Philip Pullman, award-winning author, used these ideas in his books. (Pullman has been accused of attacking Christianity in his fiction, but that doesn't prove that the idea is wrong.)

How ever many planets, stars, locations where living things exist, galaxies, universes, and even multiverses, there may be, God has them all under control -- counted and named! As indicated above, he told Isaiah that. He also expresses this in Colossians 1:15-20, in which we are told that ". . . in him [Christ] all things hold together." (ESV)

Thanks for reading!

I have posted a follow-up to this, considering some of what the Bible says about Abraham's descendants.