[eabinga]

I stumbled across this the other day, could anyone comment on this?

Creation Paradox, 1

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." (Genesis 1: 3-5)

"And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." (Genesis 1:16-17)

Comment

God creates day and night on the first day and then makes the stars and the two great lights (sun and moon) on the fourth day (Genesis 1:19). How can you have day and night on the first day without a star? To have a day, there must exist a rotating planet and a sun. Genesis proves that God (or more accurately, the authors of Genesis) could not have known about the structure of the universe, or even the difference between stars and planets.

[HiTech RedNeck]

These are earthly-perspective statements, and would fit a scenario of an earth that started out with a continuously cloudy sky, but later the atmosphere cleared and the lights became visible. Funny that astronomers continue to talk of sunrise and sunset to this day; isn't that unscientific too?

[LogicWings]

More than the physical paradox, I like the moral paradox of God commanding Adam to obey Him, when Adam could not know the difference between obeying and not obeying, since these imply moral concepts, and then condeming Adam for is 'Sin' - which Adam couldn't have committed because he was morally innocent.

If God couldn't foresee that Adam would fall, then He isn't omnipotent, and if He did foresee that, then He intended Adam fall, or He would have created Adam with more character, since Adam wasn't responsible for his character, God was. The whole thing is a philosophical morass and an outright contradiction.

[geopyg]

On one of the other posts it was mentioned that "day" is Hebrew for was "time" - so not a "day" like we think of it (needing the sun). I've come to think that the first Light that God created was pure energy - the "Big Bang". The energy later became the sun and the moon and everything else (e=mc2). Who knows? But, the "something out of nothing" discussed it the Bible sounds a lot like the "Big Bang" theory. (Beats the sun riding on the back of a turtle!)

[chaosagent]

I've always seen this as two separate events.

The first paragraph is the Big Bang and the creation of the Universe we see today, the energy of the Big Bang being transformed into the matter of the universe today...light and dark.

The second paragraph decribes the further 'evolution' of the universe into suns and moons, stars and planets.

This being said, my personal belief is that the basic tenets of both creationism and evolution are correct, or maybe half correct. Each one needs the other.

If we look at the universe around us, it's logical. Everything works like it does for a reason. Planets orbit around stars. Moons orbit around planets. Bodes Law works for the solar system. Bloods flows thru our bodies, carrying oxygen and waste products. We breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. It all works

Some of it we understand, some of we don't, yet. But we're pretty sure that in going from the macro to the micro we're not suddenly going to discover that "it's turtles all the way down" from here. (well, maybe quantum mechanics could be turtles, your guess is as good as mine.)

If you believe that God is omnipotent, and created the universe and everything in it, then it certainly makes sense that he didn't have to create it this way.

Suns don't have to fusion furnaces, burning hydrogen. They could just BE. Planets don't have to orbit suns. They could just sit there. Gravity wouldn't be needed. You would just stick the the earth because God made it that way.

And our bodies don't need cells and DNA. We could just be made of clay like the golem of old. We wouldn't need blood or brains. We would just BE because God made us that way.

But from the other side, as much as my science background would like, I just can't believe that all this was just an 'accident'. That we're just LUCKY that we evolved here on Earth.

To me it makes much more sense that we and the universe around us evolved this way because God created it that way.

That 10-20 billion years ago God started this all off with the Big Bang (Let there be light!) and we and the universe had continued to evolve because God made that way. And that we have a purpose here in the universe. We just don't know what it is yet.

So there.