Creation: Heaven and Earth II ...

Tuesday, Aug 6, 2013. We are looking into the biblical creation story. What can we say about our world, about its creation and its purpose? The story in the first book of Moses, also called “Genesis”, is highly interesting.

The first day …

Let us read on and observe, how creation is described here:

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Gen 1, 1-5)

Today we have learned that we live in a galaxy, which has the sun in its center. Chemical reactions lead to a huge amount of energy, which is transmitted through space, in the form of electromagnetic radiation. We call it “light”.

Also, we have learned that the earth is orbiting the sun. At the same time, the earth is rotating around its axis - such that the light of the sun reaches the surface on one part for around 12 hours, then this part moves into the shadow and becomes dark for another 12 hours. We call the first twelve hours “day” and the second part “night”.

Natural Science …

The bible speaks first about the creation of light. Then, it tells us that light and darkness have been separated by the Lord. It closes this passage by the remark, that “there was evening and morning - the first day”.

It is an interesting image, to see the earth from above, then start to rotate, and there we have days and nights. When we look back into our modern understanding of this rotation, we believe that it has come into being over a long period - when the planets evolved. We have “days” here on two different levels. There is the day on earth, which has evolved. It is our basic human measure of time. Before we made the first mechanical clock, before we discovered that we can use many natural processes to measure time, the rotation of the earth has been our natural clock for a long time!

Second, we have the “creation days”. When we read on, we see that the creation story is told in several “days”, which close each part of the creative activity of the Lord. We might not need to read these “creation days” necessarily as our natural days of 24 hours - there is a whole community of Christians which understands these as generic description of how our world has evolved. This needs to be discussed in more depth when we read on. But note that creation takes place within the universe, that it takes place within space and time! … (Roland Potthast) ... more texts