The Gap Theory...

Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

I used to think that the earth was completely formless, like the abyss, with waters somehow, somewhere. I have since changed my mind, and think that it was already existing, as 'moved upon the face of the waters', is more like above a dark sea. (I have changed back to 'heavens' in the verse one, as they changed it to 'heaven').

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Heavens just sounds better in the English, in the Hebrew it's singular. The earth being formless and void is that it was like a big lump, devoid of life and light.

A while back, I examined the text from the heliocentric viewpoint, as was then, and you cannot account for water being above and below the firmament, in that scenario.

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Sure you can, the thick clouds were the waters above and the seas that covered the earth were the waters below. God separated them, just like he separated the waters from the land.

I suppose it was not considered worthy to include an account of what was there before, or what was there before the creation of the heavens.

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That's easy to, before the creation of the heavens and the earth there was nothing.

Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

I do not believe the earth is 4.55 billion years old - I know that it is older than 40-50,000 years, but that is all. I am some years into being a geocentrist, and there is a lot of good evidence provided by the young-earthers that the earth is young. Not just young-earthers, some secular writers, such as Richard Milton (Shattering the myths of Darwinism) - suggest that the earth is young.
IMHO coal is not formed according to the uniformitarian scenario, but is the result of the deluge.

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I have no problem with the heavens and the earth being billions of years old, creation week started about 6000 years ago. All we know about the original creation is that it was 'in the beginning', we know when the creation of life was from the unbroken timeline in the genealogies represented throughout the Old Testament.

By the way:

Halbhh said:

Me too. I believe 100% of all the words literally.

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So do I, but I actually dig into what those words mean.

Heavens means all the Universe.

Countless numbers of stars. (we do have an estimates that are really huge -- " 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars")

2 Timothy 3:16-17 (KJV)

All scripture is given by inspiration (not dictation!) of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

One point: There is nothing here that says that the Scriptures are good for astronomy, geology, biology, physics, space-time relationships, chemistry, or even history, carbon dating.

One question: Will someone explain in simple practical terms how endless discussions on Genesis 1 (especially the time taken for creation) has equipped anyone for "good works" as meant in the teaching of Jesus (think for example of the good Samaritan, loving your enemy and blessing whoever curses you, denying your own ambitions while selflessly working for others...)? Please provide evidence in the form of actual cases, preferably your own.

The thing about stars is....when you look with a telescope you see more.

And when you look with bigger telescopes you see more and more, as you having longer time exposures or cumulative light gathering time.

Estimates are up there around the amounts like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars

Praise the Lord!

Monna said:

2 Timothy 3:16-17 (KJV)

All scripture is given by inspiration (not dictation!) of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

One point: There is nothing here that says that the Scriptures are good for astronomy, geology, biology, physics, space-time relationships, chemistry, or even history, carbon dating.

One question: Will someone explain in simple practical terms how endless discussions on Genesis 1 (especially the time taken for creation) has equipped anyone for "good works" as meant in the teaching of Jesus (think for example of the good Samaritan, loving your enemy and blessing whoever curses you, denying your own ambitions while selflessly working for others...)? Please provide evidence in the form of actual cases, preferably your own.

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Sure, the creation of the universe in general and life in particular is inextricably linked to the incarnation, resurrection and the church being raised incorruptible at the return of Christ. Our faith is in the ability of the Holy Spirit to slay the old man and raise us up to walk in newness of life. That power is available to us by grace through faith and the promise is meaningless if God didn't create life in the first place.

mark kennedy said:

Sure, the creation of the universe in general and life in particular is inextricably linked to the incarnation, resurrection and the church being raised incorruptible at the return of Christ. Our faith is in the ability of the Holy Spirit to slay the old man and raise us up to walk in newness of life. That power is available to us by grace through faith and the promise is meaningless if God didn't create life in the first place.

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I can believe that God created life without having to know the details. I cannot explain how my own body continues to live, yet by the Grace of God it does. Our faith is in Jesus Christ, his life and work on the cross and resurrection, through whom we receive the Spirit, and the fruit of the Spirit are listed in the New Testament. I don't have to know how long a day was, nor if Uscher's calculation of the date of Adam's creation is correct or not.

If you want to discuss what (for me, naturally) is more puzzling in the early chapters of Geneses than days or years, I can point you there. And it is much more germain to God's creation of humankind itself, as a likeness of himself.

Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

the luminaries are the sun, moon and stars.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.


I have heard the theory of the 'cloudy sky from the perspective of the observer', before, and I don't buy it. Let there be light, is before the creation of the luminaries, imho, (in my humble opinion). The heliocentric cosmos must have the sun first and all that.

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Consider the places where God speaks.

As you can see here put in quotation marks often used to help us notice when God is speaking to Moses (which you can also figure out still in a translation without them):

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

A range of translations, most having quotations marks --http://biblehub.com/genesis/1-3.htm

The narrations from God -- words from God which are inside the quotes as above -- were to aid Moses and others to help make some kind of sense out of this amazing and wondrous and hard to understand vision (for Moses it would look so unfamiliar it would make no sense at all).

How could Moses even know what in the world he was seeing?

Because God was speaking also, during the vision, so that Moses could have words from God to include along with his description of the vision.

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Monna said:

I can believe that God created life without having to know the details. I cannot explain how my own body continues to live, yet by the Grace of God it does. Our faith is in Jesus Christ, his life and work on the cross and resurrection, through whom we receive the Spirit, and the fruit of the Spirit are listed in the New Testament. I don't have to know how long a day was, nor if Uscher's calculation of the date of Adam's creation is correct or not.

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It's not Usher, it's how the original adds up and all translators are agreed on the numerical values of the original language. What's more, God promises us eternal life in the gospel, how much value does that carry if he didn't create life in the first place? God promises through the Scriptures a new heavens and a new earth, how does that work if he didn't do it in the first place? God can raise Christ from the dead but couldn't create Adam and Eve?

If you want to discuss what (for me, naturally) is more puzzling in the early chapters of Geneses than days or years, I can point you there. And it is much more germain to God's creation of humankind itself, as a likeness of himself.

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The normal word for day is yom, it is qualified by 'there was evening and morning'. This is a clear indication it means a normal day. The prophets could be cryptic but Moses and the other historic narratives were not. Where it says day, it means day, unless there is some indication otherwise but there is none.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

(Exodus 20:11)

No gap. No millions of years.

Well how are you able to trust anything in the Bible at all? You don't even make it through Genesis before you throw something out. Jesus didn't seem to have a problem with Noah. Elisha made an axe head float in water. The sun stood still. The fig tree withered. The red sea was parted. Twice the bread and fish were distributed among multiples.

Isaiah's prophecy that king Cyrus would let the Israelites return to Jerusalem was made about 150 years before Cyrus.

Jesus's death and resurrection was infinitely more spectacular than creation. Do you believe it happened?

God brought the animals to Adam to be named. Couldn't he also bring them to noah? How do you decide which biblical teachings to reject?

Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

Genesis 1 King James Version (KJV)
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2 And the earth was (became) without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.


Coal has been carbon dated by YECs and has been found to contain virtually no carbon 14 - so the date for the coal is at least 40,000 years old.

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The earth's crust is moving as new crust was formed along mid-oceanic ridges such as the one that exists near Iceland. Crust was sinking back towards the earth's mantle in areas of deep ocean subduction zones such as the Marianas Trench. Sometimes plates collided such as the Indian subcontinent colliding into the Asian plate. This caused some crustal material to be uplifted onto other crustal materials over millions of years to form the Himalayan Mtns. Plate tectonics is the study of movements of the earths crust along plate boundaries, major faults, sea floor spreading, uplift and subsidence..

Some beds of vegetation near volcanoes were showered by volcanic ash containing potassium-argon in the crystalline structure of minerals in the ash. The vegetation beds were buried and eventually morphed into coal under pressure and heat. The potassium-argon isotope in volcanic ash within coal was dated and indicated the age of a coal bed in Washington state was over 40 million years old.
Radiometric dating of ash partings in coal of the Eocene Puget Group, Washington: Implications for paleobotanical stages | Geology | GeoScienceWorld

I am of the opinion God has been creating the earth much longer than some people think.

wonderkins said:

Well how are you able to trust anything in the Bible at all? You don't even make it through Genesis before you throw something out. Jesus didn't seem to have a problem with Noah. Elisha made an axe head float in water. The sun stood still. The fig tree withered. The red sea was parted. Twice the bread and fish were distributed among multiples.

Isaiah's prophecy that king Cyrus would let the Israelites return to Jerusalem was made about 150 years before Cyrus.

Jesus's death and resurrection was infinitely more spectacular than creation. Do you believe it happened?

God brought the animals to Adam to be named. Couldn't he also bring them to noah? How do you decide which biblical teachings to reject?

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Saving faith in Jesus Christ is what we need, and putting His words into practice in our lives -- Matthew 7:24-27.

I know all the miracles in the Bible are true also.

Also, God as the creator created all, not only certain things, meaning the very laws of nature are His design, and they work.

The Earth we have found out appears very convincingly to be about 4.55bn years old, and that must mean time passed during verse 1, before verse 2, likely near 9 billion years. This isn't important for faith....until....someone starts preaching one version of creationism instead of the gospel, and then suddenly it's very important, because only the gospel about Christ Jesus saves, and nothing else. Preaching one certain version of creationism as if that's what saving faith must be based on is a competition against the gospel. And wrong.

I never made it about salvation. Of course I question why someone who claims to be saved would throw out such an important teaching in the Bible.

But I'm really curious how you would answer the events I mentioned in my last comment. How do you decide which miracles or events are true and which are not?

And again, if you can't trust the first 10 chapters of the Bible, how can you trust anything else to be true? Is the word of God mingled with lies?

the "light"... there is no darkness EVER with round near the Father. You will NEVER find see ANY kind of darkness "This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." ...yet it seems it was some where hmm

Satan had fallen when? yeah.. we don't know. Some give up to easy If you keep searching the WORD gives MORE questions about something that was HERE before. Its written. As for age.. not going to listen to man telling me how old the earth is. Man tells us whats IN the Sun in the earth and yet they have only been down what 7.5 miles. We know how old man is.. the earth? I DONT want to count that high.

Anyway.. you think we know ALL that the Father has hidden in His word? We still read that SAME OLD VERSE and then.. wow I NEVER see that before. Were talking about a GOD haha

The key word is "was"which should read became,void

Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

I am a Genesis 1 literal'ist - however I do not believe in Noah's flood in the later chapters of the bible.

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Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

One point: There is nothing here that says that the Scriptures are good for astronomy, geology, biology, physics, space-time relationships, chemistry, or even history, carbon dating.

I think that scripture is good for all the above.

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I'm not sure how you can square the last sentence in the quote above with your disbelief in Noah's flood. Actually it wasn't his, it was God's. And the story is not so much farther into the Bible than Genesis 1 - it's in Genesis 6. The writer of the book of Hebrews obviously believed in the flood, and he sees Noah as a hero of faith for taking God's word at face value.

And by the way, I wonder how well you would do in a high school chemistry exam, if you used only the Bible as your text. Or if it was your only text for physics, biology, geography, history or...

Hiscosmicgoldfish3 said:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Duzzant say it's a day, does it? - says 'in the beginning'.

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When do you suggest the first day to begin?
Not in the beginning?
Just read the text.
In the beginning.... ....and it had been evening and it had been morning, the first day.
Every day is counted at the end of each of the 6 paragraphs.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

the first day is not until God said - 'let there be light', before the creation of the luminaries - day one is not mentioned until then.

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You're thinking western days.
But Biblical days start in the evening, when it's dark (sun down).
In the beginning it was dark, and then God ordained there be light, and that was the first day.
The evening (dark) and the morning (light) were the first day.
But opinions vary.
What do i know. I wasn't there at the time.