Genesis 1:3-5

ebia said:

The story doesn't presume the sun is the source of all light.

Ancient people often didn't. They observed that the sun comes up in the daytime and goes down for the night time, but because the whole sky is bright in the day, even when the sun itself is hidden, they often assume the sun followed the day/night cycle rather than caused it.

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Thepz said:

We don't really know for sure. God stands outside time.

Peter makes an interesting statement about the length of a day from God's perspective. He wrote it as a reply concerning those wondering about the coming of Jesus.

Peter states, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." (2 Peter 3:8). Just to clarify, Peter is not saying that God's one-day is 1000 years. He is saying it is "like" a thousand years. Peter himself doesn't know the exact conversion, but one day to God can be a long time for us.

Now on a scientific note, scientists theorize that one can stop time by going the speed of light. Researchers as Standford have found that particles traveling near the speed of sound as having "1 minute of their time [that] might be weeks or months or even longer in our rest frame" (Gravity Probe B, para. 1). Therefore, time is relative and can be changed by how fast an object moves.

Reference
Gravity Probe B Testing Einstein's Universe (n.d.). Retrieved from einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q2566.html

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ebia said:

trying to translated it into a modern cosmological understanding isn't going to work.

This is a story written under the assumptions of an ancient cosmology.

And it's not that the story is non-physical, but rather that it's not trying to be a pseudoscientific account of what you would have seen had you been standing there at the time.

Within the story the sun is the physical sun, light is physical light, etc.
But the concerns of the story are not 19th century style facts but nth century BC questions about who created, what sort of creator is he, what sort of creation is this, where do other "gods" fit in, where do we fit in.

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