Heaven And Earth: Genesis

The Great Dichotomy, Part 8

This one has been a long time coming, and will probably be a long time in the making. Just as a reference, I'm starting this writing on August 14th. Let's see how long it takes to bring all this dichotomy stuff to an end. As of about halfway through this writing, I've already figured out that I'll need one more to wrap things up properly.

Prologue: The Story So Far

My early essays were written on this platform as a way of getting around the character limits for posting on Facebook. At the time, I was an admin in a religious debate group over there. As far as I know, The Fight On the Fence is still active. I recommend it to anyone who happens to read this and enjoys debating the God question.

That group's purpose has expanded since then, thanks to yours truly. Initially, political topics weren't allowed. As I examined that topic over the years, I came to realize that the thinking behind this rule (while designed to protect the group) lacked nuance. A person's understanding of most topics, including politics, lies downstream from their fundamental beliefs, whether that means religious beliefs or the lack thereof. Whether it's a question of whether you believe abortion is a question of infanticide or bodily autonomy for women, whether you believe nationalism or internationalism/globalism is a more moral or beneficial perspective, or whether you think tax religious tax exemptions are a good or bad thing, there are many places where religion and politics intersect. Your take on certain geopolitical matters (mainly the Israel/Gaza problem at the time of this writing) can have a direct relationship with your thoughts on religion as well. If you're a Muslim or atheist, you're a lot more likely to sympathize with the Palestinians than if you're a Christian. There are exceptions, of course; there are right wing atheists who (probably) despise the Palestianians as much as they despise the Israelis, just like there are liberal or even socialist Christians who support Palestine and regard mainstream Christianity as patriarchal and oppressive. Humans and their beliefs are illustrated with Venn diagrams for more easily than with neat categories. That's in our species' nature, and part of our capabilities as sentient beings. Much like cultural cross pollination, this is a natural process that might be understood as ideological cross pollination.

Likewise, a person's beliefs about the nature of the universe and humanity's place in it are downstream of their beliefs about God (or the absence thereof). The great dichotomy alluded to in the title of this series is exactly that.

Part 1: The Antarctic Controversy (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn) started this theme off with an obvious, physical example set in the real world: the continent of Antarctica. As the world's sole remaining (mostly) uninhabited continent, that frozen realm is the setting of many a conspiracy theory and grandiose metanarrative about lost human history as well as the subject of many scientific theories about the past and future of this world.

As a side note, all of my posts to date have been done on an Android phone. I don't know if that has something to do with why I can't get hyperlinks to work; it's a vexing problem I'll remedy in the future by editing all these articles from a different device.

I'll be the first to admit that I was a bit lost in the sauce while writing Part 2: The Future of Faith (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy-part-2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn). I suppose my intention with the title was to explore the contrast in paradigms between those who believe that religion in general and Christianity in particular will be part of humanity's long term future and those who believe (or hope) it will be abolished in the next few centuries. I ended up talking about the past far more than the future, and explained the dichotomy between religious dispensationalism and anticolonial postmodernism in a very roundabout, confusing way. I will have to edit that one far more extensively than the previous entry.

Part 3: The Supply Chain Problem (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy-part-3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn) was written near the end of the Covid era. I was reflecting on how much of a blow that dealt to global commerce, especially the lockdowns, and (while I didn't really expound on this as much as I meant to) intended to compare and contrast the respective biases between people who thought it was all a Trojan horse set up in order to make nations worldwide dependent on the WEF and those who thought it was all a rational response to the pandemic (and may well think global integration under an international cabal like the WEF to be a positive outcome). I may have to elaborate a bit on my conclusions there in the future.

Moving on to Part 4: Ghosts In the Machine (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy-part-4?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn), I traced the history of humanity's fascination with and pursuit of the concept of artificial intelligence, which goes much further back than John McCarthy coining the term in 1956, Conrad Zuse constructing the first programmable computer in 1941, or even Charles Babbage drawing up the first blueprint for what we in the modern era would recognize as a computer in 1822. From there, I actually managed to make the jump to the potential futures of AI technology and how teleological or naturalistic bias respectively define the different predictions in this regard. I vaguely outlined the impact of new technologies on religion in order to compare and contrast the “Hebraic” (aka cautious AI ethicism) and “Helenic” (aka optimistic AI accelerationism) approaches to AI tech, and how the respective characteristics of those paradigms trace back to how the ancient Hebrews and Greeks understood the concept of AI through their respective cultural lenses.

The title of Part 5: Right Versus Left (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy-part-4-right?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn) is pretty self-explanatory. I tried something new with that one in an effort to stay on track and organize my thoughts; I divided my amateur attempt to trace the historical development of the right/left dichotomy in modern times into seven sections with the following pretentious titles: The French Connection, The German Dialectic, The Italian Order, The Freudo-Marxist Project, Power In Postmodernism, and A Tale of Two Visions. That one was exhausting, both to write and to revisit, and contains all sorts of extraneous information that, while relevant, was unnecessary. Much like Part 2, I tried to fit way too much into that for my purposes.

For the record, the original intent was to explore the many intersections between religion and politics, particularly the vague parallels between political conservatism and conceptions of God as a celestial monarch on one hand, and those between leftist politics and conceptions of God as a Gnostic demiurge on the other. From there, I tried to show how similarly competing strains of atheism have developed alongside these branches of Christianity. Once again, I got way too lost in the weeds to deliver on that. Future edits of that entry will involve cutting away large portions and streamlining others to build a more coherent narrative.

Part 6: East Versus West (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy-part-5-east-versus?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn) was an exploration of the East-West Conflict, how it has defined the course of modern history and continues to do so in our time as the current tensions between Russia and the UN escalate. The intended destination here, for my own future reference, was to explore how some believe this to be the inevitable result of centuries of western imperialism, and how others see them as the inevitable fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

Part 7: Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy (https://open.substack.com/pub/deistwolf/p/the-great-dichotomy-part-7-patriarchy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2m2lzn) was slightly more personal. This series was originally planned to have seven installments, and that one wasn't the planned finale (this one is). I decided to make it in the process of writing Part 6, largely due to recent events in my own life. Suffice to say, breakups due to ‘irreconcilable differences’ are more common in this day and age than ever before. The writing itself is impersonal and focused on the big picture in keeping with the overarching theme of this series, but my head was in that space for personal reasons.

I. First Light

Along with becoming slightly more technically proficient with the tools and functions of the Writers’ Dashboard here on Substack, it has also slowly dawned on me that most of this platform’s users aren't exactly looking to read a whole book in one sitting on here. Digestibility is important, which means brevity. So let me inform you (if you haven't already seen Substack's estimate of the read time) that this one won't be brief. The final chapter of any book is rarely the shortest, and this will be no exception. So with no further ado, let the quotes and bald speculation flow.

Genesis 1:1-5 (KJV)

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 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. 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.”

Solomon advises the reader to “lean not on your own understanding” in Proverbs 3:5. I've always found difficulty in this, especially when it comes to the book of Genesis. Most of the biblical narrative at least roughly corresponds to some real point in Hebrew history, starting with the story of Abraham after whom the “Abrahamic” religions are collectively named. If we are to believe that portion of Genesis, Abram (whose name was later changed to Abraham by God) spent the first forty years of his life in Ur, one of the last cities of the Sumerian civilization. How he came to know Jehovah isn't explained, only that he left Ur behind at that time with his wife Serai to follow the will of God in a new land. This marks the beginning of the part of the Biblical narrative that concerns what was then called the land of Canaan, and would eventually become known as the kingdom of Israel.

I'm not going to delve into all the archeological contention surrounding whether the original kingdom of Israel, the later breakaway kingdoms of Judea and Samaria, or what some scholars refer to as the Solomonic Empire ever actually existed. Suffice to say that the story of Abraham is where I (currently) can begin counting the biblical narrative as somewhat reflecting recognizable historical events. It may be somewhat arbitrary, but there is a point in the analysis of every cultural epic where archeologists draw a figurative “line” and say that things which happened after this point reflect that nation's history to some extent, while the events which come before (usually concerning the creation of the world, humans, etc… things which pertain to how the world came to be as it is) fall into the category of cosmogonical myths.

This perspective makes a certain amount of sense to me, which is why I subjectively look at most of Genesis (everything before the story of Abraham) as a work of cosmogonical mythology. This mainly pertains to the seven day creation story and the Deluge, or “Noahic” flood. With that being said, it remains clear to me that the ancient Hebrews were at least asking the right questions. The first paragraphs of the Bible refer to the origins of matter and light, which are the fundamental strata of existence to anyone who is using intuitive thought and isn't aware of things like quantum phenomena or energy as a distinct category including things other than visible light (the sun). Not every cosmogonical myth approaches these questions in such an analytical way, by a long shot.

In the context of scientific cosmology, the phrase ‘first light in the universe’ is used to describe two different things: the CMB (cosmic microwave background) and the ascosmic dawn. The former corresponds to the state of affairs in Genesis 1:1-2, while the latter is eerily and beautifully similar to Genesis 1:3. The following quote describes the earliest epoch of the universe as cosmology currently understands it, a time frame which some cosmologists have described as a ‘dark age’ due to the fact that visible light (the spectral range produced by stars like Sol, our sun) did not yet exist.

“The early universe was a place so hot and dense that light could not travel freely. It wasn’t until approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang that the universe cooled enough for light to escape, leaving behind an imprint known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

This faint radiation offers a unique snapshot of the universe at this crucial time, serving as a “fossil” light from the early cosmos. Previous telescopes, such as the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the European Space Agency‘s Planck satellite, mapped the CMB with growing precision.

But now, the ACT [Atacama Cosmology Telescope] has taken this effort to the next level, capturing the first-ever detailed images of density fluctuations in the early universe.”

-Arezki Amiri via the Daily Galaxy

https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/03/we-can-finally-see-the-very-first-moment-scientists-capture-the-birth-of-the-universe-with-unprecedented-precision/

It's annoying that I can copy and paste hyperlinks with ease, but I can't create one on this Android phone. All the same, I'll continue. All this talk of new discoveries facilitated by space telescopes and ground based observatories brings “Hubble Gotchu” by Milky J to mind. That is a tale from the days of yore, when people did spontaneously silly creative things like rapping about space telescopes.

https://youtu.be/cPHfShMndeI?si=rEtr07rZ6GgX7DdH

That was lightning in a bottle, as far as I've seen. No subsequent hip hop song on the topic has ever been half as amusing, and none of them (thankfully) became an earworm in my brain like that one has been for the last fifteen years or so. Alas, much like the original Enterprise, Hubble has been phased out for newer and better models.

https://youtu.be/eD-WiXuRjXo?si=M5bldrPCkMNzlpcf

This writing brought that old earworm to mind. The initial Hubble jingle was just a Fallon skit, but NASA apparently took enough notice to allow Milky J to film the follow-up at their headquarters.

https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2010/08/03/maggies-blog-webb-gotchu/

Bringing it back around from that tangent, I've sometimes thought that this new generation of telescopes deserve some goofy jingles of their own… but I can't imagine how that would go, and frankly every attempt to duplicate the strange appeal of Hubble Gotchu has fallen flat on its face.

https://youtu.be/85unZVh4IFg?si=NGV0SCedPYtkgt8p

Much like Webb has replaced Hubble, the ACT project has been replaced by the Advanced Simons Observatory. I had to ask Gemini if they were the same thing, since the related materials don't explain the distinction. They're apparently located on the same site, but the scope and purview of Simons has superceded that of the ACT.

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/07/science-illuminated-first-light-universe#:~:text=This%20first%20light%2C%20dating%20back,can%20still%20be%20detected%20today.

Bringing it full circle, I'll bring up something else from pop culture that really stuck in my brain: Stargate Universe. This was the final addition to the mythos of the Stargate franchise, and it took a much different direction from earlier shows. Where the original Stargate movie and the first two TV series were centered around secret military organizations conducting operations on distant planets, SGU had more in common with the premise of Lost In Space. The cast played a group of people who were trapped on an abandoned but not fully derelict alien starship on a mysterious mission that was flying between galaxies, taking them ever further away from Earth. The first of the show’s two seasons was a slow burn, but the second began to reveal the ship's true purpose: to investigate what appeared to be a neural pattern in the CMB.

The Sci Fi channel was bought out around the time the second season aired, and the viewership wasn't good enough to sustain it through all the budget cuts that followed. Still, the premise is interesting, and science fiction isn't the only context in which this idea has been explored.

“A search for a message on "the most cosmic of all billboards, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)," has failed, a new study finds. The CMB is the oldest light in the universe, visible across all of space. Its microwaves have been traveling since the first atoms formed out of a haze of protons and electrons that filled the universe soon after the Big Bang. They form a background radiation pattern across the whole sky. Physicists have long studied the CMB looking for features that might offer clues about the structure of the universe. Michael Hippke, a self-described "gentleman scientist" affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany, went looking for a sign from a creator in that background radiation. But, either way, he didn't find one.”

https://www.livescience.com/cosmic-microwave-sign-from-creator.html

As Avi Loeb (who famously claimed Oumuamua was an alien probe) is quoted observing in that article, the CMB “holds some advantages” as a physical medium for the hypothetical creator of time and space to use as a medium for communication with mortal beings who live within it. The realm of physics as a whole contains more immutability than most other branches of science, since it pertains to the fundamental laws and underlying structures of reality. There would be problems with this as well, such as the fact that even the CMB is not entirely immutable. It has a “landscape” of sorts on very large scales, one that shifts and evolves with time. Dark energy, once believed to be a cosmological constant, has been observed to be in flux to some extent as well, on incomprehensibly vast scales of distance and time.

https://www.ohio.edu/news/2025/03/universe-might-be-changing-new-desi-data-shows-dark-energy-may-evolve-over-time

Frankly, literal interpretations of the Genesis story present problems for both its proponents (because it has all the elements of a cosmogonical myth) and its detractors (because it's low-hanging fruit). There are fundamental reasons for this that fundamentalists in particular almost can't get around unless they go “all the way” with it and espouse a flat earth interpretation, which denies the entire standard model of cosmology from top to bottom. There is an adjacent “galactocentric” position which espouses a cosmic model which at least includes outer space while placing Earth and the Milky Way at the physical center of the universe… a center for which there is no evidence, as the standard model currently stands.

However… while there was no atmospheric medium for the literal words “Let There Be Light” to be spoken at the beginning of time and the “light” that existed at that time wasn't even on the visible spectrum for human eyes… the event known as the ascosmic dawn represents the era in which light as we know it first illuminated the universe, an era during which the matter which would one day make up our planet was indeed “without form, and void.”

“This may not be a known fact to many, but at the start of everything, including our universe, every space one could find was cloaked in absolute darkness for the longest time. Nothing gave off light. Just a stretch of gas seeping off in multiple directions constantly. But something changed! Something woke the universe from its primordial slumber. What could it have been?

Building upon the events that happened after the Big Bang, there was a blinding darkness over the cosmos. Imagine a thick cover of darkness where light can’t even find the wavelength to propagate, let alone shine. Only one thing was constant everywhere: hydrogen gas. Beneath the scene was gravity, preparing silently for what was going to be the new order.

Everything started from the neutral gas that was seeping off in various directions at the very start, facilitated by gravity that was steaming up for something behind the scenes for the longest time. These hydrogen gases had a thick layer of cloud around them, and from these clouds did a great disintegration start, from under their own weight. This phenomenon is what is termed ‘ascosmic dawn.’ The period when our universe had its first occurrence of light penetrating through its void and empty environment.

The first stars that were created in this manner have no similarity with the ones we know in recent times. They were massive, short-lived, and ferocious. Re-ionization, a process where these newly formed stars would strip electrons from the surrounding hydrogen atoms as a result of their intense radiation, was a regular occurrence at the start of the light evolution.

This point in our universe marked the start of something that would be the basis of our knowledge about how light travels in our solar system.”

https://www.eldiario24.com/en/the-universe-first-light/18832/

A common question about (and rationale for mocking) the Genesis narrative is that it describes God separating light from darkness and coining the terms for day and night before describing the creation of the sun and moon. This, again, is just as problematic for intensely antitheist critics as it is for flat earth “truthers”, whom I view as opposite sides of the same coin. Humanity had no context for light sources outside of the sun and moon throughout most of our history, and these texts were ultimately written by humans for humans whether divinely inspired or not. The writers needed to articulate these matters in a way that was comprehensible to the readers of their own era, regardless of whether they personally caught glimpses of some greater truth. The same goes for pretty much all the stars that are visible to the naked eye in Earth's skies, since they are pretty much all of the same generation which produced our own Solar System.

The “great dichotomy” surrounding the Genesis creation narrative will remain as long as there are believers and non-believers to argue over it, but as far as I'm concerned it's a more accurate myth than most.

Is there a way to cut a middle path for the other six days of creation? We'll see.

II. Waters Above And Below

Genesis 1: 6-8

“And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”

As I've alluded to in Part I of this writing, biblical literalists (evangelical Christians and antitheists alike) tend to hold an extremely confident understanding of the language in Genesis. That is, both tend to assert (often because the latter grew up as the former) that the language used in Genesis is meant as a technical description, not phenomenological, meaning that it's meant as a literal description of cosmology rather than a rhetorical description using “pagan” terminology from the surrounding cultures of the ancient Middle East as well as distinctly rhetorical descriptions of natural phenomena. Nowhere is this dichotomy exemplified as clearly as in the form of the ancient Hebrew term raqia, which is most commonly translated as “firmament.” The word literally translates to a “hammered expanse,” terminology which can (and has, for hundreds of years) been translated to mean things other than the specific meaning flat earthers and antitheist critics alike seem to prefer to place on it. As biblical scholar James Michael Smith explains here, that very term has been the center of controversy for millennia. It and the conversations surrounding it predate the modern flat earth movement as well as modern atheism by a long shot. It is a dishonest oversimplification to say that there was one universal understanding of this word for most of the Judeo-Christian era and any attempt to question it has only arisen in light of modern cosmology. Both of those camps would have us believe that to be the case, for their own ideological reasons. In light of the current Gaza controversy, both have a tendency to be suspicious of “Jewish cosmology” and both have their own rationale behind that.

https://www.logos.com/grow/hall-firmament/

With that particular aspect of the dichotomy (a pet peeve of mine) out of the way, let's move on to the idea of “waters” above and below. Again, the standard model has shown this to be the case, albeit not precisely in the way biblical literalists both for and against like to imagine.

Here's your waters above, in two different forms…

https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/two-super-earths-may-be-mostly-water/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/astronomers-find-largest-most-distant-reservoir-of-water/

…which are certainly divided from the waters below:

https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/08/underground-water-more-water-earths-oceans

III. Terra Primordia

Genesis 1: 9-13

“And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth’: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.”

I use chapter and verse for reference because that's what this system was designed for by early Christians, but I also like to look at the texts themselves in an uninterrupted format as they were written. Many of the Old Testament texts predate the whole concept of dividing documents into reference sections like this, though the distinct writing style of the Ancient Near East (ANE, or as I prefer to call it, the ancient Middle East) makes it easy to do so.

This part of Genesis 1 is the first section that specifically describes the origins of our world as opposed to the universe as a whole. As far as it goes, this too is accurate in that it focuses on the right questions: where do air and water come from, and what made the environment like it is?

Verses 9 and 10 describe the separation of oceans from dry land, and this is indeed the first stage of the process which transformed the early Earth (which seems to have been more similar to how Venus is today) into a habitable planet.

“Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, but there was no ocean in sight for the first billion or so. That's in part because the planet was too hot for water to accumulate in liquid form.

The planet eventually started to cool below the boiling point of water – 212 degrees Fahrenheit – allowing the early ocean to form around 3.8 billion years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At that time, water began to condense in the atmosphere and rain down in the basins on the Earth's landscape, said Peter Adams, a geologist at the University of Florida.

There's some debate around how water arrived on Earth in the first place. One theory is that volcanic activity expelled water vapor and other gases from the planet's interior, where it already existed. Another suggests that icy comets deposited water when they crashed into the early planet. The reality could be a combination of these theories, plus one other that involves the major collision event that is believed to have created the moon, Adams noted.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-did-the-ocean-form-4-things-to-know-about-its-past-and-present

I'll touch on the moon in the next section. Suffice to say that if the so-called “outgassing” theory is correct, land and water did indeed need to be effectively separated, and the outgassing was a mechanism by which this happened.

As for verses 11 through 13, we're talking about the very earliest forms of life on Earth. The Ordovician era was the time of the very first life forms, the lead-up to what is referred to as the Cambrian Explosion in evolutionary theory. A lot of people who deny evolutionary theory fail to understand the distinction between geological theories concerning the formation of the planet and evolutionary theory, which specifically pertains to the origins of life. At the same time, a lot of antitheist critics reduce this description of the origins of plant life to ancient mumbo jumbo because the ancients had no knowledge of bacteria in general, let alone the vital role played by cyanobacteria in the “Great Oxidation” event that filled this world's atmosphere with free-floating oxygen. And yet, this is exactly what had to happen in order to make way for other forms of life to exist.

“About 2.4 billion years ago, a type of organism called cyanobacteria evolved on the early Earth and began carrying out photosynthesis. Photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and energy from the Sun to produce sugar and oxygen. The cyanobacteria were very simple organisms but performed an important role in changing Earth’s early atmosphere. They carried out photosynthesis to produce the materials they needed to grow. They gave off oxygen to the atmosphere as they did this.”

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-earthscience/chapter/early-earth/

Of course, I can well imagine any detractors who might actually bother to read all this accusing me of dishonest apologetics here. After all, bacteria (even cyanobacteria, which uses photosynthesis) aren't the same thing as grass, herbs, and trees, which are specifically mentioned in Verse 12 even if you grant the ancients some leniency in not adhering to the modern taxonomical standards for what is and is not a “plant.”

However, the fact is that cyanobacteria alone would never have produced enough oxygen to support a biosphere of multicellular organisms, especially land-dwelling varieties. It's still “debatable” which actually developed first, but I would think it stands to reason that plants would be needed to form an environment that could support land-dwelling animals in the first place.

https://www.science.org/content/article/land-plants-arose-earlier-thought-and-may-have-had-bigger-impact-evolution-animals

The term used for ‘grass’, dhesha, is the most broad of several words in the old Hebrew language pertaining to plants. It doesn't just mean “grass.” A better translation might be ‘vegetation,’ which includes fungi.

IV. Day And Night, Sun And Moon, Land And Sea

Genesis 1: 14-19

“And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth’: and it was so. 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, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”

This passage is where the antitheists and flat earthers really knuckle down because it seems to claim that the earth existed before the sun. How were there four “days” if there were no sun or moon before the fourth day? What kind of “evening” and “morning” could possibly have existed without them?

The antitheists say, “None.”

The flat earthers say, “God” (as in, God was the sole source of all light in the universe prior to this point). However, there are a few scholars like Arthur Khachatryan who point out that the standard model doesn't actually preclude planets forming before their stars. Astronomers’ current understanding of planetary formation is not that detailed, and in fact it's not impossible to imagine (however unlikely) that Earth could have originated as a rogue planet. Regardless of the planetary body itself, it's known (rather, strongly believed) that Earth's water is older than the sun.

https://www.cltruth.com/2019/science-proof-sun-formed-before-earth/

Speaking of water, it's theorized that Earth's moon was created as a result of an ancient collision between the primordial Earth and a hypothetical Mars-sized planetary body referred to as Theia. It was just one cosmic collision of many in the chaos of the ancient Solar System, but this one in particular was a vital step in the series of events that transformed the fiery primordial Earth into the world of water and soil we inhabit today. Theia is believed to have brought carbon and several other chemical building blocks of life to this world, as well as larger deposits of water than the vapor that was supplied by volcanic activity.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/the-formation-of-the-moon-brought-water-to-earth

“ “Scientists think that a large object, perhaps the size of Mars, impacted our young planet, knocking out a chunk of material that eventually became our Moon,” according to NASA’s Space Place. “This collision set Earth spinning at a faster rate. Scientists estimate that a day in the life of early Earth was only about 6 hours long.”

Today, Earth continues to spin because of inertia, which is an object's resistance to changes in its current state of motion. While the moon, the sun, and other objects in our solar system create forces that work against Earth's spin, they're not strong enough to prevent our blue marble from stopping. They’re just strong enough to slow its spin by 1/500th of a second over the next 100 years.”

https://www.childrensmuseum.org/stories/why-does-earth-spin

You might well surmise that the day/night cycle has just gradually lengthened since then as the planet's rotation has slowed to 24 hours, but once again science presents a more complex story. Earth seems to have remained more or less “stable” with a nineteen-hour rotation period from about 2 billion to around 600 million years ago… even though other theories postulate a 21-hour rotational period around the same time the earliest life forms appeared. Regardless, due to solar atmospheric resonance and lunar tides (ie, those “greater and lesser lights” named in Genesis), 24-hour rotation seems to have become the norm around the same time that the earliest members of the genus homo started crossing the plains of ancient Afro-Eurasia on two feet.

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/have-days-on-earth-always-been-24-hours

Is it sophistry or coincidence to think that 24-hour days, highly regulated, resonant orbital mechanics of local cosmic bodies, and the near-perfect alignment of the respective sizes and distances of the sun and moon that allow solar eclipses could hardly have facilitated our species’ development of calendars and timekeeping any better if they had been specifically designed to do so?

Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, the 24-hour day has been a fixture of timekeeping for at least four thousand years, and seems to have been around since the invention of the first written languages (if not sooner).

https://24hourtime.info/history/

V. Biogenesis

Genesis 1: 20-23

“And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.’

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’ And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.”

I find the wording of Verse 20 to be especially telling, since most theories of biogenesis posit that life began in the primordial oceans. The author of Genesis, whomever that may have been, says as much: “Let the waters bring forth the moving creature that hath life.” This precedes all the other commands regarding specific types of animal life. Naturally, this would seem to agree with most theories regarding abiogenesis; that is, life from non-life. Theists often distrust this word, as the only time it's usually used outside of strictly scientific concepts is when atheists are trying to prove the notion of intelligent design “unnecessary.” The fact remains that most of the theories which attempt to describe how exactly this happened involve autocatalytic (self-sustaining) chemical reactions in the primordial oceans.

“Origin of life studies is a field with an extraordinary diversity of proposals, but few good ways to systematically judge the framing of questions and the prioritization of evidence.”

-The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11122578/#B1-life-14-00590

The very concept of microscopic life was unknown to the ancient Hebrews, and plants are mentioned in the Genesis account before the emergence of life from the sea. With that being said, most of the details of exactly how life emerged on the “Hadean” (primordial) Earth are still strictly in the realm of speculation, and may always be so unless humans are ever in a position to observe a similar process taking place on another world in the distant future. I already discussed some of the oldest fossils of life forms that can be called “plants” in any colloquial sense. Since Genesis predates anything that might be perceived as “scientific” language by the modern mindset (ancient Greek and Hindu natural philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kanada, Shalihotra, and Uddalaka Aruni) it's only reasonable to make such allowances.

The same goes for “fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” Etymology plays an important role throughout the creation narrative, and narrow-minded translations miss the forest for the trees just as surely among atheists as they do among theists. The primary ancient Hebrew word for "fowl" or "bird" is Oph (עוֹף), which refers to any flying creature, including birds, and sometimes even insects. Therefore, the most accurate transliteration is “flyer” or “flying creature.” Oph is the original Hebrew term used in Genesis 1:20, whereas tzippor, which is used elsewhere in more specific contexts, strictly means ‘bird’. With that in mind, it becomes obvious that this portion of the text doesn't just pertain to birds.

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/what-was-the-first-animal-to-fly

In general, the mentions of animals in this creation story are better understood in terms of ecological niches (the roles animals perform in their environments) rather than in terms of taxonomy (species, genus, etc). That wasn't how ancient people thought, and shouldn't be expected when reading these texts. With that understanding in hand, the meaning of ‘whales’ in the next verse starts to become obvious even before noting that hen, the original term, is a flexible word that denotes ‘grace’ (as in, the almost ethereal grace of swimming marine organisms) as well as “sea dragon” or, more generally, “sea monster.” Leviathan has a similar meaning, but comes with a more distinctly negative connotation connecting to predators and sea creatures that can threaten ships. This word, too, is flexible enough to mean anything from the first Cambrian fish vertebrates to the giant sea reptiles of the Mesozoic to Moby Dick himself.

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2015/03/the-mysterious-hebrew-whale/

I've deliberately made the previous few sections short, partly because they touched on some of the same topics, but mainly in order to devote some extra word count to this one. During my time as an admin of a theological debate group on Facebook, “Creationism versus Evolutionism” was a debate topic I moderated more often than any other (with the possible exception of, “Did Jesus really conquer death?” Our “formal” debate format over there in Fight On the Fence included a requirement to frame debate topics as questions. While the wording was different every time (agreed upon by the participants with or without help from the admins), some topics were revisited again and again, framed by different participants in their own ways.

Atheist members were often frustrated by Christians’ inability or refusal to distinguish between evolutionary theory and abiogenesis, which are taught as two distinct concepts in most biology classes. From what I've seen, this is also a reflection of framing; while atheists generally see these concepts as related but distinct facts, theists see both as aspects of evolutionary theory. I personally see the insistence on compartmentalizing the two as semantics, especially for the purposes of debating them with someone who denies both for the same reasons. My admin style was generally hands-off unless my intervention was requested or the interactions got vitriolic, whichever happened first. I've seen many a conversation go on for weeks, usually because people couldn't agree on the definitions of basic terms. Some of these could have been nipped in the bud if I or another admin intervened sooner, but I preferred to let these conversations unfold organically, and besides… it wasn't as if that role was a paid position. Admins have jobs and lives IRL like anyone else.

I became aware of the contributions of many scientists to the ongoing controversy of the “God Question” in the course of fulfilling that role. Not least among these was the work of American physicist Jeremy England.

“Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. When something is in a state of high entropy (or high disorder) you could could switch around the components of the system and it would pretty much be the same.

But within the universe there are things, like life, which exist in a state of low entropy. This may seem like it violates the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy in a closed system always increases, or everything tends towards disorder) but that is not the case. Life does not violate the second law as it draws on energy from the environment, expending energy in order to temporarily decrease its own entropy, like how you can expend energy to temporarily push snow into the shape of a snowman and create temporary order, until entropy draws it back into disorder once more. When the overall system (including the energy source for life, and the heat expended by life) is taken into account, the overall system continues to tend towards entropy.

This statistical law of the universe was first discovered by Rudolf Clausius, who noticed that heat flows from bodies with higher temperatures towards one at a lower temperature, and not the other way around. According to England, life and life-like structures may arise in complex, chaotic environments in ways which better distribute heat to the environment. In other words, life and life-like structures arise as a consequence of entropy, for its ability to distribute heat.”

https://www.iflscience.com/the-strange-but-appealing-idea-that-life-is-a-consequence-of-entropy-73665

I first learned of this theory through atheist members of The Fight On the Fence, members who swore up and down that this constituted proof positive that there is “no need” for a creator, which if you're versed in these matters is about as close as you can honestly come to proof positive that there is no god. The idea troubled me initially, but over time it led me to a new (for me) realization, one which believe it or not had already been articulated by theologians and apologists before England even proposed the idea.

Like so many other things in this life, Jeremy England's theory (if true) can be interpreted in two different ways: mechanistic (which means naturalistic, even if the term doesn't sit right with you) or teleological. The article I quoted above does a fair job of summarizing the mechanistic interpretation, so I'll provide the teleological one… which is that Professor England's theory implies that life has an underlying purpose.

There is an open question here of whether life exists as a result of entropy, or if it exists to counteract entropy. Jeremy England's understanding of implies a mechanistic function of which life is a byproduct, while the other implies that life itself performs a function which counteracts entropy. England sees life as a mechanism which distributes heat more efficiently, which inspired his terminology for this process: [heat] dissipation-driven adaptation. On the other hand, one could interpret Earth's biosphere as a system which sustains a state of higher order in which organisms can exist. This system extends beyond the planet itself, of course, since Earth itself is within the habitable zone, the existence of which is facilitated by the sun's heliosphere and gravitational influence. The point is, even taking this theoretical model as fact leads one to a dichotomy between seeing it as a byproduct of a larger cosmic mechanism or a result of intelligent design. England's interpretation hinges on the idea that the whole thing exists for no more sophisticated reason than the efficient distribution of heat, and that, incidentally, is the least evidential and most interpretation-driven aspect of his theory.

VI. Emergence

Genesis 1: 24-25

“And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind’: and it was so.

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”

We don't need to consult etymology to know that “beast” is practically a synonym of animal. Even cattle can be called “beasts.” The main distinction here has to do with which sorts of animals were fit to eat. “Cattle” continue to be a valuable resource around the world to this day, and the way the word baqar is used in the original text most closely translates to ‘herd’. We can assume this means ruminants, which have been on the scene far longer than humans (about 50 million years) but have been domesticated for at least the last 10,000 years. Animal husbandry was the second form of “civilized” activity to emerge among humans after agriculture. “Every thing that creepeth upon the earth,” then, is a catch-all referring to any and all animals that aren't covered by “beast,” such as insects.

Emergence is a herculean term in scientific pursuits. In the most basic and fundamental definition, it's used to refer to complexity rising from simplicity, systems of higher order emerging from systems of lower order. There are also examples of emergence in which simplicity emerges from complexity, such as basic effects in 3d reality (temperature, etc) that are caused by the movement of large numbers of atoms or molecules. The John Templeton foundation distinguishes between “weak” and “strong” emergence on this basis. Pretty much every natural process I've mentioned in this essay is an example of emergence in the natural world. Most theists would say (if they're aware of the term and its meaning) that emergence is the mechanism of ongoing creation within the natural world. The natural phenomena that take place on any planet are emergent from the natural processes that brought that planet into being in the first place, and so on.

With that being said, both the natural chemistry which allows life as we understand it to exist and the gradual divergence of one ancestral species into new forms are examples of emergent processes. While natural chemistry pretty much is what it is regardless of whatever beliefs underlie the system of study being used, the latter phenomenon is referred to under different names by different institutions. Within the secular mainstream, the study of speciation is known as evolutionary systematics (or alternatively, biological anthropology).

“Evolutionary systematics is a method of classification that emphasizes the importance of evolutionary relationships among organisms, focusing on their ancestry and the historical context of their evolution. This approach combines traditional taxonomy with phylogenetic analysis to create a hierarchical structure that reflects the evolutionary pathways that connect different species, which is crucial for understanding the diversity of life, especially in primate classification.”

https://fiveable.me/key-terms/biological-anthropology/evolutionary-systematics

At a glance, it's common to presume in this day and age that evolution is a monolithic brute fact, and that evolutionary systematics is a way of understanding that brute fact. It's only through studying the work of those who deny this monolithic “fact”, either as a whole or in part, that one can come to understand how it may not be so simple.

In an article entitled “The Meanings of Evolution,” Stephen C. Meyer and Michael Newton Keas of the Center for Science and Culture distinguish six different ways in which the word “evolution” is used in scientific discouse proceed to deconstruct the way the mainstream consensus uses it outside of scientific contexts.

“Evolution and the theories of evolution are fundamentally different things,” testified zoologist Maynard M. Metcalf, the first expert witness for the defense in the 1925 Scopes trial. Metcalf’s observation at the “trial of the century” officially marked the beginning of public discussion of the different meanings of evolution for the purposes of science education. “The fact of evolution is a thing that is perfectly and absolutely clear,” Metcalf explained, “but there are many points — theoretical points as to the methods by which evolution has been brought about — that we are not yet in possession of scientific knowledge to answer.”

Metcalf’s statement suggested, as many modern biologists have noted, that the term evolution can mean different things. His comment also suggested that not all senses of evolution have the same epistemological standing. We can assert confidently that evolution “has occurred,” Metcalf explained, but we may be more uncertain about how it occurred.”

https://intelligentdesign.org/articles/the-meanings-of-evolution/

Meyer and Keas go on to outline six specific

1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature.

2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population.

3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms
   have descended from a common ancestor.

4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited
   descent with modification, chiefly natural selection acting on random
   variations or mutations.

5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended
   from a single common ancestor.

6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through an unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.”

Here we come to the crux of one of the most fiercely contended ideological dichotomies of our time. There are, of course, those on both sides who fall short of total honesty with themselves and others on this subject. There are creation scientists who claim to be completely objective and not at all “model-dependent” when it comes to this topic, and there are mainstream academics who claim to be merely concerned with the truth and to have no ideological stake in the matter whatsoever. Neither presentation is entirely accurate, nor is it completely accurate (in my opinion) to say that either perspective (or the half dozen or so other perspectives on this issue that lie somewhere in between even as the two major camps attempt to discredit them based on some perceived law of excluded middle) is an entirely unbiased pursuit of truth. The reality is, while certain aspects of evolutionary theory are unequivocally true, others are predictions based on the available evidence. There are levels of importance ascribed to these aspects of evolutionary theory too, even if they're not openly acknowledged. There is a reason, for example, that the theory of punctuated equilibrium is seen as a more “acceptable” intellectual challenge to the modern synthesis (the theory of evolution as current consensus holds it to be) than anything involving conscious guidance, anything that could be construed as God at work. That underlying reason is ultimately more ideological than scientific.

“Punctuated equilibrium is a model of evolutionary change that posits new species originate in relatively rapid bursts, followed by long periods of stability, or stasis. This concept contrasts with the traditional view of phyletic gradualism, where species evolve slowly and continuously over time. Introduced by paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972, punctuated equilibrium emerged as a response to patterns observed in the fossil record that frequently show species remaining unchanged for extended periods, interspersed with sudden appearances of new forms.”

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/health-and-medicine/punctuated-equilibrium

This idea poses a challenge to phyletic gradualism, a component of evolutionary theory which holds that evolutionary change is gradual and (with the exception of certain species like sharks and coelecanths, at least) constant. David K Elliott goes on to list several “objections” to this idea, defending the consensus view. The point here is that while it's considered “okay” to challenge certain aspects of evolutionary theory, others (such as the underlying assertion that God has nothing to do with it) are sacrosanct in all but name. A challenge to phyletic gradualism is not at all the same thing as a challenge to methodological (and therefore ontological) naturalism: the belief that nature, and specifically natural mechanisms, are all there is to see.

Not only do evolutionary scientists (and atheists) address evolution as a monolithic brute fact, they treat it as a unified dogma; much like most Christians treat the entire Bible as the pure and unadulterated word of God, evolutionists (and yes, I find the term relevant here even though I don't deny evolution, at least not entirely) treat the entire modern synthesis as something that is so completely settled that no part of it is to be questioned whatsoever. There are those who would even treat Eldridge and Gould as “traitors to the cause” because creationists and intelligent design proponents (two different things, mind you) refer to their work in their attempts to push back on evolutionary theory.

There are a number of alternative “models” for understanding the emergence of biological diversity on Earth. This overview wouldn't be complete without mentioning the classic distinction between “microevolution” and “macroevolution” made by creationists, to start with.

“Macroevolution refers to major evolutionary changes over time, the origin of new types of organisms from previously existing, but different, ancestral types. Examples of this would be fish descending from an invertebrate animal, or whales descending from a land mammal. The evolutionary concept demands these bizarre changes.

Microevolution refers to varieties within a given type. Change happens within a group, but the descendant is clearly of the same type as the ancestor. This might better be called variation, or adaptation, but the changes are "horizontal" in effect, not "vertical." Such changes might be accomplished by "natural selection," in which a trait within the present variety is selected as the best for a given set of conditions, or accomplished by "artificial selection," such as when dog breeders produce a new breed of dog.”

https://www.icr.org/content/what-difference-between-macroevolution-and-microevolution#:~:text=Evolutionists%20assume%20that%20the%20small,883%2D887).

Much of the creationist understanding of adaptation through natural selection is understood through the lens of hybridization, which is often used as a selective mechanism in artificial selection. However, what the creationists in particular are talking about here isn't evolution at all in the conventional sense. A more accurate term, as I learned from reading this article by Dr Gary Parker from Answers In Genesis, would be “entelechy”:

“God’s plan at creation is still unfolding before our very eyes. That’s not evolution (adding something that was not there before); that’s “entelechy”—the unfolding of creativity written ahead of time in the fabulous genetic code of DNA.”

https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/mutations/biblical-perspective/?srsltid=AfmBOopK0dj4OYmLQYyOh7Q7IhW5WaV2fjjuGh2sjsnIpVMdXxG0uXYk

Another theist methodology for understanding biological emergence is called baraminology:

“The term baraminology comes from baramin, which was constructed from the Hebrew root words bara (בָּרָא, to create) and min (מִין, kind). The suffix ology of course derives from the Ancient Greek ending -λογία (-logía), “the study of”. The term was coined by American botanist Frank L Marsh in his 1941 textbook Fundamental Biology (https://www.worldcat.org/title/fundamental-biology/oclc/2988889). Marsh first obtained a PhD in botany on plant ecology at the University of Nebraska in 1940.”

https://baraminology.com/

While the term was coined in 1941, the proponents of this methodology claim that their work is part of an intellectual tradition tracing back to Carol's Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist whose seminal work in the Eighteenth century laid the foundation for phylogenetics as we know it today. The mainstream critique of this methodology doesn't include that reference, which is strategic even if it isn't entirely relevant. After all, Carolus Linnaeus made his contributions centuries ago, and science keeps it moving as they say. Even so, Dr Alan Gishlick gives one really solid critique which I'll include in the next section.

“Despite its use of computer software and flashy statistical graphics, the practice of baraminology amounts to little more than a parroting of scientific investigations into phylogenetics. A critical analysis of the results from the one “objective” software program employed by baraminologists suggests that the method does not actually work. The supremacy of the biblical criteria is explicitly admitted to by Wood and others (2003) in their guidebook to baraminology, so all their claims of “objectivity” notwithstanding, the results will never stray very far from a literal reading of biblical texts. I will give the baraminologists credit in one area: they are up-front about their motives and predispositions and true to their biblical criteria and methodology, which is more than can be said about “intelligent design” proponents.”

https://ncse.ngo/baraminology

It occurs to me after reading the entire article I quoted above that Dr Gishlick and other likeminded academics consider intelligent design proponents to be a more potent threat, especially in light of the “six meanings of evolution” postulated by Meyer and Keas. I can't be sure, since this is a critique of baraminology, not intelligent evolution, but the common conception of intelligent design arguments is that they keep trying to insert God into ever-shrinking pockets of ignorance, or that the whole worldview is some bunch of upstarts who “help themselves” to scientific data while attacking legitimate science. This is a misnomer, in my opinion, especially since the theory of intelligent evolution is almost as old as Darwinian evolution and was originally conceived of by one of Darwin's contemporaries.

“Wallace, basing his theory on Darwin’s own principle of utility (the cornerstone of natural selection that says attributes in an organism will only develop when they accord the organism a survival advantage), insisted that where no clear survival advantage can be found some teleological (purposive) and intelligent agency must be the cause.

Both Wallace and Darwin were committed to science, but their conceptions of science were dramatically different: for Wallace science was simply the search for truth in the natural world; for Darwin science must invoke only natural processes functioning via unbroken natural laws in nonteleological ways. Wallace’s view of science was unencumbered by philosophical assumptions whereas Darwin’s science was pigeonholed by the philosophical presumption known as methodological naturalism (or methodological materialism).”

https://alfredwallace.org/intelligent-evolution/#:~:text=Intelligent%20evolution%20is%20a%20theory,affords%20it%20a%20survival%20advantage).

Is the above quote somewhat biased in favor of “Wallacian” evolution? Certainly. No less so than most of the critiques I've seen of all these alternative theories of natural history, many of which boil down to the sentiment that if God exists, science is rendered invalid. This is a conflation of methodological naturalism with science.

The fact is, these are all modern interpretations of the phenomenon of emergence (biological emergence in particular), and whatever else you may say about the cosmogonical myth of Genesis, the ancient Hebrews understood the concept of emergence.

““Emergence” takes on different meanings depending on what it’s being used to describe. Sometimes “emergent” is simply used to mean “coming into being.” When used in a more technical sense, though, conceptions of emergent phenomena are often divided between “weak” and “strong.” Cases of weak emergence would imply that the whole only appears to exceed the sum of its parts, but with enough knowledge the equation would even out. Weakly emergent systems are difficult to track and predict due to their complexity, but not because their nature is fundamentally new. Some philosophers even contend that all apparent emergence is weak — that it is largely an illusion brought about by the limitations of human perspective and knowledge.

Strong emergence applies to systems where the whole really is more than the sum of its parts — meaning that the emergent property cannot be understood or predicted based only on an understanding of its components. Evidence for strong emergence could include the appearance of novel physical laws or global phenomena (such as the asymmetry of time, or superconductivity). Some have argued that chemistry itself is an example of strong emergence, since chemical properties do not seem to be not fully derivable from the subatomic particles involved.”

https://www.templeton.org/news/what-is-emergence

In fact, the whole question of cosmic and/or biological origins is a question of emergence. Is emergence a natural, unguided process, or is it a purposeful mechanism through which divine entelechy plays out in the universe?

VII. Sentience, Sapience, And Primatology

Genesis 1: 26-31

“And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’

And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat’: and it was so.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

Now that we've covered most of the natural world, let's move on to the final piece of the Genesis puzzle: humanity. I'll start off by referring to Dr Gishlick's baraminology critique one more time:

“Baraminologists appear to apply an old phenetic method, without really studying how it works. More interestingly the method might not really work at all. In the published applications of the method so far, in no case did it actually distinguish between two baramins. In cases where it returned results baraminologists could live with, they determined a holobaraminic status for the group. This was the case for felids (Robinson and Cavanaugh 1998b), flaveriinae (Wood and Cavanaugh 2001), and fossil and recent equids (Cavanaugh and others 2003). In conditions where it did not return results favorable to baraminologists, other criteria are applied to achieve the desired result. This was the case for humans and primates (Robinson and Cavanaugh 1998a) where BDIST did not show a separation. Instead, the authors employed ad hoc "ecological criteria" to achieve separate baramins, while not discussing the "biblical criteria".”

I freely admit that this is one area where it becomes pretty obvious (even to me, as someone who isn't an atheist) that Genesis is a cosmogonical myth. It stems from the fact that apes are barely mentioned at all in the Bible, aside from two brief descriptions of royal gifts Solomon received in the form of shipments from Tarshish… a distant realm (in relation to ancient Israel) which is dubious in the archeological record, though that in itself is no indication that it didn't exist. The most commonly accepted location for it among Biblical scholars is in the western Mediterranean, probably somewhere along the coasts of modern Spain or France. This would have seemed like an entirely different continent from the perspective of a person living in that place and time, but that's beside the point here. I'm getting at the most likely reason that apes are all but omitted from the Bible and unmentioned in Genesis at all, which is simply because they were culturally irrelevant to the ancient Hebrews. Apparently the people of Tarshish found them a bit more interesting, since they were included in this shipment and were therefore deemed worthy of mention in that context. What's more, as you can see in the next link, looking into the history of the English words ‘ape’ and ‘monkey’ quickly reveals that they have a messy history which is barely understood even by professional etymologists. Entire articles have been written on how these words came to be used in the English language, how ‘ape’ was more analogous to how we now use the word ‘primate’ until the word ‘monkey’ was introduced into common English usage quite recently in the grand scheme of things, and how both terms were likely introduced via interactions with people from regions where these animals actually live. Before that point, European people were likely to think of them as mythical creatures if they were aware of their existence at all. And since most literacy in the Middle Ages came from studying the Bible itself in schools run by priests, it's likely that anyone who wasn't well-traveled enough to have seen one personally wasn't aware of them at all.

https://www.johnhawks.net/p/how-did-english-come-to-have-different-words-for-ape-and-monkey?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

All of which is to say this: the ‘apes’ mentioned in 1st Kings and 2nd Chronicles were most likely monkeys in contemporary speech. Therefore, apes in the “proper” sense - great apes, that is - aren't mentioned in the Bible at all, which means that baraminologists and the like are operating under multiple assumptions by categorizing them as a distinct baramin from humans. Even cats are given more consideration than apes in the biblical narrative, since lions are mentioned even though housecats are not and baraminologists make no distinction between the two. Why would they?

At the same time, it's messy and quite blasphemous to consider the idea that shit-flinging apes should be placed in the same category as human beings which are made in the image of God… even though it's not exactly unheard of for humans to fling a turd or two around, especially on certain holy days in certain countries. Hmmm. 🤔

https://youtu.be/eAjc_vhUo9g?si=0bE9QU1JGTUsoV92

I digress. I've given the idea of imago dei more serious consideration elsewhere, with the conclusion that it isn't a primarily biological distinction if at all. If humanity is to be understood as being made in God's image, it's because of our capacity to be more than animals. It has little if anything to do with what sort of creatures we are. I'm not so arrogant as to believe that God was unaware of the existence of great apes which are so similar to humans on a purely physical basis. I don't think it's arrogant at all to assume that the ancient Hebrews were no more aware of their existence than they were of marsupials in distant Australia. They couldn't write about what they didn't know, much less predict the sort of confusion that might arise from the existence of creatures with almost no biological distinction from humans if we lacked the faculties of sapience.

These are the sort of distinctions one might expect from a book written about God by ancient humans versus a book written by God through the hands of men. Hence why I see Genesis as a cosmogonical myth in the same vein as the tale of Ginnungagap, the primordial void that existed before the world began according to the Poetic Edda. Which is also pretty similar to “darkness was over the face of the deep,” imho.

I wouldn't have gone into this much depth if I didn't think the Bible contains many deep truths. I don't think it would have had the impact it did on human history over the last two thousand years if that weren't the case. There's just a pretty significant difference between acknowledging a narrative as containing truth and acknowledging it as THE Truth.

VIII. Conclusion

Genesis 2: 1-7

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

I'm not even going to go into whether there's any logical way to imagine a water cycle that functions without rain. I think I've done more than enough to make my point here for the time being. This has already dragged on way longer than the attention span of any reader who isn't similarly interested in these subjects will be able to accommodate. Atheists who make it this far will say I put way too much thought into it and gave the source material way too much credence, and theists will probably say I'm thinking too much like an atheist (especially in regards to the ape thing, no doubt). I managed to sort out my own conflicted thoughts regarding the seven day creation week. A post on the antedeluvian world would probably end up as long as this one, and I've also sorted out my thoughts on that elsewhere (they're currently somewhere in the vicinity of Graham Hancock's ideas about the Upper Dryas and the magafloods at the end of the last ice age, in case you were wondering).

Be it mainstream evolutionary systematics, microevolution versus macroevolution, entelechy, or baraminology, these terms all represent competing explanations for the sort of emergence that is observed through the taxonomic classification of plant and animal species. They're all studying the same thing through different lenses of interpretation based on different foregone conclusions.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2012/05/07/can-god-create-mutations-eliottt-sober-says-we-cant-rule-that-out/

I'll end with a quote from renowned philosopher of science Elliott Sober, who put it all in an eloquent nutshell in the following abstract statement for a TED talk he gave a few years ago:

“Can conclusions about God – for example, that he does not exist, or that he lacks this or that property if he does exist — be deduced from well-established scientific theories? For example, do established results in biology concerning mutation show that God never guides mutations? I answer this question by explaining what biologists mean (or should mean) when they say that mutations are unguided. I make use of the fact that evolutionary theory is a probabilistic theory; its truth does not entail that it is causally complete.”

The next installment in this series will be the grand conclusion, and will most likely end up nearly as long as this one did. Don't expect it anytime soon.