The fourth Day of creation sees the creation of the luminaries, the Sun and the Moon and the rest of the planets of the solar system. On this Day God also created all the stars; billions of galaxies with billions of stars in an enormous universe.
The big question for the unbelieving world is the origin of the heavenly bodies, and I don’t mean angels and demons, but planets, stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Without either invoking unknown laws of physics and/or unknown entities, such as Dark Matter, there is no physical theory that permits planets, stars and galaxies to form naturalistically. Solar systems and larger gravitationally bound systems just don’t form by themselves following the known laws of physics.
Here I continue with a discussion on the physics of the days of creation. I look specifically at the events of Day 4 of the beginning of the universe. Please read The Physics of Creation | Day 1 to Day 3 (listed below) before reading this post.
14 And God said, Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens, to divide between the day and between the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.
15 And let them be for luminaries in the expanse of the heavens, to give light on the earth. And it was so.
16 And God made the two great luminaries: the great luminary to rule the day, and the small luminary and the stars to rule the night.
17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens, to give light on the earth,
18 and to rule over the day and over the night; and to divide between the light and between the darkness. And God saw that it was good.
19 And it was evening, and it was morning, a fourth day.Genesis 1:14-19 KJ3
The word ‘luminaries’ is translated from the Hebrew word מָאוֹר ma’owr, which properly means a luminous body, a light. Thus in this passage we read that the Creator created two important light sources, the Sun and the Moon, in addition to the stars. The Sun was created to illuminate Earth during the day and the Moon and the stars to illuminate Earth during the night.
Planets are not specifically mentioned but the ancients called them wandering stars and Jude 1:13 uses such a term “wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever”. The planets are seen as wandering because unlike other stars they do not maintain fixed positions with respect to the stellar constellations.
Therefore on Day 4 we can conclude that the Sun, the Moon and the stars, including the planets were created in the expanse. God said to “let them be” there. And remember the expanse is the region between the ‘waters above’ and the ‘waters below’.
Here I continue to describe my model that I have been constructing in these chapters. In the model I take an Earth observer perspective. Thus from Earth any observer would see these luminaries in the expanse as he is looking to the heavens.
There are many occurrences in the Scripture of the Earth observer perspective, from the rising of the sun to its setting or going down (for example Psalms 50:1; 113:3).
The Sun neither rises nor falls. It is the Earth that rotates with respect to the centre of mass of the Sun. Because the Sun has 99.86% of the mass of the solar system it moves only ever so slightly as the planets revolve around it. Earth contains only 0.003% of the mass of the solar system. So we can say to a very high approximation for the Sun-Earth system that the Sun does not move with respect to Earth.
Therefore I must conclude that the language of the Bible here takes an Earth observer perspective. As such God created all the trillions of stars and placed them way out in the cosmos. The nightly motion is evidence of the planet on which we live rotating on its axis. The stars have very little absolute motion detectable by the Earth observer. Several thousand closer stars are seen to change positions. The rest are fixed.
Not only the Moon but the stars also were created to give light on Earth during the night. Sometimes the Moon is not visible and that is when the stars really shine.
Not only did God create the heavenly bodies mentioned in the passage He created all the objects in the universe, including galaxies, clusters and superclusters. He created black holes, colliding galaxies, exploding stars (supernovae), everything we observe with the biggest telescopes. And if Adam had had a big telescope at the time he lived he could have seen many of them.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched and set into operation in 2022. It is the largest most powerful telescope yet developed by man. With a 6-meter diameter mirror it has many times the magnification power of the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST up to this present time has imaged about a thousand of the most distant galaxies in the universe. And their appearance defies standard big bang expectations.
According to the big bang galaxies evolved over time from smaller irregular shapes to larger complex and more circular or spherical shapes. They are alleged to have evolved, meaning they have grown in size over time, so the more distant ones should be smaller and ‘younger’. But the JWST saw the opposite. It saw a mixture of the types of galaxies like we see in our near galactic neighbourhood. And many are too big and too ‘mature’ for the big bang, and are seen too early in their alleged history, too soon after the big bang beginning.
The simple answer is that all galaxies were created and we see a mixture of all different types in the cosmos. The creation model presented here does not expect any growth in galaxies over time as there has been no more than 8,000 years since creation. And considering everything we see today is the same age there should be no substantial difference in the mix of different galaxy types.
The JWST confirms the straightforward reading of the biblical text here. All galaxies, with billions of stars, and other celestial objects are essentially seen as God created them. It does not matter how far away they are from Earth because the light from them arrives at the Earth instantly without any travel time.
The text of Genesis 1:16-17 is very straightforward saying the starlight shines on Earth. There is that Earth-observer perspective again. There is no suggestion that the starlight is not seen initially and only becomes visible thousands to millions of years later. This means that the light arrives instantly from the stars. There is no delay. There is no starlight travel time. For more detail see the section at the end of this chapter.
The Earth was a ball of ice on Day 2 which was heated as God formed it into a rocky planet on Day 3. That left an inner planetary disk of icy material in orbit around Earth as seen in Fig. 1 where the Moon is shown, with a few planets, but the Sun out of view.
As God created the Sun and the rest of the planets in the solar system on Day 4, the outer limits of the ‘waters above’ becomes the icy and rocky planetoids and cometary material of what is now known as the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt objects are in a solar orbit. Thus on Day 4 they were placed into solar orbit from their initial Earth orbit. See Fig. 2.
The Kuiper Belt encircles the solar system from the orbit of Neptune outward. The Wikipedia entry on this I agree with.
The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed “ices”), such as methane, ammonia, and water.
Wikipedia
The only substantive difference between the solar system on Day 4 of creation and today is that inner ring of icy objects in orbit around Earth (Fig. 1). However, it disintegrated at the time of the great flood when the windows of heaven were opened.
The Moon is covered in impact craters, which is evident that at some time in the solar systems history there were showers of asteroids and meteors. To a lesser extent that occurred on Earth also.
There are several large impact craters. The Chicxulub crater, also known as the Yucatán crater, is about 10 km in diameter buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It is claimed by biblical-history-denying geologists to be a prehistoric impact crater dating to 66 million years ago. Probably the one they say killed off the dinosaurs.
Instead the biblical creation scenario makes more sense. Many large icy asteroids hit the Earth during the time of Noah’s Flood. Some left their marks that we still can observe.
The solar system was designed to protect life on the third planet from the Sun. The large gas-giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the Creator’s protection system to absorb impacts of wandering bodies coming in from the outer solar system potentially heading towards Earth.
The luminaries have various design purposes.
14 And God said, Let luminaries be in the expanse of the heavens, to divide between the day and between the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.
Genesis 1:14 KJ3
For signs? Navigation by the Sun and stars is one very useful feature. It was used for thousands of years until GPS and other global navigation satellites were launched to provide that service.
For days and years? The most basic astronomical cycle, the Day-Night cycle, is the result of the spherical Earth spinning on its axis. The light from the Sun marks off that line on the surface of Earth as the Earth rotates.
The days here are the 24-hour days defined by the Hebrew merism “… it was evening, and it was morning”, which is followed by the phrase “a X day” where X is the ordinal number for the day.
The six creation days are not some indeterminate period of time as the compromisers claim. Sure, the Hebrew word יוֹם yom for day could mean that but when repeatedly used in the evening-and-morning structure, as it is for each day of creation, there is no alternative. Besides Exodus 20:11 could not be clearer.
11 For the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then He rested on the seventh day.
Exodus 20:11a AKJV
For seasons? Tilt of axis is the cause of seasonal variation during the Earth’s journey around the Sun. The side of the Earth tilted towards the Sun is hotter than the side tilted away.
In Fig. 4 below the northern hemisphere is in summer, while the southern hemisphere is in winter. Then 6 months later the southern hemisphere will be in summer and the northern hemisphere will be in winter.
The variation in the distance the Earth is from the Sun during its journey around the Sun over a year is only a very small contributor to seasonal variation in weather.
19 He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knows his going down.
Psalm 104:18 AKJV
The Moon passing through it phases, a result of its position in its monthly circular orbit with respect to the position of the Sun, is a marker for the seasons. Because the orbit of the Moon around Earth is approximately one calendar month it is used to mark off the seasons into monthly periods.
The Moon orbits the Earth in about 27.32 days relative to the stars, which is known as a sidereal month. However, the time it takes for the Moon to return to the same phase, such as from full moon to full moon, is about 29.53 days, known as a synodic month. The difference is due to the Earth’s movement around the Sun during the Moon’s orbit.
The tilt of the spin axis of the Earth is around 23.4 degree from vertical. Vertical is the normal to the ecliptic, the plane of all the planets. That may have been less at creation which would have resulted in much milder seasonal variations summer to winter. Some have suggested that the tilt increased during the great flood due to changes in the mantle and crust.
Those much milder seasons would have meant much better growth of vegetation in the pre-flood world which is supported by the enormous deposits of coal in sedimentary beds found all over the planet. Thus coal is fossiliferous and a direct testimony to the global nature of the Genesis flood. Also we can say that it was providentially provided by the Creator.
Certainly slow changes (nutation) are possible in the spin axis of our planet but the angular momentum of the massive body as a whole is determined largely by the mantle mass and not the core. It is hard to believe any event could shift it very much. The strongest pull on the tilt of the spin axis now is the gravitational effects of the Sun and the largest planets in the solar system.
The rotation axis of the electric current in the liquid outer core is not aligned with the planetary spin axis. Therefore the magnetic poles are offset from the geographical poles by a varying amount around 10 degrees. That misalignment could be evidence of Earth changes during the great deluge 4,500 years ago.
The Earth’s magnetic field is an important design issue for life on the planet. A strong magnetic field creates a force field around Earth to the high energy particles coming mostly from the sun but also from interstellar space, called cosmic rays. See Fig. 5. If that protective shield should weaken more charged particles can get into our environment and particularly affect electromagnetic signals used in telecommunications.
Total energy from the Earth’s magnetic field has decreased over the last 190 years since it has been measured. It is in exponential decay and if continued would lead to a loss of all shielding effects. It also means, if projected backwards in time, that the Earth cannot be older than about 10,000 years, because, if it were, the magnetic field strength would have been so high it would have been an impossible condition for the planet. That is, the planet could not have had its origin in such a high magnetic field.
Therefore secular geophysicists argue that the outer core of the planet has an in-built magnetic-field dynamo. The internal currents are such that they constantly re-energise the magnetic field and therefore it could have been cycling up and down in field strength for billions of years.
The old-earth geophysicists agree that the Earth’s magnetic dipole field strength is decaying but promote the idea that the energy loss is being gained by the non-dipole field, that is, it is shifting into the quadrupole and octupole components.
Dr. Russell Humphreys wrote the following in his 2002 CRSQ research paper on this subject.
This paper closes a loophole in the case for a young earth based on the loss of energy from various parts of the earth’s magnetic field. Using ambiguous 1967 data, evolutionists [geophysicists] had claimed that energy gains in minor (“non-dipole”) parts compensate for the energy loss from the main (“dipole”) part. However, nobody seems to have checked that claim with newer, more accurate data. Using data from the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) I show that from 1970 to 2000, the dipole part of the field steadily lost 235 ± 5 billion megajoules of energy, while the non-dipole part gained only 129 ± 8 billion megajoules. Over that 30-year period, the net loss of energy from all observable parts of the field was 1.41 ± 0.16 %. At that rate, the field would lose half its energy every 1465 ± 166 years. Combined with my 1990 theory explaining reversals of polarity during the Genesis Flood and intensity fluctuations after that, these new data support the creationist model: the field has rapidly and continuously lost energy ever since God created it about 6,000 years ago.
The total energy of the magnetic field, when all components are included, is exponentially being lost.
This is evidence of Earth and the universe being created less than 10,000 years ago. It is also a design principle. Read The Mysterious Weakening of Earth’s Magnetic Field Explained.
Without the Sustaining Power of the Creator, which is something like a Fifth Force in the universe, given sufficient time, our planet will eventually lose its magnetic field. Thus without the Creator’s intervention life would eventually ceases to exist. Without its protective effect life could not exist. Such is the importance of the magnetic field.
All Creation in the Present ‘Now’
When creating the Sun, the Moon and the stars, God said, ‘let luminaries (lights) be in the expanse of the heavens’, which is followed by ‘And it was so’. (Genesis 1:15)
This language implies as soon as God spoke the lights (and significantly the stars) were visible from Earth. The expression ‘And it was so’ does not connote billions of years of travel time for the light from the stars to reach Earth, but rather it was instantaneous.
This point is strongly made in Psalm 33.
6 Through the Word of Jehovah the heavens were made; and all their host by the breath of His mouth. … 9 For He spoke, and it came into being; He commanded, and it stood fast.
Psalms 33:6, 9 KJ3
As soon as God spoke ‘it came into being’. He commanded and ‘it stood fast’. There was no delay. And all creation is viewed within an Earth-centric frame of reference.
God created the whole creation in the present moment, which we call ‘now’. Isaiah 48:7 makes this point.
7 They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them, lest you should say, ‘Behold, I knew them.’
Isaiah 48:7 ESV
When God was creating He says He did not do it a long time ago but ‘now’.
5 For this escapes their notice by their willing it so, that heavens were of old,
and earth by water, and through water, subsisting by the Word of God,
6 through which the world which then was, being flooded by water, perished.2 Peter 3:5-6 KJ3
The world is willing ignorant (KJV) of the condition that the heavens were created in. Here the Lord spoke about the judgment on the ungodly in the great deluge, wherein He used the water that the Earth was created from and in.
The phrase “subsisting by the Word of God” is a reference to the Sustaining Power of the Creator. It is evidence of the state of the pre-flood solar system, when a remnant of the ‘waters above’ were held in Earth orbit until the deluge. They were in a gravitationally quasi-stable equilibrium until God withdrew some of that sustaining power.
In the judgment by water context the Lord also spoke of the coming final judgment.
7 But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.
2 Peter 3:7 AKJV
I am not suggesting that the very distant stars in the heavens are included in the final judgment of fire on the ungodly but I am highlighting here how God sees the heavens existing in the present now.
Then how can I say the light reached the Earth from the distant cosmos instantaneously?
The frame of reference of the observer is Earth. God always speaks from that perspective. Here I am trying to avoid any technical discussion and use no equations. The way to understand this is in the natural language we use.
When we see an event happen we naturally say it occurred at the time we saw it. I am suggesting then that that is the language of the biblical text. When God created the Sun, the Moon, planets and stars, if you hypothetically had been on Earth on Day 4 you would have seen those lights without delay. That is what it means to be created now. Certainly Adam would have seen them when he was first created on Day 6.
This means we have adopted the timing convention that means there is no travel time for the light from the cosmos. We see everything in the cosmos in real time under this convention. It is only a convention, so there is no way to refute it. And my argument here is that that is the convention of timing when events occur that the Creator used in His description in the Bible.
Oh but wait what about the size of universe and the finite speed of light? Since the speed of light was measured this objection has risen.
I do not dispute the distances in the cosmos, nor the size of galaxies. They are truly very distant and for that we use a measure called a light-year, the distance that light would travel in one Earth year. The speed of light used there is the canonical value, c, equal to about 300,000 km/s (186,000 mi/s).
That speed is measured using a single clock and some method of reflecting a light signal back to the point of emission. As such it is called the two-way speed of light and designated by the symbol, c.
However the light coming in from the cosmos travels only one-way to the Earth observer. This highlights the importance of the Earth-observer perspective. If you have never measured the one-way speed of light then you cannot say what speed it is.
And it turns out that it is impossible to measure the one-way speed. This is because it is bound up with synchronising two clocks separated by a distance. Therefore only by choosing a speed can we come to any conclusion. But if we choose a speed it is only chosen by convention. That is what a convention means.
For those who want to understand this from a more technical perspective Read The Conventionality Thesis on the Synchronisation of Clocks Separated by Distance. There I describe the physics of the speed of light and the convention needed before any measurement can be made.
It does not matter what your cosmology is! Because all observations of the cosmos are made in the Earth-observer frame, we are free to choose any incoming one-way speed of light. The physics carried by the information in that light still needs a physical description but the irrefutable fact is that we only receive the light one-way at the Earth or in orbit with a space-based telescope.
By believing the language of the Bible, as stated above, is the language of creation in the present now, we implicitly assume or choose the incoming one-way speed of light to be infinite. Thus if infinite there is no time delay in any light signal from the cosmos, which means we are observing all events in real time. Real time means in the present now, not at some past time.
This simple fact again escapes their notice by their willing it so. The biblical history deniers cannot accept such a simple explanation so they must reject it because otherwise the conclusion is intolerable to them.
Nothing in the last 120 years of relativistic physics contradicts this simple explanation. In fact, many have tried over that time period to get around this but have failed. They have failed because fundamental physics requires a free choice of the one-way speed of light, and that is only by convention.
Related Reading
- The Physics of Creation | Day 1
- The Physics of Creation | Day 2
- The Physics of Creation | Day 3
- 6-Day Creation of the Universe
- The Sustaining Power of the Creator
- Can We See Into the Past?
- Earth’s Magnetic Field: A Shield by Design
- The Mysterious Weakening of Earth’s Magnetic Field Explained
- Starship Earth
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