A close and scientifically informed study of the text of the Judeochristian Bible (or, at least, the Jewish portion thereof) reveals a truly stunning discovery -- the book does not actually describe a God as having created every aspect of our Universe, but instead discusses a comparatively minor deity acting only on what is quite possibly a very small corner of an already-created Universe, one presumptively either originating by some natural mechanism or having been previously created by a much superior entity.

'In' the beginning....

Genesis 1 begins, appropriately enough, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" -- now note that carefully, for "in the beginning" is a point in linear time, a point which can not come about until time itself exists. But, as Einstein taught us with his Theory of Relativity, as confirmed by the observation of gravitational lensing and numerous other phenomena, time is a function of space. Before space exists, there is no time, hence no linearity, hence no "beginning" at all for anything to begin in. And yet, the Bible begins "in the beginning" without indicating who or what caused time itself to come into being, so that a beginning could be.

Consider it like this. The assignment of a thing to having been "in the beginning" is like reciting a poem "in the lake" -- if I were to tell you that someone did exactly that, you would not be able to leap from that description that the person who initiated the recitation of a poem "in the lake" had, as well, necessarily been the Creator of that lake. Oh, it might be so, but if you wished people who understood the difference to take that to be the case, you'd have to specify, "so-and-so created a lake, and in the lake so-and-so recited a poem." And so it is with time/space, and the whole of the physically bounded concept of linear time. The Bible studiously damns itself with silence as to any mention of where the space-time continuum originated generally, and especially as to who created "the beginning" in which its deity was then, and only then, claimed to begin reciting some parts of the world.

'Heaven' and 'Earth'

Now, to the rest of the sentence, the line credits the Bible's deity with the creation of "the heaven and the earth." We might take this to mean the whole of our Universe, except that a few lines down, which we will get to in a moment, the Bible precisely confines both heavens and the earth to much stricter meanings than that. Next it states, "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." Now notice carefully again, it does not specify that God created the waters, just that they were there, and God moved on them. And then, naturally, comes the line wherein God continues with, "Let there be light: and there was light." For the third time, again, it does not indicate that the God of the Bible created the light, for at this point it was already observed that some portion of the earth was in darkness; instead it simply allows that this deity allowed light to enter what had been dark on the Earth, without any mention of anything beyond this lone planet.

But back to the meaning of the heavens and the earth, "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." So here we see that "Heaven" is not the whole of empty space and other galaxies and such, but simply a firmament which divided two sets of earthly waters from each other.

"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."

Notice this carefully, for when we speak of "Earth" our minds leap to the whole of this thousands-of-miles-thick globe, but the Biblical definition, the meaning of what portion was created by the Bible's God, is much, much less than that, for it is only the dry land which protrudes from the water to which the Bible lays claim to its God's creation.

Lights 'in the firmament'

Next God commands "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night," with those lights dictating seasons and days and years. And again, yes, the Bible's God is described as making stars, but only those stars for which "God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth."

We know that "the stars" described here are things which are set "in the firmament of the heaven," and so must somehow be embedded in that tangible material described as existing in that layer of water over the Earth (and surely that excludes from existing inside the waters around the earth all of what we now think of as stars, the smallest of those being many times larger than our whole planet, and the largest swamping most of our Solar System as well); and we know as well that in any event the description provided biblically excludes all stars which do not "give light upon the earth." And so the Bible gives no indication who it was who created any other planets (they not being mentioned, at least not as planets, at all), and all the space gas and dust and those countless galaxies which are not visible from the dry land below our atmosphere. And indeed, our review of distant galaxies through the most powerful X-ray and radio telescopes has made clear that the vast majority of all stars in existence are (and will forever remain) invisible from the Earth, in terms of provision of what we perceive as light.

And so....

Perhaps (despite later chest-puffing) this is why the God described in the Bible is limited to acting on just our one Solar System, if even the whole of that. And perhaps this is why the God described in the Bible so clearly lacks the power to do as simple a thing as pluck Earth from our Solar System and deposit it in the same orbit around a comparable star in this galaxy or any other; or to pluck our Solar System from its current location and place it elsewhere in our galaxy, or another.


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FERRASSIC

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