Let There Be Light

In recent years, much to my surprise, I have become a strong advocate of the theory of Creationism over Evolution. God’s words resonate, despite my will to overlook them.

After waking my wife this morning, I hit the light switch and commanded: “Ah, let there be light.” Noticing that two of four light bulbs disobeyed the instruction, and wondering how long they had been burnt out, I remembered God. Like a dead light bulb, He often goes unnoticed; and yet He is everything: the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, and all other characters ever devised by man.

It was this realization that took me to the topic at hand: God and light. I kind of remember God ordering light and then seeing that it was good. What? Why did He check?

Was He worried that when He said: “Let there be light” instead of light, a kangaroo would fall from the sky? The only reason a creator of something thinks to evaluate how good it is, is that He does not know how good it will be before He creates it. What is Moses trying to convey when he informs me that God checked if the light He summoned actually arrived in good condition? This confused me very much. I voiced my concern to my wife: “Shut up,” she explained.

The source of the original light remains unknown. Shortly after God created light, He created stars and the sun and other unnamed heavenly bodies He specifically designated as light sources. The first light was divine, it would seem, as it preceded all of these. The whole light issue seemed a bit murky. I attributed my confusion mostly to ignorance. As embarrassing as this is to admit, I don’t read Genesis. I almost sold my Bible at a garage sale years ago, after Jerry Seinfeld asked a compelling question: “What good is a book after you read it?” I have read it, but I don’t think I paid much attention or this simple matter would not seem so puzzling. To solve the problem, that nagging question of why God thought to “see that it was good,” I think I am going to simply read the text, as inscribed by the finger of God, in its original Elizabethan English. So others can benefit from my research, I will take notes as I proceed down the path from confusion to the inner light of God’s word.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Huh? In the beginning of what? I think I remember that humankind was created near the end of the week and did not begin on this day. God also began earlier. He was apparently homeless, but I am jumping ahead. What did begin on this day: the earth and the heavens? Obviously, they began on the day of their creation, but so do all things one creates. It is like saying: “In the beginning I made toast.” It is a true beginning from the toast’s perspective, but for the rest of us, it is a mere continuation.

It is a well established fact that God lives in heaven, so I can understand why He built His house as the very first thing. Prior to the beginning He was a vagrant.

Next we learn that that earth was formless and void and the darkness was over its surface. Of course, where there is a surface, there is also a form, but whatever He says I must believe. I guess He means that it was liquid, perhaps and had no fixed form. Let me keep reading and maybe it will become clear.

It would seem that God’s Spirit moved across the surface of the waters. Since a spirit definitely has no form, that it could move across something else that also has no form is a bit confusing. I have not yet found where God saw that Genesis was good, though, and I think He forgot to check. Perhaps if I keep reading, God will start making a little more sense.

I quickly reached the point in the story where God created the light and saw that is was good, exactly as I had remembered. This is the first recorded time in history when any being in the universe checked the quality of His work. That makes God, by definition, the Father of Creation. Here is my rationale: Herodotus is considered the Father of History because he was the first historian to document his sources. I read his Histories of Herodotus when I was young. Source accreditation was sprinkled throughout the work with the utmost journalistic integrity. “I know that happened because I heard it from the Delphians,” for example. When history’s father tells us that the Gods are envious of human happiness, we know he fully researched his facts and we believe him. When God tells us the light was good, as He is the Father of Creation, we should believe Him.

The light really is good. The earth, however, has its problems. The temperature fluctuates radically. What is comfortable one day is miserable the next, making it hard for any animal to live out its life in a consistent climate. Some areas have too little food, while food rots uneaten in others. One area has way too much water and another way too little. The tectonic plates are poorly designed. They routinely crash into each other, which breaks them and also busts the ground God built on top of them, sometimes destroying whole cities. Pressure builds up inside the earth and spews out molten ash and rock all over people’s houses. This problem could have been solved with a simple relief value, if God had detected the flaw in the design phase. The oceans are a big huge blunder. He saw the need for salt, and thank Himself that He did, but then He made it all salt. The beings on land cannot drink it. He never saw that coming and never bothered to go back and fix it. The light was the first thing He verified to make sure that it was good. While important, it would have been nice if He had started His quality control with the first creation, the most mission-critical piece: earth. The earth works, but barely. In comparison to the “light,” the earth is a bucket of bolts that hardly runs and now I know why.

At this point, God had finished creating the light. The source of light, the sun and other heavenly bodies, would soon follow, but first, God divided the light from the darkness. I don’t remember reading that before. Darkness is the absence of light. You cannot combine them, or you end up with only light. You cannot divide something that is already separate. I don’t know why someone felt the need to make up this absurd detail.

It would seem that God called the light day and darkness night. I hope He is not annoyed that we usurped these terms for our own use. We already had a term for light: “light,” and for darkness: “darkness,” but we did not have a term for the period of time in which each of these were present in certain parts of the world and we needed one. Since God had created exact duplicates and left two very much needed terms out, humankind borrowed them for another purpose. Every time we say “tonight, …” God probably kicks a cat and clinches His fist.

Anyway, right after God created the light, the heavens and the earth, there was evening and there was morning on the first day. The text does not clearly state it, but I think God turned around and asked where those came from. Genesis reports that God invented the ingredients for all of this and then the evening and morning just happened. The “What the f***” that God probably uttered was conveniently left out of the Holy Text.

As I am sure you know, since the time of creation, mankind flipped the positions: we now have morning first and then evening. It is funny, though. We are not following the original design, which is OK since the evening and morning aspect may not have been mandated by God in the first place. It follows that the next day there would be evening and morning, and the next, ad infinitum. Humans like morning to come first, probably for the coffee and bacon more than anything else. However, the consequence is that we are always one half day behind creation. Since the day begins in the evening, but we recognize it in the morning, we are calling the middle of the day, the beginning. In reality, “the evening and the morning were the first day.” It is not a big deal, but it is just something I learned.

Bright and early in the evening of day two, God summoned forth a firmament. I don’t know what that is. I tried looking it up, but that made things worse. Merriam Webster called it the vault of the arch of the sky: heaven. I think He may have created heaven twice. I am not sure if He threw the first one away or just added to it. Since He is in heaven, He probably noticed that something there, in His own house, was inadequate; like maybe in the first heaven the drinking water was polluted with salt. He probably told Moses to report it as a firmament rather than a “heaven do over” in order to trick us into thinking He is perfect.

It would seem that God’s final act on day two was to put some of the waters from the earth on top of heaven. There is no mention why He would do such a thing. It is possible that He replaced the first heaven because it was bone dry and He was thirsty. Another possible explanation is that Moses may have added this text without God’s consent because it sometimes rains, and scientist that he was, Moses realized that rain does not come from nothing, a concept he probably called “rain ex nihilo,” so God must have stacked some water on top of the sky in preparation. Moses concludes day two by reaffirming that evening comes first and the day ends with morning. He is just yapping. We are not going to honor that.

On day three we learn that the earth was originally a water planet. In retrospect, we know this is not good for man. Later we discover that the reason all of this exists is for humans. To correct this error, God committed to his first recorded miracle: He piled earth’s water in a single spot, thus revealing Pangaea, the super continent that was the air enriched environment man needed to survive. Though it had been submerged in water for more than two days, it was “dry land!” I was surprised to learn that God ran out of words and so He called the dry land Earth, a term already used the first day to mean water planet, which is by definition wet. At this point, He could have used either “day” or “night,” which were two leftover words, since man had not yet stolen them. By day three, the term “earth” meant the planet, less the water. He called the water seas. He was not sure if Pangaea would emerge dry, so He checked. He saw that it was good. Quality control complete.

The next two things that happened are strange. Separately, either event makes sense, but sequentially, it is bizarre. Here is the first one: God summoned grass, herbs, trees, to inhabit the earth, “and it was so,” meaning they answered His call and blinked into existence.

Here is the second one: The earth brought forth grass, herbs and trees. God checked if it really happened and saw that it was good. The fact that it happened twice in a row is not discussed as odd. This would be Genesis 1:12 and 1:13. In verse 12, God summoned the vegetation and it arrived. In verse 13, God summoned the vegetation and checked to make sure it was there. If God had been a little more efficient and tested his work in verse 12, the first chapter of Genesis would be 30 verses instead of 31 and I may have found the time to read it sooner.

In verse 14 God made a calendar. He used light, which is not odd because He didn’t understand the Solar system and how it works yet, since He had not yet created Copernicus and Galileo.

In verse 15 God repurposed the lights He used to make His calendar in heaven. He decided that since they were bright, He could use them to illuminate the earth. He verified that this was His original intention and found that it was. God doesn’t make mistakes, but that He changed His mind is clear. This second reason for creating them was an afterthought. Not only did He say they were created for one purpose, then another, but proved it, by placing them in heaven. If His original intention was to light the world, He would have put His lamps where they were needed, on the earth itself, and it is likely that Edison would never have been created.

Verse 16 is really confusing, but I am trying to understand it. God made two great lamps, the greater lamp to “rule the day,” and a lesser lamp to “rule the night.” Some people would argue that in this context “rule” means to illuminate, an idea easily refuted when we consider that He already made those lamps in verse 15. More mysterious is the fact that the greater lamp, which I think is the Sun, was created to “rule” the day, and that lesser lights were created to “rule” the night, and He made the stars also. This suggests that the stars themselves are not the chosen regents to rule in the Sun’s absence, but something else is. The stars appear to be little more than decorations, until we learn a verse later of their dual existence. God decides that they could help with the light also. Had He placed them on earth, probably one star would have been sufficient for the whole planet. However, it took billions to accomplish the same task because of their awkward location, which was in heaven where you would expect to find deities.

Now you may ask, as I did, why the Sun would rule at all; but it’s obvious. At the time God created the universe, the Sun was known to rule the world, and was usually the most powerful God of all of them. Long before God created the earth, the Egyptian Sun God Ra was ruling it. It is a Paradox, a core device needed to make Judeo-Christian theologies work.

Verses 17 and 18 try to smooth over the some of the apparent discrepancies of prior verses. It turns out that the illuminating regents, the sun the stars, and the mysterious material that God only defined as not the sun and not the stars were all placed in the heavens for three reasons: 1. To rule over the day and the night, so God did not have to. 2. To divide the light from the darkness, which as we know is not possible, unless He first found a way to mix them without damaging the darkness. 3. To illuminate the earth, which is naturally devoid of lamps. Verse 18 concludes with the declaration that God saw that it was good. I think God was mixing functions of the heavenly bodies and by this time His whole quality control process was failing. The ruling heavenly bodies needed to be in heaven, because the throne is there. However, the lamps needed to be on earth to really be efficient. Making the lamps also be the rulers was a mistake, in my humble opinion.

In verse 19, God affirms that day four worked exactly like days one through three: there was evening, then morning, not the other way around. Again, He is wasting His time. He may as well remove verse 19 and push verses 20-31 each up a verse.

In verse 20, God foolishly orders the water to bring forth moving creatures that hath life, which I have no problem with, but then also the fowl that will fly above the earth. That was probably not the best approach. As the waters brought forth the birds, a good many of them drowned. He should have ordered the sky to bring them forth. It was an easy mistake. He had never made a bird before.

Verse 21-23, God had the waters bring forth every creature that moveth. Curiously, he makes no mention of the immobile creatures, the ones that moveth not; nor is there any sign of them. We only know of His intention to create them by the declaration that He started with the ones that moveth, not just with “the creatures,” and he never brought the others up again. He also had the water make some whales and birds. God blessed the birds and the whales and the fish and ordered them to have sex: “Be fruitful, and multiply.” Almost none of the species knew Elizabethan English well enough to process the instructions, so the majority of them soon perished. At that point it was late morning, God was exhausted, and day five ended.

Verses 24 – 25 teach us that God made all the creeps on the earth. For reasons He never disclosed, cattle received special recognition, which helps us understand why some cultures worship them in the cow form.

In verse 26, we learn that God made man in their image. God never creates things quietly, like an artist does. Instead, He uses incantations, like witches would do, so if you are in ear shot, you can hear creation happening. God’s spell: “Let us make man in our image,” probably baffles Biblical scholars because they take it out of context. Had they simply read the other 25 verses, they would know about the Sun and the stars and would realize that this newly created heaven was swarming with deities.

So, God created humankind and put “them” in charge of everything on earth. “Male and female, He created them.” There were enough of these humans to have complete dominion over the millions of creatures of the earth. Remember this, as it will become of paramount importance shortly.

At the close of day six, God surveyed all He had made. In a mere six days He had amassed a bunch of things that were slopped together, but amazingly, when He examined His work, He decided that it was all good. His earth didn’t work very well. His people were put in charge of everything even though they had just popped out of the sea, gasping, wet and hungry, and had no idea what was going on or how to run any of it; and He had left the Sun and the Stars in charge of man’s days and nights, even though it was a philosophical violation of His imperialist vision of monotheism. None of this mattered. He was tired and it was all good enough. He did not say it was perfect. He said it was good.

A little while later He came to realize that He developed it all much too fast and it was a mess and His creatures were evil. He thought He had checked to make sure they were good that first week, but this specific design flaw was very subtle; so He killed almost all the people and the other animals with a great flood. Compromiser that He was known to be, He saved off a few of the evil things, so after the flood waters receded, they could replace all the evil things God smote, instead of Him having to rebuild them. His genocide was intended to destroy not only humanity, but all life, a fact he made abundantly clear. If man was guilty, everything must die. From His giant perspective we all look alike. I think I figured out why the plan failed. The majority of life on this planet is in the ocean, and yet, His weapon of choice was water. Most of the intended victims were unaffected, which is probably why His plan of mass slaughter did nothing to solve the problem of evil.

After learning this, which took Him a few thousand years, He decided that maybe if He killed His Son, that would help. Needless to say, that didn’t work either. His Son woke back up and evil continued on. In both cases, the Flood and the Crucifixion, some carnage was done, but the intended victims ultimately survived. Had either plot succeeded, the earth may be devoid of evil today.

To date, He has made no announcement regarding what He intends to kill next, and all because He rushed through the design of a very complex task that He underestimated from the Beginning, which brings me back to my original question: “The beginning of what?”

In chapter two, we learn that God created Man, then all of the plants and the animals, but because man was not satisfied, He created a “help meet,” which was a mate for Adam to have sex with. I know what you are thinking: did you not just describe how God created everything, then man last, on day six?

Well, yes, we discussed that. However, that does not change the fact that God created man first, and then the beasts of the field to keep the man company; nor does it do anything to avert the eternal truth that these beasts were created before man, and as a meets for man, and were inadequate for their purpose. After a discussion with man, God saw they were not good, after all, and admitted His mistake; His second attempt produced a woman.

At first glance the order of animal creation may sound like a contradiction, but there really is a good explanation, which I will share momentarily, and besides, just a word of advice: I wouldn’t let Him hear you say that, if I were you.

Originally, God had imagined a single man, and when it died, that would be it. However, man was unhappy with the beasts because they were exceptionally awful to mate with. Therefore, God created a servant for man whom He called woman, which the man did enjoy doing.

It is curious how God intended to run with a single human, but because that human needed a meet, He created not one meet, but millions of people, even though, omniscient as He was, He surely realized how evil they would be and also how hard it would be to exterminate everything that creepeth to pay for the sins of Adam’s meet.

There are no contradictions in the creation narrative. Nowhere in the Holy text of Genesis One does it say that the “people” God created were homo-sapiens. I think the “males and females” created after the other animals in Genesis One were Neanderthals or something, and perhaps Adam, the single man created before the non human animals in Genesis Two, was a racist Cro-Magnon who did not want to have sex with a disgusting Neanderthal. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to either.

Modern skeptics are quick to nitpickingly argue that Genesis Two is a complete contradiction of Genesis One and use this against God. They are fools. This text was written thousands of years ago. Had God spoken of the Neanderthals in Genesis One or the Cro-Magnon in Genesis Two, the homo-sapiens reading about it would not have understood. They did not even realize they were homo-sapiens, so we could not expect them to understand Adam’s taxonomy. It is better to not try to pit Genesis One against Genesis Two in a made-up holy war. The important thing is to walk away with the wisdom the story intends to impart, which I think is this: no matter how skilled you are, don’t just assume your work is good without periodically rechecking it.

None of us could have done a better job if we had been there, way back in the beginning, whatever that means. Though it reveals flaws in the earth’s design and shows mistakes that are hard for the devout to acknowledge, I hope no one underestimates the importance of this sanctified historical record. Without Genesis to guide us, we would be completely perplexed about how and when the Judeo-Christian Gods created things. Science concurs. Within the scientific community we find conclusive evidence that man, when left to his own devices, will invent far-fetch tales that stretch the fabric of credulity beyond reason. He will say we came from apes, then amoebae, and when none of this makes sense, he asks: “Well, how about a protein?” If life requires organic matter to create it, then organic matter cannot have existed ex nihilo, my scientific friends. If organic material is life, then life did not evolve from organic material. If organic material is not alive, then life could not have evolved from it. Your circular reasoning amuses me and annoys the Creator.

Man’s quest to understand creation is misguided, woman’s too. “Did God create us” should never be uttered. The correct question is not if, but how, did They create us? By God’s own admission They created us in Their image. Their image, not that of a Miocene ape or an Amoeba proteus, was the design. When were we created? In the beginning, as Genesis clearly states. We came before all the other creatures that creepeth, who only exist to serve us and each of them was created prior to our existence. It is written for all to see.

How long will we exist?

The Gods have been plotting our destruction since we were first developed. The original idea was to make only one of us, which would die. That did not work because he complained too much, so the Gods tried to kill off most of us with rain, which failed because the majority of life on earth has gills or other water-bearing apparatuses and He gave an unknown quantity of chosen ones a boat, Noah and Gilgamesh, for example, which preserved us long enough to make new people to replace the ones God destroyed. Next God tried killing His Son, which was supposed to convert us from something broken to something good, but that also failed when His Son woke up. He only sleepeth. What the Gods will try next is unknown, but one thing is certain: as sure as there are Gods in heaven, the story of our creation is not yet complete.

Proponents of evolution are quick to discount the literal word of God. They desperately argue that it is unreliable and they invent false inconsistencies like the ones refuted above; and they offer alternative stories to answer the made up mystery of our existence. Their fables tell us how a protein once evolved a brain and birthed more thinking proteins, which developed opposable thumbs, and society, and reason and culture, and ultimately God. They turn creation inside out. They find their fantastic invention plausible, unlike the documented history of the actual events. With their hand on the Bible, they ask: “How does the Christian know?” They peddle their ridiculous tale about in the name of science; but what they are really doing is antagonizing their Creator. He has repeatedly shown Himself to be intolerant of man. He only wanted one in the first place; and it has whined and complained and tried to change God’s design from the moment it popped out of the sea. It makes up global warming, then complains that it’s too hot. It commits genocide and then denounces the God it claims is a myth for allowing it. The man misuses intercourse, which God generously provided, for utterly ignoble purposes and then tries to force the God he denies to join the perpetrators in Holy Matrimony.

We deny the history of God’s creation in favor of fables. We think we are the creators of light and we marvel when we discover it has burned out. But God tells us of the source of light and it is not a bulb. We keep trying to get our fake lights to work. Over and over, we try new bulbs and all the while, God is still on His first sun, which burns as brightly today as it did in the beginning. His heaven and earth are not perfect. He never claimed they were; yet all we do is whine and complain about the design, while forgetting where it came from entirely, except on rare occasions when we give Him full credit and denounce Him for it.

This protein need not worry about a nuclear holocaust or a cosmic hail storm or chemical warfare ending his existence. He has but to keep doing what it is doing and the Creator will again unleash His mighty destructive force against him. And next time, He may succeed.