I apologize for not making my last anime blog yet, but I'll get to it when I get to it. But for now, I feel prompting on the topic of Genesis and a few passages near the very, very beginning that used to worry me.
I had been reading Genesis chapter one, and although I had read it before, I noticed something that irritated me. In verse three God creates light and separates it from the dark. At first, you're assuming the stars and the sun and all that, because it says he called the light "day" and the dark "night". Then, in verse fourteen you are suddenly left shocked and confused because it says that God divided the day and night - implying that they weren't before - and says that he created the sun and the moon (of which they correctly accredited the science of the four seasons to by the way). You're left in the dark, right? He created all these things like the planet and its shape and the water and all that, but apparently the sun wasn't there yet.
Before I go about answering this question, there is the matter of time which trips people up quite a bit. It does indicate in the Bible many times that God doesn't care about time. Humans who claim that God actually created the universe in six days don't really seem to get that God doesn't care about our days. Sure, six days I suppose, but they're six days in God's time, and according to 2 Peter 3:8 "With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." That's God's time for you. When he says "soon", it might mean next year. In thirty years, you might agree with him, but at the time it seems quite lengthy and that is because he lives in the past, present and future all at once. This minute isn't even this minute for him. Kind of mind blowing, right? Anyway, I just wanted to point that out because I think science could have taken as long as God wanted it to take for things to happen.
Back to the original question, the difference between the creation of light and dark versus the sun and the night must be made clear. Oddly enough, I was watching an episode of charlieissocoollike, a popular youtuber who I enjoy from time to time. Charlie is actually an atheist (and for those of you who judge, he's a normal and wholesome individual, for lack of a better term). However, he likes doing these short little vlogs about science, where he briefly and simply explains some smaller scientific concepts so they are fun and easy to understand. Perhaps it is childish that I watch them, but I think they're fun and interesting, even though I generally already know the information. This last one was about stars and he mentioned something I hadn't really thought much about, even though I had heard of it. He dipped into the surface of the fact that we are technically made out of stars, just like everything else on the planet.
If God made the light, and we are made from stars, who is to say God did not create the stars first or something like them, and then when they "died", they became the planet, which is where we could have been truly made from the dust? No human in the days of Moses would understand that we were particles from a ball of gas like the sun, but now we do know that information, and we should also be intelligent enough to interpret the words send in the times. It says he made the light, so perhaps he made the stars. After that, he formed the earth and the waters - everything but the living creatures. So after the light is spread out among other stars and celestial things, we have the dust, and rocks of the earth. This is when we joined our solar system as a planet rotating around the sun, creating our four seasons etc. So now we are a blank planet made from a star, rotating around a star, and with a moon.
Wonderfully enough, there is no woeful tale in Genesis about how creation had to survive in the darkness or anything stupid. Instead, a very scientific and straightforward approach is taken, and it says that next came all of the plants, and then all of the animals. If God created man from the dust of the earth, then we are still made of the same star material which we had before. He may have then just created all life from the dust. We were just made special, and after all of the other animals. Because we were some of the latest creatures to have "evolved" into actual homo-sapiens as opposed to older humanoids, I think its quite possible that Adam and Eve were just the first of our real race, or of one of the much closer races. It is possible that older humans were just not capable of possessing a human soul, or the Holy Spirit and so they could not comprehend enough of God to be considered in his image. We do know that Adam and Eve were not the only people on the planet after all, so what exactly made them so special? The only thing I can think of is that although they may have been the first homo-sapiens or something of the like, they were not the only human-type creatures around.
Of course, this entire blog is speculation, but hopefully it brought you some interesting thoughts and answered a few questions. That's my analysis of Genesis versus Science because I usually find that God and Science fit together nicely. He did create it after all. We just have to figure it out.
Here is the link to Charlie's vlog if you would like to see it. Its about five minutes long, and quite enjoyable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pag1NdPKcYM
