Genesis 1:6-8

Bible study with Dr. Chuck Missler

DAY TWO (Genesis 1:6-8)

Genesis 1:6-8
Then God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." Thus 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 the evening and the morning were the second day.

The “2nd Day” is probably the most difficult of all six days of Creation to understand. One obvious reason is the ancient vocabulary used to describe it.

Proverbs 8:8-9
...let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters

The Hebrew word, Mayim, is translated as "waters"
- Mayim can mean "water or waters”
- Mayim can can also mean danger, violence, transitory things
- The origin of the word is a dual of a primitive noun (i.e., a plural form that is always used in a singular sense.

Is the term “water” used as a metaphor or a synecdoche? 

A summary of Psalm 104
God created the waters in the clouds (v. 3), and on the earth (v. 6). He controls their boundaries (vv.7-9) and appoints springs to break out (v.10) and rain to fall at his bidding (v.13), thereby fructifying the earth and gladdening the heart of man (vv. 11-18).

There are over 200 different figures of speech found in the Bible, such as synecdoche, puns, metaphors, similies, and allegories. In Psalm 104, we see "water" used to idiomatically to point to certain things. For example, Jesus is our Living Water.

Coming back to the text at hand, could water, in Genesis 1:6-8, be used as a synecdoche of plasma?

Properties of Plasmas
Plasma is known as the 4th state of matter, where molecules are ionized (in a “pre-molecule” state).

David Bohm, from the University of London, was a protégé of Einstein’s, one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists, and one of the world’s most eminent thinkers. At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, he noticed that in plasmas (gases composed of high-density electrons and positive ions) the particles stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were part of a larger and interconnected whole.

At Princeton, in 1947, he continued his work in the behavior of oceans of particles, noting their highly organized overall effects and behaving as if they knew what each of the untold trillions of individual particles were doing. Bohm’s sense of the importance of inter-connectedness, as well as years of dissatisfaction with the inability of standard theories to explain all of the phenomena encountered in quantum physics, left him searching. With a supportive relationship with Einstein, they shared their mutual restlessness regarding the strange implications of current quantum theory. Bohm’s interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the sub-quantum level, location ceased to exist. All points in space become equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property “non-locality.”

An atom is mostly empty space
The nucleus of an atom is 100,000 times smaller than atom.

There are over 200 known sub-atomic particles
• Hadrons (subject to the “strong” force), e.g., Baryons (Protons, Neutrons, and Mesons).
• Leptons (not subject to the “strong” force), e.g., Neutrinos (10,000 times lighter than electrons) and Quarks.

Quarks
There are six quarks (named whimsically, “Up,” “Down,” “Charm,” “Strange” “Top/Truth,” and “Bottom/Beauty”) that are part of the “Standard Model” of the atom. Evidence of all six has now been measured experimentally, with the final “top” quark having been discovered in March 1995. The quark theory of structure views force-carrying particles, called gluons, as binding the quarks together to form the protons.

Symmetry of Design
Each particle has an antiparticle. When a particle collides with its anti-particle, both particles are annihilated, creating a photon. Reversibility of this process implies that light could created a particle and its antiparticle “out of nothing.” This scientific theory resonates with God's Day 1 of Creation: God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light (Genesis 1:3).

The World of Quantum Physics
Quantum physics, unlike the world that we know, is non-causal and non-deterministic. Nothing is definitively real. We cannot say anything about what things are doing when we are not looking at them. Reality is non-local: distant particles seem to be inseparably connected into some indivisible whole. Although particles can sometimes behave as if they were a compact little particle, physicists have found that they literally possess no dimension. Everything is probabilistic in some strange way.

This is Copenhagen's interpretation of quantum physics: In the quantum world, a system has no reality except while it is being observed. [Example, “Schroedinger’s cat” paradox.]

Non-locality is not just a theory
- 1964: John Stewart Bell, CERN, Geneva, formulated a mathematical approach to demonstrate non-locality: “The Bell Inequality.” At the time, the technology was not available to test the theory.

- 1982: Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard, and Gérard Roger at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Optics, Paris, conducted a landmark experiment: The Two-Particle Experiment, in which it demonstrated that photons exhibit non-locality.

Niels Bohr, 1885-1962
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”

Richard Feynman
“I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics... in fact, it is often stated of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. Some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it, in fact, is that it is unquestionably correct.”

A similar statement can be made about the God's Word!

Without quantum physics, we would have no lasers, semiconductors, microcircuits, etc. Our reality depends on the implications of quantum physics. And yet, the theory behind it is so unbelievable.

The Hebrew word, Raqia, is translated as "firmament"
Raqia means extended surface (solid), expanse. In Greek, it alludes to firmness. In Latin, it alludes to 3-dimensional solidity, firmness, empty space.

How is something solid be empty space? Well, since the atom is largely empty space, on the atomic level, even the most solid of blocks are made up indeed of empty space!

Separation of Raqia (firmament) & Mayim (water)
The Canopy Theory [Henry Morris and Institute of Creation Research.] explains that "waters above the earth" can refer to the following:
- The atmosphere
- Sky; region of stars, etc. 
- Heaven, the Throne of God
- The "fabric" of Space itself

The Fabric of Space: A History of The Aether Hypotheses

Psalm 19:1
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) taught that the physical world was made up of four elements: air, earth, fire and water. Tying these together was a “subtle” medium, called “aether” (later known as the vacuum, Latin: vacuus, “empty”). 

At the time, the earth was believed to be fixed, immovable, and at the center of the cosmos. In a sense, the aether was the substratum of the material world. 

The Greeks believed that “nature abhors a vacuum” so they could not imagine space as being totally empty. They also believed the stars were suspended from, or attached to, a rotating crystalline shell at a fixed distance from the earth. When some of the “stars” (planets) were observed to be moving with respect to the “fixed” stars, a series of rotating crystal spheres was postulated. Not until the 16th century were these Greek (Ptolemaic) ideas challenged by the Copernican revolution.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) challenged the notion with the Copernican revolution.

Rene Descartes (1596-1640) championed the theory that the aether was a plenum, from the Greek word for “full.” Descartes imagined that a very dense medium of very small particles pervaded everything, in constant motion; more solid than matter, yet invisible. Descartes’ universe was purely a “mechanical universe” and his theories were soon superseded.

Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647), inverting a long, glass tube with mercury into a dish, observed that the mercury dropped some 30 inches at the closed upper end of the tube, thereby creating what was obviously a vacuum.

[From 1641 to 1642 Torricelli was Galileo’s secretary. On Galileo’s death in 1642, Torricelli succeeded him as professor of philosophy and mathematics at the Florentine Academy. Torricelli gave a definition of atmospheric pressure and in 1643 invented the barometer.]

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) took this work even further and soon everyone was convinced that the vacuum of space was empty after all.

The Nature of Light
Light “particles” could traverse a pure vacuum without the necessity of a real medium pervading space. However, other experiments soon began to show that light was a wave phenomenon. So which was it? Was light a particle or a wave?

At the time only compressional waves were imagined, but light waves proved also to be transverse. In parallel with all these growing controversies, the velocity of light was finally measured by Olaf Roemer in 1675 and found to be finite, although the values he obtained were a few percent higher than the present value of 299,792.4358 km/sec.

Maxwell’s Equations
In Sir Isaac Newton’s day (1642-1727), aether was believed to be more fluid than solid and a medium which would support waves.

James Clerk Maxwell (1839-1879) developed a set of equations which described how light waves could travel through an aether. He proposed that light waves are composed of oscillating electric and magnetic vectors in an x-y plane for a wave traveling in the z-direction. For a wave to exist at all, a medium must possess elasticity (a spring-like property) and also inertia (a mass-like property). The velocity of a wave in any medium is equal to the square root of the stiffness divided by the density of the medium.

Maxwell found that the aether possessed an electric-field scaling parameter, called “dielectric permittivity,” a magnetic-field scaling parameter, called “permeability.” Light slows down in glass, in gases, and in water—because media other than the vacuum had differing permeability and permittivity.
Empty space behaves like a transmission line with a “characteristic impedance” of 377 ohms (which is the ratio of permeability to permittivity for “free space.”)

The aether was once again viewed as a very real medium which could be stretched or compressed. It had resilience or compliance and inertia, yet no known physical substance had a stiffness to mass density ratio anywhere near 9 x 10^16, which was required of the aether as a medium. The
aether appeared to possess elasticity but negligible inertia.

Michelson-Morley Experiment
The idea that some kind of aether medium existed prevailed until 1887 when Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward Morley utilized an interferometer in an attempt to detect the relative motion of the earth. No motion of the earth relative to the aether could be detected: the Aether apparently did not exist. The negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment baffled scientists until Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, published in 1905.

Einstein’s Theory
That the velocity of light has the same value in all reference frames, whatever their velocity, may be relative to other frames. Thus, modern physics took off in the direction of Special and General Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics.

For many scientists, the notion that an actual aether existed was simply discarded. Yet, the apparent non-existence of an aether raised many other problems, including the confounding Michelson-Morley experiment.

“Zero-Point” Energy
If the temperature of an empty container is lowered to absolute zero, there still remains a residual amount of thermal energy that cannot by any means be removed. This is the “zero-point energy.” A “vacuum” is now known to be a vast reservoir of seething energy out of which particles are being formed and annihilated constantly.

Why doesn’t the electron in an atom simply radiate its energy away and spiral into the nucleus? It picks up energy from the background zero-point energy and therefore is sustained by the energy (which is estimated at 1.071 x 10^117 kilowatts per square meter!).

Without the zero-point energy, all electrons would collapse in their orbits!

Colossians 1:16-17
For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

“...consist”: In the original Greek, the word meant, "to sustain," "to hold together" – Jesus is the zero-point energy!

Hebrews 1:1-3
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.

“Stretching the Heavens”: The Fabric of Space
Is "stretching the Heavens" more than a metaphor?

Throughout the Scripture, we come across various ways that describe space as a "fabric:
- Who alone stretches out the heavens (Job 9:8)
- Stretching out heaven like a tent curtain (Ps 104:2)
- Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in (Isa 40:22)
- He has stretched out the heavens (Jer 10:12)
- The Lord who stretches out the heavens (Zech 12:1).
- Other mentioning of “Stretching the Heavens”: 2 Sam 22:10; Job 9:8, 26:7, 37:18; Psalm 18:9, 104:2, 144:5, 40:22, Isaiah 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15; Ezekiel 1:22; Zechariah 12:1

According to the Bible, space is not an empty vacuum
It can be “torn” (Isaiah 64:1); “worn out” like a garment (Psalm 102:25); “shaken” (Hebrews 12:26, Haggai 2:6, Isaiah 13:13); “burnt up” (2 Peter 3:12); “split apart” like a scroll
(Revelation 6:14); “rolled up” like a mantle (Hebrews 1:12) or a scroll (Isaiah 34:4).

If space can be "rolled up" or "bent," then there is a direction it can be rolled or bent toward. This suggests there exists additional spatial dimensions.

Hyperdimensions (> 3 dimensions): Beyond Euclid
June 10, 1854: Georg Riemann gave a lecture on Metric Tensors, arguably the most important mathematical lecture ever given. It took over 60 years for his lecture to be applied.

1915: Einstein went to his grave frustrated over his inability to reconcile issues with 3 dimensions, which subsequently yielded by applying his previous insights (4-dimensional space-time).

1953: Kaluza-Klein proposed 4+n dimensions (Light & Supergravity).

1963: Yang-Mills Fields was developed (Electromagnetic & Both Nuclear Forces).

1984: Superstrings, 10-dimensions, was developed. The current thinking among quantum physicists is that our universe consists of one-dimensional “superstrings” vibrating in 10 dimensions.

Dimensions of “Reality”
Should we take the Bible literally?

Nachmonides was a 12th century Jewish scholar, who concluded, based on a detailed study of Genesis, that there are 10 dimensions in the world that we live, and only 4 are “knowable” (Commentary on Genesis, 1263).

Particle physicists of the 20th century (i.e., hundreds of years of research and billions of dollars later) came to the same conclusion: The world we live is has 10 dimensions, and 4 are directly measurable (3 spatial + time). The other 6 are “curled” into less than 10^-33 cm and thus inferable only by indirect means.

We have spent billions of dollars building elaborate particle accelerators to learn what Nachmonides discovered by a careful study of Genesis 1!

Boundaries of Reality

Proverbs 16:33
The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD.

Einstein paraphrased Proverbs 16:33 -- “God does not play dice.”

There are two mathematical concepts that do not exist in our physical world

1. Randomness (cf. Prov 16:33)
Mathematicians rely on supercomputers to generate random numbers. These really are pseudo-random numbers, because the fact that they are generated by supercomputers running algorithms prove that these numbers are not truly random!

The fact that randomness has never been observed in our physical world casts evolutionary theories, such as the Chaos Theory, into great doubt.

2. Infinity (cf. Jas 1:17)
On the macrocosm level, we know that the universe is finite (because if it was infinitely old, for example, there would be no heat exchange, as everything would be at equilibrium).

On the microcosm level, quantum physics has shown us that at 10^-13 cm, molecules cease to have locality. 

Everything (time, mass, etc.) we know is made of quanta. Like a photograph, our physical world is pixelated, as if we live in a digital simulation. And like a photograph that captures a 2-D picture of a 3-D reality, our physical presence is a mere snapshot, a hologram perhaps, of our spiritual reality.

2 Cor 4:18
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

The inability to confirm the existence of infinity—in either the macrocosm of the astronomer or the microcosm of the quantum physicist—has placed an unwelcome limit on our cosmological speculations. Even the ambiguous comfort of true randomness within the physical world has now been called into question by the new math of Chaos Theory. (This would also seem to pull the rug out from under those who insist on ascribing the creation to a accident of “chance.”)
It is amazing—and yet not surprising—that the Word of God presents a view of reality that is not at variance with these contemporary insights from the very boundaries of our present understanding of the physical universe, which is but a transient illusion for temporal.

WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL THIS?

Risk Analysis
A Type I Error is the rejection of a true hypothesis.
A Type II Error is the acceptance of a false hypothesis.
(J. Neyman and E. S. Pearson, Transactions of Royal Society of London, A, 31, 1933, pp. 289-337.)

Pascal’s Wager
“Yes, but you must wager. There is no choice, you are already committed. Which will you choose then? Let us see: since a choice must be made, let us see which offers you the least interest. You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will; and, your knowledge and your happiness. Your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


Study Questions
1. Is there life on other planets?
2. Could life have started “on its own”?
3. On which day was: the earth created? the sun created?
4. Could photosynthesis occur without the sun?
5. What are “hyperspaces”? How do they impact our perspectives of Biblical topics? In what way does the Bible anticipate our current discoveries regarding the nature of hyperspaces?
6. What is meant by “non-locality” of particles? How do these discoveries impact our Biblical views?
7. Which two concepts in mathematics are elusive as far as our physical universe is concerned? How do they bound our understanding of reality?
8. Why do some scientists suspect that the entire universe, as we know it, is some kind of synthetic simulation; a subset of an ultimate reality? 
9. Why are classical scientists shocked at the findings of quantum physics? How do they impact our own perspectives?
10. List the primary versions of “Big Bang” models and discuss their fatal shortcomings.
11. Explore the various paradoxes emerging from quantum physics and their implications in understanding our universe.