Creation question

[dmwessel]

No, I’m saying that plants are able to live under a light cloud cover - I’m saying that day and night were already established - right from day one. To have day and night, you have to have sunlight, even if you cannot see the orb of the sun. I’m saying the sun was there right from the first day.

The waters were separated, water above the earth sounds like cloud to me.

As the cloud cover thinned, plants were able to develop - ask any Englishman who lives under a constant overcast for months at a time! Or even the dwellers in the monsoon rainy season in Asia.

And eventually the air clears, and the orb of the sun, and the moon and stars are visible.

For an earth system that developed through five eras before the coming of man, it is a plausible succession of occurrences.

Vs. 3 is incomplete because it doesn’t show how night and day are separated. Verses 14-16 ("**greater light **to rule the day" and the “**lesser light **to rule the night”) actually completes the picture, which means that 14-16 (fill-in information) are actually a *part *of vs. 3 (you couldn’t know how night and day were separated if it wasn’t for the information in Vs. 14-16). This clearly shows that the verses are not in chronological order.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

This sounds like those arguments about whether the parting of the Red Sea could have been caused by a string wind, or natural damming of the water upstream, or some such, or whether the Star of Bethlehem was a nova, or a comet, or two planets that appeared to be nearby.

It was a freakin’ miracle. We don’t have to create a naturalistic explanation.

God, a being of infinite power, had just created through His will the whole of space and time, all matter, all energy. If He wanted to create plants, or seeds, or the chemical and genetic building blocks of plant life and order them to survive without benefit of sunlight for a day, or two days, or a millennia, or an eon, that would have been well within His power.

 

[edwest2]

You answered your own question by stating the premise. Genesis is not meant to be taken literally - case closed!

That is not accurate.

"Real History

"The argument is that all of this is real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.

"Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work—things God really did.

"The Catechism explains that “Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337), but “nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun” (CCC 338).

“It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use.”

Peace,
Ed