Hello bkayw,
Honestly, it doesn’t require astrophysics to explain the cosmology of the Ancient Near East and how well it’s duplicated in Genesis, and even more so in Job. While there’s no physical analogue to the star-embedded firmament holding back the waters, I could cite works running from the Enuma Elish to the Eridu Genesis across a period of 1900 years prior to the writing of Genesis that contain the same elements.
The attempt to draw out a description of creation from these texts is wrong-headed in my view. It’s clear to me that the writers were using the cosmology of the time that “everyone knew” in order to tell a story about their gods, and the writers of Genesis continued this tradition, replacing the earlier creators from Enki to Marduk with the Hebrew god. When you read the midrash, the ancient commentaries that accompanied these texts, it’s quite clear that the original audience wasn’t looking for lessons in cosmology, let alone literal interpretations. Genesis itself contains two widely divergent views of their god in chapters 1 and 2, and it was the aspects of this god as a creator that concerned them, not the creation itself.
Ross is an interesting fellow, but his rejection of biological evolution is unacceptable, and is yet another example of a scientist embarrassing himself by writing outside his field of expertise. His localized flood that nevertheless encompassed all of humanity is not merely blind to the origins of the tale, but false to fact. Humans have never been gathered together inside a single river valley within the geological record. Anatomically modern humanity traces back about 200,000 years to its origins in south central Africa, from which it spread out eastward across the continent from there before crossing out of Africa into the ANE some 150,000 years later. Geographically dense populations didn’t exist until after the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, and even then were spread out across three separate flood plains, including Mesopotamia, the Nile, and the Indus valley civilizations. You don’t learn about this by studying astrophysics, and Ross would be well advised to look beyond astrophysics before he chooses to write about this again.
I’m far more impressed with scholars such as Ken Miller (a Catholic just by the way) who begin with the acknowledged science and then draw out their theology without first backing up 2500 years to put on the ill-fitting suit of a primitive and since rightly displaced cosmology. I recommend to you his book,
Finding Darwin’s God.
As ever, Jesse
