Genesis: Day 1

Yo, 

I feel like a challenge. So over the next few posts I will attempt to answer a question that has plagued religious believers and scientists alike, for centuries...
Does Christianity contradict Science?

Righty-O, ma homies, lets begin with Genesis! It’s possibly the most controversial... but a good starting point in my opinion;

Day 1

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.



This is the intro to the best selling, the most revolutionary, and the most controversial book of all time, yet many skeptics still haven't actually read it... They simply assume that all of genesis is complete Horse manure, because... well because they’ve been told it is. But, I hope in actually reading it you can see that it actually makes a lot of sense.
Lets consider the Big bang. We know it happened, or we wouldn't be here. We know when it happened, and even how it happened and what it was! But we still have no clue as to what caused it, or even what existed before it. Therefore the phrase ‘In the beginning God created...’ may be unprovable, but it is entirely logical.
Plus, what is described in verses 2 to 5 fits amazingly well with modern understanding of how solar systems are formed. Especially when you remember; this was written when people still thought the earth was flat!
Here is the ancient explanation vs the modern day scientific one:


The first day according to Genesis:
1- the earth was formless....God was hovering over the waters.
2- Let there be light, etc.
3- separated the light from the darkness...
4- there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.


‘The first day’ according to Science:
1-The Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud 4.568 billion years ago (oh, and the question of where water originated is still unknown, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon, here is a link if you are interested)
2-The centre, where most of the mass collected, became increasingly hotter than the surrounding disc. As the contracting nebula rotated, it began to flatten into a spinning protoplanetary disc with a diameter of roughly 200 AU and a hot, dense protostar at the centre
3-The planets formed by accretion from this disk.
4-The temperature, reaction rate, pressure, and density increased until hydrostatic equilibrium was achieved, with the thermal energy countering the force of gravitational contraction. At this point the Sun became a full-fledged main sequence star.


That’s cool! So far the two explanations fit, how wonderful for us all. However, there is the small issue of 50 million years, not equaling a day... But I put this error down to us humans. Back then I believe God could have explained about protostars and light years, and told us everything we need to know about the Higgs boson. But if some apparent lunatic prophet had challenged the theories of the time with anything that crazy sounding, it most certainly wouldn’t have ended up in the bible!

Having said that, at the time Genesis was still seen as pretty crazy! It was estremely revolutionary and went against all the established theories - all of which have since been conclusively dis-proven. I think this was the maximum change the people could have tolerated. Which is why it had to be explained in metaphor.



To wrap things up for today, ‘Day one’ survived my little test (but I think it’s going to get a lot tougher for poor old genesis :p).


Cya