In the Beginning...

Berzerker

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God created Heaven and Earth...

or is it

God created the heavens and the earth

or

of God's preparing Heaven(s) and Earth

what day(s) were Heaven and Earth created?

where is the universe while Heaven and Earth are being created?
 
I've read The Art of War two or three times. When I was younger, I tried to infuse an understanding of heaven as a plane of godliness, perhaps a plane of inspiration, with the more obvious reference to weather—clearly the power of the gods?!—here and there. The most recent time I read it I realized it literally and only means "sky".

China ain't Canaan, but sometimes the most literal, worldly interpretation is the best.

Source: guy who knows nothing about the Bible.
 
The Bible does associate Heaven with the sky, but I was under the impression Heaven was in the sky and not readily visible and the ancient Babylonians needed some kind of tower to reach it
 
IIRC in Christianity, Heaven is where God and his angels dwell.

The "heavens" is something entirely different. It is typically a reference to the upper end of the sky.

I don't think that the "universe" is mentioned in the Bible. The concept was probably foreign to the ancient Hebrews.
 
I'll break this down for you

Day 0. God created the universe
Day 1. God created time
Day 2. God created the heavens
Day 3. God created the Earth
Day 4. God created bushes and all other vegetation
Day 5. God created ligers and all the other animals
Day 6. God created Man, Woman, and Bigfoot
Day 7. God created the weekend
 
In the beginning God created everything in the universe.

After that it was mere manipulation.

The phrase "let there be" should not be construed as re-creating everything over again. The word created was only used once at the beginning. Unless one attempts to state without it actually being stated, there was only the manipulation of matter and energy into a form that produced a physical reality. Without that, everything would just be without form and void as was described before the act of manipulation.

The difference between create and made is create is an original thought, or action, while made is the changing of that which is already there.

According to the account it only took a defined period of time, and it was finished. What we know today which those who put the account to writing, may not have known, is that all the stars and planets in the sky were part of the universe and not just located in the sphere around the earth we call the sky (atmosphere).

There does not seem to be any indication that God had issues when working with the whole universe, nor was limited to only contributing to a particular section of the universe.
 
I'll break this down for you

Day 0. God created the universe
Day 1. God created time
I see some conceptual paradox here. Is it proof of the absolute omnipotence of God ?
 
Stephen Hawking would agree with you, though I've read elsewhere that the science is less certain than he makes out.

A Very Clever Bloke said:
As we look out at the universe, we are looking back in time, because light had to leave distant objects a long time ago, to reach us at the present time. This means that the events we observe lie on what is called our past light cone. The point of the cone is at our position, at the present time. As one goes back in time on the diagram, the light cone spreads out to greater distances, and its area increases. However, if there is sufficient matter on our past light cone, it will bend the rays of light towards each other. This will mean that, as one goes back into the past, the area of our past light cone will reach a maximum, and then start to decrease. It is this focussing of our past light cone, by the gravitational effect of the matter in the universe, that is the signal that the universe is within its horizon, like the time reverse of a black hole. If one can determine that there is enough matter in the universe, to focus our past light cone, one can then apply the singularity theorems, to show that time must have a beginning.

How can we tell from the observations, whether there is enough matter on our past light cone, to focus it? We observe a number of galaxies, but we can not measure directly how much matter they contain. Nor can we be sure that every line of sight from us will pass through a galaxy. So I will give a different argument, to show that the universe contains enough matter, to focus our past light cone. The argument is based on the spectrum of the microwave background radiation. This is characteristic of radiation that has been in thermal equilibrium, with matter at the same temperature. To achieve such an equilibrium, it is necessary for the radiation to be scattered by matter, many times. For example, the light that we receive from the Sun has a characteristically thermal spectrum. This is not because the nuclear reactions, which go on in the centre of the Sun, produce radiation with a thermal spectrum. Rather, it is because the radiation has been scattered, by the matter in the Sun, many times on its way from the centre.

In the case of the universe, the fact that the microwave background has such an exactly thermal spectrum indicates that it must have been scattered many times. The universe must therefore contain enough matter, to make it opaque in every direction we look, because the microwave background is the same, in every direction we look. Moreover, this opacity must occur a long way away from us, because we can see galaxies and quasars, at great distances. Thus there must be a lot of matter at a great distance from us. The greatest opacity over a broad wave band, for a given density, comes from ionised hydrogen. It then follows that if there is enough matter to make the universe opaque, there is also enough matter to focus our past light cone. One can then apply the theorem of Penrose and myself, to show that time must have a beginning.
 
In the beginning God created everything in the universe.

After that it was mere manipulation.

The phrase "let there be" should not be construed as re-creating everything over again. The word created was only used once at the beginning. Unless one attempts to state without it actually being stated, there was only the manipulation of matter and energy into a form that produced a physical reality. Without that, everything would just be without form and void as was described before the act of manipulation.

The difference between create and made is create is an original thought, or action, while made is the changing of that which is already there.

According to the account it only took a defined period of time, and it was finished. What we know today which those who put the account to writing, may not have known, is that all the stars and planets in the sky were part of the universe and not just located in the sphere around the earth we call the sky (atmosphere).

There does not seem to be any indication that God had issues when working with the whole universe, nor was limited to only contributing to a particular section of the universe.

the problem I have with that interpretation is the universe is not mentioned in Genesis, Heaven and Earth have definitions and they appear on the 2nd and 3rd days

Heaven was the "firmament" God placed amidst the water on the 2nd day and the Earth was the dry land that appeared on the 3rd day... If Heaven and Earth existed "in the beginning" before the 1st day then where were they?

God created the dry land but it was covered by water until the 3rd day? Then it wasn't dry land, it wasn't Earth and "in the beginning" doesn't refer to pre-1st day events.

if we use the actual definitions for these words a different picture appears - in the beginning God made the hammered out bracelet and the dry land

that wasn't the beginning of time, or the universe, etc, the "beginning" refers only to when Heaven and Earth came into existence and Genesis says that was on the 2nd and 3rd days of creation

so what existed before the 1st day?

a dark, water covered world followed by God's spirit

God wasn't even first, tehom (Tiamat) came before God
 
In the beginning God created everything in the universe.

After that it was mere manipulation.

The phrase "let there be" should not be construed as re-creating everything over again. The word created was only used once at the beginning. Unless one attempts to state without it actually being stated, there was only the manipulation of matter and energy into a form that produced a physical reality. Without that, everything would just be without form and void as was described before the act of manipulation.

The difference between create and made is create is an original thought, or action, while made is the changing of that which is already there.

According to the account it only took a defined period of time, and it was finished. What we know today which those who put the account to writing, may not have known, is that all the stars and planets in the sky were part of the universe and not just located in the sphere around the earth we call the sky (atmosphere).

There does not seem to be any indication that God had issues when working with the whole universe, nor was limited to only contributing to a particular section of the universe.
The universe didn't just suddenly spring into existence with stars and planets and galaxies. The cosmologists and astrophysicists know this from observation and measurement. We know from various dating methods approximately how old our own planet is. It's considerably older than 6000 years, but nowhere near 13.7 billion. The generally-accepted figure is 4.5 billion years.
 
Yeah, but assuming that a creature with unlimited powers exists, surely it could create a Universe with a snap of the fingers, in which everything appears as though it has existed and evolved for billions of years. No idea why any God-like figure would want to be that deceptive, but assuming that such a God entity exists, and is uberpowerful, it's conceptually non paradoxical.
 
To create could mean "a thought out process from nothing." My guess is the first verse explains how matter and the emptiness between matter came into existence. The spoken word gave physical form to that matter in the following verses. It clearly states that the earth was without form and void. Sounds like matter in space to me. Perhaps the plural form of heavens explains the multiple levels of solar systems and galaxies. I can only assume it means more than the atmosphere around one singular planet. The only difference between the first few verses and the current big bang theory is the size of the universe at the moment it was "energized". Perhaps we refuse and deceive ourselves because we have no proof on the actual size of the universe. Both now, and whenever it began.
 
Surely it's conceptually possible for a universe to exist without any dimensions of time, only space.
Yes, but it's rather harder to have "day 0" followed by "day 1" without a concept of time, right ?
(in fact, it would be rather hard to have ANYTHING "followed" by anything if there is no time)
 
No time in our universe, but perhaps a concept of time from the point or view of this God, though. I think in physics it's possible for one universe have a dimension of time and another one to not have one.. I mean, assuming that other universes can even exist, but for the purposes of this we're assuming that even God exists, so other universes seem fair game.
 
Even 2000 years ago, the followers of Jesus claimed this God would cause time to stop. This current heaven and earth (universe) would come to an end, and be replaced with a new one. All of humanity from the beginning would witness this event.

Btw, the International Standard translates verse 1 as the universe with a footnote, Lit. The heavens and the earth, ie space and matter.
 
I've read The Art of War two or three times. When I was younger, I tried to infuse an understanding of heaven as a plane of godliness, perhaps a plane of inspiration, with the more obvious reference to weather—clearly the power of the gods?!—here and there. The most recent time I read it I realized it literally and only means "sky".

China ain't Canaan, but sometimes the most literal, worldly interpretation is the best.

Source: guy who knows nothing about the Bible.

I don't know what translation of Sun Tzu you were reading but in Chinese the word Tian, typically translated to English heaven, does not simply mean the sky.
 
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