Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 2)

Day 2: Firmament, waters under and above

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And 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. And the evening and the morning were the second day” (Gen 1:6-8).

Interpretations of Day 2:

• Literal 24-Hour Days:    4 days before man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 11,000-10,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 7,500,000,000-3,750,000,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 3,750,000,000 years)

A firmament, the arch or vault of the sky, can be seen only from the surface of a planet. That means planet Earth, our home world’s sphere, formed on the second “day” of Creation. Astronomer Hugh Ross says: “From what I understood to be the stated viewpoint of an observer on Earth’s surface, both the order and the description of creation events perfectly matched the established record of nature.”⁹

Young Earth Creationists say the “firmament” appeared just 5,000 or 11,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, Earth took shape sometime between 7.5 billion to 3.750 billion years ago. Squarely fitting into this time span is the scientific estimate that, based on the age of the oldest rocks, the Earth was formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago.¹⁰

A nebulous hypothesis?

The Encarta Encyclopedia tells us that Earth and the “planets reached their present sizes and arrangement probably within 10 million to 50 million years after the Sun’s ignition.”¹¹

The Nebular Hypothesis, which posits that solar systems formed from nebulae, swirling clouds of gases and dust in space, has raised many questions that remain unanswered. For instance, if all the planets had formed from one spinning disk, why are the inner planets much smaller than the outer ones? It should be the other way around.

The sun has 99.86% of all the mass of the solar system, but only 1.9% of the angular momentum. The planets have 98.1%.¹² Why? 

All the planets should spin in the same direction, but Venus, Uranus, and Pluto rotate in reverse. Some planetary orbits are tilted. One of Saturn’s 60 moons, Phoebe, has a tilted orbit nearly perpendicular to the planet’s equator. Of the nearly 200 moons in the solar system, more than 30 orbit in the opposite direction. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have moons orbiting in both directions.¹³

Why did colliding particles adhere rather than destroy each other? Science writer Erik Asphaug points out: “It turns out to be surprisingly difficult for planetesimals to accrete mass during even the most gentle collisions.”¹⁴ Even if a planet did manage to form through collisions, it would be nearly non-rotating, because the spins imparted by many small impacts would have been largely self-canceling.

Concerning gas planets, Boyle’s Law states that gas clouds dissipate, they do not agglomerate. Gases disperse rapidly in the vacuum of space, specially the two lightest gases, hydrogen and helium, which compose most of the mass of the giant gaseous planets.¹⁵

If the solar system had formed from a cloud of dust, particles that did not become part of planets, according to the Poynting-Robertson Effect, should still be falling into the sun today, burning up and giving off a measurable infrared glow. No such glow has ever been detected.

Author Stephen G. Brush observes: “Attempts to find a plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of the Solar System began about 350 years ago but have not yet been quantitatively successful, making this one of the oldest unsolved problems in modern science.”¹⁶

Waters under and above.

The “waters under the firmament” we understand as the oceans, as well as underground water, including the waters beneath the continental shelves and tectonic plates, evidenced by the formation of the Mid-Ocean Ridge stretching under both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But what were the “waters above the firmament”?

The psalmist affirms there were waters above the firmament or sky: “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens” (Ps 148:4).

Ice crystal canopy? Researcher Dr. Joseph Dillow speculates that the high-altitude waters may have been water vapor¹⁷ above the atmosphere, forming a protective canopy around the planet. Extremely low temperatures in the Earth’s upper atmosphere could have frozen much of the water vapors. In the early 1900s Isaac Vail theorized that the “waters above the firmament” might have been an ice-crystal canopy.¹⁸ Dr. Larry Vardiman thought of the ice particles as equatorial rings surrounding the Earth similar to those around Venus.¹⁹ Recent studies by Donald Cyr on light patterns that could have been produced by a crystal veil fifty miles above the Earth where noctilucent clouds form, showed a correlation with patterns in archeological artifacts (pottery, woven materials, temple construction). These relationships have reportedly been confirmed in computer simulations.²⁰

There seems to be a hint about this in the Biblical text: “Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, sparkling like ice, and awesome” (Ezek 1:22, NIV).

A hanging “circle.”

The ancients thought the world was flat. The first Greek philosopher Thales believed the world was a flat disk floating on water. Later, men realized that the circular shadow which covered the moon during lunar eclipses was that of planet Earth. World-circling sea voyages during the Age of Exploration provided additional proof that the world is a globe. With the coming of the space age, photographs from manmade satellites captured the curvature of the Earth's horizon. Finally, men first saw the Earth as a complete orb floating in space in December 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft carried astronauts around the Moon.

Yet, the prophet Isaiah knew more than 2,750 years ago that the earth was a circle, or what we call today a globe or sphere: “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isa 40:22).

Earth’s support. The cosmogonies or legends of the origin of the world of various cultures have different things supporting the Earth -- twelve pillars, four huge elephants, three great fish, a great bull, a giant tortoise, the god Atlas, etcetera.

Around 4,000 years ago, Job already knew that the earth hung in the emptiness of space: “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7).

Empty north.

Job cryptically said that the north was over the empty place. Incredibly, astronomers have discovered that the area north of the axis of the Earth, toward the pole star, is indeed nearly empty – unlike the rest of the star-filled sky! An article in the November 27, 1981, issue of Science magazine reported: “The recently announced ‘hole in space,’ a 300 million-light-year gap in the distribution of galaxies, has taken cosmologists by surprise… But three very deep core samples in the Northern Hemisphere, lying in the general direction of the constellation Bootes, showed striking gaps in the red shift distribution.”²¹

Center of the universe?

Jewish tradition has it that God formed the earth and the entire universe from a single piece of rock. In the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch, the man saw the rock holding up the world: “I then surveyed the receptacles of all the winds, perceiving that they contributed to adorn the whole creation, and to preserve the foundation of the earth. I surveyed the stone which supports the corners of the earth” (Enoch 18:1-2).

The rock is said to be the same block on Mount Moriah upon which Abraham laid his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It was also the room-sized rock inside the Holy of Holies of the Temple that King Solomon built. Falling under different hands since 70 A.D., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, the rock is today the centerpiece of the Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third holiest shrine.

The Temple Mount is in Jerusalem, which pious Jews in all ages have regarded as the center of universe. God Himself spoke of the city as being centrally located: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the center of the nations, with countries all around her” (Ezek 5:5, NIV).

Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary tells us there are also historical reasons for this: “The medieval concept that Palestine was the center of the earth is not as farfetched as one might expect. This tiny strip of land not only unites the peoples and lands of Asia, Africa, and Europe but also the five seas known as the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Palestine was sandwiched in between two dominant cultures of the ancient world – Egypt to the south and Babylon-Assyria-Persia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the northeast.”²²

Cartography and calligraphy. Mapmakers and scribes confirmed the idea. Gentile cartographers traditionally drew their world maps with the Holy Land at the center. On the next page is a simplified 11^th century world map depicting the world as a disk surrounded by water, with the east on top (a common practice for many centuries). Paradise (Eden) is in the east, as part of Asia, with the two other known continents then, Europe and Africa, occupying the northwest and southwest, respectively. Jerusalem lay in the center of the disk of the Earth.²³

In addition, the handwritings of nations west of Jerusalem – Greek, Latin, French, German, English, and others -- are written from left to right. On the other hand, the scripts of countries east of Jerusalem are written from right to left – Hebrew (Abraham came from the east), Aramaic, Chaldean, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, etc. It is as though the calligraphies of all the other peoples to the east and to the west of the Holy Land are pointing to Jerusalem as the center!

Cosmological confirmation. Dr John Hartnett, in his book Starlight, Time and the New Physics, refers to “recent observational data that overwhelmingly leads to the conclusion that the universe must have a centre, with our galaxy somewhere near it… Observations also indicate that we are in a galactocentric universe.”²⁴

D. Russell Humphreys notes: “The quantized redshift data imply that we are within about 100,000 light-years of the center, a very small distance compared to the diameter of all the matter in the cosmos, at least 40 billion light-years. The probability of us being so close to the center by accident is less than one out of a quadrillion, implying we are where we are as a result of purposeful design.”²⁵

Galaxies are moving away from the Earth in every direction. The CMBR comes to us from all directions. These strongly indicate that we are indeed in a central location.

God’s throne nearby?

As the Creator of the universe, God must have placed His throne at the very center of His creation. Ellen G. White, the 19^th century Seventh Day Adventist leader and prophetess, wrote about “suns and stars and systems, all in their appointed order circling the throne of Deity.”²⁶

Interestingly, according to the World Book, “radio telescopes and infrared telescopes have shown that a powerful gravitational force comes from the exact center of the galaxy… so strong that the mass responsible for it must be about 3 million times as great as the mass of the sun… packed into a volume of space smaller than our solar system.”²⁷ Could God’s throne be there? Earth is very near the center of the Milky Way.

No wonder the psalmist was inspired to write: “And He has exalted the horn of His people, The praise of all His saints -- Of the children of Israel, A people near to Him” (Ps 148:14, NKJV). The nearness may be more than just figurative, it may actually be physical.

Divine arrangement?

Did the arrangement of the solar system simply happen by chance? David sings of God arranging the celestial lights in the heavens: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…” (Ps 8:3, NIV).

As any school-age child knows, the sun is much bigger than the moon. Yet, the sun and the moon, viewed from the Earth, appear to be of the same size. The impression is reinforced during solar eclipses when the moon covers the sun. That is because the sun, whose diameter of about 1,390,000 km, which is around 400 times bigger than the moon (3,480 km), is approximately 400 times farther away from the earth (149,600,000 km) than the moon (384,467 km). Incidentally, the size of the moon is just over ¼ that of the earth (12,756 km). Are not the ratios uncanny? (Notice the recurring number “4,” the Biblical number for the world. The numbers “4,” “40,” and “400” are associated with the Son of God, God’s hands-on co-Creator. Is it any wonder these numbers figure in the relationships among the Earth, the sun, and the moon?)

Moreover, the moon revolves around the Earth every 29.5 days. At the same time, it completes one rotation around its axis every 29.5 days. Thus, we always see the same side of the moon. How did the numbers happen to be identical to produce that extraordinary effect? It is too improbable to be simply the product of chance!

“Oddball” planet Earth. The distances of the seven major objects closest to the sun, excluding planet Earth, have an exponential ratio. Starting from Mercury, the distances from the Sun of Venus, Mars, the Asteroid Belt (materials that failed to become a planet), Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus approximately double from one object to the next.²⁸

In the table shown here, Earth is an out-of-place oddball in the solar system! It looks like it had been plucked from somewhere and inserted into the system’s arrangement.

(The two outermost objects, Neptune and Pluto, do not form part of the equation. They occasionally switch places, owing to Pluto’s eccentric orbit. Astronomers suspect an outside force had perturbed their orbits in the past. Pluto came closer to the Sun than Neptune in 1979 and stayed that way for the next twenty years.) 

⁹Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 1993, p. 15

¹⁰Planets, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

¹¹Planetary Science, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹²“Why ‘Six Days’?,” Personal Update, November 2003, p. 12

¹³Walt Brown, Astrophysical Sciences, Internet

¹⁴Erik Asphaug, “The Small Planets,” Scientific American, Vol. 282, May 2000, p. 54.

¹⁵Ibid.

¹⁶Stephen G. Brush, A History of Modern Planetary Physics, Vol. 3, 1996, p. 91.

¹⁷Noah’s Flood --  Where did all the water come from?, ChristianAnswers.Net, Internet

¹⁸Dennis Petersen, Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, 2002, p. 30

¹⁹ChristianAnswers.Net, op. cit.

²⁰Donald Cyr, “The Crystal Veil,” Stonehenge Viewpoint, Issue 106, 1995 

²¹Mitchell Waldrop, “Delving the Hole in Space,” Science, 27 Nov. 1981

²²Palestine, Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary,1986

²³“Three Days and Three Nights,” Las Day Ministries, undated

²⁴Carl Wieland, “Starlight and time – a further breakthrough,” June 26, 2009, Internet

²⁵D. Russell Humphreys, “The Battle for the Cosmic Center,” Internet

²⁶Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, 1990 Reprint, pp. 677-678

²⁷Milky Way, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

²⁸Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God, 1997, p. 192

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)