Day 5: Water creatures, fowl
“And God said, Let the waters
bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may
fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great
whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth
abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw
that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the
evening and the morning were the fifth day” (Gen
Interpretations of Day 5:
- Literal
24-Hour Days: 1 day before man was created circa 6,000
years ago
- Thousand-Year
Days: circa 8,000-7,000 years ago
- Diminishing Day-Ages: circa 937,500,000-468,750,000 years ago
(Duration: approximately 468,750,000 years)
According
to Young Earth Creationists, aquatic creatures and birds first appeared no
later than 6,000 years ago, but no earlier than 8,000-7,000 years ago, either.
In
the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, God created the first marine animals during Day-Age 5, sometime between 937.5 million and 468.75
million years ago. This corresponds precisely to the oldest known animal fossils,
about 700 million years old, that the Encyclopedia
Britannica identifies as Ediacara
fauna, small wormlike creatures with soft bodies.45
Oxygen-breathing animals.
Until
about 700 million years ago, there was a negligibly low amount of oxygen available.
(The estimated threshold or minimum amount of oxygen needed for animal life to begin
and multiply on earth is 1-10% of the present atmospheric level.)46
Photosynthesizing bacteria then began oxygenating the oceans to produce the oxygen
needed by new marine animals that derived energy through respiration.
Do
you see the thoughtful planning involved? God created plants on
Day 3 to produce oxygen. After an adequate supply had been assured, He proceeded
to create oxygen-breathing animals on Day 5.
The Cambrian “explosion.”
Approximately
544 million years ago, new forms of life with various anatomical structures
appeared in rapid succession.47 Writer Leslie Orgel said in the New Scientist: “Beginning at the base of
the Cambrian period and extending for about 10 million years, all the major
groups of skeletonized invertebrates made their first appearance in the most
spectacular rise in diversity ever recorded on our planet.”48
All
the basic shapes and features of multi-cellular organisms living today first
appeared during that period: mouths, eyes, gills, intestines, shells, bones,
spines, appendages, joints. The seas teemed with a great variety of
invertebrates: sponges, worms, bryozoans (“moss animals”), hydrozoans
(jellyfish), brachiopods (clams), mollusks (snails), arthropods (trilobites),
echinoderms (starfish).49
Sir
Jonathan Sacks wonders, “Something’ happened to cause an ‘explosion’ of complex
multi-cellular body forms. Scientists have long been puzzled about why this
burst of diversity occurred… How did life evolve at such speed that even
Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, was forced to suggest that it came from
Mars?”50
Gerald
Schroeder suggests the increased supply of oxygen resulted in a tenfold
improvement in the conversion of food to energy. With the new energy, organisms
were able to develop more complex structures.51 These were the
“abundant moving creatures in the waters” (Gen
The first fish.
Fish
appeared 490 million years ago. The presence of a backbone
differentiates the fish, a vertebrate, from invertebrates. But where it came
from remains a mystery.
Author
Arthur Strahler wrote: “Origin of the vertebrates is obscure -- there is no
fossil record preceding the occurrence of fishes in the late Ordovician time.”52
Writer Francis Downes Ommanney says, “How this earliest chordate stock evolved,
what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly
fishlike creatures we do not know. Between the Cambrian when it probably
originated, and the Ordovician when the first fossils of animals with really
fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years
which we will probably never be able to fill.”53 The Readers Digest sums it up: “To our
knowledge, no ‘link’ connected this new beast to any previous form of life. The
fish just appeared.”54 But, of course. God created the fish.
Dragonflies and
dragons?
God
also said: “Let the waters bring forth…
fowl that may fly above the earth… And… great whales” (Gen
“Fowl.” The word is translated from the
Hebrew owph, meaning “to cover with
wings or obscurity.” “Bird” is tsippor
in Hebrew. In its commentary on Genesis 1:20, Barnes’ Notes explains: “[Bird of wing] Here the wing is made
characteristic of the class, which extends beyond what we call birds.” The
commentator points out that owph (“fowl”)
means more than just “birds.”55
The
idea is demonstrated in Leviticus 11:13-20: “And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls;
they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage,
and the ospray, And the vulture, and the
kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night
hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the
cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier
eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. All
fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.”
God
enumerated birds under the word “fowls,”
but also included a flying mammal – the bat! Let us grant that in that
pre-scientific time the Israelites did not know the difference between a true
bird and a bat. Yet, in the last line we read a stranger thing: “fowls that creep, going upon all four.”
Four-footed fowl? No member of the avian family creeps, much less on all fours,
because birds have only two legs. The NKJV renders the verse in a more
contemporary language: “All flying
insects that creep on all fours…” (Lev 11:20, NKJV; also NIV and NASU).
It
becomes clear that the word “fowls”
lumps together true birds, a flying mammal, and flying insects -- even if they
are biologically unrelated. It shows that owph
refers to any creature that flies! Science asserts: “There is no fossil
evidence of primitive wings prior to the appearance of fully developed winged
insects...”56
Thus,
the “fowl” from the waters in Genesis 1:20-22 may have actually been winged
insects, prehistoric predecessors of modern dragonflies, mosquitoes, and
similar insects which lay their eggs and spend the larval stages of their lives
in the water!
Great whales. The “great whales” God created, rendered “great sea creatures” in NKJV and NIV, and “great sea monsters” in NASU and ASV, is hataninim hagadolim in the original Hebrew text.
In
other Bible verses, the translation is “dragons”: “Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons (taninim)…” (Ps 148:7a);
“Thou shalt tread upon the lion and
adder: the young lion and the dragon (tanin)…” (Ps 91:13; Ps 74:13, Deut
32:33, Jer 9:11). Elsewhere, the translation is “serpents”: “And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh,
and they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before
Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent (tanin)… For they
cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents (taninim)…” (Ex 7:10,12a).
“Dragons” and “serpents” are both reptiles. Hence, the Hebrew taninim hagadolim (“great whales”) must have actually been huge sea reptiles -- marine dinosaurs – the sea serpents of ancient legends!
____________________
(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)
