From the primeval sea to the creation of the earth, there is another step in the process of creation. There is a biblical text in Job 38; 4-7 in which certain words are attributed to God which reminds us of the primeval sea from which the earth would have been extracted. In the text, God asks on what are the bases of the earth sunk? Such words couldn’t have been said by God, because the earth doesn’t have any bases sunk on anything. Nevertheless, such bases can be linked with the primeval sea from which the earth would have been extracted.

At the beginning everything was under water, flooded, no terrestrial atmosphere, no stars, no sun or moon and very importantly, no sky. It is an error to try to imagine the earth, as it is today, a spherical planet covered by water, rather one should imagine the whole sky covered by water, earth included. A very interesting image about the beginning is depicted in the book of Genesis. On one side, we have God, and on the other side we have an immense ocean, which engulfed even the sky. One should notice that the dome of the sky was created only in the second day and without sky the image about the beginning of the creation from the Bible describes an impossible situation, no light, no morning and evening, no sun, no moon, no stars, hence no “heavens”.

From the Almighty Creator of the universe another order of creation was expected, a rational one. Why did God need water at the beginning as a raw material, for the creation of the universe? There wouldn’t be any reason for that. The existence of a primeval ocean encompassing the entire universe doesn’t have any scientific support. According to the book of Genesis, not only the stars and other celestial bodies were not created in the first day, but even the place for them wasn’t there.

How would God have possibly created the sun, the source of the daylight, from the first day, if the sky, the suitable place for the sun, was not in place? In the book of Genesis, the daylight was created on the first day and the sun only on the fourth day. There wouldn’t have been any place for sun on the first day of the creation; there was no sky, in the biblical story of the creation on that day. How could daylight have been created without the sky and how was the first morning and evening, described by the Bible, possible? A morning and an evening under the waters of the primeval sea would have been impossible in spite of what the book of Genesis states. The entire story is an incredible mixture of inconsistent details.

The order of creation, from the book of Genesis, doesn’t have anything to do with the factual reality. On the first day, even if on paper we have the heavens and the earth we don’t really have the basic conditions for the existence of neither the heavens nor of the earth.

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We have an immense surface of water instead, a primordial universal sea. The earth in the form of dry land appears only on the third day, after the separation of the waters.

“6 And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7 So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8 God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1; 1-10 NRSV)

Many speak of an intelligent design, in the creation of the universe, but this intelligent design cannot refer to the biblical account, which is not intelligent at all. An intelligent design excludes absurd or impossible situations. Daylight under water, before the creation of the sky, morning, and evening without sky and sun, and the earth a solo planet, created under a universal primeval sea, is not at all an intelligent design is an absurd and naive design. A more intelligent design, it seems to me, is the generation of all that is from an initial state of almost infinite density and temperature, a singularity, which expanded and became our universe. This Big Bang theory can explain much more intelligently the apparition of the universe, because it is the expression of a rational and intelligent chain of events. Adding to that, this Big Bang theory is based on direct observations of cosmic past events, which left traces until today.

For me, the main problem with the creation of the earth is the separation of its creation from the creation of the whole material cosmos, from the stars and all celestial bodies. This partition in the process of creation brings us to numerous contradictions and even absurdities. We can see and the sciences confirm that the earth is a part of a much bigger reality which is the universe, and the two must be seen together and having the same origin. The universe and the earth followed the same process of creation in a certain order; they didn’t appear randomly in a chaotic way. The whole universe and the earth are indestructibly linked in the same process of their apparition and development based on the

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natural laws and not on mythological storytelling. They are connected as the whole and its parts and the latter cannot exist without the former, not even for a split second, but even less for three days.

In the book of Genesis, the earth is seen as being prior in existence and detached from the other celestial bodies, and that is strongly contradicted by modern cosmology with numerous solid arguments. Without the universe, the earth cannot exist because our planet is a product of the evolution of the entire cosmos. First it was the beginning of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and only after that one of its by-products, our planet, formed to be what we know today, starting around 4.5 billion years ago. To place the creation of the earth before the apparition of the universe is an irrational and inaccurate thing. This is another contradiction of the book of Genesis.

The planet Earth and the vegetal life on it couldn’t have appeared before the stars as the book of Genesis says, because many material elements found on Earth would have been initially produced in the stars. Cosmos was made originally from hydrogen and helium, hence all heavy materials were produced in stars which had to be much older than the earth. This idea was initially advanced by Carl Sagan who famously said that “we are made of star stuff”.[1] The following quotation explains in few details this idea:

“His statement sums up the fact that the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies, as well as atoms of all other heavy elements, were created in previous generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago. Because humans and every other animal as well as most of the matter on Earth contain these elements, we are literally made of star stuff, said Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.”[2]

As Chris Impey competently said, “all organic matter containing carbon was produced originally in stars”.[3] Plants are constituted from organic matter and they use CO₂ for their nutrition.

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Plants cannot live without CO₂ hence they couldn’t have survived the third day of creation without an element which is produced in stars, but stars would have been created only on the fourth day. Science explains very well how the heavy elements are created inside stars using the laws of nature, so the narratives of the creation of plants and even of the animals from the book of Genesis are an absurd description. This quotation explains why the earth, the plants and animals and the human beings couldn’t have been created as the book of Genesis says:

“Once the universe was created by the Big Bang, the only abundant elements present were hydrogen (H) and helium (He). These elements were not evenly distributed throughout space, and under the influence of gravity they began to “clump” to form more concentrated volumes. Evidence of this uneven distribution can be found in the anisotropies detected in the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB) by the COBE satellite in the early 90’s. These clumps would eventually form galaxies and stars, and through the internal processes by which a star “shines” higher mass elements were formed inside the stars. Upon the death of a star (in a nova or a supernova) these high mass elements, along with even more massive nuclei created during the nova or supernova, were thrown out into space to eventually become incorporated into another star or celestial body.”[4]

In order for the planet Earth, or for the plants which would have been created before the creation of stars, to contain some elements, or in the case of plants to feed with carbon dioxide, the stars would have needed to be created before the earth, but also some of them had to become nova or supernova, and should have thrown out into space elements with a higher mass. This is a reason why we need long periods of time for the evolution of nature.

The creation of stars on the fourth day and their explosion in the same day is something preposterous. Even so, it would have been too late for the formation of the earth or for the constitution of the plants. It is also contrary to the story of the creation of the stars from the book of Genesis because the creation of the celestial bodies was considered by God to be good. How good could the creation of the stars have been if

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they were created to illuminate the nights together with the moon and to be signs for the inhabitants of the earth, but some of them would have exploded the day in which they were created? The creation of the stars wouldn’t have been really good. 

Even if some stars exploded in the same day they were created, the cosmic distances being huge, the heavy elements couldn’t have reached the earth in order to become components of the marine animals and birds which were created on the fifth day.

There is also another aspect which shows that the earth wasn’t created apart from the solar system. The earth and all the other planets from the solar system orbit in the same direction around the sun, all of them being made from the same gases and cosmic debris.

“There are two outliers in the solar system which seem to break the rules about conserving momentum — Uranus and Venus. Uranus spins on an axis of almost 90-degrees (on its side). Venus meanwhile spins the opposite direction as Earth and the other planets. In both cases there is strong evidence that these planets were struck by large objects at some point in the distant past. The impacts were large enough to overcome the angular momentum of the bodies, and give them a different spin.”[5]

Creation in two stages, first the earth and after that, on the fourth day, the universe, is extremely problematic because it seems like a double creation or a repetition of the creation of the earth on another level, where many other planets, similar to our planet, were created. Why would our planet have appeared on another day of creation than countless other planets in the universe, if all planets have the same way of taking shape? There isn’t any reason for that. It was the same processes that determined the apparition of all planets in the universe; planet Earth was generated by the same mechanisms as other planets were.

At the same time, the creation of the cosmos in two stages would have meant two different steps in the creation of the basic material from which the cosmos had been made. Matter had appeared, in a certain moment of the history of the universe, and that moment is a part of a chain of events which didn’t happen twice in the same way in the same universe.

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 Matter overcame antimatter after the Big Bang and this process of creation of matter happened once, not twice.

Many planets were created in the same stage of the evolution of the solar system, and not only the earth. All planets from our solar system passed through the same cosmic process and have the same origin. There is also the opinion that the earth belongs to a group of planets from our solar system which are the youngest in comparison with other planets from the system, hence other planets were formed before earth. All planets were formed from the same nebula of gases, not simultaneously but at different times over millions of years.[6]

There are other strong reasons for the dismissal of the account of the creation of the earth from the book of Genesis. Our sun is a second-generation star, meaning that other stars had formed before it. The sun formed before the earth, being at the centre at the nebula of gases and other materials from which our solar system was constituted.

“Our sun is at least a second-generation star. How do we know? We know because the sun and Earth and everything around us on Earth, including our own bodies, contain chemical elements heavier (more complex) than hydrogen and helium. All chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are thought to have formed inside stars, via the process of thermonuclear fusion that enables stars to shine. These elements or metals were released into space via supernova eruptions.”[7]

If the earth was created after the creation of our sun, and our sun is a second-generation star, it is obvious that the creation of the stars didn’t happen after the creation of the earth as the book of Genesis declares. Creation of the stars after the earth is in sharp contrast to scientific data. We have to discard either almost all cosmological science or the description of the creation of the earth, sun, moon and stars, from the book of Genesis because they don’t go together.

The sun from our solar system not only gives us light and heat but also was a catalyst for the formation of the earth, hence the existence of the sun was a condition for the apparition of the earth. The following quotation explains how things happened:

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“Basically, scientists have ascertained that several billion years ago our Solar System was nothing but a cloud of cold dust particles swirling through empty space. This cloud of gas and dust was disturbed, perhaps by the explosion of a nearby star (a supernova), and the cloud of gas and dust started to collapse as gravity pulled everything together, forming a solar nebula — a huge spinning disk. As it spun, the disk separated into rings and the furious motion made the particles white-hot. The center of the disk accreted to become the Sun, and the particles in the outer rings turned into large fiery balls of gas and molten-liquid that cooled and condensed to take on solid form. About 4.5 billion years ago, they began to turn into the planets that we know today as Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the outer planets.”[8]

The apparition of the earth before the sun is an absurdity as big as the creation of daylight before the sun, and both are stated by the book of Genesis. The earth is so inextricably linked with the solar system that they cannot be seen as being created in “two different days of creation” or two stages of creation disconnected between them or connected in a reverse order, as the book of Genesis says. Again, we face a disruption in the order of creation. The entire biblical mythology aimed to explain how earth appeared and only secondly how the universe emerged, as if what was closer to the writer was more important than what was farther from him. In other words, the attention was concentrated on Earth, seen as the most important, and only after that all celestial bodies found a place in the whole picture, subservient to the earth.

Nevertheless, besides the sun, the moon and the stars there are many other celestial bodies about which the book of Genesis doesn’t say anything, for example, other planets similar to the earth. They are not stars because they are not massive enough and for this reason the pressure inside of them couldn’t cause a nuclear reaction. On the other side, according to a definition given by a scientist “a star is usually defined as a body of gas which is large enough and dense enough that the heat and crushing pressure at its centre can produce nuclear fusion.”[9]

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Let us imagine what happened with the earth in the first three days of the creation following the stories from the book of Genesis. It was alone, surrounded by water, for one day. After that the earth, for another two days, was surrounded by the empty dome of the sky and over the sky, again, water. On the fourth day, suddenly, a huge universe was created around the earth in order to illuminate it and to serve as signs for it. When reading those stories one may understand that the earth is so important that an entire universe was made only for it.

In the real world, the planet Earth is so small compared with the universe that one may ask why such a huge universe was needed only to illuminate and show the seasons for Earth. There is a disproportion which gives a contradiction. Comparing the earth with the universe, one can understand that the latter is more important than the former on the cosmic scale and also from the point of view of origins or duration.

Billions and billions of celestial bodies are too many only for the use of the planet Earth. There must be something more in the explanation of the existence of such a quantity of celestial bodies besides their utility for the planet Earth. It seems that the book of Genesis doesn’t give us the correct story. If the universe is so big the reason for its existence isn’t only to serve the earth. Moreover, the universe is expanding. Why is this expansion necessary from the point of view of the earth? The expansion of the universe doesn’t make any sense if the earth and the universe were created as the book of Genesis says.

How about the alleged daylight from the first day, where was it on the second day? It would have to come out from the water and be placed on the dome of the sky, created in that day, but unfortunately without a source. How would the light have come out from the water and be placed in the sky on the second day of creation? The story looks very absurd but that is what the book of Genesis presents and what many commentators wrongfully pretend to be inspired by God. The light would have been created on the first day of the creation but the sky only on the second day. Moreover, the sun would

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have been created on the fourth day. Someone just switched on and off the light, for three days, until the source of it was created, the sun. In the first day of creation the created light was under waters because there wasn’t yet sky.

The earth being alone in space couldn’t have allowed its illumination from an artificial light. At least one other celestial body would be needed in order to illuminate a planet like earth and to generate mornings and evenings, and also two rotation movements of the earth – one around the source of the light and another one around its own axis – are also necessary, to light the whole planet. That presupposes a mechanic of two physical entities attracting each other by gravitational forces.

A very improbable artificial light created on the first day of creation would have had to be orbited by the earth, while the planet also spun around its axis in order to illuminate its entire surface, but the sky wouldn’t have been there in order to make possible such a trajectory. A light illuminating the earth under the waters of the primeval sea and generating morning and evening is the most absurd proposition about the origins of the planet Earth.

One can be sympathetic with the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis only until one looks at the sky and compares it with what the book says. When one does that, he or she understands that the earth is only a very tiny part of the visible universe and it is impossible to accept that such immensity would have been created only in service of the earth. If there is such a thing as the centre of the universe it is very hard to identify. The earth doesn’t rotate only around the sun, but also it spins at the same time as the solar system around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy to which it belongs.

The motivation for the creation of the stars given by the Bible must be wrong because there are many invisible celestial bodies which couldn’t have been created for the illumination of the earth or as signs, because they cannot be seen from the earth. Their light cannot be seen with our eyes, without technical means, and such technical means were available starting only with the recent past. More than 99% of the celestial bodies we can see with our eyes are stars in our galaxy (or planets).[10]

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This is a good analogy:

“Without telescope or binoculars, filters or crystal balls, what are we seeing when we look at a night sky full of stars? How far into space are we seeing? Put into an analogy, if the entire surface of the earth represents the expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, then the region encompassing the stars visible to our unaided human eyes would be roughly the size of California–with most of them contained in an even smaller area. In short, most of the celestial bodies that we see in the sky are not only the closest things to us in the universe; they’re pretty much the closest things to us merely in our own galaxy!”[11]

Why would God have created such a huge universe which doesn’t correspond to its declared purpose? The earth uses only a very tiny part for its lighting and astronomic signs. In this way, it is obvious that the function attributed to the stars in the book of Genesis is wrong. This is what the Bible says about this function:

“14 And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1; 14-19 NRSV)

Many stars are not in the firmament only to illuminate the earth, because the lights of many stars aren’t seen from the earth, or they have to travel a long period of time in order to reach it. The purpose of the creation of stars presented by the book of Genesis, is not in accord with the astronomic facts, is a naive invention, and is bound to generate confusion. To illuminate the earth and to be useful as signs for the earth, the universe wouldn’t have to be constituted of billions of stars and countless planets.

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If someone believes that the lights from the stars, which were created on the fourth day, according to the Bible, reached the earth in the same day, they must think again, because the light from the closest star, Proxima Centauri, travels to the earth in 4.22 light years.[12]

If God created the stars on the fourth day, their light didn’t reach the earth on the same day but long after their creation. The creation of the stars was unfit for the purpose allocated to them, by the biblical texts, for a very long period of time and for the majority of them was not suitable at all. The stars invisible to our eyes cannot lighten the earth at all and cannot constitute signs in any way, hence they haven’t been created by God to illuminate the earth as the book of Genesis maintains. If they were created to illuminate the earth and to constitute signs they have been placed too far from the earth, so there was a mistake in their design when comparing with the purpose of their creation declared by the Bible.

Why would God have created so many stars which were meant to illuminate the earth, stars not seen from it, or visible stars which were seen only after a very long period of time? To me, there is one convincing answer. God didn’t create the stars for the illumination of the earth, as the book of Genesis declares, but He acted as the theory of Big Bang predicts. God is the force behind the Big Bang who organises the matter and uses it as the fabric of what he wants to create.

One part of the universe is visible from the earth with unaided eyes and another part isn’t. Not even the most sophisticated instruments available to humankind can bring us to the edge of the universe which extends much further than we can see.

“Galaxies extend as far as we can detect... with no sign of diminishing. There is no evidence that the universe has an edge. The part of the universe we can observe from Earth is filled more or less uniformly with galaxies extending in every direction as far as we can see - more than 10 billion light-years, or about 6 billion trillion miles. We know that the galaxies must extend much further than we can see, but we do not know whether the universe is infinite or not. When astronomers sometimes refer (carelessly!) to galaxies

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 “near the edge of the universe,” they are referring only to the edge of the OBSERVABLE universe - i.e., the part we can see.”[13]

The stars had been created on the fourth day according to the book of Genesis but became visible much later and long after the sixth day, when the creation was over. Strangely enough the biblical texts say that the creation was finished but the light from the stars didn’t yet appear on the firmament. Much more rational and credible are the scientific explanations in which the creation of stars is a continuous process and not only a one-day job. Stars are generated during our days as well as in the past so their creation wouldn’t have been achieved at only one stage in the evolution of the universe.

    Earth is a part of a whole, of a complex system, in which it completes the structure to which belongs. Earth cannot be conceived isolated from its cosmic environment, existing on its own, without other celestial bodies. Earth cannot be seen as the first, and the most important cosmic body, like a sort of centre of the material universe, its most essential part. Understanding earth in this manner is motivated by a religious purpose but doesn’t have anything to do with facts.

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➤

The Bible says that the Earth was created by God. In its own words, it actually affirms that:

“In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1; 1-2 NRSV)

The earth was created together with heavens in the beginning. The Bible doesn’t say explicitly what “heavens” mean and what exactly had been created in “heavens”. Whilst for Earth, very few details are given, for heavens, there isn’t any description. Complete secrecy or lack of imagination? According to the Bible, God didn’t see fit to disclose anything about His world, and its population, in the book of Genesis. That brought humanity to countless speculations about angels, Satan’s revolt, and so on. A whole religion is created on the approximations about what “heavens” really means, because the book of Genesis doesn’t give us any clue about the issue. The religious imagination is based on the extreme scarcity of the texts of the book of Genesis.

The lack of information about “heavens” can bring one to the conclusion that by “heavens” the writer of Genesis chapter 1 meant something much simpler than is commonly believed, no angels or the Kingdom of God, but only the cosmic space. 

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    If “heavens” meant something more complicated such as the Kingdom of God, some more information about it would be expected to be found in the stories of creation. But even if that were true and “heavens” was understood to mean the cosmic space and nothing else, the creation of a space for cosmic bodies without the existence of the dome of the sky is absurd, it is a blatant contradiction which by itself disqualifies any truthfulness in the stories of creation. When the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, “heavens” would have existed, according to the book of Genesis, in the lack of the dome of the sky which separated the waters from above from the waters from the earth.

At the beginning everything had been under waters, including the atmosphere of the earth, and there hadn’t been any sky, therefore no “heavens”. There couldn’t have been any “heavens” at the outset of creation because God had created the dome of the sky only on the second day of creation, according to the book of Genesis, and without sky no “heavens” would have been possible regardless of what we mean by “heavens”. The Bible literally says that at the beginning it was “heavens” without the dome of the sky and all that existed had been covered by the waters of a primeval sea.

The whole complexity of cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology etc. is concentrated on two pages of the Bible. In this case lack of information is equals to no real information. What could be the cause of this poorness of information? Lack of information contained by the book of Genesis could have one main cause. The authors of the texts didn’t have any information about the origins of the earth and universe. Keeping to a very general level, an author or an editor could have diminished the danger of giving some imaginary details which could contradict each other and make the stories inconsistent. Nevertheless, the authors or the editors of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis have fallen into this trap in spite of the very few details which are given. As a matter of fact, little details which can be found in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis don’t harmonise well with one another and are of a peripheral importance.

In the book of Genesis the creation of the universe is only the stage for the main drama, the relation between God and His children. When the drama ends the earth will also disappear and a new earth will replace it. (Revelation 21; 1) 

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    Neither the creation of “heavens” and the earth nor the apparition of humankind has anything to do with real facts, but it has a logic in which true cosmology doesn’t find any place.

In the book of Genesis, God is presented like a craftsman happy with His work. At the end of a specific activity He found that His work was good and at the final of the entire development the results of His work were even very good. Even if God declared His creation to be very good He wanted to destroy the most important part of it through the waters of the Flood. Looking to our world, we can conclude that something was wrong with the creation from the beginning, at least from a moral point of view, and we cannot attribute all sufferings on the earth to humankind. Sufferings and death existed before the apparition of humankind on Earth generated by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes generated by the movements of the tectonic plates, illnesses, or others. To see the earth as an idyllic place without destructive natural events or illnesses before the apparition of the first human beings is a hypothesis contradicted even by the Bible, because before the creation of humankind other biological beings were created.

After ending His task God took a rest and His rest is a commemoration of His creation. The book of Genesis doesn’t tell us what God was doing after His rest, after the Sabbath. Did He start a new creation in another universe? Was the creation of our universe God’s first work, was it the last? Did God work only once in His entire eternal existence, for six days? In order to correctly evaluate the importance of our universe we should know if God had created only us or if He creates new universes all the time. It is also important to know how other universes, if they exist, resolved the problem of good and evil. Such knowledge would help humankind to see our universe in a much broader context and also to understand God much better. Isn’t the knowledge of God the sense of human salvation? The Bible says that it is. At the same time it must be said that the book of Genesis doesn’t contain such information which would be a true revelation for humankind.

Can God be the Almighty Creator of the universe and, at the same time, can He, as a Creator, cease to create anything else? A Creator who doesn’t create is not a Creator anymore. It is very difficult to accept that the Creator, with incredible creative powers, had created only once, a creation which, in a way, betrayed Him, and after that He stopped creating.

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    God is presented as the Creator of a single creation or process of creation. An infinite God would be an eternal Creator who would generate new creations continuously. The quality of God as a Creator and the uniqueness of His creation which proved to be imperfect seems to contradict one with the other. There are so many questions to which the Bible doesn’t give us any answer. These are important questions if one really wants to understand God and the process of creation of our universe.

The real world is a very dynamic one in which new worlds including new universes are likely to appear all the time; it isn’t a static existence in which only one universe was created once and for all as the book of Genesis seems to imply. The Bible induces the opinion that God would have created only our universe, which is unique in the entirety of existence, but this is contrary to what the modern sciences theorise. This aspect is important if we want to understand how unique our world is, and how unique is our story in the cosmos. At the same time, Jesus said that God still works. (John 5; 17 NRSV)

If God works all the time, having only periods of rest, what is He doing? Is He sustaining only the work that He already did in our universe? What does it really mean that God sustains the universe and what is the scientific implication of such a fact? Where do we find in the mechanisms of the functioning of the universe, following scientific research, the principle of God’s sustenance? If this principle is real there must be an element, exterior to the nature of things, which is required for all reality to function, the principle of God’s sustenance. A modern scientist, Steven Hawking, affirmed that there isn’t such an element and God’s existence is not necessary for the universe in order for it to be as it is.

Does God continuously support or survey the universe and does He really intervene for the prevention of any cosmic catastrophe? Cosmic catastrophes happen all the time. The stars die, they explode and create heavier elementary particles, such as iron, without which even man could not exist. In other words, a certain amount of destruction in the cosmos was necessary for the existence of our civilization. New stars are created all the time so the expression “end of creation” implied by the book of Genesis is not exact. 

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   The universe changes all the time, it is not destined to be forever in the same configuration as the Bible implies. The universe expands, is evolving, it is not static, and it is not created around the earth in order to be at its service. The universe wasn’t “ready” at the end of sixth day of creation and the rest taken by God at the end of His creation doesn’t make any sense, if it is compared with the dynamic of the universe.

The problem is that despite of what the book of Genesis maintains the creation of the universe doesn’t have any end, it is a continuous creation which contains also moments of destruction. For the human beings, a rest day makes sense, but for God such a pause is absurd. How would the creation have been supported during the Sabbath if God rested for one day? If the entire creation is reliant on God for its continuous sustenance, one day off for Him would have been a disastrous event for the creation. If God really sustains in existence His creation all the time, He couldn’t have taken a day off from this activity. At the same time, if the world wasn’t created in six days but it appeared and evolved in a much longer period of time and still continues to evolve, the Sabbath day doesn’t have any realistic support.

Some religious people say that God created on the fourth day all matter for the stars which assured the conditions for them to be continuously generated, but this isn’t what the Bible says. The stars would have been created in the fourth day to be signs and to illuminate the nights, and that wouldn’t have been possible if only the matter for stars was created then. Either all stars were created by God on the fourth day as the texts from the book of Genesis assert, or they are generated by the laws of physics all the time. One version contradicts the other. We can see what the truth is by studying the cosmos with technical means. Moreover, when God created the earth He had to create at the same time the matter for the constitution of the earth, but earth and stars are created from the same matter, which would have been created on the first day and not in the fourth day. If God created the matter of the earth on the first day, why did He create the stars only on the fourth day, if the matter was already there, three days earlier? There is no logic for that. The daylight, therefore the sun, was needed for the process of creation from the first day and the rough material would have been there. Why didn’t God use that existing matter and create all that was needed from the beginning? The book of Genesis doesn’t answer to that question.

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