by John Holbrook Jr.
A Biblical View, Blog #034a posted February 27, 2017, edited March 9, 2021.
In my blog of February 20, 2017, I commenced a four-part series on natural history in the Bible. The first part was devoted to a discussion of the cosmology in Genesis 1:1 – 2:3, which I call the Creation Chronicle. This second part will continue that discussion.
Day 1 continued
KJV Genesis 1:2-5 – 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Based on a careful reading of Genesis 1-3, the Ancients discerned a series of ontological orders that together provide a comprehensive view of reality. This view can be found in the work of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. It has been resurrected by Wolfgang Smith,[1] with whom I disagree slightly, but to whom I owe much. Here is what I imagine Creation looks like from God’s perspective. It is divided into three domains containing seven orders, as follows:
DOMAIN 1 – THE ELEMENTAL WORLD is the most fundamental world. It consists of the three orders which we perceive with our minds – not with our unaided senses – (1) the Primordial Realm, (2) the Possible Realm, and (3) the Probable Realm.
Order 1 – The Primordial Realm is the Ancients’ materia prima. It is the most fundamental realm and corresponds to the primordial chaos in Genesis 1:2a, which is tohu-wa-bohu – i.e. “without form and void.” It is the “face of the deep” in the same verse and “the face of the depth” in Proverbs 8:27, upon which God would subsequently set his compass.[2] The primordial is the realm of undifferentiated “stuff.”
Order 2 – The Possible Realm is the Ancients’ materia secunda. It is the next order and corresponds to the realm of potency or potential, on which God has set his compass. It is imbued with mathematical, geometric, logical, informational, and statistical structure that is the subject of investigation by the abstract sciences. It is sometimes called the signata quantitate. Its structure determines what can happen, not what will happen. It is analogically equivalent to the Euclidean plane before the geometer constructs anything (a point, a line, a circle, a square, etc.). Order 2 is the realm of possibilities (i.e. it determines what structures and processes are possible).
Order 3 – The Probable Realm is the physicists’ quantum world (unknown to the Ancients) and what I call the materia tertia. It is the next order and corresponds to the realm of intellectual constructs, such as waves, atoms, sub-atomic particles, etc. It is the analogical equivalent of the Euclidean forms, such as the circle, the ellipse, the parabola, etc., which lack any essence, any corporal content. An operator (using instruments, if he is a man) acts on these constructs and thereby transforms something that is potential and imperceptible in the sub-corporal domain into something actual and perceptible in the corporal domain. Examples of such constructs are mass, energy, particles, waves, space, time, etc. These constructs cannot be reified; they are products of the operator’s models and measurements conducted with instruments. They are not something which moves from potency to actuality. Order 3 is the realm of probabilities (i.e. it determines what structures and processes are probable).
DOMAIN 2 – THE NATURAL WORLD is the actual, physical world in which we live. It is a world of unique forms and substances – i.e. no two objects in it are completely alike. It consists of the two orders which we perceive with our unaided, bodily senses (although the process by which this perception occurs is a mystery) – (4) the Inorganic Realm and (5) the Organic Realm.
Order 4 – The Inorganic Realm consists of the inorganic compounds that make up the Mineral Kingdom. This order exhibits a spatial hierarchy – geometric in nature.
Earth – the terrestrial sphere (the residue of the waters below the firmament) which is probably located at the order’s center.
1st Heaven – the firmament, the expanse, or interstellar space, in which the sun, moon, and stars are located, which is above and surrounds the earth. It is a plenum consisting almost entirely of plasma.
Upper Waters – the waters above the firmament, which consist of a sphere of water above and surrounding the first heaven.
2nd Heaven – a sphere of unknown nature above and surrounding the “waters above the earth.” Its outer edge is the boundary of Universe.
Order 5 – The Organic Realm consists of the organic compounds which make up the three kingdoms of life. It is physically located within Order 4 (in the biosphere at the surface of the earth), but it is an ontological level higher than Order 4. Its prime characteristic is the presence of coded information (DNA), which could not have arisen from the inorganic Order 4 but required an intellect to design it – let alone the myriad of living forms which it describes. It too possesses a hierarchical order: plants exhibit less complexity and abilities than animals, and animals exhibit less complexity and abilities than humans. [3]
5a – The Vegetable Kingdom is embodied in plants or fauna, which are living, but apparently[4] Alfred Korzybski calls them the energy-binding form of life, because they bind up the energy of the sun in their structure and thereby provide sustenance to the higher forms of life.
5b – The Animal Kingdom is embodied in animals, birds, fish, insects, and creeping things which are living and animate, excepting humans. Korzybski calls them the space-binding form of life, because they can move across the terrestrial surface in search of food, shelter, etc.
5c – The Human Kingdom contains humans who are living, animate, and reflective. Korzybski calls them the time-binding form of life, because, through scientific investigation (research), applied science (technology), record keeping (libraries), etc., they can progress through time, creating ever more sophisticated art, artifacts, social structures, etc.
DOMAIN 3 – THE SUPERNATURAL WORLD is the world outside Universe which we perceive with our minds and our spirits after God reveals to us that the Bible is his Word Written and Jesus of Nazareth is his Word Incarnate. I surmise that it is the 3rd heaven to which Paul referred in 2 Corinthians 12:2. It contains two spiritual orders: (6) the Celestial Realm and (7) the Divine Realm.
Order 6 – The Celestial Realm is embodied in angels and demons.
Order 7 – The Divine Realm is embodied in the Godhead.
With the above distinctions in mind, verse 1:2 – “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” – can be parsed as follows:
“the earth” here refers to the primordial realm. It cannot refer to the Earth of verse 1 or to the Earth as we know it, because it was “without form and void.”[5] It must refer to matter, but to matter in a primordial state in which it was without form or substance.
“darkness” here refers to more than an absence of light. It also refers to a lack of energy.
“the deep” refers to the same matter in a primordial state but conveys the sense of its being an abyss – an abyss of formless, substance-less, energy-less something-ness.
“…the Spirit of God moved…” (KJV) – or “hovered” (NIV) – refers to God’s bestowal or impression of structure on this matter in the primordial state, thereby transforming it into matter in a potential state.
“the waters” probably refers to matter in a subsequent state. “The deep” is a customary term for fathomless water. “The waters” is also a customary term for fathomless water. The use of different terms for the same matter, however, suggests that its state has changed. It is now in a possible state.
Verse 1:3 – “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” – records the injection of light or energy into “the waters.” Thus “the waters” were transformed into a globe of water with its center at the center of Universe.[6] What was possibly water became actual water, and I surmise that this transformation had something to do with the imparting of energy into it.
Verses 3-5 record the illumination of God’s creation by either (a) forces within the globe of water itself or (b) God himself. If the illumination had derived from forces within the globe of water, however, it probably would have been uniformly distributed, whereas these verses indicate that only a portion of the globe was lit. “…God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Moreover, a source of light which illuminated one hemisphere, but left the other hemisphere in darkness must have been outside the globe of water. This suggests that there was a spherical shell above and surrounding the globe of water that consisted of something other than water, the outer edge of which constituted the border of Universe. Finally, God-the-Son said, “I am the light of the world.” [7] Whereas God-the-Spirit handled the transition from the primordial realm to the potential realm, which is described in verse 2, God-the-Son handled the transition from the potential realm to the actual realm by providing the initial light in God’s creation.
Thus, at the end of Day 1, Universe consisted of a sphere with two parts: [8]
Part A – Matter – a giant globe of water, illuminated on one side, at Universe’s center and
Part B – Space – a spherical shell of unknown composition and thickness, above and surrounding the matter (see the 2nd heaven below for more information).
Day 2
Genesis 1:6-8 – 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 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. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
On the second day, God divided Part A – Matter (the giant globe of water) into three parts or spatial segments – Not part of the geologic record.
Part A-1 – a small globe of water, a watery earth, at Universe’s center, which is identified as “the waters which were under the firmament” (Genesis 1:7). It would provide the material for Earth.
Part A-2 – an intermediate spherical shell of water of unknown thickness, above and surrounding the small globe of water. It is identified as “the firmament,” “heaven,” and “the expanse.” [9] Some commentators identify the expanse as Earth’s atmosphere. If one calls Earth’s atmosphere “Heaven,” however, what does one call interstellar space, where reside the sun, moon, and stars? Moreover, verses 1:14 and 1:16 make clear that the sun, moon, and stars lie in the firmament. “And God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven…. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.” Thus, firmament would provide the material for interstellar space – i.e. the 1st
Part A-3 – an outer spherical shell of water of unknown thickness,[10] above and surrounding the firmament. It is identified as “the waters which were above the firmament” (Genesis 1:7). I call it the upper waters.
Thus, at the end of Day 2, Universe consisted of four parts or spatial segments: [11]
Part A-1 – a small globe of water at Universe’s center – i.e. a watery earth.
Part A-2 – a spherical shell of water above and surrounding the small globe of water – i.e. the firmament.
Part A-3 – a spherical shell of water above and surrounding the firmament – i.e. the upper waters.
Part B – a spherical shell of unknown composition and thickness above and surrounding the upper waters – i.e. the 2nd heaven (referenced above). Its outer edge is the border of Universe. It has not been detected; its existence is implied by the Bible’s references to a 1st heaven (Revelation 21:1) and a 3rd heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2), in between which there must be a 2nd heaven.[12]
Day 3
KJV Genesis 1:9-13 – 9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
On the third day, God divided and transformed Part A-1 – the small globe of water – into three parts or spatial segments:
Part A-1-a – the land – a solid globe of minerals at its center, which God further divided into three main parts or spatial segments:
Part A-1-a-(1) – the core, which consists of iron & nickel. Its radius is 2,142 miles.
Part A-1-a-(2) – The mantle, which consists of spherical shell of silicates above and surrounding the core. It is 1,789-1,810 miles thick.
Part A-1-a-(3) – The lithosphere, which initially consisted of a spherical shell of rocks above and surrounding the mantle. (After God later elevated a portion of it above sea level, it became 63 miles thick, which includes the crust (4-25 miles thick) and the top portion of the upper mantle.)
Part A-1-b – the sea – It initially consisted of a spherical shell of water above and surrounding the lithosphere. (After God later elevated a portion of the lithosphere above sea level, it became 0-6.8 miles deep.)
Part A-1-c – the air or atmosphere – It consists of a spherical shell of gases (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.09% argon, 0.03% carbon dioxide, and traces of several others) above and surrounding the globe. Its inner edge borders on the globe’s surface; its outer edge, on the 1st heaven. It extends approximately 435 miles above the earth’s surface. It is divided into five main parts or layers by temperature:
Part A-1-c-(1) – the troposphere (0-7 miles),
Part A-1-c-(2) – the stratosphere (7-31 miles),
Part A-1-c-(3) – the mesosphere (31-50 miles),
Part A-1-c-(4) – the thermosphere (50-440 miles), and
Part A-1-c-(5) – the exosphere (440-6,200 miles).
God then adjusted the interface between the land and the sea – probably using tectonic upheavals within the lithosphere – so that the surface of the matter below the air was divided into two segments:
A single continent, which appeared out of the sea.
A single sea, which surrounded the land.
God then created flora on the land and in the sea.
Day 4
KJV Genesis 1:14-19 – 14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
On the fourth day, God transformed the firmament into interstellar space, the first heaven. Its content by mass is primarily electromagnetic plasma (est. 96%) and secondarily astronomical bodies (est. 4%), such as stars, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets which occur within astronomical objects such as galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, and planetary systems – starting with the earth’s sun and moon. Its extent is unknown.
God refers to the astronomical bodies and objects as lights, and he explains that he intends the sun to rule the day, the moon to rule the night, and the other lights in the firmament to mark (a) the signs and (b) the years, seasons, and days.
Day 5
KJV Genesis 1:20-23 – 20 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. 21 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. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
On the fifth day, God created the fish and the fowl – first the fish to populate the sea and then the fowl to populate the air.
Day 6
KJV Genesis 1:24-31 – 24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
On the sixth day, God created animals and humans – first the beasts, insects, etc. to populate the land and then humans to populate and subdue (cultivate) the entire earth and to exercise dominion over all other living creatures. In other words, God made humans to be the stewards of the earth.
Day 7
KJV Genesis 2:1-3 – 1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made..
On the seventh day, after finishing Universe, which consisted of the earth, the first heaven, the upper waters, and the second heaven. God rested from his work of creating and sanctified the seventh day as a day of rest.
Length of each creation day
The phrase “the evening and the morning were the…day” with which the author ends the record of each of the first six days indicates that an exact, twenty-four day is meant, and that the delimiting of the day should start with night-time and end with day-time – i.e. following the order of creation, in which darkness preceded light.
© 2017 John Holbrook Jr.
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[1] My acceptance of the ontological orders of the ancients owes much to three books by Wolfgang Smith: Cosmos & Transcendence – Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientific Belief, Sophia Perennis, San Rafael CA, 2008; Quantum Enigma – Finding the Hidden Key, The (1995), Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale NY, 3rd edition 2005; and Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology – Contemporary Science if the Light of Tradition, The, Foundation for Traditional Studies, Oakton VA, 2003.For help in understanding these orders, see my “E02-V3 Table 6A – The Ancient’s Ontological Orders.”
[2] “…I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth…” (KJV Proverbs 8:27).
[3] Here I make use of the classes of life suggested by Alfred Korzybski in his Manhood of Humanity, (1921), International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, Lakeville CT, 1950.
[4] I say apparently because not everyone agrees. Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird argue in The Secret Life of Plants, Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1973, that plants are animate and aware.
[5] The Hebrew word “bohuw” or bo’-hoo (Strong’s #922) is used only twice in the Bible (Genesis 1:2 and Jeremiah 4:23), and its second use appears to be quoting its first use. The word means void, empty, or vacant, or vacuous.
[6] If matter began as water at Universe’s center, it would have taken the form of a globe, because water maintains a common level. It is interesting to note that the Maidu of Central California, whom the anthropologist and ethnologist William Schmidt (1868-1954) identified as one of the oldest primitive cultures on earth, believed that the earth was, in the beginning, only a great sea (see Schmidt, Wilhelm, The Origin and Growth of Religion – Facts and Theories, (1916-1930), Wythe-North Publishing, Proctorville OH, 2014, p. 189, where he cites R..B. Dixon, “The Northern Maidu,” in Bulletin of American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XVIII, 1905, p. 335).
[7] John 8:12 and 9:5.
[8] Here I commence using a somewhat cumbersome system of notation to make clear where each piece of creation originated.
[9] “Firmament” in the King James Version (KJV), the Revised Standard Version, and the American Standard Version (ASV); “expanse” in the New International Version (NIV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), and Young’s Literal Translation; “space” in the New Living Translation.
[10] “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heaven” (KJV Psalm 148:4).
[11] For a cosmological theory which accounts for these spatial orders, see D. Russell Humphreys’ Starlight and Time, Master Books, Colorado Springs CO, 1994.
[12] Outside Universe is the Third Heaven. Its content and extent are unknown. It has not been detected; its existence is established by the biblical account (2 Colossians 12:2).