Thoughts on the Bible: Genesis 1

[This also just is not working. 

(See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html for a previous attempt that didn't work very well.)

(Better yet, see https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is going to work.)]

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading it a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods that of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't.

So, where they came from. 

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously.

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are somewhat influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the nearly identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as all at once. 

This is about God, not about the universe. Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were rather created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

But Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was, and how it helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it.  

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. Peter mentions this when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8, that a day for God is like a thousand years for us. Not equal, like. A day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. It's kind of hard to say that first day was a literal 24 hours, or even any specific time period. 

The Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe. 

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality.

Gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

But the rocks at the center of the clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day, the waters under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the hydrogen above by the primitive atmosphere, the "sky".

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, and, as I understand it, helping in various ways. What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. We rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in.

And a long time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started appearing from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) on the land, and therefore, we must assume, in continental shelf area under the water by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars appeared in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth period, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth period, further driving the process we would call in our modern language, terraforming.

In the fifth period, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth period, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success.

Why do I way prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created.

Some people think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think it must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- about 8,300 parsecs away, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. 

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. If it is not true, we have to understand that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, the idols were of human invention, and humans tried to pattern their idols after what they understood of the real God. 

In the time since then, humans have tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. 

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding in the past.

Why do I say that we were there?

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating man, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

We have changed the meaning of dominion to believe that dominion can be arbitrary. But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, and the requirement that we will report to God on our efforts at the end of our assignments in mortality, and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also made clear elsewhere.)

Creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that this was some kind of preparatory creation -- planning, maybe, maybe giving us our assignments. We still did not have physical bodies with which we could physically till the ground.

Before I forget, I should point out that these are my interpretations. They are not binding on anyone besides me, and I reserve the right to re-think things next time. These interpretations should be considered to be personal opinions and not considered doctrinal.