Origins: The Firmament of Genesis 1

the word firmament is mentioned 17 times in the King James Version of the Bible the day to creation account in the first chapter of Genesis describes God making a firmament to divide waters above from waters below what was this firmament understanding what God made on day 2 can lead to some stunning astronomical conclusions coming up on today's edition of origins the firmament of Genesis 1 with dr. Danny Faulkner [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello my friends and welcome to origins my name is dawn Chapman and it's my privilege to be your host during this program we showcase interesting guests who presented ensigns along with other important facts validating the truth of creation and the accuracy of God's Word today's guest dr. Danny Faulkner earned graduate degrees in physics and astronomy and taught at the University of South Carolina Lancaster for 26 years he's been extensively involved in creation science writing many articles and serving on the board of directors of the Creation Research Society several years ago dr. Faulkner retired as professor and now has joined Answers in Genesis in Kentucky as a full-time scientist and speaker dr. Faulkner it's a such a privilege to have you with us thank you now today we're gonna talk about firmament I got to tell you that title doesn't do anything for me you got to help me understand I know this is something that is kind of new things that have happened in you that you want to share with us will you bring the listeners on board I don't want to tell you over the past year or two my my whole understanding of this has changed to match angel my mind about stuff and it's rocked my cosmology to the core so I'm excited about it still believe that God made the heavens in the air oh yes in six days a few thousand years ago but I've got a different appreciation I think sort of where things are and how we put it together make it and I think this is important because I've been stymied for decades trying to put together what I consider a good creation model of astronomy if we can't get something this fundamental right then what hope do we have so I'm making I think we're making progress now so I'm excited about this we're excited we're excited to share your insights alright wait wait the firmament or I'll call it expanse is probably a better term for all this let's go back to Genesis should go back to Genesis and read a big is the very first verse of Genesis is in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth that's pretty straightforward you'd think it's talked about separate things maybe but you're looking at and those kind of jump out at me right the heavens in the earth what does this mean by the way you may notice that it's heavens here but in some translations it's heaven so which is correct yes we'll talk about that more in a minute but there it's tricky to do this you'll see why in just a minute but that's the very beginning thing here and many of us including me for many many years thought that this was the heavens here was the creation of space as we know what we call outer space today now of course you know in ancient times of the Hebrews well nobody really understood what we mean by outer space today it's a different way of looking at things that's a modern concept okay well the first one I want to show this photograph to you that's a photograph at the center of the Milky Way I took that recently I was in South Africa and I took took this with my camera put on a tripod and had some help with it fell to help me do some photoshop on it but that has a really nice photo of the Milky Way I do believe you know the Milky Way as our galaxy contains a few hundred billion stars and we're just one of those huge huge array of stars but you know we read on day two I just read the beginning of the day one account just as one one but we learned that on day two God made this thing called the affirmed event and I put in there expanse because a lot of modern translations render it expanse rather than it as firmament and I think that's a better better rendering altogether and you know going back 45 years ago when I was in high school I read this in the Genesis account and I wondered what is this firmament thing and and I just puzzled over that for years I'm glad to share with you today some of my conclusions I've reached well we know he made it on day two whatever it is and I want to read out here if I could the day to account only found in Genesis verses 6 through 8 here and it says and God said let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters waters thereto and let that separate the waters from the waters and God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse and it was so and God called the expanse heaven and it says there the evening in the morning or the second day notice the expansiveness mentioned several times serious and the waters are mentioned several times it turns out waters are mentioned a number of times and the numerous times in the Genesis account of creation you know second Peter 3 talks about the water is going back to the creation being very abundant so let's note a few things here by the way this is a photograph of the Pleiades I didn't take that but a friend of mine did the Pleiades is a star cluster it's prominent in the in the winter sky and it's mentioned three times in the Old Testament twice in job and once in the Book of Amos well what can we note about what we've read so far first of all what we talked about so far is day 1 and day 2 and day 1 and day tooned appear to be different things being talked about so we need to be careful we don't read into day 1 some things that maybe we're on day 2 and vice versa that's tricky and it's caused some rethinking on my part in recently recent year or so also there's waters above this thing whatever it is it says it's to separate the waters from below from the waters above again water playing a very key role in the creation account and I've been puzzled a lot really these waters above what are they where are they and what are they doing today that's a big question and it's changed my way of looking at this entirely once again and also as an astronomer I'm very interested on stars because well I study stars that people specialized people do different things in astronomy but I do stellar astronomy that makes me a stellar astronomer you see I think so alright but the stars were not made until day four so whatever's going on here on day one and day two it didn't include cars that's right okay we need to keep that in mind again we don't want to try to in things from date four into day one and day two and want to keep day one and day two straight I think many times have kind of blurred those distinctions we need to be very careful because god with the trouble of making a distinction he did and so we need to honor that a distinction and maybe there's some subtle clues that we can pick up and all of that now remember it talked about the heavens God made the heavens on day one heavens and earth he says but then he makes this expanse on day two and at the end of the day to account he equates the the expanse with the heavens as God called the expanse that heavens so it kind of puts us in a curious position did God create the heavens two times once on day one and one Sunday to a quick reading what have you think there's it's on day one and it's also on day two and that's tricky yes and and I don't think he created the same thing twice he created it once whatever was now could be talking about two different things a lot of different possibilities here but for a very long time I want to point out that I thought that God made space on day one and so when he starts talking about this expanse on day two what is that what is that sort of thing and the way we interpret that will have profound effects upon our cosmology and ultimately upon our astronomy and hey as an as an astronomer as a creation astronomer I'm keenly interested to find out what kind of model I can build based upon the biblical data there you know we we scientists build models or theories all the time sure week creation scientists do the same thing it's just our worldviews different we start with Scripture rather than starting with man's ideas about billions of years in evolution of everything in existence well firmament heaven these two terms sometimes used interchangeably it seemed well take a look at the word heaven it the Hebrew word used there is ksham ayam when you see that I am ending it means it's a plural what's interesting is there's no singular form for it huh it's a it's a plural form it works for both it's never heaven there's always heavens yes right or well let me answer expenses well they can it can work all right by the way I'm think of the word dear yeah you can have one deer or two deer or three deer okay it's the same word moose elk the same way you don't you don't have mooses or deers and you'd usually tell from the context how many you're talking about particularly if it's to give a sentence the verb will help you it's a plural or whatever unfortunately in the vast majority of times and by the way it occurs four hundred and twenty times in the Old Testaments there's a lot of usages that's a lot but in the vast majority of situations it's used in the objective case not the subjective case by the way the word is translated heaven most times I think 398 times either heaven or heavens 398 times the other other 22 times it's talking about things up above us can be the sky above us for instance so there's no doubt what this means really it's pretty clear it's talking about things above us now the thing translated firmament and again a lot of us today would say expanse because that's most modern translations say that it comes from the word rakia rakia no I get that sound inside if you want to do it right unlike shamaya it only occurs 17 times with such fewer instances it's more difficult to translate and it occurs over half of those times 9 of the 17 in Genesis 1 alone there are the verses right there so it's only used 8 other times outside of that and even then it's not talking about the same thing many times so when it comes down to rakia firmament expanse whatever you want to say it could have some some wiggle room on what you think that it means and this has always been a problem in trying to decipher this well the day for account comes along right after that and I'm gonna quote here directly from Genesis 14 1 14 15 and 17 and it says first of all let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens quite literally you would say I guess mixing English and and and and Hebrew you would say the rakia of the shamaya I like saying that rocky of shin myeon but expensive the heavens that's two words together in ones modifying the other ones in a prepositional phrase with it well what I think those lights are done day four would be that's the creation of the stars yeah the Stars and the Sun and the moon we're talking astronomical bodies right and by the way I think that would include all the things you can't sue the naked eye like asteroids and satellites you planets but I think it's all about the astronomical bodies here and next verse it says and let them be lights in that again expanse of the heavens that rock he of shamaya and then finally it says and God set them talking about the lights the luminaries in the sky set them in that expanse of the heavens the same phrase three times and just a few verses just don't what five three three out of four four or five verses there and keep in mind that God had just created this expanse in the day to account whatever it is the rakia and he equated it with heavens at the same time there's an exact equation made there God said called the rakia the swam called the rock the expanse heavens so I think the fact that God went through the trouble of identifying this shamaya more the expanse on day two equated it with the heavens and then almost you know with day three in between comes back to this and he uses the phrase expanse of the heavens expensive the heavens expense that happens three times to tell us where he put the stars I think it's pretty clear what he's talking about wherever he put these lights in the heavens he's he put them in the expanse and that's that's a pretty strong case I think we can make here well conclusion we reached then is that the expanse is where the stars are maybe you could just expand that just mean not just the stars but also the Sun and the moon and other things as well in the the heavens there and astronomical bodies in general going in this expanse that was made on that I don't want to get ahead of you but it is is that does that word now become a synonym for space well again we got to be careful because space is a modern concept but yeah I'm thinking in terms of space if we want to take this the ancients the place where the stars are yeah that's what we would call space we should say outer space more than 60 we kind of drop the outer now but yeah I'm thinking astronomical space I'll put it that way yeah that's a good team and now what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to put it in what moderate how the modern people can understand it right in a way that the ancients could have understood it because they were the principle audience right and also you have the you have the Bible itself telling you that I think propositional truth and it has to make sense to the original readers it has to make sense to us well you know some of the ancient people got this we have here the ancient cosmology this is the photograph of the celestial spheres or models I used to use in my teaching of astronomy the ancient Greeks thought the earth here in the center was surrounded by this celestial sphere it was hard it was crystalline meaning it's transparent made a glass or something and he said a little yellow dots on here these yellow dots are all stars and those stars are kind of located on this this celestial sphere and the things spun around us as we rotated each day I used to views these in my labs to show my astronomy students illustrate some of the principles we see of aspects in the sky and unfortunately people they call this the stereo MA that's the Greek word for this thing it means something hard and rigid and unfortunately many people began to read that as the expanse of their firm at the rakia they identified their their the biblical concept with this physical thing and that led the problems again I could give a whole presentation on that not enough time today but I'll tell you this it causes us then to have pause we need to be very careful that we don't interpret genesis in the Bible in general in terms of our current cosmology because it can lead to also two troubles for instance this there's this thing called the Flammarion engraving it's a supposed to be medieval here's flat over here flat earth right supposedly but that's not that's not true people didn't believe the Flat Earth the Middle Ages but that's the common misconception here's the Sun and the moon and the stars there's the firmament right there and here's the edge of that firmament maybe there's some water along the edge here and this intrepid explorers that managed to find its way to the edge you stuck his head out and and he's seeing the workings of what's really going on behind is that pretty much what you think the people in the Middle Ages believe that's breaking so that's what people tend to think you know they think they don't you could believe this engraving came right out of the Middle Ages it didn't it came from 1888 Flammarion was a French man who wrote a book on on meteorology and he uses to illustrate in his book and it was supposed to represent the medieval sort of sort of thing going on the 20th century a new approach people then rejected the beer into trouble with all of that so what we did is this became common to believe in the in the 20th century that the heavens of day one the creation of Airy verse one was the creation of the space of the universe and I said that was my thinking for a very long time but then the idea became around the expanse of day two wasn't space but was merely the Earth's atmosphere and that was a whole new replacement we had and I think we need to spend a little bit of time talking about how that led us astray at some point so this led what we call the canopy model and the belief there the canopy model was that the there was one of the waters above the expanse it was water out here above the earth and that supposedly protected us from harmful UV radiation radio waves could pass out in visible light could someone can come through but harmful UV radiation didn't come and that would protect us from bad things why people live for nine hundred years before this one and the idea was is that it collapsed at the time of the flood to produce the waters from the from above however this is largely rejected now most creation scientists have backed away from it doesn't see it but not not a lot of creationists who are average folks still kind of hold of this no a lot of them do I go surprised to learn that but it just doesn't work physically and and there's some questions at you exegetically as you'll see more towards the conclusion so if we reject you we are back welcomed origins we have dr. Danny with us and we were talking about firmament in Genesis one but right before the break you were sharing with us that your studies have led you to some discomfort with the canape theory but if you're gonna take that away from us you have to give us a viable alternative can you do that for sin did I think I can okay I've gotten really excited about these alternatives first of all come the conclusion from some of the reasons I've already shared sure that the expanse is what we would call outer space today okay okay maybe the atmosphere - it's not real clear necessarily but I definitely think it is what we call outer space yeah and that then leads to some very interesting conclusions three startling conclusions actually as an astronomer these are huge number one if they're the expanse this rakija this firm that is space then remember it's separating waters about below the on the earth waters above so there must be waters just beyond where that is if the waters are just beyond then there must be an edge to the thing there must be an end to the universe Wow and that's something that cosmologists astronomers physicists can't even fathom today and it took me that's all that wow it's like having a head-on collision it was jarring but I'm very comfortable now because it seems to come out of the Genesis creation account number two since it expands these are the rockiest things that expanded are stretched outward it coming from the center and where is it what's at the center of the earth is so consequently the universe has a center and by the way we're pretty close to it again that's even worse than the universe having an edge perhaps because we're not the center but we're close to this we might be the center of IV I don't have to be like horseshoes and hand-grenades close is good enough all right but there's some evidence by the way dealing with redshifts of galaxies that suggest this is a case astronomers ignore and have for 40 years but there is evidence to suggest that this actually is the situation now think about that if this vast universe has a center we happen to be near it what does that suggest suggest as a creator we've got a some sort of special location we have a special relationship with it created and so consequently most most scientists don't like this conclusion at all you don't want to go yeah and then finally the water is at the edge of this thing there's water out there and you know people would say well in space it's got to be well maybe ice or a baby vapor in fact in the universe we see evidence of water all over the place water is the second most abundant mall assuming the most abundant molecule in the universe but everywhere we happen to see it it seems to be in the solid or the gas form but you know what Don there were Hebrew words for ice and vapor and neither one is used there it's the word Maya meaning water so you're not gonna go for gas or or ice here you're saying there's liquid water at the edge and how it stays that way I haven't a clue but yes that's it I'm simply taking the what God's word at what it seems to suggest here and on top of that I know from physics that if water any state of matter has any temperature at all it's gonna have to radiate that as it gives off radiation now it's very far away it's very cool also I believe the universe is expanding that's good well documented from from a cosmology and astronomy does that mean the edge is expandable probably okay probably I'm thinking that but as this radiation comes towards us it gets stretched out and it's sent to longer and longer wavelengths yeah so here's what I would suggest basically want to read in Scripture the universe should be we should be bathed near the sin of the universe by all this radiation coming forward with long wavelengths well done that's exactly what we see that's what's your guy back in 1965 two astronomers named Penzias and Wilson discovered this uniform radiation coming from all directions it's called the Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB for short and fifty years ago when they found this this was heralded as being a prediction of the Big Bang in the universe started with a rapid appearance of space and everything but as it turns out if someone would have taken the Bible very seriously they might have been able to predict this before this discovery had they taken this seriously so today we've got an image here of what the background radiation looks like this is like a map the entire world and got these light and dark regions showing up in different places on it I think this may be I'm not saying it definitely is I'm simply saying if this what I've develop is halfway right this could be great coming from the from the rakia the waters above that God created on day 2 Wow and I find that fascinating this is new very new in fact your audience here is hearing this some of the first people to hear this and I think that this this represents some nice challenges for us to do continual work in this sort of thing I like to show that Hubble Deep Field this was taken 20 years ago each little smudge you see on there about 1700 of them are all galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars if you held a great large grain of sand at arm's length it would just barely cover this up that's how small that is giving an idea of how big the galaxies are we believe that this is near the edge what we call the observable universe the assumption is that the universe is a lot bigger than that I'm beginning to think that maybe the observable universe is the universe and God is allowing us in this late date to finally encompass all of creation all of them see all of it for the first time as a possibility well you know one of the fascinating things about science is when you discover things it doesn't leave less it always makes for more study there's more to be studied and you've certainly given us some fascinating things to think about let's go back real quick in just a minute to the first verse because one of the things that you said first was that a quick reading of Genesis 1 and 2 almost looks like we make the heavens twice so how do you reconcile that I'll come a conclusion we find the term phrase heavens and earth God made there I think it's like an introductory statement of the entire creation account it's a it's a phrase that says God made everything and by the way here the details of how he did it yes so it's an introductory statement of what follows almost like in a written page where there's something in dark print that kind of states what's going to be in the paragraph below exactly and that's what God is doing for us there well that's fascinating and I think it's I think it makes a lot of sense thank you sir for your work and thank you for sharing it with us and folks I hope it has been meaningful for you you know one of the things I love is that in creation scientists are never afraid to stop looking and developing and finding new true and you know when we dig to the bottom of the truth here's the bottom line it's God's view that he created you and that should always be your worldview too I hope you found this fascinating I hope you found it in Ricci I hope you'll join us again soon for origins and until then god bless you you origins is made possible by the faithful prayers and financial support of you our cornerstone family you

Channel: Cornerstone Television Network

Views: 240,193

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Keywords: Genesis, Dr. Danny Faulkner, Donn Chapman, Answers in Genesis, Bible, Science, Creation Science, Christian, Christian TV, flat, earth

Id: RG_SiZ8m0CM

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016