Well, I guess we have opened a real can of worms, or a worm of cans as the case may be.   The subject of the moment is the fact that the first chapter of Genesis is actually totally consistent with cosmology and evolution. The creationists' monopoly of Genesis is void and their seal of ownership is invalid. Not that I want to be accusatory, but since a great number of my fellow scientists have been burned at the stake for their observations, and even today the battle line between science and religion has become more intense, I feel it necessary to speak frankly.

While I respect one's right to hold with such truths as in his mind are self-evident, my objective is at the very least to show that there are other options to the interpretation of Genesis than that of a universe made “to go.” Some would ask, however, “Why bother trying to make an obsolete myth relevant to 21st century science?”  In fact, 21st century science is yet very primitive and we still know squat. What Genesis has to say is more relevant to the highly advanced science of those who built the pyramids and had civilizations for thousands of years. The burning of the Library at Alexandria set the human race back 50,000 years. That’s another subject for a future Friday frothy. 

So let me see if I can summarize in a few words what thousands of books and articles have been written about over hundreds of years, costing untold billions in research on phenomena taking 15 billion years to occur, the result of such research perhaps resulting in the end of civilization in the big “dang!”(nuclear war).

Here goes. Out of something, which is nothing, came something, which is also nothing, whose big goal is to get back into being the nothingness that it actually is. In its effort to return to nothingness, at temperatures of trillions of degrees, a sound so large that it condensed into particles without mass was uttered as the primal scream. Like a clap of thunder shattering rain drops, particles from nowhere formed from light that has no mass.^[1] Photons squished together so tight and so hot that they exuded particles with mass. . . and anti-mass. After only one billionth of a second the fight was over. After all the matter and anti-matter duked it out photons were finally set loose and set a veil over the cosmos, called non-poetically the “cosmic microwave background radiation.”  At this point, although there were plenty of photons everywhere, the percentage of particles relative to the volume of the universe was exremely small, as it still is.  As things cooled, electrons fell from the darkness like snow.^[2],[3]

A note about the primal scream. What I am alluding to here is string theory. I am not referring to the scream of flossing your teeth. According to physics, calculations involving infinitely small particle points are problematic. Mathematically it is possible to deduce that the ultimate form of matter is linear, and the character of the particle that is formed is dependent on the vibratory rate of this string. Thus "sound" (at least analogically, as on the larger molecular level sound is an effect of vibration) precedes matter. "And God said..."

Not too bad I guess. Not quite as elegant as saying,  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” According to modern cosmology the early universe was a deep, dark deep indeed. The new allegations of dark matter and dark energy and the apparent fact that not only is the universe expanding, it is doing so at an accelerating rate, suggests that creation is still going on. The Big Bang did not just happen, it is still happening.^[4]

At this point there were no stars, only darkness for billions of years. Only a few surviving particles spread throughout the void in a very uniform way, which was a problem.  Protons and helium uniformly spread throughout the place doesn’t make for very interesting game time. Something needed to shake things up and cause some gradient of density.  Some sort of “quantum fluctuation” seems to have occurred which caused the uniformly distributed protons to start klopping together to form clouds of dust and gas. As the clouds formed, gravity brought them together tighter and tighter. As things got tighter and tighter, protons began to fuse—nuclear fusion began—and the same light that formed the protons in the beginning  was squeezed back out of them, and the first stars were born. ( I don’t make this stuff up, other scientists do). Finally, after billions of years, there was light.

Not too bad, but, again, not as elegant as “And the Spirit of God moved upon the waters, and God said, 'let there be light,' and there was light.”

I discussed the “evening and morning" issue in the previous exposition. Time in Genesis is not linear, it is exponential.  Physicist Gerald Schroeder^[5], who wrote the book on this very subject, has an excellent discourse on the time aspect. (Disclaimer- I have no vested interest in this book except that the dude beat me to it.)

Now here is a quite interesting thing. We are made of carbon, iron, calcium, and phosphorous. Basically everything that is in a good bag of fertilizer. If everything was initially just protons how did we get such bigger atoms? When protons fuse in the depths of stars then the result is helium. When helium, which consists of two protons in one nucleus, is fused together, then a nucleus with four protons results. Four plus four is eight, four plus two is six and so on. Needless to say, it is much more complicated than that. It always is. A star can only go so far before it uses up all its fuel, and then it explodes in a supernova. In doing so it spreads its dust and newly made elements all over the place and eventually all this dust gets incorporated into new stars and the elements get pounded into even heavier elements. After several generations of star formation and death, elements like we have now came to be formed.  Interestingly, heavy elements like gold, and heavier, could not be made even in the hearts of living stars.  Only the bursts of the supernovas of their deaths are strong enough to make gold. 

Eventually all this stuff began to accumulate in clouds of dust, and through the process of planetary differentiation solar systems with planets orbiting their stars began to form.

Okay, I admit, not very poetic at all, but that is what I interpret the Genesis "firmaments" thing to be all about.

To answer again "Why bother to correlate some old myth with modern science?":  The (quote) “old myth,” by which I mean Genesis, demands a more intellectual context for study and dialogue than the oversimplification that standard creationism imposes.  Genesis is a fabulous piece of literature which, read in harmony with the observations and theories of science, is absolutely staggering.  Were you a literary scholar, would you be happy hearing Shakespeare equated to a comic book?  Neither am I, a proponent of both science and faith, at ease with literalist superficialities that have made a majestic book look bad.  Believing the descriptions presented in Genesis need not mean believing that this limitless universe, its objects and events, were all thrown together fully formed in a 144-hour flurry of unaccustomed activity.  The universe in all its aspects of time, space, energy, matter, and process is incalculably deep and rich, defying the idea of its reduction to little more than a bit of spare change God tossed to a bum.^[6]                

So this morning and evening were the First Day.  We will save the next three Days for later. I am getting thirsty. This creation stuff is a lot of work.^[7]