Genesis 1:1 and Creation Ex Nihilo Under Attack

For the last two-thousand years, Christians have held that scripture teaches that God created the universe out of nothing, or at the least "things which are seen are made from that which is not seen" (Heb. 11:3). The great majority of Jewish rabbis have agreed with this view. One of the main verses of scripture to support this position is the first verse in the Bible. It is almost universally translated as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Christian apologetics has gotten some mileage out of this ever since the Big Bang (with or without hyperinflation) has been revealed to be the most consistent scientific explanation for how the cosmos appeared. The universe had a beginning. Other creation accounts in other faiths consistently have the gods fashioning the cosmos out of some pre-existing material. Some Christians once considered the "Big-Bang" to be an anti-Christian idea, but over time most have realized that since it is confirming "Creation Ex-Nihilo" that it actually harmonizes with scripture. Atheists and naturalists realized this much more quickly, and spent decades trying to find a way to shoe-horn an eternal universe or at least eternal multiverse, into the data.

That being so, forgive me if I am skeptical of recent claims that Genesis 1:1-2 has been mistranslated over the centuries and should actually be translated in a way which suggests that the God of the Bible fashioned the universe out of a pre-existing, though chaotic, material just like in those other creation myths. Here are the new alternative translations from the Wiki article on Genesis 1:1-2a, and the classic translation of verse one.

1. As a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning (In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth). ED: THIS IS THE CLASSIC TRANSLATION

2. As a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless).

3. Taking all of Genesis 1:2 as background information (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth being untamed and shapeless, God said, Let there be light!).[4]

I find it just too convenient that after twenty centuries with hardly any dispute, only in the last few decades has there been any serious challenge to the idea that Gen. 1:1 teaches creation ex nihilo. I'm not saying that no one else ever proposed these alternative translations, once every few centuries someone might suggest so, but the view never got traction. The text just doesn't support it, and it is doubtful that it even allows for it. Only after it gets embarrassing for the skeptics that the Bible stands out from other creation stories in a way which is confirmed by modern scientific observation do the faux-sophisticates dust off these hypotheses.

Look, I have no loyalty to modern translations when they obviously don't fit the underlying Hebrew or Greek, my book is evidence of that. But this effort seems very forced and an attempt to make the Genesis account just like other Ancient Near East Creation stories where uncreated matter existed but was in a chaotic and primordial state before the gods brought order.

These Hebrew scholars are now claiming that they have learned that in certain circumstances the text can be translated so that it is describing an already existing condition. OK, so the matter existed in a sorry state before God spoke His word. But that doesn't mean that the already existing condition wasn't also created by God, as the traditional translation indicates. God created the universe Before the First Day. The creation week is describing His work ON a universe which He had previously created. That's all the verse is saying and attempts to make it more than that torture the text.

For example, the latter two translations above start with the English word "When". Well, there is a Hebrew word translated "when" (as well as "for" and a couple of other things) (more than one really) and this word is not in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1. They stuck in an English word where there was no Hebrew word there. Then, to start verse two, they leave off the "and" which joins the condition of the earth to God creating it. In the Hebrew of this verse there is a "waw" character there which means "conjunction" (and). In other words- the "and" is in the Hebrew text, but the new translations leave it out, while also starting the verse with a word which is not in the text.

Do you see the first word to the right (Hebrew is read right to left) which is translated "in the beginning"? The exact same form of that word is used several times in Jeremiah (and nowhere else in the bible). Each time it is also translated "In the beginning" or rarely "at the beginning". It is never translated "When in the beginning" and if you read it like that in these other places it is awkward grammatically. Unbelievably, some have tried to use the fact that "when" can legitimately be translated from verse 2:4 to argue that it should be in verse 1:1 as well, even though they are not the same word! I've also heard it argued that it fits better with the pagan Enuma Elish to translate it that way! Talk about reaches! What does this text actually say?

See that character to the far left that looks like a colon at the end of the word for earth? That is the sof passuk, equivalent of a period in Hebrew. So if "When" starts that verse, and again the characters indicating "when" do not appear, it must be "When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (PERIOD). " These alternate translations don't account for that!

Grammar in other languages can be tricky, but that is an awkward fit in any language. It isn't a proper sentence. At most it could be a sentence fragment in answer to a previous question (obviously not) or a title. In English of course, titles don't need periods. But if it is a title, that doesn't explain why the next sentence begins with a conjunction. "And the earth was formless and void...". What is it conjuncting with if not the previous sentence? These alternate translations have to twist the text and ignore how the same word form is used elsewhere.

Up to this point I would imagine that all creationists are cheering me on. But all of this raises another issue, because if the traditional translation is correct, it means that initial conditions of creation, before God spoke His word into it, were far from perfect. Regardless of which way the verse is translated, it poses a problem for Young Earth Creationism. They think God created the universe as a place of sinless and deathless perfection. In their theology, there was no physical death before the fall of Adam. Either way you look at it though, the text doesn't say that. Creation started off a bad place to be that was increasingly made better by His Word entering that creation. At the sixth day He appointed man as His representative to finish His work of subduing the earth and exercising dominion over it.....confirmation that despite all the ordering He had done it was still a somewhat unruly place, save for the garden.

It will be interesting to see if YEC even give up on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to preserve a theological framework which is inconsistent with the initial state of the universe in Genesis 1:2. They either have to give up the idea that God created the universe, demoting Him into a fashioner of what already existed apart from Him as the Gnostics and other ANE cultures thought, or they have to jettison their ideas about the universe being perfect before the fall of Adam. What I pray they give up is theology which isn't really in the bible concerning early Genesis and instead adopt the Christ-centered model, which gloriously demonstrates that Genesis isn't just another ANE myth, but the inspired word of God.

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Post Script-

Dr. Henry Sun was on a YouTube video from the "What Your Pastor Didn't Tell You" channel and he was defending the re-translation based on the idea that it was a construct. The young host asked him if that mattered. Here is my response which I put in the thread. Dr. Sun did not reply even though he replied to others in the thread.....

You asked the right question at 23:26. I question whether Dr. Sun has the right answer. More likely it DOES NOT MATTER whether it is construct or not because Hebrew has these groups of characters and words meant to be taken as a single thought and put with those in the next section. I don't say this as an expert in Hebrew, but it is something elementary. So using what the bible Hub interlinear shows.... "In the beginning of Created God - the heavens and the earth". You have two thoughts there. The first is taken and applied to the second. Even if the "of" is there, it still means "of the heavens and the earth: IMHO. 'The beginning of the heavens and the earth was God creating them' is still the thought that is being expressed. "And the earth was formless and void" starts with a conjunctive "AND". It is connected to the first part. "“When God began to create the heavens and the earth,” doesn't match with the conjunctive "and" which starts verse 2. Not sure it would even need one if what it is trying to say is that the earth was formless and void when God began to "create" it. Verse three is where the actual work, but not BARA, creating work, begins. That starts with a consecutive and, showing that it is referring to something happening AFTER verses 1 and 2. Verse two has His spirit brooding or hovering. He isn't doing any creating there. Even if it means He "began creating" then He "began creating" sometime before the start of verse 3, because v 3 starts off with the consectuive "and". Therefore this translation is nonsensical. It is describing Him as beginning the creating and then in v 2 describes Him as NOT creating but just brooding or hovering. Then there is a time movement, and the subsequent event (which isn't even "creating", that verb is only used on days five and six) which is shaping an already existing world, begins. The use of bara only on days five and six is another reason why this new translation does not add up. He didn't "create" the heavens OR the earth on any of the six days. Rather, other words are used to describe His action. The only things created during that week were animals of the sea and sky and humans on days five and six respectively. This supports the idea that the "creating" of the heavens and the earth came before the first "day". After that He 'worked on' or fashioned the heavens and the earth which He had previously created. His examples of "when the sentence structure was the same and it is translated "when"" are I am sorry to say, misleading. For example Numbers 3:1 was his first cite and his translation says "When the Lord spoke to Moses". But the actual word used is a combination of the Hebrew "Be" and a form of "Yom". So that a more precise translation would be "in the day the Lord spoke with Moses" or "in the year" or "in the time" the Lord spoke with Moses. So the Hebrew "Be" combined with some time refferent is "In the ___________". Well, if the time referrent is "beginning" then the translation should be "in the beginning".

************************ Update: this article shows the details of the issue and why the best solution is a tweaking of the translation in a way that retains the intent of the traditional translation rather than one of the convoluted new translations that have their own problems "Originally, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.... The same prefix also means "at, so it could also be "At commencement, God created the heavens and the earth....." or "In A beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"....implying there could be mulitple universes each with an indpendent supernatural realm. That's even if there is a problem with the original translation. As I have said, Numbers 3:1 literally means "in the day" and it has the same "be" prefix as is found in be-reshith in Gen. 1:1. It seems like it doesn't have to say "ba" to be translated "in THE (time period)".

Get the book.

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What Does this Failure to Develop Resistance Say About Unaided Macro-Evolution?

So it turns out that this tuberculosis bacteria has been trying for seven decades to develop resistance to a particular anti-biotic that will still permit it to be viable- without success. This is equal to many millions of generations of bacteria in a population of many billions which were under stress due to the anti-biotic.

Does this say anything about the limits of purely natural evolution? I think so. Even if other bacteria species have made the jump and developed resistance to an anti-biotic (at the cost of reduced fitness otherwise) this one seems to have hit on a hard biological limit which unguided evolution cannot move it past. Surely this is not the only such hard limit in earth's living things. If this organism can't make this jump, how likely is it that the same mechanisms can cause a deer-like animal to develop into various types of whales in probably much fewer generations and far less tries?

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The Gene Changes Needed to Give Humans Big Brains Points to Design

There is a board I once frequented where I asked to quit getting notifications when I no longer wished to be associated with the board. In so doing, all my comments there got deleted, which I have no objection to and said so at the time. Still, I am glad a preserved some choice comments from a couple of threads. One thread concerned a study which reported on some amazing findings about the genetic differences between us and apes. On the thread I tried to point out that these differences aren't likely to be the product of mere chance with these comments about things said in the study. Quotes from the study in a white background and my comments on it shaded tan background below...

" they also didn’t see it in orangutans and found only truncated, inactive versions in our closest relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees." 

This is not a mere duplication. This is a crucial gene which does not exist except in chimps and gorillas, and then only in a truncated and inactive form. They said it somehow got “repaired” somewhere in the hominid line. You would think an inactive gene that was already truncated would collect more and more mutations until it was a real mess. But in this case when it gets turned back on it increases brain size? 

And check this quote out: 

"“What’s amazing is that there are many signaling pathways that control the development of the embryo and are completely conserved between species. The Notch signaling pathway is the oldest one. You can find it in every animal you look at. It has been used by developing embryos for as long as animals have existed. And yet, there is a very recent innovation in this pathway specifically in the human lineage, through NOTCH2NL,”

So the pathway is conserved in every animal species for hundreds of millions of years yet this quantum leap forward happened so far as we know just this once 3 million years ago? Is it not astounding that a path can be stable and essential for so long and then a game-changing improvement comes about via a repair to a long-deactivated and truncated gene? 

And that happening once is astounding enough, but did you catch this one?.. 

“The Vanderhaeghen team developed a tailored RNA sequencing analysis for specific and sensitive detection of human-specific genes in human fetal cerebral cortex. This allowed them to identify a repertoire of 35 genes unique to humans that are active during development of the cerebral cortex in humans, including NOTCH2NL genes.” 

THIRTY-FIVE functional genes unique to human linneage just on the development of our cerebral cortex. That they know of....

And it goes on like that. For those who will allow themselves the capacity to question whether humans are strictly the result of what we call "natural" evolutionary processes I think the results of the research point toward the answer being a resounding "no".

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The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event Another Problem for Naturalists

The Cambrian Explosion refers to a geologically short period of time in which every type of basic body plan (phylum) of all animals alive today - and quite a few others which are now extinct- show up in the fossil record. Many scientists say that this happened within a 30 million year time period- a long time to us but shockingly fast if we are counting on naturalistic evolutionary forces to produce dozens of new body plans. But it gets worse because other research suggests that the real innovation occurred in only 20 million years.

Even that number probably over-estimates the time it took for all these new phyla to show up. This is because it is only a calculation based on the fossils we have found in the fossil record. What if the new phylum which shows twenty million years after the Cambrian begins is really of a creature who was around much earlier, we just haven't found an earlier fossil of it yet? So the short length of time is liable to get shorter as we learn more.

Of course naturalists don't like what this implies, so they have been hard at work producing speculation about how the life forms of the previous era were not so different after all and basically dreaming up everything they can to make the case that the Cambrian Explosion wasn't such a big deal after all.

But it turns out they have another problem almost as big as the Cambrian Explosion and this one might be even harder to explain away. While all these new phyla show up in the Cambrian, they don't diversify for 40 million years. Each body plan has very few species with that plan. Then, all phyla start dramatically diversifying at once into new families. Its called "The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event" and it happened in an even shorter period of time than the Cambrian Explosion.

Now it turns out that this event too happened in a much narrower window of time than one might expect with known naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms. Here is how the link described it....

The early evolution of animal life on Earth is a complex and fascinating subject. The Cambrian Explosion (between about 540 to 510 million years ago) produced a stunning array of body plans, but very few separate species of each, notes Stigall. But nearly 40 million years later, during the Ordovician Period, this situation changed, with a rapid radiation of species and genera during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.

I think what they are trying not to say is that naturalists have two problems, not one, when it comes to explaining the diversification of life in the seas. The earth can bring forth living things after their kinds- there is a background sort of "evolution" going on, but the record also shows changes too big and too fast to reasonably explained by any known evolutionary method. It looks like at certain points, nature had help. Help to do things greater and faster than she can do on her own without it- we don't see that magnitude of rapid change now.

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I really did not know who "Joshua Harris" was but it appears that Christianity has had another celebrity professional Christian walk away from the faith. If this keeps up all God is going to have left are those who love Him for who He really is. Mere amateurs who don't get paid a nickel for their love nor one minute in the spotlight for their adoration will comprise the bulk of the church. The payment Christ made for their sins was enough for them. I think God can handle it.

It seems that Mr. Harris achieved fame young for a book he wrote about "giving up dating" (I Kissed Dating Goodbye) in favor of courtship. There is a lot wrong with modern dating, don't get me wrong. But whatever alternative Mr. Harris pursued wasn't foolproof either. Last year he separated from his wife. This year he loudly left the Christian faith, condemning the church for the usual laundry-list of misdeeds such as not accepting homosexual relationships as "marriages".

Since I don't know the fellow, apparently he didn't even know himself very well, I cannot say with any certainty what his motives are, except to say that even the best of them will be tainted with sin like mine and everyone else's. I do see a pattern though. He wanted praise from people. He wanted to one-up the works of others. When he was a Christian, his way of finding a spouse was more spiritual than yours. But when he couldn't live up to the expectations he set for himself he didn't find humility. The law isn't supposed to make us proud, it is supposed to make us humble and point to our need for grace through Christ. Those who hold up some law, even law based in scripture, and then make their boast in how well they follow that law are setting themselves up for failure. 

We were meant to fail in our own strength. That was the real point of the law. He had to fulfill it for us. What I think Joshua Harris has done is that in pride he has refused to take that last vital step. I wonder if he ever grasped the true essence of the Christian faith- that it is not about how good we are but about how good Christ is.

If you will think about it you will see that Joshua Harris has not changed a thing about himself. He simply changed value systems. He is still trying to be justified by works. He is still telling people that his set of good works are better than theirs. He is still seeking the approval of the masses, just different masses. Once he couldn't cut it under the Christian framework, he decided it was false. In truth, it was just no more use to him. Nor is it of use to anyone who approaches from an attitude of pride.

The Hermeneutic of Godlessness: Shoe-Horning Naturalism into the Interpretation of Scripture

Hermeneutics concerns itself with the frameworks or methods that one uses to interpret texts, in particular Divine texts. So for example a theologian might look at the Christ-centered model for Early Genesis and ask, "What Hermeneutic did you use to come to those conclusions?"  They are asking about the methods and premises and parameters that were used to draw a particular meaning from the text.  A similar term "Exegesis", is a subset of hermeneutics, and focuses on just the rules you used to interpret the text and not the overall narrative.

Hermeneutics are not a bad thing, but it's a subject for theologians, not teachers. Neither Moses, nor the Prophets, nor Christ, nor the Apostles, spent much if any time describing what their "hermeneutic" was. They just taught from the text as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance and left it for the theologians who came after to talk about how such meaning was derived and discover what rules the teachers used in expounding from scripture. I consider the teacher to be like Galileo or Copernicus. They describe the truth of the universe as they see it. The theologians are more like Newton. They come along afterward and say "Here are the rules concerning what they were talking about". It isn't that one is good and the other is bad, but it is not everyone's job to be both.

The truth is that often the apostles didn't follow what mainstream theologians would consider sound hermeneutics. In the second half of Galatians chapter four Paul writes about how the two sons of Abraham really represent two covenants. What rules did he use to get that connection? None that would be approved by most of today's theologians, but he is still right. After all, he was an apostle and his ministry was validated by extraordinary miracles. Those folks are getting their message directly from the Holy Spirit, so man-made rules (which are really what hermenutics are) are no obstacle.

I will say that even though I don't have a developed "hermenutic" and don't care to expend any effort forming one, I do realize that just because an apostle can make those types of leaps doesn't mean that you or I can. We can apply the connections they made because it is reasonable to suppose that their making a connection itself validates that connection. But we can't pull our own from the ether. We are not them. We have to make the case that a connection is valid by, for example, showing where it is pointed to in the rest of the body of scripture.

That's just a decent start on a principle of exegesis, it is a long way from a hermenutic. And while I don't say hermenutics are bad, they can be bad. Even when they are good, they can be a distraction which changes the subject from "what do you think the Holy Spirit showed you from God's word?" to the question of "what contexts, semiotics, presuppositions, and parameters did you use in coming up with that meaning?" Hey, I am just telling you what I think God told me. My focus in on the message, not devising a set of rules or contexts which determine how the message was derived. It's not my job.

Again, that doesn't mean they are bad, just not my thing and nothing I care to be distracted by. But they can be bad. Innately bad. You can have bad rules or methods for interpreting divine texts and one in that category would be a flawed or bad hermenutic. I've run into a perfect example of one recently. Here is the background for it....

The assumption of naturalism is that all causes and phenomena have natural causes. The use of methodological naturalism is a perfectly valid, and perhaps essential, tool to scientifically study the natural universe. This is the premise that for research purposes we will assume that all actions have natural causes- no supernatural causes can be considered. This is the standard operating procedure for "natural science", that is, the study of the natural universe. Because we are within nature we often used "science" and "natural science" interchangeably. But "science" is a method of study, not a subject matter. If one is not studying the natural universe, there is no reason in principle one must limit causes and meanings to natural ones. I speak about this in my call for theology to operate more like a science, as it once did.

While the natural sciences may use the methodology of naturalism to study nature, there is no reason this tool must be extended into a philosophy. It is one thing to say "we are only going to consider natural causes in this experiment because that is all we can test for" and quite another to say "there is no such thing as a supernatural cause." This is elevating a tool or method into a philosophy which makes claims about every area of existence.

What I have discovered is that there is a surprising number of theologians and "theologian-adjacent" people who insist on attempting to impose what is in effect philosophical naturalism as a requirement for any valid (in their view) interpretive method (hermenutic). They do this by saying that the meaning we derive from scripture must be limited to 1) the scope of understanding of the human author and 2) accessible to the audience of the day. Such arbitrary rules are in effect asserting that there is no detectable supernatural action involved in the scriptures. God can't have put a hidden meaning into the text to be revealed in later generations because such a message would be beyond the understanding of the human author and undetectable to an audience of his day. The text meaning is limited to human understanding at that time.

Some insist that these are the only valid ways to interpret religious texts even though the logic of their two requirements is almost self-refuting. The human author and the audience of the day considered much of the text to be prophetic utterances from God. They would have been completely comfortable with the idea that God would also be laying groundwork for some progressive revelation of His nature with these words. These rules would invalidate much of the exegesis of the apostles who often tied events in the Old Testament to events surrounding Christ. It was even expected that God could speak through someone who was not even aware that they were speaking by inspiration (John 11:50-51). So in effect these artificially imposed man-made rules claim that the text of scripture can only have a meaning that the audience of the day would understand, but that they were in fact dead wrong about what they understood!

I almost feel embarrassed writing about it, so absurd is the assertion that what claims to be a Divine text only be evaluated for meaning under such man-made rules. The Holy Spirit is the real author, and He is not limited to the understanding of the human author through whom the texts were penned. Just the opposite. 1 Peter 1:20-21 says that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of private interpretation- it is not a question of what the author meant. Rather it says "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." The naturalist hermenutics deny what the scripture claims that it is. It presupposes rules which forbid consideration of any detectable Divine action - based on no evidence and in denial of the testimony and evidence which exists. You may have heard of "presuppositional apologetics"? This type of hermenutic is also presuppositional- just with premises which conform to naturalism rather than theism.

I view it as most often an attempt to rig the terms of debate in advance so that one side can't possibly win. Atheists do this when they, for example, demand "scientific" proof for the existence of God when by definition science cannot test for the supernatural. I can hear them protest, "but you are violating all the principles of sound hermenutics when you say it means this". No, I just feel no obligation to be bound by rules made up by people whose world-view I consider ridiculous. I don't care about the rules you made up, even if you put a fancy name to them and surround them with a bunch of $64 words. You don't get to make the rules for me, in particular if your rules assume the prophets and the apostles had it all wrong.

In conclusion, I see attempts to change the subject from what I am teaching to explaining, applying, or devising a methodology to describe how such a meaning was obtained into two categories: Attempts I am uninterested in and see as a distraction and attempts I am fundamentally opposed to.

The latter usually try to insist on premises which amount to philosophical naturalism, and this is an arbitrary restriction which I summarily reject. The former is more of a diversion from better things even if it is not bad in itself. Given the terrible theology and misunderstandings out there on early Genesis, it is enough of a challenge to get folks to see the material with new eyes and understand what I am saying. I have no time or inclination to hash out how such a meaning was derived. The message is too important to shift the conversation to its method of composition. Never mind that just now, I want people to know what it is saying. I am not opposed to such conversations, I just can't spare the time to be a part of them.

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Evidence for Early Dates for Gospels

Early dates for the gospels? What this link is claiming is that there is a document family, f35, which goes back to the 3rd century AD. None of the documents that old are complete so we can't tell if they had colophons at the end- we just have fragments and scraps from the documents that old. But  "descendants" of that document "family" from the 12th or 13th century do have colophons at the end. At least half of them do. And these complete documents with colophons at the end  claim that "this gospel was first released X years after the ascension of Christ". And those dates are quite early.  If indeed the complete documents we have from the 13th century were faithfully copying the colophons from earlier documents then it appears that the so-called "synoptic" gospels were released within 15 years after the Resurrection. Read about it here.

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