Saturday, January 14, 2012

Grass first?

Sun and grass
Christian wallpapers

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas; and God saw that it was good.
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.
Genesis 1:10-11

The first Creation story in the Bible is in Genesis 1:1-2:4 and is dated to the beginning of the Persian period 550 before Christ or earlier.

The story is genuinely geocentric and gives a cool natural description of the creation in stages, from the Word commanding let there be light (fiat lux!) to the separation of land and sea and the creation of life.

The story in the beginning of the Bible is 2500 years old or even older and comes to us from the ancient Near East.

I was always just kind of sighing at the creation of green grass and fruit trees before God put Sun and Moon and stars up there for us humans to use as calendars and to give us light day and night.

But then I was given the chance to study origins of life on Earth and even to look at the very very first signs of life [myBlog] known today that were discovered recently from Australia.

Of course the ancients who wrote the Bible had no idea of the relationship between Sun and green grass, which is created first by the commanding Word of God. Even 19th century scientists had no understanding of photosynthesis so how would the people living in the prescientific era understand it.

No way, Jose, and claiming so would twist the Word of God to something it is not.

But now I am not sighing anymore at this mistake among the many others in the story of Creation.

I am actually intrigued and a bit baffled.

Separation of land and sea - this is an important subject in the study of early planet Earth and evolution of life.

And the very very first living things on the shallow seas (not on dry ground, as far as we know today) are cyanobacteria.

The very first living creature mentioned in the Bible is green grass.

Well... a community of cyanobacteria is not green grass.

But it lives by photosynthesis creating oxygen with the power of Sun. Just like green plants do.

Here learning more about Nature makes also that ancient creation story even more fascinating. After all, that story can easily be printed on an A4 sized paper

No, it is not a scientific description (in our language and terminology for those processes we have learned to know in God's world) of the creation of the Universe.

It is God's signature "I have made all this"

And quite a signature it is!

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