Erm, is this actually news? I remember a small book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. My memories are vague though because I was more interested in the dinosaurs and sable tigers.

I remember a big book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. I remember being more interested in the animals on the ark going in 2 by 2.

But even before that:

> In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ...And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ... And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so.

So:

First, Earth covered with water, clouds right up against the water, no sun

Then, Earth covered with water, a clear visible area between the clouds and the water.

Then Continents appear.

I'm as atheist as they come, but I guess it's a little weird how many religions describe the earth as being completely covered in water initially. Maybe it's a coincidence and a natural progression in thought when thinking up a random story of earth's creation, but interesting nonetheless.

Pfft everyone knows this is all just a simulation and "gods"/creation was just the init-script. Gotta do a bulk load into memory of all that water first before computing textures and other compute intensive shit....

There was a really bad flood in the bronze age that wiped out the records of a few civilizations. For a lot of people, it really was a reset of the world after the water receded.

Pretty much all of the significant early civilizations appeared around large rivers (I guess a good source of water and nutrient rich soil is necessary for a large civilization) seems reasonable that a major flood would have to happen at each of those places eventually thus becoming their flood myth?

Also sky looks like it's all made of water and some water often falls from it. Dry land therefore must be exception made by gods for us.

Another 'coincidence' is that the order that plants, water animals, land animals, flying animals, and humans are created seems to match what you might derive from evolution theory. And, that man is created from dust of the earth. Kind of weird to even think that different animals came about within an orderly process. Kind of weird to think that the universe had a beginning; seems to make more sense to assume it just always was and will be, but current science agrees: universe had a beginning and will have an end.

You write: "the order that plants, water animals, land animals, flying animals, and humans are created seems to match what you might derive from evolution theory"

I don't see that. Genesis 1:21 says "great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind" were created on the 4th day, and "every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind" were on the 5th."

Evolution theory has that whales specifically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans ), and all marine mammals, evolved first on land then entered the sea. The same for winged creatures.

Additionally, the Bible has two creation stories, with different orderings. Genesis 2 has man created before animals.

Genesis 2:7 - "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Genesis 2:19 - "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them"

> "Additionally, the Bible has two creation stories, with different orderings. Genesis 2 has man created before animals."

This is an incredibly important detail that a lot of people ignore. Genesis 2 is a fairly old and classic creation story, whereas Genesis 1 is probably the most recent addition to Genesis, probably written during the Babylonian Exile. It's a poem, structured by the days of the week, that tells that God didn't only create animals and humans, like Genesis 2 tells, but also the very fabric of the universe, light, darkness, the sun and stars, etc. It expands the scope of Creation compared to the more human-level view of Genesis 2. Genesis 2 is the human story of creation, Genesis 1 is the scientist's story of creation (at the time; Babylonians were the scientists of their age and studied the stars).

Thanks for your strong points. I guess I would say that it's still interesting to me how close it is to current details of evolution theory. According to my other reasons for believing in God and the value of the Bible, it seems wiser to assume that the scientific community has yet to observe enough. But, I understand how someone would prefer the current consensus of the senses.

I guess I just don't see how it's all that close.

How are there grasses and herbs and trees (Genesis 1:12) before there's day and night or seasons (Genesis 1:14)? Evolutionary theory says that life was created after the crust cooled down - which means there was already day and night. And seasons too, since that depends on the inclination of the Earth.

Genesis 1:16 says the Moon was created after fruit trees. The earliest seeded trees are from the late Devonian, so no more than about 400 million years ago - well after the Moon started to orbit the Earth.

There are many other creation myths. How do you evaluate them for accuracy if you don't use "the current consensus of the senses"? Perhaps Mbombo really did vomit us up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbombo , and we just haven't found the evidence?

> I guess I just don't see how it's all that close.

To me, it is interesting that the rough outline is similar. Yes, I agree that some specifics are not in the same order. Also, simply the fact that Genesis 1 describes a process at all, seems like a prescient paradigm. And, that there was actually a Beginning, rather than just everything always existing.

> Mbombo

My best guess is that the creation story was passed down orally for a long time, thus there are variations in different cultures. So why would I accept the Genesis account as more accurate than the account given by the Kuba people? That's predicated on my faith in the Judeo-Christian God. Why do I have faith in Him? Because I was born into a Christian household, and learned about the teachings of the Bible, then opened my mind to seek the truth with relentless intellectual honesty (or at least tried to), and God worked in my life (just a case study here), and I couldn't harden my heart to how meaningful He is. So, I was no longer debating with facts, but with a Person. In addition, every intellectual debate always left room to maintain faith or abandon faith. I haven't found an argument that forces me to disbelieve (nor do I have one that forces someone to believe). It's clear from Scriptures that God allows us the choice; that he doesn't make himself undeniably plain.

The Biblical creation story seems strongly influenced by the older Babylonian creation story, for which we have written records. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1#Influence... points out:

> The Enuma Elis contains numerous parallels with the Old Testament, and has led to a general conclusion amongst some researchers that the paralleled Old Testament stories were based on the Mesopotamian work. Overarching similarities include: reference to a watery chaos before creation; a separation of the chaos into heaven and earth; different types of waters and their separation during the creation process; as well as the indirect textual similarity between the number of tablets and the number of days of creation: seven.

I therefore think it's difficult to say that Genesis 1 "seems like a prescient paradigm" when the roughly similar outline existed before Genesis was written. At the very least, the Enuma Elis should also be considered an equally prescient paradigm, yes?

My current stance on that is that the account in Genesis is older than the Babylonian version, despite not having yet discovered any written record of the former older than the latter. And again, that the Genesis story was passed orally for some time, and many cultures appropriated and molded it to reinforce the divine power of their government. As discussed in the previous post, I'm biased because of personal experience. Though for precedence, consider how the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought a written record that was a millennium older than any other known at the time (I don't know much about archaeology, but I think that's accurate).

And another example of archaeological discovery affirming Biblical accounts after a period of doubt (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#Biblical_background):

> Before the archeological discoveries that revealed the Hittite civilization, the only source of information about the Hittites had been the Old Testament. Francis William Newman expressed the critical view, common in the early 19th century, that, "no Hittite king could have compared in power to the King of Judah...".[10]

From the link you shared, this theory would be interesting to explore:

> Based on an analysis of proper names in the texts A.T. Clay proposed that the Enuma Elish was a combination of a Semitic myth from Amurru and a Sumerian myth from Eridu—this theory is thought to lack solidity, and specifically any historical or archaeological evidence.

It feels like you've shifted the topic.

Earlier you wrote "simply the fact that Genesis 1 describes a process at all, seems like a prescient paradigm."

I commented that it cannot be seen as a prescient paradigm because earlier texts describe a similar paradigm.

You correctly point out that the Genesis story can be older than Genesis 1.

Which I agree with, since I think the Enuma Elish is the same Genesis story. Or rather, the Genesis account "[borrowed] themes from Mesopotamian mythology, but adapt[ed] them to the Israelite people's belief in one God" ( Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative ).

I also agree with the concept since the Biblical flood narrative is believed to have been written nearly 1,000 years after older written Mesopotamian flood myths - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Mythologies .

Any argument for older precedence must also consider that Mesopotamian mythology is also almost certainly far older.

However, you still can't argue that the Genesis 1 description seems a prescient paradigm. At best you can say is that you believe there are centuries older accounts which match the Genesis 1 description and which, if found, would be a prescient paradigm.

But the complexity of that statement doesn't fit your "simply the fact" comment.

> And another example of archaeological discovery affirming Biblical accounts after a period of doubt (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#Biblical_background):

Was all of The Illiad correct because Troy was found?

Note also that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Hittites comments about ongoing "debates about possible identities between the Anatolian Hittite Empire and the biblical Hittites".

And yet God made Sun, 'day' after he made fruit-bearing trees. Wonderful lack of coincidence.

I'm fairly certain that having plants before the Sun contradicts most scientific consensus. Though, right now I'm focused on the things that are strikingly similar to our current observable knowledge. I also leave a lot of room for the scientific community to discover reasons to adapt their theories, as has historical happened. It is important to note that 'light' existed on 'day' one, and perhaps in a few hundred years we will discover a more specific description of how that was true, but the story doesn't claim plants grew without light. (Regarding the 'days' of the creation story, I certainly leans towards interpreting that poetically, for a few reasons, not the least of which being the lack of the Sun until 'day' four.)

In Genesis 1, light and dark, day and night, were created well before plants and trees. It's just the sun and stars that came later somehow.

Yea... but we know that light comes from fusion happening inside the sun, so the light on day 1 must be some other kind of light. Some spiritual light? Not sure how plants can photosynthesize that.

Author didn't know what he was talking about and any relation of his writings to actual reality is purely accidental.

What do you make of Adam being ashamed of being naked in the presence of God?

To me, that seems to be just something a clothed adult in a pudic society would think, not something the first man would actually feel.

The transition from being unashamed to ashamed is a big part of the Garden story.

First: "Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame."

Then, later: "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths."

I don't know, or care to focus on, how literal or figurative the story is. Perhaps it's describing a change that occurred during evolution to (or within) homo sapiens, a change that caused us to be more self-aware (in a bad way?), self-reliant, conscious of good and evil. Just speculation here.

Adam fell into the duality of the subject object relationship when he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this much is implied in the very name of the tree which relates two opposing and irreconcilable terms. After eating from this tree, Adam began to see himself as seperate from God. This led to the absursity of his shame, since putting on clothes is not going to hide what's underneath from the all knowing being. For man, it is absurd that he sees himself as seperate from God, whose existence man depends on for his own being. Seeing his nakedness after having not seen it previously also speaks to man's mode of being shifting from the inward to the outward, with the surface of the body being the limit of outward development and the preoccupation with it being exposed pointing to this shift and fall. The two eyes of the two individuals, again signifying duality, being opened also attests to this shift since the eyes that see the nakedness can only see outwardly. And finally, recall that this shift from the inward to the outward is precisely the fall of man, since the "Kingdom of God is within you."

> Perhaps it's describing a change that occurred during evolution to (or within) homo sapiens, a change that caused us to be more self-aware (in a bad way?), self-reliant, conscious of good and evil. Just speculation here.

This is something I think about sometimes. We now know that anatomically modern humans shared a timeline and even bred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, probably others. So there was a period when anatomically modern humans, probably cognitively modern (thus capable of language) or close to it, were interacting with these other archaic homo sapiens and probably became aware of their cognitive differences. Maybe these ancient stories reflect an early rationalisation of how human-neanderthal or human-denisovan physical and cultural practices differed. Of course the stories would have to be transmitted for thousands of generations...

Bonus armchair biblical hermeneutics: the Nephilim [1] are the biblical reflex of older stories about one or more archaic homo sapiens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim

That could certainly explain how Cain, son of allegedly the first man and woman, was afraid of what other people might do to him when he was exiled. Clearly his family wasn't the only people on Earth.

Though I don't think that's really about Denisovans and Neanderthals. It's just a transition from creation myth to other kinds of myth, and not reflective of any real events. I'm a Christian, and I'm firmly convinced that the first half of Genesis (possibly all of it, but definitely the first part) is just a collection of older mythological stories shaped into a somewhat cohesive whole, with some mention of God shoehorned in, whether it makes sense or not. It's certainly not meant to be taken literally in any way. There might be a kernel of truth to some of them (there probably was a big flood where someone saved a lot of animals), but that kernel is small. From Abraham onward, it starts to look more like it might be based on real events.

> "our skin is pretty bad compared to almost every animal out there."

Our skin is awesome compared to almost every animal out there. No other animal can sweat like we do, which is essential to keep our body temperature down during long periods of exertion. Humans can hunt almost any animal to exhaustion. We may not be fast, but we've got way more endurance than any other land-based animal, and our skin is a big part of that.

(Admittedly you alluded to this with "to better suit our hunting style", but I thought I'd make this more explicit. Human skin is fantastic.)

That's not universal. Only some hunter-gathers use animal's skins. Some use, eg, gourds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka .

The modern Sentinelese are hunter-gathers and also essentially naked, wearing only "bark strings", says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese .

These observations support my view that the statement "Being exposed means that you cannot even take care of yourself" is not universally correct.

I'm genuinely curious as to why do they even bother with those strings then?

Is it shame?

Is it something else?

I am no anthropologist. A quick search on the topic (not specific to those people) suggests decoration, identity, and "perception of how to live life" are possible reasons.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160919-the-real-origin-of-c... comments that it might be decoration.

> Gilligan points out that humans were probably decorating themselves long before clothes even existed. "When you look at contemporary hunter-gatherers who don't use clothing, they decorate themselves brilliantly with body painting. You don't need clothing in order to do that."

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/debunking-colonial... points to several "contexts and situations where elements of dress [broadly speaking] seem to have been of particular relevance." One example is:

> a hunter, before he tracks his prey, must cut himself and rub the cuts with a root called ssho /oa. And he must rub his body with it and wear ssho /oa in a band around his shoulders. This is to get the game to “run foolishly”, not knowing that it is afraid, and to approach the hunter as an equal. ...

> Far from being naked, or nearly naked, the Bushmen of colonial southern Africa had a complex and meaningful practice of dress. It was intimately related to subsistence, identity and their perception of how to live life in the world as they knew it.

The author's book is at http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/dress-as-social-relations/ .

More on what eats what I reckon :)

Also interesting (and slightly OT) that almost every living thing either has origins in water or gestates in a fluid. Am I wrong? Are there any animals that are born/created "dry"? I can't think of any but it doesn't mean there aren't any. If that's your observation of life, stands to reason you'd come up with a similar "creation story" for the world.

Religions such as? I'm only familiar with christianity so I'm curious what other religion has this feature. (Obviously any religion that's referring to the same source, genesis, are counted as 1)

The Quran says this kind of stuff about creation:

1. https://legacy.quran.com/21/30

2. https://legacy.quran.com/41/11

By Wikipedia's count, dozens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths

Quite a few across a wide geographic range all identically feature a handful of humans (and possibly animals and/or plants) being forewarned of an impending flood, building boats (or otherwise being put in boats), and surviving until the waters receded. (EDIT 2: I realize now that I got things mixed up and you were asking for the "Earth started off underwater" myths, but there are plenty of examples of those, too).

EDIT: to elaborate further on some specific examples (pulled from Wikipedia, except for the African example which I pulled directly from the cited source, since the article didn't include synopses of any of those examples):

- North America (Hopi): « The other version [of the Hopi story of their entrance into the "Fourth World"] (mainly told in Oraibi) has it that Tawa destroyed the Third World in a great flood. Before the destruction, Spider Grandmother sealed the more righteous people into hollow reeds which were used as boats. On arrival on a small piece of dry land, the people saw nothing around them but more water, even after planting a large bamboo shoot, climbing to the top, and looking about. Spider Woman then told the people to make boats out of more reeds, and using island "stepping-stones" along the way, the people sailed east until they arrived on the mountainous coasts of the Fourth World. »

- South America: « "The Inca’s supreme being and creator god, Con Tici (Kon Tiki) Viracocha, first created a race of giants, but they were unruly, so he destroyed them in a mighty flood and turned them to stone. Following the deluge, he created human beings from smaller stones. "In other versions of this story, the impious race is the pre-Inca civilization of the Tiahuanaco Indians about Lake Titicaca, the large high lake in the Andes. Viracocha drowns them and spares two, a man and a woman, to start the human race anew. Some versions of the Unu Pachakuti have the surviving man and woman floating to Lake Titicaca in a wooden box." »

- India: « Matsya (the incarnation of Lord Vishnu as a fish) forewarns Manu (a human) about an impending catastrophic flood and orders him to collect all the grains of the world in a boat; in some forms of the story, all living creatures are also to be preserved in the boat. When the flood destroys the world, Manu – in some versions accompanied by the seven great sages – survives by boarding the ark, which Matsya pulls to safety. »

- Korea: « Namu Doryeong (Hangul: 나무도령, Hanja: --道令) is a myth about the son of a guardian tree spirit. The son, Namu Doryeong, survived a flood by floating on the tree. He first saved a colony of ants from the flood, then a swarm of mosquitoes, until he had saved all the animals of the world. Namu Doryeong finally saved a young human boy, despite the tree's advice against it. After the flood, Namu Doryeong met an older woman and her two daughters on Mt. Baekdu, where they had been safe from the flood. The woman told Namu Doryeong if he won a contest, he could have her daughter's hand in marriage. Namu Doryeong won the contest with the aid of a swarm of ants, who turned out to be the very ants that Namu Doryeong had saved during the flood. Namu Doryeong and the human boy married the two daughters, and they formed the next race of humans. »

- Scandinavia: « According to the Gylfaginning section of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, Bergelmir and his wife alone among the giants were the only survivors of the enormous deluge of blood which flowed from Ymir's wounds when he was killed by Odin and his brothers Vili and Vé. They escaped the sanguinary flood by climbing onto an object and subsequently became the progenitors of a new race of Jötunn. »

- DRC (Bakongo): « An elderly woman, tired and covered with sores, arrived at a town in a valley. She asked for hospitality but was turned away at every home except the last one she came to. The people there took her in and cared for her until she was well again. When she was ready to leave, she told her hosts to come with her. Because of the other inhabitants' lack of hospitality, the town was cursed, and the Supreme God, Nzambi, would destroy it. The night after they left, heavy rain fell, turning the valley into a lake. All of the townspeople were drowned. »

I think you're referring to the deluge, which is interesting, but different to the sea in genesis 1.

Yeah, I realized that after typing everything up, lol

One point of comparison would be the sheer number of "earth diver" myths (believed to have originated in East Asia, then spread across modern day Russia/Finland and North America), in which some being (often a bird) dives into that primordial ocean and pulls up the land.

Sounds like readers of HN need to behold the protong:

http://unurthed.com/2007/12/23/szukalskis-science-of-zermati...

water-based creation myths are quite common, there is some classification of creation myths that divides them in 4 great groups (ex-nihilo, water based, cosmic eggs, dismembered god).

The most famous example would be the Enuma Elish, where the world comes from the meeting of salt water and fresh water.

Most of the Bible content comes from scriptures and wisdom that came thousands of years before Christ. It wasn't supposed to reveal something but to remind men of ancient wisdom, which was visualized by seers long before Christ; Not all of it makes sense or is valuable to me, and the religious part of the Bible may be questionable, but the moral teachings contained in it are faultless, because they're so simple and above any prejudices;

What about "snowball earth"? Did that happen before or after?

The ice age was well after the continents.

The universe itself is the simulation, there is no outside “observer” except consciousness itself. At least that’s my current general belief

Why is it a simulation? Isn't it reality?

Oh boy, you're one of today's lucky 10,000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlTKTTt47WE

I'm aware of the theory, but I was specifically addressing the case of simulation with no outside observer. In that particular flavor of the theory, I feel the word 'simulation' is not as useful as simply calling this system 'reality'.

At this point I don't believe there's even a distinction to make, tbh. I definitely don't believe we perceive "objective" reality, our bodies have so much filtering going on (and different species have different filters, thus a "different" reality).

Not perceiving something doesn't make it cease to exist. So, there's still the question of choosing to believe that an objective reality exists at all, even though we can't accurately/fully perceive it. On another note, if the universe is infinite, either through expansion on the macro level or through endless sub-denomination of particles, and we perceive but a finite portion of it, then do we perceive nothing (as a constant out of infinity approaches zero)?

A simulation requires something else being simulated in order for it to be a simulation, otherwise it's just itself.

Or God.

Question I desperately want the answer to: if memories are encoded (nature not nurture), then how far back can we remember? And where is this intuition derived from?

For example, we can almost imagine what memories are shared to us from 3-4 generations back, and assumably that pattern continues. Does it end 20k years ago (presumably not), are there intuitions that are wiped out over millennia, or do we have intuitions that date back to our first multicellular / higher order processing days?

Not what you're asking about, but there's an idea that some Australian Aboriginal legends record historical events that happened thirteen thousand years ago:

https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

Is there any evidence for this? I suppose instincts are 'nature' driven evolved memories of a kind, but I'm not sure that's what you are referring to.

The Earth wasn't first covered with water though, the article says the earliest continental material is even older at 4bn years. It may have been covered with water at some point 3bn years ago, but if we're talking about when it 'in the beginning', there's no reason to choose to start the clock then and not earlier.

You're misreading this simple text.

It's talking about primal elements and how something formed out of formlessness and emptiness. At the point where an actual "earth" (e.g., a planet) is formed there is no mention of it being covered with water; more like the opposite.

> Spirit of God was hovering over the waters

Looks pretty clear to me?

To the writers and readers of this text "the waters" would have meant, first and foremost, the primal element. Not the literal stuff floating in puddles.

The correct analogy for a person from 2020 would be "chemical elements", or even "atoms and molecules".

Interesting perspective. It's certainly worth keeping in mind that words from ancient texts may have had meanings that we currently don't recognise anymore. This sounds quite plausible.

I'm not religious at all though I grew up in the church as a child and this part of Genesis has always been the one piece of the bible that I've marveled at ever since.

It's not just beautiful but coincides almost too perfectly with the science.

When I first heard about 'water above' I was chuckling. It's just more than 2000 years old explanation why the sky dome is blue. What's blue? Water. Sky blue? There must be water above it. Why it doesn't fall? God keeps it up.

No concept of Rayleigh scattering, atmosphere or outer space. Just: Blue? Water!

And yet I heard it read to the crowd of people in a communal building and they listened to it as if it made sense more than 2000 years later, in the age of science, when we already learned how to properly know things.

> Water. Sky blue? There must be water above it. Why it doesn't fall? God keeps it up.

Is there a variation on "straw man" that's more like "shadow boxing", where someone grossly misunderstands what someone's saying and then argues against their own misunderstanding?

I've never heard any reference to the sky being blue because there's water there. People 4000 years ago weren't stupid. Everyone knows rain comes from clouds, not from a blue sky. If you read one sentence in isolation and it seems stupid or perverse, you should first check to see if you're understanding it correctly, before writing it off, particularly if it's from a different language, culture, or time.

My interpretation of this I've given above already: The "waters above" were the clouds. This makes sense of the paradox that the creation story describes light as being created before the sun. Everyone knows that light comes from the sun; so why would anyone make up a story where day and night happen for three days before the sun shows up?

But suppose instead, what was described was from an observer on a particular point above the earth's surface:

1. Sun ignites; you can see light in general but you can't see the sun because all you can see is fog on a water.

2. The "fog" lifts above the water and become clouds, so now there's visible space between the water and the clouds, but you still can't see the sun.

3. The clouds part, and now you can see the sun, moon, and stars.

> Is there a variation on "straw man" that's more like "shadow boxing", where someone grossly misunderstands what someone's saying and then argues against their own misunderstanding?

Are you accusing me of strawmaning great wisdom of people that didn't have a single measurement device they could apply to what's above their heads?

I read in less then 2000 year old writings of a philosopher that everybody knows that though diamonds are hard, they can be split with goats blood. Should I think deeply about it and come up with charitable interpretation because people back then weren't stupid? Lack of data makes regularly smart people create weird beliefs.

> I've never heard any reference to the sky being blue because there's water there

'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.'

Firmament is the thing that stars lie onto. So definitely there's saying about waters (not some special waters like clouds but plain usual waters just the same as the ones below the firmament).

Association with sky color blue is my own specific idea about why would anyone in their right mind speak about waters above in exactly the same way as terrestrial waters. I'd even call this interpretation of mine, charitable.

> People 4000 years ago weren't stupid. Everyone knows rain comes from clouds, not from a blue sky.

Ah, but where the clouds come from? Was it also that obvious that they don't come from blue sky?

> My interpretation

...

> The "waters above" were the clouds.

Are clouds mentioned any more than color blue?

Other than that, wonderful interpretation of something that didn't happen and even if it did it couldn't be observed, because on day 4 the only living things were plants.

Something like this, I reckon.

https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/gre13.htm

Where did all the water go? There aren't enough clouds to cover all the continents with water. I'm guessing a lot of it must be trapped in the mantle.

It's not about mass but distribution. If all the land is flat, there won't be anything sticking out after the water is added.

Well, just to go along with the story...

The Flood account specifically states that the water came not only from rain, but from the "fountains in the deep." Gen 7:11.

Hot tub earth

In a book written for people on Earth with a purpose other than explaining physics? Of course it glosses over a bunch of stuff before any of Earth as we know it existed. Really - if one doesn't believe in God, fine, but the number of arguments I hear where people say, "An omnipotent being must not exist because I obviously know better and would have done this differently" just astounds me. It's as illogical a train of thought as anything you hear from religious crazies.

It's not glossed over, it's just wrong. According to genesis There was water before there was light.

That's a valid point. The parent one is not. My beef is with atheists criticizing the irrationality of religion and then being as irrational as what they criticize.

From the perspective of an observer on the earth.

Light in a general, diffuse form started to penetrate the atmosphere at some point (this is the "creation" of light at 1:3). Then there was an expanse created to form a division between water below and those above. For an observer on earth, light would have only gradually penetrated the waters above as they formed into clouds. Eventually, the sun and moon and stars, and their motions, would become visible (1:14-18)

What is the water above? A thick cloud? I see, so the clouds dissipated and revealed the sun, moon, day and night with it. Is that correct?

That ruins it...otherwise this "let there be light" can be used to say it's the Big Bang.

>>"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.

I was of the understanding that the opening statement covers the entire universe, and the rest of the explanation covers the formation of the earth from the perspective of someone on the earth. That will explain why the sun and moon only become visible later.

that's interesting and one I haven't thought about before.

I'm sorry if i came off wrong. You're right, I was probably missing the point. I meant no disrespect.

> You’d have to wonder how any explanation that wasn’t obviously made up by a race that lived on the Earth and understood nothing about the wider universe could get the facts so wrong.

You'd have to wonder how a scientific understanding could possibly be reflected in a poem that makes heavy use of reflective structures.

It's a poem, of a particular kind. The people it was written for would not have taken it literally. IIRC the Talmud doesn't say that it is obviously something literal. That's a more modern trend of Christianity, and even there, many sects don't.

There's problems with taking it literally. That it isn't scientifically accurate is the least of those.

Biblical Literalism is a biggest plague on modern Christianity. Nothing else has done as much damage. It drains the Bible of its real meaning, and forces Christians to choose between rejecting reality and rejecting faith.

It is a relatively recent development; in the Middle Ages, the literal interpretation was only one of four levels of interpretation, and generally seen as the least important one. It's about the last 2 or 3 centuries that Biblical Literalism became big.

> Curiously it became a poem that doesn't have to be taken literally after it was proven to be completely wrong.

Not really. The Mishnah, of the Talmud, originates from around 200CE. The first commentary on the poem treats it as a purely symbolic construction. These commentaries sum up thinking that was already common at the time, based on long oral traditions.

Not really, there's been scholarly argument against a literal Genesis since at least the 5th century A.D. if not before.

I'm a christian, but there are even bigger issues with Genesis from a scientific point of view: how about the dinosaurs, bacteria, viruses and so on.

There are some Bible quotes that seem to show transcedental, accurate insights -- like the Earth floating in void, but not much, that's not something central to the Bible.

Why is there an expectation the the Bible will talk about dinosaurs or bacteria/viruses specifically? It would not be meaningful for a book focused on the spiritual to provide a treatise on dinosaurs, bacteria/viruses, unless the authors were somehow trying hard to address possible disbelief thousands of years later, which they were not.

However, the existence of dinosaurs does not conflict with Genesis at all. The Bible simply says animals were created before man. For how long animals existed before the creation of man is not specified, it could have been millions of years. This allows for dinosaurs to have existed and gone extinct before man came along.

Also, the Bible does not talk about bacteria/viruses, but in the books of Moses, scientifically sound instructions are given as to how to curb the spread of disease through personal hygiene (e.g., burying human waste) and quarantining, etc. This implies a knowledge of the germ theory of disease. Contrast this with the ancient Egyptian "medical" practices of applying human waste poultices to open wounds, and the practice of open defecation common in many parts of the world even now.

Exactly. People try to make the Bible into something it was never meant to be. It's a spiritual book about the relationship between humans and God. Although much of it takes place in history, it's not meant to be a historical treatise, and certainly not a scientific one. It has to be read and interpreted in the context in which it was written, not our modern context. Many things may still apply to us, but many don't, or need to be reinterpreted from that context to ours.

From a specific Christian perspective:

Dinosaurs are believed to have been here before the flood by some. As for bacteria and viruses, well when you bring sin, you bring forth death, and death has many forms.

Course there's bacteria that isn't necessarily bad, and that's just part of the balance of things.

DNA is literally a language / coded instruction set - something that had to be designed and created, I've written a lot of code, it never ever accidentally writes itself, I have to design it and think thoroughly of what I want it to do.

Sounds like My Book of Bible Stories. https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-stories/

I remember a bunch of science books for kids in the 90s, that more or less all uniformly declared that planets were only "native" to our solar system.

Like, they couldn't even allow the possibility "We don't know" and instead decided to push lies to our feeble minds.

And then, when they were being discovered around the turn of the millenium, everyone treated extra-solar planets like something amazing. No, they're totally expected! Not finding any at all, that would've been surprising.

Ditto, though a SNES video game called E.V.O. for me as a child. In the earliest stage/era of Earth in that game it's a water world (and you're a fish).

Your comment made me think of SimEarth for the SNES (I never played it on the PC).

New evidence for a hypothesis is still news, even if that hypothesis is the most favored one.

PBS Eons on YT is a great channel for this kind of stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzR-rom72PHN9Zg7RML9EbA/vid...

Earth has gone through a few Iceball stages, purple eras, red ones, and blue ones too. Our days have been much shorter and the moon caused massive tides too. Like life, she constantly evolves and will continue to do so.

> sable tigers.

Did you mean to say saber-toothed tigers?

Have since learned they were not tigers and called cats these days. Source: La Brea tarpits museum

Thanks. I was sleep writing.

I learned only a few months ago that you can find in Australia some rocks that are 3bn years ago. It’s a unique situation I’ve learned and very "useful" to scientists!

I went to Australia a few years ago and didn’t knew about that. Just want to go back there to see that! The site is very difficult to access though.

> Just want to go back there to see that!

Just don't climb Hanging Rock.

A note to anyone who wants to follow up on this lead: these are called stromatolites.

Stromatolites are specifically fossilized bacterial colonies. Nothing GP said was about stromatolites, just "rocks".

People should definitely go look up stromatolites, though. They're cool.

So, were they completely immersed in water?

They formed in shallow water, so to begin with, yes.

Tidal pools

Costner would be pleased...

For the viewers, 'mixed reception' is more appropriate. Some of us will agree with reviewer Roger Ebert "The cost controversy aside, Waterworld is a decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me".

I wonder how our planet would be characterised in the context of the whole galaxy.

We have no reference point(as in, other civilisations), so the fact that we're e.g. tilted somewhat, rotate at a decent speed or are in 70% covered by water might well be the weirdest thing in the universe.

The weirdest thing about us is most likely the fact that our moon is almost exactly the same size as our sun (relative to distance).

I hope that in a billion years we will have time lapse videos of how Earth changes :-).

You could get it now. You just need a very powerful telescope that you send to somewhere a billion light years away faster than the speed of light, and take pictures along the way.

There is a thin slice of space in which photons are bent 180 degrees around a black hole.

Given sufficient resolving capability, you could theoretically zoom into that slice and see earth as it was 2x the distance in light years ago. Realistically it would be a dusty noisy mess, but there are photons coming back to earth after bouncing off in the direction of the center of our galaxy 50,000 years ago.

Actually, even more than that! There is a very narrow region where photons can actually orbit a black hole multiple times before escaping. In fact there is a region where photons may orbit indefinitely!

https://www.universetoday.com/110682/can-light-orbit-a-black...

The article mentions the photon sphere, but is there any source on "orbit multiple times before escaping"? My experience is just in Kerbal Space Program, which is a 2-body approximation, but afaik once you are in orbit, you can't escape without changing your velocity. Also, 180 degrees is the exclusive limit of a gravity bend; less than 180 is not an orbit, but as soon as you reach 180 degree bend, it becomes an orbit.

Of course, with 3-body things get much more complicated. For a third body to pull photons out of a photo sphere, fascinating and I can imagine it happening, but I haven't seen any sources along these lines.

With all of the mass inflow there is likely a very turbulent gravitational environment just outside of the event horizon. This could be sufficent to provide a little transient local lensing to kick a photon back out (or in).

Or more practically, hope for a bunch of alien civilizations to have put up mirrors aimed in our direction.

I believe we may be stretching "practical".

You forgot to figure out how to communicate with said aliens faster than the speed of light so they have time to set this all up before the light, which has a 3 billion light-year head start, gets there.

> a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience

> 1 photon/second

Perhaps your eyes are better than mine...

Start taking 1 photo from space every 10 or 100 years.

At 30 frames/second, shooting at one frame every 100,000 years, a film of the whole 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution would run 25 minutes.

If you wanted more detail, you could shoot every 10,000 years, running a bit over 4 hours.

Humans would appear in this long version of the film, in the final 0.667 seconds, or the final 20 frames. The 2,000 years since Christ's death would be a blur on the final frame. All of human history for the past 10,000 years would almost fill out that frame.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would appear 3 minutes 33 seconds before the end.

The Cambrian Explosion, about 27 minutes from the end. That's the history of all multicellular life.

At one frame every 100 years, the film would run 17 days 8 hours and change.

And at a frame every decade, 300 years a seconds: 5 months 3 weeks.

YouTube sees 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. If that were to corrspond with our movie of Earth's history, you'd need 150,000 years to upload all of it.

Space is big, as you may have heard.

Time is long.

And in this video you would witness how trees became the dominant lifeform on Earth and have remained as such ever since.

Or algae and plankton.

Regards plant life generally, one rather stunning realisation for me is how recent many of the now-dominant forms are.

Grass is younger than the dinosaurs. Flowering plants evolved during their reign. The major crops of the world (wheat, maize, rice) are all largely human-engineered, through artificial selection over the past few thousand years.

There's a lot of competition in the primary-producer niche.

We can bullet time through humanity's time.

push the framerate up.

May have to procure a little cubesat. Now I just have to eat healthy to stay around for the final video :)

If we as a species make it that far, parts of your genetic material will have survived, somewhere.

This doesn't even require the survival of the species, we share about half our DNA with bananas.

Granted the persistence of humans provides quite a bit more, and implies the survival of (some) culture as well, which might matter more.

> we share about half our DNA with bananas.

I’ve seen this claim before. Where does it come from?

Humans have 23† pairs of chromosomes covering 21 thousand genes; bananas have 11 pairs, triplets, or quads†† covering 36 thousand.

† Usually, but there is a surprisingly high frequency of different chromosome counts

†† I only found out about triploid and tetraploid chromosomes today, don’t expect me to know anything

It's because genes are highly conserved, and I should have been more precise: we share about 50% of our genetic code with bananas. Intuitively this makes sense, since genes code for proteins and we can eat bananas (which can in turn eat us, with some help).

If you count the exome, which is not highly conserved because it doesn't play much of a role that we know of other than coiling, it's more like 1%. So "50% of our DNA" is not accurate, it's our genes.

Was all the land flat or where did the water go? Melt all the ice and empty all the clouds, rivers and lakes - you still won't have enough water to cover the continents.

If the earth's landmass was flat, you don't need as much water to cover the continents.

If the earth had just "recently" cooled from being a ball of magma, it makes sense that there weren't major upheavals yet. It was only after significant tectonic motion, subduction, etc, that you got the variety of geographic terrain and continents we have now.

that's very likely. I mean, Water World is pretty much a future-set-in-the-past story isn't it?