1.5 From the Fourth to the Seventh day

by Ulrich Utiger

Abstract

As explained in section 1.2.4, the fourth day has only one reference. This is also the case for the following days, which is why they can be discussed more shortly. Furthermore, since they are interconnected, they are presented together in this chapter.

Contents

Fourth Day
The Physical, Biological and Human Evolution
References

1.5.1 Fourth Day

And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. And God made the two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night – and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day (Gen 1:14-19).

The fourth day reports a separation into night and day similar to that already described by the first day (Gen 1:3-5). This first repetition of the creation of the day has the same meaning as the repetitions of the terms heaven and earth in Genesis 1:2, 1:6-8 and 1:9, which always express restrictions of the frame. This allowed us to establish the dualities of the first four levels (fig. 3). The new creation of the day thereby also expresses a restriction of the frame.

However, this restriction is made to the element earth of a global duality heaven/earth, which must be understood as follows: as discussed in the previous section, the first creation of the day is related to the invisible world, which is illuminated by the celestial light originating from God, who is exterior to his creation. This is why the invisible world of the angels is a restricted universe in the sense that its creation implies a restriction from the Creator, who is infinite, to his creation, which is finite. This duality Creator/creation is the recurring theme behind all the different dualities heaven/earth that we have encountered so far because the latter duality is an image of the former, whatever its level.

The second creation of the day (Gen 1:14-19) is related to the Sun, the Moon and the stars destined to illuminate Earth’s surface. This light also comes from the exterior and therefore implies a similar restriction, namely to the terrestrial surface in the space of which we live and move. So analogously to the invisible world illuminated by God’s light, Earth’s surface is illuminated by the light of all celestial bodies from all possible levels (galaxies, stars, planets, Moon), but especially by the Sun, which is an image of God (p. 2). Seen from Earth, all these celestial bodies seem to be placed at the same distance in the spherical sky, which may be called heaven. So the sky and Earth’s surface form together a duality heaven/earth that is global in the sense that the sky encompasses the whole physical universe outside the Earth.

We can consequently conclude that the fourth day is not focused on the formation of the celestial bodies but on the light they emit. In fact, it refers to an event that took place during the big rain as a continuation of the stage described by the third day’s second reference (tab. 2). At this stage, there was a thick cloud layer around the Earth (sec. 1.3.3) such that a possible observer standing on Earth’s surface would never have had any chance to see celestial bodies. The cloud layer was so important that dark night reigned on Earth similar to the darkness of the early universe. But then, the troposphere slowly dried out during the big rain and finally allowed openings to appear in the sky and the light of the Sun, the Moon and the stars to shine on Earth’s surface (Ross 2001b pp. 21-31), resulting in the blue sky scattered with white clouds we know from present times, which is the final stage of the material evolution.

Univers	Earth’s surface
four-dimensional, possibly spherically curved space	two-dimensional spherically curved space
hot and rapidly expanding early universe	rapidly growing Earth consisting of hot liquid minerals in stage of accretion
electrons combine with protons (hydrogen forms) after sufficient cooling such that the universe becomes transparent	vapor droplets in the troposphere combine with each other (it rains and the primitive ocean forms) by cooling down such that it becomes transparent
stars and galaxies form through gravitational forces: the universe becomes illuminated.	The cloud layer gradually disappears letting appear the celestial bodies: there is light on Earth’s surface
expanding universe and scattering galaxies	The primitive continent appears and scatters (continental drift)

Table 3: Analogies between the formation of the universe and the planet Earth.

The global duality sky/Earth’s surface is not an abstract artificial construct but puts the creation of the whole material universe in relation with that of the Earth. This relation can be observed in nature, as summarized in table 3. As mentioned earlier, there is an analogy between the big bang and the big rain: the first event produced primitive water, hydrogen, which was uniformly dispersed in the early universe; the second event produced real water, which was uniformly covering Earth’s surface. Hydrogen initially occurred in form of protons by combining with quarks after sufficient expanding and cooling of the universe. Later, they combined with electrons through further cooling. In a similar way, there were at first steam molecules in the atmosphere. Then, they combined with each other to form increasingly heavier droplets through cooling to finally rain down in the primitive ocean.

Furthermore, such as the early universe was little and hot, also the Earth initially was little and hot when it was in the stage of accretion. And such as the universe is possibly a four-dimensional expanding spherical space, as discussed in section 1.1.2, the Earth’s surface is likewise a spherical two-dimensional space, which was also expanding, that is, growing through accretion. There is even a counterpart to the scattering of the galaxies: continental drift, which scatters continents inside the spherically curved space of the ocean.

 

1.5.2 The Physical, Biological and Human Evolution

On the fifth day, the animals living in water and the birds were created (Gen 1:20-21). If one regards the first oxygen respiring microorganisms as animals, then the first specimens of this kind appeared as monocellular eukaryotes in the Paleoproterozoic (sec. 1.4.3). However, single-celled organisms are no longer considered animals. First multicellular animal life forms may have appeared 2.1 Ga (Albani et al. 2010), but this is controversial. There is more evidence in the Ediacaran (635-541 Ma), during which strange soft-bodied water animals like Dickinsonia and Charnia emerged. At the discovery of their fossils, it was not immediately clear whether they were plants or animals. For Dickinsonia, its status as water animal has been confirmed recently (Bobrovskiy et al. 2018). Charnia looks like a fern and was indeed anchored on the bottom of the sea. This is why it was first interpreted as a kind of algae at its first discovery as a fossil in 1958. Later, it was declared a sea pen like soft corals, which actually is again disputed. In any case, it was an animal living in water (Antcliffe & Brasier 2007, 2008).

This shows that the first animals appeared long after the plants, but they also evolved at first in the ocean, which thereby is the environment of the first water plants and animals. This is why their creation can be interpreted as another restriction from the ocean to its inhabitants involving a reduction of the level: since the ocean is part of the fourth level according to figure 3, the plants and animals living in the ocean can be placed on a fifth level. Furthermore, since plants are at the base of the food chain of all animals, the first are the environment of the second in a sense. So this calls for a smaller restriction from plants to animals inside the fifth level analogously to the structure of figure 3. This has been taken into account in figure 9, which also reveals that the fifth day is a transition from the fourth to the fifth level analogously to the previous days.

The oldest fossil of a bird, Aurornis xui, has an age of about 160 Ma (Godefroit et al. 2013). For a long time, this status had been occupied by Archeopteryx (150 Ma), a fossil which was discovered only two years after Darwin’s first publication of On the Origin of Species and seemed to confirm his theory because it filled the gap between dinosaurs and birds as a transitional species (Grimaldi & Engel 2005 p. 74; Dawkins 2006 p. 262; Dembski & McDowell 2008 pp. 69-70). If the Hebrew word oph (birds) in Genesis 1:20 is understood in a broader sense and extended to flying fish, this date can be shifted backwards to about 240 Ma, which is when Potanichthys xingyiensis emerged (Xu et al. 2013). On the other hand, the first insect may have been Rhyniognatha hirsti, which emerged during the Early Devonian Period (~400 Ma) and was possibly already winged even though this is contested (Engel & Grimaldi 2004; Haug & Haug 2017). The first confirmed flying insects appeared in the Carboniferous around 350 Ma (Grimaldi & Engel 2005 p. 180). Birds and insects obviously need firm ground to live and reproduce, so they were certainly no water animals.

The first animals that began to tread dry land where amphibians from the mid-Cambrian (~530 Ma) as revealed by trackways left in nearshore environments (Edgecombe et al. 2020). These amphibians mostly thrived in water, making just sporadic excursions on land. Until recently, the oldest air-breathing land animal was considered to be the millipede Pneumodesmus newmani, which lived about 414 Ma (Suarez et al. 2017). This status was then handed over to a fossil of a scorpion from the early Silurian (~437 Ma) found in the Waukesha Biota of Wisconsin (Wendruff et al. 2020). Hence, mentioning the creation of the birds before the sixth day when all land animals were created (Gen 1:24-25) seems to be premature.

However, the Hebrew oph (Gen 1:21) is not only used for birds but also for insects (Lev 11:20). And kanap (Gen 1:21) is not restricted to wings of birds (Ex 19:4) but also includes wings of insects (Is 18:1) and angels (1 Ki 6:24; Is 6:2). So here again we are faced with a vertical chronology of analogous creations that cannot be located precisely on a timeline and extends to all life forms capable of moving in three dimensions by contrast to the moving of land animals in two dimensions only. Furthermore, the ocean is the environment of finned species and represents heaven from the duality ocean/continent (p. 2). Analogously, the atmosphere is the environment of flying species and also represents heaven from the duality atmosphere/Earth (fig. 3). So here reference is once again made to the angels, who are capable of moving around in a heaven that possibly has more than three space dimensions. This is why it is no coincidence that finned and winged animals are created on the fifth day, which implies that there is some overlapping with the creation of land animals on the sixth day.

Figure 9: The global duality heaven/earth of the whole evolution revealing the similarity between the formation of the universe and the Earth.

Finally, God also created mankind in his image, male and female, on the sixth day (Gen 1:26-31). Since humans descend from the animal kingdom, the sixth day is a transition from land animals to humans. This implies another restriction from the fifth to the sixth level, which is structured like the other levels in figure 9, taking into account human evolution and history. In this sense, Jesus Christ is in a way the last and most evolved "species", marking the end of the whole evolution. Thus, God completed his work and rested on the seventh day and sanctified it (Gen 2:1-3).

Let us resume all transitions and put the days and levels in relation to each other: the first day makes a transition from the first to the second level, that is, from the visible universe to our galaxy (p. 2). This is analogous to the second day, which makes a transition from the second to the third level, that is, from our galaxy to the solar system (p. 2). As seen also, the third day is a transition from the third to the fourth level, that is, the solar system to the Earth (p. 2). However, the fourth day is a transition from the first three levels to the last three levels: as discussed in the previous section, the surface of the Earth is illuminated by the Sun, the Moon and the stars. A restriction is thereby made from the whole universe to Earth’s surface inhabited by plants, animals and humans. The fourth day is therefore situated on the transition from heaven to earth of the global duality. The fifth day is again a normal transition from the fourth to the fifth level. This happens likewise with the sixth day. All six levels can be disposed around a circle in order to reveal the global duality as illustrated by figure 9.

As can be seen, this integral evolution results in a sequence of alternating elements heaven and earth, with heaven always surrounding the next element earth. With the atmosphere, the elements heaven begin to materialize, while before they represent nearly empty space, which shows that the invisible world becomes increasingly visible and material as a model on the planet Earth. This materialization involves all levels up to Christ, the incarnated God. The duality heaven/earth is thus not only expressed in the interior of the levels but also globally across all levels, such that the levels are cut into two halves, those before and those after the formation of the planet Earth. The former manifest heaven and the latter earth, thus expressing the global duality.

Hence, the whole physical, biological and human evolution ends up with Christ, who is “The Son of man” and “master of the Sabbath” (Mt 12:1-8). This is why the seventh day is placed in the time of Christ, who rejoins the first level, which stems from God. Furthermore, the seventh day does not conclude with the formula, “There was evening and there was morning”. According to Henry Blocher (1984 p. 44), this indicates that the last day is permanent. In this sense, the time of Christianity may be understood as a kind of sabbatical historical age, perfectly buckling this circle of evolution in the sense of Colossians 1:15-16:

He is the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of all creation,
for in him all things were created,
in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities,
all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.

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References

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