Questions, Questions . . .
When did God make planets? When did God make galaxies? How do dinosaurs fit into the creation of Genesis? How long did God take to create the world? Was there a Creation Week of six real days?
WHAT HAPPENED during the Creation Week described in Genesis chapter 1? What was the Creator's plan in this Week? When exactly did God make all the things we see around us in the earth, in the sky and in the heavens of outer space? We seek to put the Creation Week and God's creative acts during this Week into a scientific context, as we think about the objects and the things that we study in science. We are going to see that the Biblical teaching about God's Creation Week is totally compatible with the findings of modern science.
But first of all some tough questions. When did God make the planets? -- for example the planet Saturn, first seen really close-up by the Voyager 2 craft in 1981, along with many of its moons. When did the Creator make Saturn and its moons? When did God make, for example, the planet Pluto? Pluto is the most distant planet from us. It is so distant, four billion miles away, that the best image ever obtained by earth-based telescopes is very fuzzy at best. Pluto's moon Charon was discovered in 1979. When did God make it? Genesis chapter 1 does not seem to mention it.
When did God make the extremely distant objects we call stars? -- stars like Betelgeuse, 600 light years away, so distant that light travels for six hundred years to get from it to us. Yet it is so vast -- a million times bigger than the sun -- that powerful telescopes can detect surface features on this star even at its great distance from us. When did God make this vast object?
When did God make the galaxy that we live in, the Milky Way Galaxy, estimated to contain two to three hundred billion stars? "Galaxies" are not mentioned in Genesis chapter 1. For that matter, planets are not mentioned by that name in Genesis chapter 1. And except for the earth's moon, the moons of planets are not mentioned in Genesis chapter 1. Is the Genesis account of creation simply prescientific and mythical, or does it really include and account for the findings of modern science? Can Genesis chapter 1 account, by way of example, for the Andromeda Galaxy? -- the closest galaxy to us, yet so distant that a beam of light leaving Andromeda and traveling 186,000 miles every second would take two million years to reach us.