You might consider that when Genesis says “light”, it’s referring to light, and when it says “water”, it’s referring to water. That makes a lot more sense.
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She is a bit contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but if you like what you have heard from Hossenfelder, her “Lost is Math” is a very worthwhile read. I also recommend “Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality”. That book has a much stronger experimental focus than most on the subject, tethering the strange ideas physicists have about QM to the actual observations which underlay those interpretations. The great thing about these two books is that they convey good content and provide insight into how science is done, and how it is neither tidy nor unsubstantiated.
In a different vein, I also would commend “A Perfect Predator”, an page turning autobiographical account of a near fatal fight with a super bug infection. This book is a portal into a three way struggle for survival between a human being, invading bacteria and bacterial infecting virus. The dance of adaptation between these three organisms, with a desperate and heroic fight for life at stake, is a beyond fascinating microcosm of evolution in real time.
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I don’t recall seeing anyone say that.
I think this is partly a communication problem. You are using some of the technical terminology from physics. But you are putting that together into sentences that don’t fit with how physicists normally talk. I expect that they are not sure what to make of your posts.
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Thanks! They all look fascinating. Hopefully my library has some or I will have to increase my book budget. 
I definitely like Sabine. I forgot to mention her YouTune channel. Well worth subscribing. Her wit is hilarious. Her latest music video on Theories of Everything is gut busting. So interesting to me that many theoretical physicists seem to have some kind of artistic outlet that they’re also incredibly gifted at.
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That’s a great question. You might like some of his books:
I don’t agree with him on everything, and neither will you. That’s okay though.
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@thoughtful, I wanted to reiterate what @nwrickert said here. I’ve been lurking the threads you’ve been starting here, since I generally like anything physics-related, but I haven’t had anything to say on them yet, because, well…
… this is entirely meaningless to me. I love Genesis 1. I just don’t see it as a scientific exposition of the creation of the world. God gave us the ability to do science; he didn’t need to hide scientific discoveries in Scripture. He has more important truths to communicate to us, and to the original audience.
So I’d agree with Neil - at least part of the reason you aren’t getting much of a response from the physicists (and there are a couple who are active here) is that they can’t tell what you are actually trying to say, and so see nothing to respond to. Here’s an example:
I have no idea what you mean when you say that the aether might be “virtual”. I know about virtual particles - and I also suspect that you have several misconceptions about them, since popular level explanations of them tend to be horribly misleading, unfortunately.
Here’s another example:
I have no idea what this means. What is this “light” that isn’t on our EM spectrum supposed to be? I can’t tell you if an idea has merit when I don’t understand at all what the content of the idea is in the first place.
I don’t want to discourage you in any way. As others have said, we appreciate your enthusiasm and imaginative thinking. But I also concur with others that you need to learn more. It would be good to temper your enthusiasm with a serious effort to understand. (And understanding the physics, how God has made this universe work, is itself very rewarding!) It will take a while. This is not stuff that can be learned in a few days by watching a few YouTube videos.
To that end, here’s some other good resources:
Crash Course Physics, though be aware that their material on quantum mechanics and relativity is extremely shallow. It’s good to brush up on Newtonian physics.
Minute Physics Intro to Special Relativity is a decent intro to special relativity, though only as a primer to the material. To actually learn it, I recommend the next link.
Einstein for Everyone, an excellent online course on relativity, briefly touching as well on Einstein’s contributions to quantum mechanics.
I’ve heard good things about Through Two Doors at Once, which @RonSewell recommended. If that interests you, also check out Adam Becker’s What Is Real.
Looking Glass Universe has good videos on quantum mechanics. Also check out this one by 3Blue1Brown.
For quantum field theory and the Higgs boson, Professor Matt Strassler is your guy.
Finally, getting back around to Genesis 1 - once you’re done reading @swamidass’s GAE, I highly recommend @jongarvey’s Generations of Heaven and Earth.
Happy reading!
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I don’t understand. The text of v. 2 says the earth is there. The phrase, “formless and void,” though interpreted variously, in no way suggests “but not there” (unless you mean "not there fully as we experience it…but your follow up doesn’t suggest this). If you want to press physical dimensions (though the narrator would not be thinking of physics here), it must include 3 dimensions b/c the Spirit is hovering over the waters.
WTF???
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At this point the standard Wolfgang Pauli quote would traditionally be inserted.
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Thank you and @nwrickert for both being kind enough to explain that to me. The best comparison is that I’m like my 4-year-old. He gets a lot of stuff wrong, but he’s trying to put things together in a way that makes sense, as we all do when we’re a kid: We end up not understanding the concept completely and makes a lot of mistakes. Because I’m learning on my own and not very methodically, I understand I’m making the childish mistakes and asking questions that don’t make sense. So thank you for at least reading and I’ll see if I can ask a better question.
I don’t believe God is hiding scientific discoveries in scripture. I believe Genesis 1 is an inspired story of how God literally made the universe, with its focus on earth and mankind. I was an English major. I see the chapter as a story for children to easily memorize, and I also a methodical description of what an artist is doing. But either way, an accurate one. So I think it helps us analyze the art. I really enjoy seeing patterns in literature, and like writing literary analysis. I’ve been studying physics the same way. What are the patterns? What questions are still out there? How are things defined? These are some of the questions I’ve been sometimes subconsciously trying to answer.
Tbh, all I really know about them is a video or two I watched on Feynman diagrams. 
I also watched something else on how the EM field affects the electron field. I thought that was an interesting pattern: photons and electrons seem to be interacting in unique ways. But maybe that’s true of all particles, and I’m making assumptions based on lack of knowledge. I understand subatomic particles can decay into other particles. That is weird. It seems to me there would be a reason for it.
I actually don’t know what this Day 1 “light” is supposed to be either. Perhaps it is unknowable.
But I will try to explain my guess:
I suppose the idea is that since we can only measure the probability of where an electron is, there is a non-zero vacuum energy, there is a measurement problem in quantum mechanics, and electrons and photons seem to have a special relationship; that maybe there is a 4th spatial dimension? That we understand 3 spatial dimensions, but we can’t measure the additional spatial dimension specific to light that pervades the universe? (Or we only can measure 2 dimensions of the EM spectrum and guess at the 3rd.)
(Maybe those things I’m listing don’t have anything to do with each other either, and I’m totally screwing it up ; I’m just seeing them as a pattern)
Thanks for all the suggestions!
@structureoftruth see my reply to @deuteroKJ for more details. I tried to explain everything that’s currently in my head about how the Artist created the masterpiece. I realized I hadn’t fully explained where I’ve been going and what’s in my head. I edited it a couple of times to be more clear. But let me know if it’s still not.
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Yes, I mean: Not fully there as we experience it.
As I understand it, the text is saying the earth is empty and has no form. What does “empty” mean? I understand “empty” in terms of a void to mean “nothing inside.” But it also has no form, so how does that make sense? Usually we describe emptiness inside of something that has form. Like a cup is empty.
To explain where I’m coming from:
The reason I got to less dimensions is because I was studying what physics videos said about the origins and basics of the universe. I realized general relativity was using 4 dimensions - 3 of space + 1 of time… So I decided to take notes on each Day of Genesis 1 to see when various laws of nature, of physics, came into play. But I decided to divide the days into dimensions as well. Obviously on the first day there was time. What else did the text require? I saw that it required no more than 1 dimension of space:
To me, one dimension of space would sense of the text by making the “earth” (matter) formless and void.
If the building blocks of matter had no mass or charge, they could exist in one dimension of space, if I’m understanding everything correctly: (But who knows? I’m having a lot of fun in my stupidity otherwise. )
I have been picturing a circle of transparent liquid, made up of all of the those building blocks God would ever use in the rest of the creation week, as I thought about what the “waters” could be in Genesis 1:2. To me, this is the singularity that physics describes. Perhaps this is quark-gluon plasma, but some kind of stuff made out of the standard model of particles, held together without electrons.
So then I was having trouble placing gravity into a category. Einstein placed it into 3+1 dimensions. But everything I was watching said it had to be there at the beginning of time, or very close to. That made sense to me, once I realized scientists said general relativity and quantum mechanics don’t go together. Physicists are missing something about the way God created the universe. Perhaps the gravity is emergent.
I’m picturing the Spirit here as outside the universe, outside of the universe’s dimensions.
The question to ask is whether this is what the person who wrote genesis 1:2,2 was picturing.
How is your interpretation of Genesis 1:2,2 different from those who “spiritualise” the meaning of Genesis and treat it as some kind of parable?
How do you know the “building blocks of matter” could exist in one dimension?
Why would you think a circle (a 2D shape) with a transparent liquid (a 3 d object) made up of building blocks of matter be 1 dimensional?
Why should this kind of arrangement be described as “waters”?
what you are writing is incomprehensible. Its like the sentence below:
“John wrote walked his car and swam in the wall, now i think walls are made of spaghetti”
How would you respond to someone who asked your opinion on the above idea.
I don’t think what they were picturing is relevant. God had to give this description to Adam who retold the story.
My interpretation is different than a parable because it’s literal and I don’t see another way to make sense of the text scientifically - I could never tell what “formless and void” meant before. But feel free to give me another one that actually makes sense scientifically - what have you pictured them to mean?
Darned if I know. I think I came up with it after I read Flatland or maybe it just made sense then. I don’t remember the order. lol, tonight I started watching a video about what the Planck length is and I better figure out what the Planck constant is too - I need to go to bed so my brain is too fried to figure it out. I’ve just heard it explained as the smallest length. I figure the smallest thing only has 1 dimension because we cannot measure its width so…that works.
As I explained above, it’s 1-dimensional only because we can’t measure its width.
“Waters” is what the text says - I’m trying to figure out what the waters are - see my other thread (no one’s responded yet). Biblical Cosmography -> Primordial Waters = Fluid Dark Matter? - #2 by thoughtful
We only think of matter as 3D, but in my picture, matter is 1D because it can only be measured in 1 direction and that’s why it still be can be waters. I realized after I wrote this, people will object that a circle is 2D, but that’s the best way to understand it - and I think that gravity would form it into a circle. Sort of funny after I wrote my previous comments I was watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI57XIZ17hE and I was like - wait, my picture is sort of a protoplanetary disk. I’ll take it 
Too tired to know if I’m making sense. I’ll edit this tomorrow.
Let’s assume God gave this description directly to either Adam or Moses. Do you think God explained the science behind creation ?
Since Moses or Adam didn’t know anything about quantum physics and such, why do you expect the communication to be scientific in nature?
The way, i see it, God communicated some spiritual truths to Moses. Truths about God’s power, His relationship to creation (as the creator) and so on.
We can understand these things when we read Genesis. Now, God might have scientific concepts that we could understand when he thiks about creation… But Moses never recorded these thoughts (because God didn’t communicate them to him).
You are not trying to interpret the book of Genesis literally, you are trying to twist the words in genesis to match Science. The strange part is that, you don’t understand the science.
The good news is, you don’t need to understand science to understand what God is communicating in genesis 1.
Its impossible to interpret genesis in a literal manner and derrive a “scientific” theory of creation. This is because the book is not teaching science. We will have to “add to” and “twist” God’s word in order to make it say things it does not.
I take what it teaches me about God and nature and God’s purposes from the text.
Why do you figure that. Why can’t there be a cube of space that is 1 planck length long, one planck length wide and 1 planck length deep?
I have no idea. Scripture is silent about that.
Science studies the nature of the universe, so the text is scientific in that it tells us about the origins of the universe.
No, I was trying to figure out what the text meant. I put things in categories and patterns. I noticed it kept matching science in some ways.
Please tell me where I have the science wrong.
Why is that so? That’s what I’m trying to do - understand how God created the world a little better. I have never been able to picture in my mind what was happening on Days 1-4 very well. I wanted to understand it better, so that I could get a picture.
Of course, there can be. But then that would make it measurable in 3 dimensions.
The English word “formless” is misleading. The two words together show up in Jer 4:23, pointing to judgment that leaves the land uninhabitable. Therefore, it seems best to see Gen 1:2 as describing the earth as uninhabitable and uninhabited. The whole account is how to get the earth functioning for humans on Day 6.
If you mean time was created on Day 1, this is definitely a plausible reading, given that “light” in v. 5 is a temporal unit (“daytime”) not the physicist’s light.
If we assume consistency of terms in vv. 3-5, then v. 3 may be implying something like “let there be time” (if so, however, then we definitely don’t have a strict historical/scientific account, b/c it would be nonsense to have time created during a day!). However one takes “light” in vv. 3-4, there’s a problem with trying to think in terms of physics. In v. 4 God separates light from darkness. Whether we consider these physical light/darkness or temporal units (daytime/nighttime), its seems nonsensical to assume both were initially inseparable since, by definition, one presumes the absence of the other.
Therefore (and combined with other factors) any attempt to find a concordist reading (i.e., a scientific explanation) of Gen 1 will fail IMO. It’s simply not what the author is doing or what the original audience would understand or need.
I don’t think the grammar would allow this. And, theologically, the whole point of the Spirit’s presence is to guarantee the propriety of the process and outcome.
Welp there goes my whole profession! Honestly, this is a statement that cannot and should not be taken seriously. Otherwise, you’re creating your own Matrix and you are the master.
Sorry, no evidence of this whatsoever. The text requires knowledge of Hebrew (e.g., wordplays), but Adam didn’t speak Hebrew. It also requires a knowledge of things in Israel (e.g., temple, festival calendar), which obviously Adam did not have.
because you shouldn’t. It’s not a scientific text at all. Such an assumption flies in the face of its genre, social setting, and intent.
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Thanks for mentioning this passage. I had come across it and forgotten. I see the emphasis there on uninhabitable and uninhabited. I was just looking at the chapter and saw this: “Behold, he comes up like clouds; his chariots like the whirlwind; his horses are swifter than eagles— woe to us, for we are ruined!” I pointed out in this post
I see this passage doing something similar. It’s referring to multiple points in God’s story all at once. It’s a reference here both to creation, temporal judgment, and Jesus’ second coming. I don’t think the temporal judgment negates the meaning for creation; it just adds another context.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m emphasizing instead that time was created “at the beginning” with matter and light was created afterwards. The separation is important because science would say they are all at the same time.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. But I see the text saying there was darkness until light was created, light filled the universe until the beginning of the second day when night/darknes s fell. For us, that means the earth is rotating, so I see the disk I describe rotating to create darkness. That’s probably wrong. Just a possible interpretation.
I describe in my other post that the Bible refers to a “third heaven” so I don’t see why not. I’d agree with the second sentence.
I may be misunderstood, and if I misspoke I apologize. I meant to say that one person’s exegesis is not any more correct than mine just because of the time period we live in. God’s Word is always relevant. Of course, that doesn’t mean that mine is either. We should always search scripture and see what the church has said.
Of course, Adam did not speak Hebrew. That’s not what I was trying to convey. I meant that God gave Adam the story, it was retold throughout generations until likely Noah wrote it in Genesis. There’s way too much emphasis in modern textual criticism of Middle Eastern context - I’ve done a bit of research of those stories - their origins are all based after the flood because they didn’t really know anything else. Genesis is emphasizing that was not the beginning of everything.
There’s tons of disagreement about what its genre is. Those things inform the text, but they shouldn’t impose on the text.
Thanks for the interchange, though we’re clear light years apart (no pun intended!) on how to approach the text.
V. 4 says God (actively) separated light from darkness. It seems to picture the two originally mixed (which is physically impossible).
By grammar, I mean the Spirit is on the waters, which is over the earth. They’re all in the same plane of existence it seems.
In any case, this might sound odd, but “heaven” is still considered part of creation. The “third heaven” (coming from Paul) stems from different traditions that separate the heavens into sub-categories (often two, three, or seven). In Paul’s use, it refers to where God dwells (it’s all still highly symbolic, but that’s the sense).
I thought you were saying we shouldn’t take into account what the original author/audience had in mind. In my mind, this would be a denial of what inspiration (as classically defined, i.e., we must account for the human side) and run roughshod over proper hermeneutics.
What story? If it’s Gen 1 as written, then that story depends on Hebrew and awareness of the Israelite setting. If you mean something else (e.g., some set of facts about the order of creation events), then it’s not Gen 1 we’re talking about but a reconstructed history.
Again, no evidence of this and the same problems persist.
I think you’re confusing/conflating terms. Textual criticism has little to do with ANE (also “Middle Eastern” is an anachronistic term for ancient Near Eastern). But I think I understand (but vehemently disagree) with your stance. While there is IMO legitimate debate about how to engage the OT vis-a-vis ANE texts, I can’t imagine studying the OT without considering its ANE cultural context (as best we can understand it). Part of this is based on my understanding of inspiration; and it’s only substantiated with every text and topic I research.
not quite sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve done more than a bit of research, and (again) it’s clear as day to me that Gen 1 is written in part with these other stories floating in the air (in part, in order to polemically challenge them). Of course, their origins are after the flood…and so is Genesis (which also post-dates most of these ANE accounts).
No doubt. I literally just finished a rough draft on a book on Gen 1 last week, which in part deals with the difficult topic of genre. But I can’t find one solid option that would lend credence to reading the text in a scientific manner. In fact, I think the assumption that we should find a scientific reading is itself an imposition on the text.
But really glad to see you creatively engaging these things. Like I said, we are coming at this from quite different angles.
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That’s the point of an aether! 
That’s exactly what I’m saying! Did you read my other post yet? It’d be great if you can give me feedback on my exegesis of “heaven of heavens.” Biblical Cosmography -> Primordial Waters = Fluid Dark Matter?
Yes, again I’m with you here. Again, see the other thread. I also believe it refers to where God dwells.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote generally. I meant “Moses” writing it, not Noah. I don’t have any investment on who authored it. I assume generally stories were carefully told and written down until one person gathered them into Genesis.
As I mentioned in this thread to an earlier reply, I see it as a description of how an artist put art together. But to analyze the art, I need to understand the mediums and method the artist is using. So that’s why I had to study the science. I actually find it weird that people are saying I’m doing a scientific reading - I guess I am, but my intention was just to understand the steps better and to picture each step. I couldn’t picture most of it as a kid and ignored some of the text.
Is the “artist” approach one you deal with in your book at all? I’d be curious if anyone else sees it this way. I also think it’s written very simply so that children can memorize it easily.
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OK. So I should learn terms before I use them obviously I watched a video on the Planck length that said string theory and loop quantum gravity are using the Planck length as well. So I think your description @Ashwin_s would still be considered a point or 1-dimensional. So increasing only 1 dimension of that “cube” would still make matter only 1-dimensional; increasing 2-dimensions, 2-dimensional; etc. if I’m understanding it right. My apologies. Now I will have to find out how the theories are using this.
Thanks for clarifying. It does seem I need to go back and read your earlier post. Sorry for assuming things without getting the full context.
The idea of artistry comes up in several layers (i.e., chapters). We have a layer called “The Song” that is basically a summary of the Framework hypothesis. Also “The Analogy” draws on Jack Collins’ analogical-day view in which God is pictured as a farmer. In the intro, we do talk about Gen 1 serving as a mnemonic, and make comparisons to Jesus’ genealogies.
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