It is my purpose to here present my thoughts on the Genesis story of creation based on a literal interpretation of the Bible text and on a conviction that God operates logically and in perfect order. We are told in Genesis 1:1 that, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Also, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God"(John 1:1). We really don't know when that "beginning" was. From astronomical data we know that the beginning of some of the stars and distant galaxies was many millenia ago. We can see stars evolving from gaseous nebulae; some have exploded into novae, some have collapsed into white dwarfs and even black holes, some have expanded into red giants, and some like our yellow sun seem fairly stable for the time being. We see stars evolving and coalescing into clusters and spiral galaxies around gravitational centers thought to be black holes. Some of these stars, like our sun, have families of planets. All of the stars which we have observed are composed of the same elements that we find on earth, so the cosmos appears to have a common source and design.
With this knowledge in hand we can follow a logical progression back to the "beginning." God chose a lonely planet in an obscure solar system about four light years, or twenty-four trillion miles, from the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, on which to perform the crowning act of creation, the creation of mankind. This solar system is on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy which is one of the millions of like galaxies scattered throughout the immensity of space, each one composed of millions of stars. Thus, I believe that the earth existed as a part of this solar system long before the first day of creation week as a lifeless, amorphous mass "without form and void." Creation week began with the creation of light (Gen 1:3) when God ignited the sun's nuclear furnace for the dawning of the first day. Following this event, He molded and structured the planet as an ideal habitat for man. All life on earth began during the six days of that week, which Bible chronology indicates must have occurred some 6,000 years ago. Subsequent geologic features such as fossils, sedimentation, tectonic and volcanic activity as well as death itself can be attributed to sin and the upheavals of a universal Genesis Flood. Any apparent conflict of this cosmogony with the description in the Bible of what happened on the fourth day of creation week can be resolved by semantics and a different interpretation of the text based on the ambiguities of the Hebrew language. This conflict resolution is discussed in a separate study called "The Fourth Day."
