Forming the Light
The Hebrew Scriptures often use the word יָצַר yatsar, translated form, to describe the process of making an artistic work. A potter takes clay and forms it into a vessel. There must be raw material or some kind of resource available before an artist can form anything. In Genesis 2:7, God formed the man from the dust of the ground. The man was the artistic work God formed using dust of the ground as raw material. Chemical analysis of human remains agrees with the chemical analysis of the dust of the ground. But that dust came from the ashes of burned-out stars. We are made from stardust. Astronomers have been saying this recently, but the Bible said we are made from dust thousands of years ago.
Let’s go back much earlier than the formation of the first man, to the very beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. At the beginning nothing was visible, because everything was dark. Light was the first visible thing in all creation. The light then made other things visible. According to Isaiah, God must have formed the light from some resource He had created earlier. But what is the resource He used in forming light?
Light Shining out of Darkness
The apostle Paul was certainly aware of Isaiah’s meditation on the creation narrative. Paul meditated on the darkness of Genesis 1:2 and the light of Genesis 1:3. He wrote to the church he founded in Corinth: God said, “Let light shine out of darkness!” (II Corinthians 4:6). Paul quotes God directly. Moses also quotes God directly in Genesis 1:3, but he has God saying, “Let there be light!” According to Moses, there was light because God commanded it to be. Paul agrees with that, but he provides additional information. Moses does not name the source of the light, but Paul fills in the details. According to Paul, God’s command made the light shine, but He also commanded darkness to be the source of the light.
How can darkness be a source of light? Only in the last hundred years or so have we learned the answer. Invisible, that is, dark, energetic rays can collide and produce light and particles at the same time. We now understand how it is possible that at the beginning light shone out of darkness. At that time the first morning began.
The Confirmation of Darkness and Light
Earlier we mentioned three Bible writers who brought their own point of view to Moses’ narrative of the darkness and the light. We will save the comments of John for another chapter. However, Isaiah’s and Paul’s comments add to the confirmation. They accurately describe darkness as a created thing from which light can form. When God says, I form the light and create darkness, He makes perfect sense to physicists. The darkness of gamma rays is the resource God used to form the light. How could Isaiah or Paul possibly have conceived of darkness shining and making light, thousands of years before physicists understood it and demonstrated it in the laboratory?
Gamma rays are dark and subatomic particles are invisible. The first visible thing in the universe was the light. Moses was right in saying that the darkness came first, and then the light. Not Moses nor Isaiah nor Paul could have known about gamma rays, the partial materialization of energy, and the formation of light. When they described the process God used to create the universe and to make light shine out of darkness, they used words that until the last half century made no sense if taken literally. Isaiah’s and Paul’s remarks were usually taken symbolically or spiritually. Bible interpreters have puzzled over their words for thousands of years. Yet their words fit exactly with what we now know about physics. Now we know that the literal sense is completely accurate.
Once again, we ask the question: How did Moses, Isaiah, and Paul get their story right? They all quote God directly. Paul continues to say in the same verse that God made his light shine in our hearts. Just like Moses, both Isaiah and Paul say they got their information directly from God. If that is true and God exists, then the story makes sense. This gives strong support to the teaching that God inspired the Bible. Not Moses nor Isaiah nor Paul could have learned by study or reasoning the truth they give, but God certainly knew how He created the universe, and He let His friends know. When God’s friends wrote down what He told them, His Spirit kept them from making mistakes. The Bible writers often say they were careful to present nothing but the word of the Lord. The atheists who do not believe in God are the ones hard put to explain the accuracy of the Bible.
Second Evening—Expansion
As the first morning drew to a close the light became less intense and redder, like a fire that is going out. Almost all the high-energy rays were broken up by that time, and the particles collided with each other less and less frenetically. After 380 000 years, when the temperature had dropped to only 3 000º C (5 000º F), the nuclei could at last capture and hold the free electrons and form the first atoms. The scattering of the light diminished, as it does when a morning fog dissipates. The last light traveled freely in all directions, from every place toward every other place in the universe. Expansion made the universe dark and transparent, open to our inspection, and the second evening began.
The second great epoch of darkness began when the expansion had cooled the gas that formed at the end of the first morning to the point where it no longer emitted light. Galaxies and stars as we know them now were as yet unformed, and there was nothing else to shine. In the darkness the entire universe was expanding. All regions were separating from each other. All regions were also expanding, but the denser regions did not expand as rapidly as the rarefied regions. Eventually gravity overcame the tendency of the dense regions to expand, and they began to contract in on themselves.
The pressure forced the expansion of the universe, and the expansion cooled it. The expansion also cooled the light. This means that the expansion stretched out the light waves longer and longer until the light waves became heat waves. Heat waves are invisible, dark to our eyes. Further cooling over the course of thousands of millions of years stretched the heat waves into millimeter waves, then microwaves, and finally into waves a television set can detect.
Let’s go back much earlier than the formation of the first man, to the very beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. At the beginning nothing was visible, because everything was dark. Light was the first visible thing in all creation. The light then made other things visible. According to Isaiah, God must have formed the light from some resource He had created earlier. But what is the resource He used in forming light?
Light Shining out of Darkness
The apostle Paul was certainly aware of Isaiah’s meditation on the creation narrative. Paul meditated on the darkness of Genesis 1:2 and the light of Genesis 1:3. He wrote to the church he founded in Corinth: God said, “Let light shine out of darkness!” (II Corinthians 4:6). Paul quotes God directly. Moses also quotes God directly in Genesis 1:3, but he has God saying, “Let there be light!” According to Moses, there was light because God commanded it to be. Paul agrees with that, but he provides additional information. Moses does not name the source of the light, but Paul fills in the details. According to Paul, God’s command made the light shine, but He also commanded darkness to be the source of the light.
How can darkness be a source of light? Only in the last hundred years or so have we learned the answer. Invisible, that is, dark, energetic rays can collide and produce light and particles at the same time. We now understand how it is possible that at the beginning light shone out of darkness. At that time the first morning began.
The Confirmation of Darkness and Light
Earlier we mentioned three Bible writers who brought their own point of view to Moses’ narrative of the darkness and the light. We will save the comments of John for another chapter. However, Isaiah’s and Paul’s comments add to the confirmation. They accurately describe darkness as a created thing from which light can form. When God says, I form the light and create darkness, He makes perfect sense to physicists. The darkness of gamma rays is the resource God used to form the light. How could Isaiah or Paul possibly have conceived of darkness shining and making light, thousands of years before physicists understood it and demonstrated it in the laboratory?
Gamma rays are dark and subatomic particles are invisible. The first visible thing in the universe was the light. Moses was right in saying that the darkness came first, and then the light. Not Moses nor Isaiah nor Paul could have known about gamma rays, the partial materialization of energy, and the formation of light. When they described the process God used to create the universe and to make light shine out of darkness, they used words that until the last half century made no sense if taken literally. Isaiah’s and Paul’s remarks were usually taken symbolically or spiritually. Bible interpreters have puzzled over their words for thousands of years. Yet their words fit exactly with what we now know about physics. Now we know that the literal sense is completely accurate.
Once again, we ask the question: How did Moses, Isaiah, and Paul get their story right? They all quote God directly. Paul continues to say in the same verse that God made his light shine in our hearts. Just like Moses, both Isaiah and Paul say they got their information directly from God. If that is true and God exists, then the story makes sense. This gives strong support to the teaching that God inspired the Bible. Not Moses nor Isaiah nor Paul could have learned by study or reasoning the truth they give, but God certainly knew how He created the universe, and He let His friends know. When God’s friends wrote down what He told them, His Spirit kept them from making mistakes. The Bible writers often say they were careful to present nothing but the word of the Lord. The atheists who do not believe in God are the ones hard put to explain the accuracy of the Bible.
Second Evening—Expansion
As the first morning drew to a close the light became less intense and redder, like a fire that is going out. Almost all the high-energy rays were broken up by that time, and the particles collided with each other less and less frenetically. After 380 000 years, when the temperature had dropped to only 3 000º C (5 000º F), the nuclei could at last capture and hold the free electrons and form the first atoms. The scattering of the light diminished, as it does when a morning fog dissipates. The last light traveled freely in all directions, from every place toward every other place in the universe. Expansion made the universe dark and transparent, open to our inspection, and the second evening began.
The second great epoch of darkness began when the expansion had cooled the gas that formed at the end of the first morning to the point where it no longer emitted light. Galaxies and stars as we know them now were as yet unformed, and there was nothing else to shine. In the darkness the entire universe was expanding. All regions were separating from each other. All regions were also expanding, but the denser regions did not expand as rapidly as the rarefied regions. Eventually gravity overcame the tendency of the dense regions to expand, and they began to contract in on themselves.
The pressure forced the expansion of the universe, and the expansion cooled it. The expansion also cooled the light. This means that the expansion stretched out the light waves longer and longer until the light waves became heat waves. Heat waves are invisible, dark to our eyes. Further cooling over the course of thousands of millions of years stretched the heat waves into millimeter waves, then microwaves, and finally into waves a television set can detect.