At some point every believer must answer the question of authority. Who or what will be the reigning authority in my life? The choice is stark and simple. Either the God of creation or the frauds of provably false “science.” Make your choice - it’s not that hard.
Very nice defense of Scripture. I would point out that other theories of Genesis 1 aren't necessarily in response to post-Enlightenment 'Science', for example Augustine's Framework Hypothesis and if I recall the Day-Age theory or something like it is find in Tertullian. There are moreover several reasons in the text itself to doubt that the periods were 24 hours, or perhaps even roughly comparable to our terrestrial day.
The first and most significant is that the sun didn't exist until the 4th day. I am comfortable saying that there was an Earth spinning on its axis for the first 3 days and that there was one side of it exposed to a greater amount of light and the other a lesser.(BTW we so often miss how wildly different this period was from our own as an example rather than a 'dark space' sky the sky from Earth at this point was almost certainly luminous even without the sun. The idea that simple physical observations made in the last few hundred years can reduce all of these differences to a matter of arithmetic and calculus to be ciphered and take the measure of the Lord and His Creation is impossibly naive) But to suppose that the Creation of Sun and Moon and their being set into current relationships with Earth did not affect rotational period is nowhere implied in the text that I can find. To put such a system together without changing the motion of the Earth would be a truly impressive display of the Glory of God, but is unmentioned by Moses. The creation of the moon and its entry into orbit would probably affect the Earth's motion less than that of the sun but of course we would just be spitballing if we pretended to know either the signs or the magnitudes of these supposed changes.
The second significant affect on the rotational speed of the Earth comes a bit later in Genesis 7. When the 'fountains of the deep' were broken up a large volume of, probably liquid, water moved from below the Earth's surface to the surface and some inestimable fraction eventually became clouds. That clouds were previously unknown is implied by the novelty of the Rainbow. If Angular Momentum is conserved, and we would expect it to be since the Earth isn't much in contact with any other objects, then redistributing this fraction of the Earth's mass further from the center would be expected to slow the rotation. The release of the floodwaters probably also began the expansion of Earth's surface through plate tectonics that we know today, this release of considerable tension and energy from within the Earth very probably affected rotation, by changes to the liquid magnetic cores motion and density but again sign and magnitude of the change would be difficult to predict.
So, while I am comfortable saying that the 7 days of Genesis represent 7 rotations of the Earth, there simply isn't any data to suggest the period of these rotations, and good Scriptural reasons to suspect that that period has changed, although nothing conclusive as Scripture very rarely deals in measures of time other than natural days and years.
At some point every believer must answer the question of authority. Who or what will be the reigning authority in my life? The choice is stark and simple. Either the God of creation or the frauds of provably false “science.” Make your choice - it’s not that hard.
Very nice defense of Scripture. I would point out that other theories of Genesis 1 aren't necessarily in response to post-Enlightenment 'Science', for example Augustine's Framework Hypothesis and if I recall the Day-Age theory or something like it is find in Tertullian. There are moreover several reasons in the text itself to doubt that the periods were 24 hours, or perhaps even roughly comparable to our terrestrial day.
The first and most significant is that the sun didn't exist until the 4th day. I am comfortable saying that there was an Earth spinning on its axis for the first 3 days and that there was one side of it exposed to a greater amount of light and the other a lesser.(BTW we so often miss how wildly different this period was from our own as an example rather than a 'dark space' sky the sky from Earth at this point was almost certainly luminous even without the sun. The idea that simple physical observations made in the last few hundred years can reduce all of these differences to a matter of arithmetic and calculus to be ciphered and take the measure of the Lord and His Creation is impossibly naive) But to suppose that the Creation of Sun and Moon and their being set into current relationships with Earth did not affect rotational period is nowhere implied in the text that I can find. To put such a system together without changing the motion of the Earth would be a truly impressive display of the Glory of God, but is unmentioned by Moses. The creation of the moon and its entry into orbit would probably affect the Earth's motion less than that of the sun but of course we would just be spitballing if we pretended to know either the signs or the magnitudes of these supposed changes.
The second significant affect on the rotational speed of the Earth comes a bit later in Genesis 7. When the 'fountains of the deep' were broken up a large volume of, probably liquid, water moved from below the Earth's surface to the surface and some inestimable fraction eventually became clouds. That clouds were previously unknown is implied by the novelty of the Rainbow. If Angular Momentum is conserved, and we would expect it to be since the Earth isn't much in contact with any other objects, then redistributing this fraction of the Earth's mass further from the center would be expected to slow the rotation. The release of the floodwaters probably also began the expansion of Earth's surface through plate tectonics that we know today, this release of considerable tension and energy from within the Earth very probably affected rotation, by changes to the liquid magnetic cores motion and density but again sign and magnitude of the change would be difficult to predict.
So, while I am comfortable saying that the 7 days of Genesis represent 7 rotations of the Earth, there simply isn't any data to suggest the period of these rotations, and good Scriptural reasons to suspect that that period has changed, although nothing conclusive as Scripture very rarely deals in measures of time other than natural days and years.