CHAOS!

Genesis 1:2

. . . As our journey through time brings us to the near edge of pre-history, we find the Earth in a state of apparent chaos -- it being: 1) shapeless, 2) empty of all life, 3) completely flooded, and 4) shrouded in darkness – with the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the waters.

Although the First Day of Creation Week has not yet even begun, our Earth already exists – and for some mysterious reason the account of its chaotic condition suddenly becomes much more detailed . . . and even somewhat odd.

For example, the Earth is shapeless, apparently lacking the normal topography of hills, valleys and mountains. Why? Did God make it that way ‘in the beginning’, or has the shape he originally gave it somehow been destroyed – and why do we need to be told these details, anyway?

The planet is also devoid of life -- but isn’t that just what we might expect if life hadn’t yet been created? Is the account simply stating the obvious, or does God expect us to read more into it, especially in the light of modern scientific discoveries – and perhaps perceive some warnings for our own age?

The Earth is apparently flooded, probably because it has lost its topography. Furthermore, the Spirit of God is ‘brooding’ on the surface of the waters, as if contemplating a terrible turn of events. Could it be that God’s original creation has somehow been reduced to a state of chaos -- and any prehistoric life-forms that inhabited it now wiped out?

Finally, on top of this, there is darkness on the face of the deep waters. Possible causes of this darkness might be: 1) that the Earth is enveloped in very thick clouds of some kind, and/or that: 2) the sun is no longer shining, for some reason.

Although interpretation so far suggested for these first two verses of Genesis would be totally rejected by Young Earth creationists, it is interesting to compare it with the current findings and speculations of science.

Geologists, for example, and all the other ‘ologists’ that work with them are increasingly convinced that many of the bizarre life-forms whose fossil remains are found in the lower groups of rock strata of the Paleozoic (Ancient life) and Mesozoic (Middle life) eras were wiped out in a series of mysterious, mass extinctions – numbering at least fifteen, according to the research of Raup and Sepkoski.

The most recent and most keenly debated of those events is the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction, which apparently wiped out the Dinosaurs a mere 65 million years ago, thereby ending the terrifying Age of Reptiles.

The favored extinction mechanism for American scientists, at least at the moment of writing, is massive meteorite impact, possibly involving one gigantic specimen some six to ten miles in diameter that may have struck and buried itself in Mexico’s Yucutan Peninsula -- resulting in destructive tidal waves on the one hand, and volcanic eruptions and fire-balls on the other that burned up whole continents, suffocating all animal life, and blackening the atmosphere with sufficient ash, dust and smoke to totally exclude all sunlight and so destroy all vegetation.

An article in the Times of London described how Indian scientists, who have also been investigating the demise of the dinosaurs, have discovered thousands of perfectly preserved, mostly spherical eggs in some 50 hatcheries scattered over an area of 4,000 square miles. Apparently many villagers pray to these fossiled eggs which they venerate as being the testicles of the Hindu god Shiva, the deity of destruction, and put them in wayside shrines along with flowers. The mass destruction of the these dinosaurs and the abandonment of the eggs, is attributed by the Indian scientists to a meteorite some 25 miles wide which apparently created a vast, but now covered, crater stretching, from Bombay to the Seychelles.

They estimate that the impact released far more energy than the world's entire stock of nuclear weapons -- thereby melting rock with intense heat, spewing out multiple millions of tons of debris, burning up the oxygen of the atmosphere, and creating an incredibly powerful shock wave. Again, the envisioned outcome was a black dust cloud that encircled the whole earth and obliterated the sun for six months, thereby also wiping out all plant and animal life on land and in the sea.

. . . Having just read verse 2 of the Genesis account of Earth’s early history, could these scenarios sound faintly familiar?

Although American scientists are hot on the trail of the one gigantic meteorite that they see as the main perpetrator, the pock-marked appearance of the Moon’s surface, as well as the photographs NASA gets back from its planetary explorers, all seem to corroborate such a theory of mass destruction by multiple meteorite bombardment – possibly with the asteroid belt as the remains of a now non-existent tenth planet. How could the Earth have escaped unscathed?

The Mesozoic era of life, a time when the world was apparently populated and dominated by strange and repulsive monsters including six-foot scorpions, forty-foot dinosaur-crunching crocodiles, and a wide variety of other fierce and even flying reptilian creatures, ends at the K-T boundary, as already noted -- which is associated world-wide with a two-centimeter thin layer of clay that is greatly enriched in Iridium, a chemical element which is common in meteorites but quite rare on Earth generally.

What followed on from the Mesozoic was the present Cenzoic (Recent-life) era and the Age of the Mammals and flowering plants -- a more familiar and friendly world, populated for the most part by warm-blooded, furry and potentially cuddly creatures that we find much more to our liking -- a new world that is strangely similar to one whose creation we are about to read about in the next couple of chapters of Genesis.

As a result of his studies of fossil remains of obviously extinct organisms, the 19^th century anatomist Georges Cuvier became a great believer in ‘revolutions’ or ‘catastrophism’ as the cause of those extinctions. However, when Darwin proposed his theory of evolution which required vast stretches of time to have any possible credibility, geologists such as Lyell rallied to his cause by rejecting Cuvier’s ideas and opting instead for ‘gradualism’ -- the idea of thick layers of sedimentary rock being deposited extremely slowly on the beds of the oceans at rates that would require millions of year per metre.

One obvious objection that Lyell et al brushed aside was the need for the continents to repeatedly yo-yo up and down over the ages, in order to cause the ingressions and regressions of the sea required to create all those sedimentary rock strata – and to explain the repeated transformations of crushed vegetation into massive beds of coal sometimes consisting of hundreds of layers, each separated from its neighbors by sediments. More recently, however, evolutionists feeling confident of having won the war against creationism have been emboldened to return once again to catastrophism and the ideas of mass extinctions mentioned above.

Because so many apparent mass extinctions have been discovered, some scientists are beginning to wonder if they are in some way connected – one theory being that they were all caused by a comet that swept by the Earth every 40 million years or so, triggering tidal waves and earthquakes as it did so.

A more simple explanation might be that there was in fact one massive extinction, as inferred in the second verse of Genesis – and that all the organisms found in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata, rather than demonstrating some imagined emergence of increasingly complex life-forms out of the ocean slime and onto the land and into the air, simply represent the complete flora and fauna of a prehistoric world that once existed but was then destroyed before the six days of creation had even begun.

We can return later to a discussion of why that "prehistoric" world existed and why it was destroyed . . . but meanwhile, let us voyage on through time to the Day One of CreationWeek.