DAY ONE

Genesis 1:3-5

And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

If the Old-Earth hypothesis is correct, then what we begin to read here on Day One is a description of how God set about correcting the four conditions of chaos that had befallen the original earth – starting with the removal of darkness by the creation of light, and the restoration of the diurnal cycle of night and day – reconstruction, rather than a totally new creation.

"The New International Commentary on the Old Testament" says: "In essence, this reconstruction suggests that verse 1 describes the original creation, which was flawless. Then something catastrophic happened, throwing God's perfect earth into turmoil and judgment so that it became without form and void. Subsequently, God started a second creation, so that verse 3 describes not creation but re-creation. The length of this gap between the first and second creation is impossible to determine."

The creation of light on this first day, with no named source, is not apparently referring to the creation of the sun, which, like the Earth, already existed anyway. On this point, the Jewish "Socino Chumash" commentary says: "This was a special light which functioned only during the seven days of creation."

If this correct, the implication seems to be that the sun was, at this time, no longer radiating energy -- its nuclear fusion chain reactions having been shut down for some reason. In other words, the destruction that had taken place in the solar system was even worse than suspected by scientists.

Perhaps we might compare God’s action here to that of a rescue and emergency crew setting up temporary lighting in the buildings of a city wrecked by an earthquake, for example, in order to get the reconstruction work under way before the permanent electric supply is re-connected.

If we continue to identify this scenario with that following the K-T extinction, we might infer that on Day One God also removed the dust and smoke particles from the air in order to allow the light he had now created to spread out across the hemispherical surface of the waters on that side of the Earth.

Having, thus, illuminated the scene, we read that he next separated or divided that light from the darkness – possibly implying that the Earth had also been stilled on its axis and needed to be set rotating again, in order to restore the sequence of day and night.

Again, we are free to speculate as to the consequences of the Earth being set back in rotation. If, for example, only the solid body of the earth was set moving, the natural inertia of its billions of tons of water would resist this motion and lag behind, resulting in massive tidal-wave action and vigorous scouring of the surface. The possible consequences of this cataclysm, on top of earlier upheavals during the meteorite bombardment of the K-T extinction episode, we leave to the speculation of geologists and paleontologists . . . as we journey on through time to Day Two.