DAY THREE

Genesis 1:9-10

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

As we begin Day Three, the shapeless Earth is still flooded, despite the apparent removal of the vast amount of water that was to return later when the floodgates of heaven were opened once again during the time of Noah.

Incidentally, the term "floodgates of heaven" was simply a metaphor used to describe a complicated process in one simple sentence. Scholars who should know better, but whose thinking is unconsciously shaped by evolutionary ideas, take the use of such metaphors as evidence of the ignorance of ancient peoples – ignoring the fact that the modern science relies heavily on metaphors to get a handle on abstruse concepts – for example, the particle and wave theories of light and matter, and the model of non-existent lines of force to describe a magnetic field – and that intelligent adults make use of metaphors to teach children.

To expose the dry land mass, still more water remained to be removed, and one obvious possibility is that God drained if off by raising the Earth’s continental surface and lowering the sea bed. If that is what happened, it is easy to imagine how the ensuing torrent could gouge out a structure such as the Grand Canyon.

If we press the parallel with the Deluge a bit further, some of the excess water may have been drained off into the vast subterranean reservoirs whence they came -- "the fountains of the great deep", that burst open again later during Noah’s Flood.

If the notion of vast subterranean water deposits seems unlikely, bear in mind that science knows much more about space than it does about the interior of our Earth – which is why there is still much speculation regarding the mechanism of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which incidentally usually spew out steam along with the magma. Geological theories also change, and some scientists now suspect, for example, that methane gas, previously thought to be of uniquely of fossil fuel origin, may actually be continuously manufactured from deep-lying non-organic carbon deposits.

According to current theory the Earth is in three parts – a 4000-mile diameter molten Core, probably composed of magnetic materials such as iron and nickel, which is surrounded by an equally thick Mantle at temperatures above 1000 Celsius, sufficiently high to make it semi-plastic. Finally, on the outside, floating in effect on the Mantle, and supposedly separated from it by the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, comes the solid Crust on which we live. The Crust, paper thin by comparison, is thought to vary in thickness from about 5 miles beneath the oceans up to 25 miles or more in the continental masses, so that where the mountains rise higher, the roots sink deeper to provide the buoyancy to support them.

In 1957 the Mohole Project was conceived with the goal of drilling through this crust at its thinnest point beneath the ocean in order to penetrate the Moho and obtain an actual sample of the Mantle. Following several years of inconclusive investigation, the uncompleted project was closed down in 1966. Such remains the depth of our knowledge of the inside of the Earth!

Returning to Genesis, notice also that the waters were gathered together into one place, which seems to suggest that God created one vast contentinent surrounded by seas on all sides – identical, it would seem, to Alfred Wegener’s concept of Pangea (Greek, meaning "once joined"), a super-continent that later broke into the sections that now constitute the Earth’s continental masses and large islands.

After scorning Wegener’s wild ideas for several decades, scientists now believe that there was indeed a Pangea that later cracked up into a dozen or so Tectonic Plates that have ever since been slowly drifting on the oozing convection currents of the underlying Mantle. As any atlas shows, the coastlines of South America and West Africa look as if they should fit together, like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, a fit that is even closer if the submerged continental shelves are matched up.

Since we are told that by Noah’s time the Earth had acquired mountains, we might assume that those features were imposed on the initially shapeless planet surface at this time. Notice, however, that the Hebrew word for mountain also signifies simply a hill, something at "looms up", so the topography of the pre-Flood world may well have been hilly but still much flatter than ours -- which could have implications weather patterns at the time.

Notice again that God called the dry land "Earth" -- so that, as in English, the Hebrew word used here can signify either the whole planet or simply the dry land potion of it. It is this Earth, the continental land mass restored or created on Day Three, that Moses was referring to when he said, as we saw earlier, that "in six days, God made the heaven and the Earth and all that is in them in, and rested the seventh day" (Exodus 20:11).

Having established the dry land which was bare of vegetation, God, quite appropriately, next completes Day Three’s global landscaping project by making all kinds of plants, as described in the following verses. Let those who would to scoff at this account as unscientific and superstitious please demonstrate their credentials by creating a single blade of grass -- then perhaps we can take their objections more seriously.

Genesis 1:11-13

And God said, Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth. And it was so.

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

Commentators generally agree that what these verses are describing is the creation of vegetation in general, and two kinds in particular. The first kind are flower-less plants, such as conifers, that produce the bare seeds such as can be shaken out of pine cones – and which are therefore or called "gymno-sperms" (i.e. "naked seeds"). The second kind, logically, are flower-ing plants, such as apples and plums, and peas and beans, that produce fruit with the seeds encased inside them – and which are therefore called "angio-sperms" (i.e. "encased seeds).

It is significant that gymnosperms did not appear in the fossil record until the Upper Cretaceous strata of the Mesozoic era, as did the large mammals. Both are characteristic of the New Earth, a different world from the one that existed "in the beginning".

However, the second significant statement in these verses -- that the plants were to reproduce "according to their kind" or, more famously, "after their kind" -- is perhaps more important, and is repeated several times to stress that importance. The stress is almost uncanny, as if God foresaw the madness that would emerge first from the minds of the likes of Darwin and Wallace, and also William Charles Wells, who apparently first proposed the theory of natural selection some forty five years before the publication of "The Origin of Species" but was ignored by the scientific world.

Notice that the account does not say simply that the plants were to reproduce, which one might think would be an adequate statement, but that they were to do so in a particular way, subject to a certain limitation -- "according to their kind". This seemingly innocuous phrase is in fact the nub of the whole creation-versus-evolution debate.

Less-informed religious leaders in Darwin’s day apparently held that plants reproduced themselves in such a way that the offspring were always virtually identical to parents and ancestors, as if God had carpeted the Earth with a living equivalent of plastic Astroturf. Darwin could see from the evidence of his own eyes that this was simply not true.

Unfortunately, when Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published his plant classification system, Species Plantarum, in 1753 -- and extended it to animals in Systema Naturae in 1558 -- he also seems to have regarded the Genesis "kind" in a similar narrow and rigid way, equating it to the term "species".

Consequently, as Richard Leakey explains: "In Darwin's time a species was seen as a distinct group created by God" -- and therefore thought to be rigidly invariable for all time. Consequently, as a result of Darwin’s studies, the much misrepresented Genesis account of creation was brought into disrepute as being unscientific and wrong.

A century later, however, both evolutionists and creationists seem to be discovering that God designed into the DNA of plants a potential for creative variation, with the express purpose of enabling them to adapt and survive in the wide variety of growing conditions, as well as simply create interesting variety and beauty. However, that variation is "after their kind" -- so that roses, for example, will always remain roses, no matter how exotic they become.

It is as if God provided each kind of plant with a genetic "wardrobe" of possible variation – possibly even a mechanism for generating an endless stream of variations, but all "after their kind". Scientists have discovered what may well prove to be that "wardrobe", the so-called "redundant" or "junk" DNA -- "genes" on the massive chain molecules that make up the chromosomes of the cell nucleus, that apparently have no purpose.

In "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins says that biologists are "racking their brains" trying to find out what useful purpose this apparently surplus DNA -- the so-called "junk genes" -- might have.

Gordon Rattray Taylor, in "The Mystery of Evolution" explains that most cells contain surplus DNA, the amount varying from 20 to 80% of the total. These gene copies, as he calls them, are mysteriously imperfect and are apparently unstable, constantly breaking down and being renewed. As to their purpose, Taylor says: "The most daring hypothesis, however, is that this redundant DNA might compromise a store of mutant forms which the cell is waiting to try out".

What an astonishing discovery, and fully in accord with the Genesis assertion that God designed plants to reproduce " after their kind"!