Let There Be an Expanse

There is something about black-and-white pictures.  They are collective cultural memories that speak to us of a time when things were different.  A day when things seemed to matter more. Where people dressed in a way that declared that their lives had dignity and their work was sacred.  A time that seems to be fit with wonder and possibility, where, after a fresh coat of morning snow, families dressed in peacoats and warm winter gloves, would leisurely walk through their neighborhood, silently looking at the distant horizon and pondering what the future might bring.

We are reminded of it during the Christmas season, where we see movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” with top-hats and scarves befitting bright smiling faces that speak to us of an optimism that transcended the troubles of their times.  It was an age where fathers were present, deeply cared about their children and would turn to God to face the trials of life.

This generation – the black-and-white photographed generation – was great.  It endured two World Wars, a massive plague, and the Great Depression.  One born within it would have started his life riding horses and boarding massive boats and, in his days, would have seen the advent of the automobile, the airplane, the television, the computer and essentially every form of technology that we use today. 

This was the most creative generation in the history of the world and its men wore suits.  Which has kind of formed a rudimentary societal idea that great men wear suits.  We are reminded of this when we watch the black-and-white short clips of the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer, with his pork-pie hat, his baggy business attire and the trademark cigarette hanging casually out of his mouth – as though, through an obscene amount of use, it had become affixed to his body and was now a part of him.  Attire he wears as he is overseeing the construction of the single most fearsome weapon ever created.

If one were to come across an image of Edwin Hubble he is likely to find something similar – a picture   of him wearing a full suit, pipe-in-mouth, staring ever so intently into the camera.

He is the archetype of the adventurous soul.  Dressed in a way that seems he has just left the freshly kept fire of his study to assuage his admirers by posing for a photograph.  A snapshot taken so quickly that he couldn’t bother to take the warm pipe out of his mouth, so he just kept it in for effect, as if to immortalize the moment he had just been spending where he was ruminating about what he had seen in the stars.

One who doesn’t know what Hubble filled his days with would likely see from this image that he was an explorer and a great mind. And Edwin Hubble was certainly both things.  For it was his very eyes that peered through the Hooker Telescope into distant space and saw things that no person had ever seen before.

The images of what he saw are wonderous and would have certainly inspired wonder in all who saw them, but it was the ramifications of what he saw, along with the budding theories of his day, that would all-together alter the scientific communities’ view of the origins of the universe.

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It all started with a breakthrough in understanding the color of the light that comes from stars.  This discovery, largely the product of the work of Vestro Slipher, found that “light coming from a galaxy moving away from the earth appears ‘red shifted’ as the wavelengths of the light coming from the galaxy are stretched out or lengthened.  The light coming from a galaxy moving toward the earth appears ‘blueshifted’ as the wavelengths of the light coming from the galaxy are compressed or shortened.” (Meyer, ROG)

Slipher was able to learn this by taking the work of Christian Doppler, which largely pertained to sound, and applying it to light.  With sound, wave lengths are shortened when an object is approaching (think of the sound of a train roaring toward you) and stretched out as it is moving away (think of the sound of a train as it passes you).  Light, though it moves much faster than sound, is similarly emitted in waves that are affected by their relative motion to whoever is viewing the source they are emitting from.

Dr. Slipher found that “longer wavelengths correspond to redder light in the electromagnetic spectrum and short wavelengths correspond to bluer light.”  Due to this “light from an approaching object will look bluer and light from a receding object redder than it would otherwise look.” (Meyer, ROG)

Hubble, upon hearing this, set himself to examine this reddish light as it emitted from certain stars and found something extraordinary. He discovered that “the red shift associated with different galaxies at different distances revealed that more distant galaxies receded at faster rates than galaxies closer at hand.  In fact, as Hubble plotted the recessional velocity and distance from earth of the different galaxies, he discovered a precise linear relationship between recessional velocity and distance.” (Meyer, ROG)

In short, he discovered that the Universe is expanding like “a balloon being blown up in all directions” as if “from a singular beginning” (Meyer, ROG).  He was able to formulate a precise calculation regarding this that became known as Hubble’s Law¹.

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This discovery of the Expanding Universe, combined with a new approach to gravity that had been postulated by Einstein called General Relativity (which implied a relationship between space and time – aka spacetime²), along with the assumed principle of naturalism became the foundation of what is now called “The Big Bang Theory”.

In the next post we will discuss the Big Bang Theory in greater depth but it’s important to acknowledge that Scripture itself has much to say about the Expanding Universe.

In Genesis 1 we see that the early universe, just after the time God created it, was one solid glob of liquid-like substance³.  We shall see in the next post that the proponents of the Big Bang believe that the universe in this state was an infinitely small point.  While one doesn’t have to read Genesis 1:2 in that way, he certainly could read it in that way because size doesn’t affect God the way that it does us.  He fills all space and is not affected by the natural definitions and boundaries that man is (see Psalm 139:7-11), so for God “the deep” that was the primeval universe could have been microscopic in size.  One also doesn’t have to read Scripture in this way mind you, because God puts no descriptor as to the size of “the deep”, only that Holy Spirit hovered around it, waiting for what God would say next.  On the other hand, the primitive cosmos could have been larger than what popular science says it was, but the point - at least from the perspective of Scripture - is moot, for the Bible could be read either way.

At this point there had been darkness stretching back into the infinite past. God then clears His proverbial throat and says “Let there be Light”, thus putting an end to the eternal night, a darkness that will never return for the people of God (Revelation 22:5) but fearfully will be the portion of those who reject Christ (Jude 1:13).  The light here is interesting because the scientific community believes the Big Bang to have occurred at an incredibly hot temperature.  Such heat would obviously produce light so it could be understood – should one be integrating Scripture with modern scientific theory - that this light is what immediately preceded or was directly after the Big Bang.  Everything we know about light is that it has to emit from some physical entity so one would think that the solid glob of liquid called “the deep” could very well have become the source of this light because it was the only thing in the physical world at that time.  It also is possible that God could have had the light be supernatural in origin and not require it to emit from a physical thing.  Again, this doesn’t really matter because these verses could be interpreted in either way.

But assuming that light did in fact emit from this primordial liquid glob we then see something amazing happen.  God then speaks again and this time He creates a thing called “The Expanse” and sticks it in the middle of this glowing liquid glob and causes it to separate (Genesis 1:6).

The Hebrew word for Expanse is “Raqia” (a noun) is from the root word “Raqa” (a verb) that means “to beat out, spread out or stretch.”  As such “Raqia”, which is “Raqa” in the form of a noun, could be translated as “the thing that spreads or stretches out”.

In short, we see in Day 2 that God created something that has a property, in and of itself, that stretches things apart, and placed it within the liquid glob, resulting in it separating “the waters from the waters”.  One could certainly interpret Genesis 1:6 as God placing this strange feature of physics – that the universe is expanding – directly into “the deep” so that it would expand then, and so that it continues to expand today⁴.

If you – like I did for the longest time – have read the book of Genesis with the notion of space being a blank canvas that God painted on, then you would be wrong.  God created the matter that comprised the Universe on Day 1 and created space itself – that separated that matter – on Day 2.

Genesis 1:6 is told from the perspective of the Universe, thus the waters separating from each other are likely the plasma or liquid stages of the galaxies, stars, planets and so on that fill the heavens.  Verse 7 is told from the perspective of the Earth, and in verse 8 names the space that now separated the earth from the rest of the waters as “Heaven.”

It’s important to note that the Earth is the focal point of much of Genesis 1.  At first glance, this seems strange considering the vast size of the universe as compared with the relative smallness of the earth, but we shall see in the coming posts that this makes sense because of what exists on earth – namely people.  Science is realizing more and more that the components of the cosmos, including its size, play necessary roles in making life possible on the Earth.  So, with that in mind, it makes sense that the Earth is the focal point, even if it’s just a tiny dot on the map of all the God created.

But we see here – plain as day – that God created a mysterious property that spreads out the material world, and that science finally caught up to this in finding that not only did He do this then, but that His initial Command “Let there be an Expanse in the midst of the waters” seems to still be in effect today (Psalm 104:2).

So, for now it may be appropriate to take a brief pause and to meditate on memories more distant than black and white pictures and on feats more astounding than the development of atom bombs.  Is it not amazing that space itself is one of God’s creations?

Truly the Heavens speak of the glory of God (Psalm 19:1).

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*Image taken from https://evolutionnews.org/2019/01/proper-credit-who-discovered-hubbles-law/)

*All References to (Meyer, ROG) are taken from The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer

¹If the reader wants to explore this deeper then I’d recommend reading chapter 4 of the Return of the God Hypothesis

²If the reader wants to look deeper into the concept of spacetime you can find this in chapter 5 of the Return of the God Hypothesis.  If the reader wants to see how the concept of spacetime might make for an interesting interpretation of Genesis 1, I’d recommend reading my Blog Moses knew about the Theory of Relativity

³At least one could view it this way – one could also view it as the earth being solid and covered by liquid, or the earth being solid being covered by water, as in H₂O.  For the purpose of this particular mode of thought I am treating the “formless and void” state of Genesis 1:2 as a liquid or plasma like substance that is contained “within the deep” as if the earth itself was a portion of the original liquid that comprised the universe in its early stages.

⁴One doesn’t have to believe that it expanded then at the rate that it does now.  Scripture doesn’t say anything about the expansion rate, nor that it was the same at all times, that is an idea of modern science based upon the assumption of naturalism.