(January 8, 2014 at 6:28 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth."why is this a dumb idea? Because you decided to trivialize it? Please explain.
Wrong. The scientific consensus places the age of the Universe to be around 13.8 billion years old. We could rightly say this constitutes the beginning. The Earth, on the other hand, is 4.5 billion years old. Does the beginning include the 9.3 billion years or so that followed the birth of the Universe? Perhaps Christians define "beginning" to include all time but that's obviously a dumb idea.
In the beginning God created the heavens, the Hebrew word for heavens is:
שָׁמַיִם shamayim. It means abode of the stars. This came first. The scientific consensus you mentioned agrees. Then the passage mentions 'the earth.' This came after the creation of the heavens, which again your source material confirms.. There is no time frame mentioned between the creation of heaven and earth. The only part of creation that is mentioned that ties itself to a time frame is the creation of light. Light was created on the first day. Don't confuse this with what happened 'in the beginning.'
