C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944-1960

C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944-1960
Gary B. Ferngren Department of History Oregon State University Corvallis, OR 97331
Ronald L. Numbers Department of the History of Medicine University of Wisconsin 1300 University Avenue Madison, WI 53706-1532

In his voluminous publications, C.S. Lewis infrequently addressed the subject of creation and evolution, and on such occasions he usually endorsed some version of theistic evolution. In a series of previously unpublished letters to his friend Captain Bernard Acworth, written between 1944 and 1960, Lewis explained at some length his views on the question of origins.These letters reveal that during the last years of his life Lewis grew increasingly uncomfortable with the claims being made for organic evolution. Here we present for the first time in their entirety the passages of Lewis's letters to Acworth that deal with creation and evolution; we also describe the historical context in which they were written.1 Unfortunately, Acworth's letters to Lewis seem not to have survived; at least they are not among the Lewis papers in the Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Exactly when Bernard Acworth (1885-1963) and C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) first metor began correspondingis unknown. It is clear, however, from the earliest of Lewis's ten surviving letters to Acworth that this was not the first contact between the two men. Lewis closed with a cordial invitation "to spend a night with me next term," and Acworth's son, Richard, recalls that his father sometimes stayed overnight with Lewis and his brother when visiting Oxford.

In the mid-1940s Lewis, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, was already a famous medievalist, novelist, and Christian apologist. Acworth, too, was well known, especially in military and political circles. The son and grandson of Anglican clergymen, he had trained at the Royal Naval College before embarking on an illustrious career as a submariner, winning the D.S.O. during World War I and later becoming a pioneer advocate of sonar. Following his retirement from the Royal Navy about 1930, he became a freelance journalist, serving as naval correspondent for such newspapers as The (London) Morning Post and The Yorkshire Post. A staunch opponent of socialism, air power, and imported oil, he twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, in 1931 and again in 1942. His outspoken opposition to the policies of Winston Churchill during World War II and his calls for peace with Japan prompted the prime minister to urge electors to vote against Acworth and moved the London Daily Mirror to demand his arrest. The resulting notoriety severely damaged Acworth's reputation in the publishing world and led to what he called a "literary boycott" of his work. About the same time he became increasingly interested in evangelical Christianity and for a brief period toyed with the idea of becoming a lay reader in the Church of England.2

In 1929 Acworth published the first of over a dozen books, entitled This Bondage, an eccentric critique of evolution, relativity theory, and air power provoked in part by the military's growing infatuation with airplanes. Convinced that biologists derived one of their most conclusive proofs for the truth of organic evolution from the "mysterious and wonderful" migratory habits of birds, he sought to demonstrate that "the scientific treatment of birds in flight"especially their alleged insensitivity to the windargued against the theory of evolution.3 Although largely ignored by the scientific community, the book attracted the attention of Douglas Dewar (1875-1957), barrister and amateur ornithologist, who himself was beginning to doubt the validity of organic evolution. Dewar invited Acworth to lecture at the Victoria Institute, a religiously conservative organization that had long served as a haven for the dwindling remnant of British creationists. There Acworth met other like-minded men, including the distinguished electrical engineer Sir Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945), then president of the institute. 4

In the mid-1930s Acworth, Dewar, and Fleming launched the Evolution Protest Movement, dedicated to opposing the teaching of organic evolution as a scientific fact. By this time Acworth had become convinced that evolution was not only false but responsible for "the present bankruptcy of civilisation." In a book entitled This Progress: The Tragedy of Evolution (1934), he denounced evolution as a child of Satan. "The goal of evolution," he declared, "through psycho-analysis, is moral degradation; through organised mass birth-control, and sterilisation, extinction; and through its social creed of communism, revolution." He concluded with a call to overthrow evolution so that he could see "England prosperous, England merry and England free."5

Acworth's conviction of the incompatibility of evolution and Christianity no doubt prompted him to press Lewis for his viewsand to attempt to recruit his pen and prestige in the protest against evolution. Lewis's replies show that although he at first rebuffed Acworth's overtures to endorse creationism, he was by 1951 inclined to agree with Acworth in regarding evolution "as the central and radical lie" governing modern civilization. However, he still remained unwilling to lend his name publicly to the antievolution crusade. The following excerpts from Lewis's surviving letters to Acworth (which include everything in the correspondence relating to science and religion) chronicle Lewis's views.

September 23, 1944: "Do I agree that the theory of evolution, its truth or falsehood, is of fundamental importance to the Xtian faith?" This question can have several senses, in some of which the answer yes wd. most seriously misrepresent my position. I believe that Man has fallen from the state of innocence in which he was created: I therefore disbelieve in any theory wh. contradicts this. It is not yet obvious to me that all theories of evolution do contradict it. When they do not, it is not my business to pronounce on their truth or falsehood. My "message" on any biological theorem wh. does not contradict (or wh. I, with my imperfect process of reasoning, do not perceive to contradict) the Creed, is not "equivocal" but non-existent: just as my message about the curvature of space is not equivocal but non-existent. Just as my belief in my own immortal & rational soul does not oblige or qualify me to hold a particular theory of the pre-natal history of my embryo, so my belief that Men in general have immortal & rational souls does not oblige or qualify me to hold a theory of their pre-human organic historyif they have one.

December 9, 1944: Thanks for your interesting letter of the 8th:I can't have made my position clear. I am not either attacking or defending Evolution. I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if Evolution is true. This is where you and I differ. Thinking as I do, I can't help regarding your advice (that I henceforth include arguments against Evolution in all my Christian apologetics) as a temptation to fight the battle on what is really a false issue: and also on terrain very unsuitable for the only weapon I have. Atheism is as old as Epicurus, and very few polytheists regard their gods as creative.

There is no evidence that Lewis ever read the Genesis account of creation literally.

June 14, 1950: Thanks very much for the booklet. I don't see how at my age, I can start making myself a good enough Biologist to reply to the Darwinians.

September 13, 1951: I have read nearly the whole of Evolution [probably Acworth's unpublished "The Lie of Evolution"] and am glad you sent it. I must confess it has shaken me: not in my belief in evolution, which was of the vaguest and most intermittent kind, but in my belief that the question was wholly unimportant. I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. The section on Anthropology was especially good. ... The point that the whole economy of nature demands simultaneity of at least a v. great many species is a v. sticky one. Thanks: and blessings.

October 4, 1951: No, I'm afraid. I shd. lose much and you wd. gain almost nothing by my writing you a preface. No one who is in doubt about your views of Darwin wd. be impressed by testimony from me, who am known to be no scientist. Many who have been or are being moved towards Christianity by my books wd. be deterred by finding that I was connected with anti-Darwinism. I hope (but who knows himself!) that I wd. not allow myself to be influenced by this consideration if it were only my personal concerns as an author that were endangered. But the cause I stand for wd. be endangered too. When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the look out for things that might discredit him. Sorry.

December 16, 1953: Many thanks for your cheering card...I can't help sharing a sort of glee with you about the explosion of poor old Piltdown [the fossil remains of an alleged human ancestor exposed as a hoax earlier in the year]: but I hope no one on the other side will rush in and try to exploit it. We might lay ourselves open to v. easy replies: (1) That the scientists have not yet been convicted of so many frauds as the Christiansforged decretals, faked miracles, and all! (2) That they themselves have discovered their own frauds & published them. But of course one inevitably feels what fun it wd. be if this were only the beginning of a landslide. I've never read [Charles] Lyell: should I?

September 18, 1959: I am most interested to hear of your young biologist [unidentified]; and his experience impresses me again with the suspicious disingenuousness of orthodox biologists.

March 5, 1960: Did you know that your theory of a catastrophic shift in the angle between our axis and the ecliptic [which Acworth invoked to account for the Noachian deluge and the sudden change of climate that froze the Siberian mammouths] is closely paralleled in [John] Milton's P[aradise] Lost Bk. Xor possibly IX. This in his view is one of the ways in which the change of conditions after the Fall cd. have been produced. Have you read this book by the Jesuit [Pierre Teilhard] de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man) wh. is being praised to the skies? This is evolution run mad. He saves "continuity" by saying that before there was life there was in matter what he calls "pre-life." Can you see any possible use in such language? Before you switched on the light in the cellar there was (if you like to call it so) "pre-light;" but the English for that is "darkness." Then he goes on to the future and seems to me to be repeating [Henri] Bergson (without the eloquence) and [George Bernard] Shaw (without the wit). It ends up of course in something uncomfortably like Pantheism: his own Jesuits were quite right in forbidding him to publish any more books on the subject. This prohibition probably explains the succès fou he is having among our scientistson the same principle whereby [Boris] Pasternak's (really, v. second rate) novel owes its [illegible] fame to the condemnation of the Russian government.

These letters to Acworth shed welcome light on Lewis's personal views regarding evolution. They complement the evidence from his published works and reveal to some extent the development of those views.

There is no evidence that Lewis ever read the Genesis account of creation literally. Repeatedly and publicly he described it as a folk tale or myth. In The Problem of Pain, published in 1940, four years before his first surviving letter to Acworth, Lewis constructed his own "myth" of human origins, which he described as "an account of what may have been the historical fact." Professing no objection to the notion that "man is physically descended from animals," he suggested that over time God "perfected the animal form" that was to become the first man by endowing it with human consciousness. The resulting "Paradisal man" engaged in full and unbroken communion with God while remaining, by our standards, a savage. Although he was as yet untainted by sin, his technology remained primitive. In joining an evolutionary picture of human biological development to the biblical account of the Fall, Lewis wished to demonstrate that the two views are not (as they seem to be) mutually exclusive. For him, technological backwardness implied nothing about intelligence or virtue, both of which might have been highly developed in prehistoric humans. When early man fell into sin (under circumstances Lewis does not describe), his spirit began to lose the control it had previously held over his body:

The total organism which had been taken up into his spiritual life was allowed to fall back into the merely natural condition from which, at his making, it had been raisedjust as, far earlier in the story of creation, God had raised vegetable life to become the vehicle of animality, and chemical process to be the vehicle of vegetation, and physical process to be the vehicle of chemical.6

Lewis's acceptance of divinely guided human evolution prompted him to modify not only the Genesis account of creation but also the traditional Christian understanding of the Fall.

Lewis's acceptance of divinely guided human evolution prompted him to modify not only the Genesis account of creation but also the traditional Christian understanding of the Fall. The existence of pain in the animal kingdom especially troubled Lewis, who devoted an entire chapter to the subject in The Problem of Pain. Theologians, he noted, had previously attributed the origin of animal suffering to the Fall of man. But the scientific evidence that carnivorousness was "older than humanity" had led Lewis to conclude that evil had manifested itself long before Adam in the law of tooth and claw. To account for this fact, he postulated a hypothetical pre-Adamic fall, in which Satan corrupted the world and caused animals to live by preying on one another.7

Lewis may have accepted a theistic version of organic evolution, but he resisted attempts to draw broad philosophical implications from scientific theories. This reticence is suggested most notably in his posthumously published essay on evolutionism, "The Funeral of a Great Myth," probably written in the 1940s. In this piece he distinguished between "the doctrine of Evolution as held by practising biologists," which he deemed to be "a genuine scientific hypothesis," and the speculative versions of evolution that preceded Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Scientific evolution, he argued, is a purely biological theorem. It takes over organic life on this planet as a going concern and tries to explain certain changes within that field. It makes no cosmic statements, no metaphysical statements, no eschatological statements.

By contrast, popular evolutionism often claimed to account for the origin and development of both the universe and terrestrial life from an initial state of chaos to a future of almost infinite possibilities. According to the popularizers, Reason has "evolved" out of instinct, virtue out of complexes, poetry out of erotic howls and grunts, civilization out of savagery, the organic out of inorganic, the solar system out of some sidereal soup or traffic block. And conversely, reason, virtue, art and civilization as we now know them are only the crude or embryonic beginnings of far better thingsperhaps Deity itselfin the remote future.

Lewis especially objected to the idea that human reason and an ordered universe could have arisen from the inorganic and irrational.8

The above statements on evolution, which date from the 1940s, suggest that Lewis accepted evolution while rejecting evolutionism. None of his published writings show a basic antipathy to science, although Lewis came to believe that all scientific theories are tentative and as dependent on changing presuppositions and climates of opinion as on new empirical data. Writing in the late 1940s, Chad Walsh, an acquaintance of Lewis's, described him as not anti-scientific in a Fundamentalist sense. He is not troubled by the "conflict between science and religion" for the reason that his theology does not conflict with anything that science has so far discovered or is ever likely to discover. One cannot imagine him voting to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the schools of Britain.9

Lewis's early letters to Acworth, which deny that biological evolution is incompatible with Christianity, lend compelling support to this irenic portrait of the Christian apologist.

The later Acworth letters, however, indicate that during the 1950s Lewis became increasingly critical of evolutionism and what he called "the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders."

The later Acworth letters, however, indicate that during the 1950s Lewis became increasingly critical of evolutionism and what he called "the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders." He had much earlier come to feel that evolution was often held for dogmatic rather than for scientific reasons. Thus in "The Funeral of a Great Myth" he quoted D.M.S. Watson's assertion that evolution "is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible."10 Lewis's later writings reveal his belief that evolutionism had become a theological creed, a view that found humorous expression in his poem "Evolutionary Hymn," which concludes with the following verse:

Evolution was a creed so pervasive and so deeply held that even to appear to question it was to invite attack. For example, in a vitriolic article the Marxist geneticist J.B.S. Haldane accused Lewis of getting his science wrong and of traducing scientists in his works of science fiction.12 It is probably because evolution formed the basis of theories of philosophical naturalism like Haldane's, which had become the dominant secular world view, that Lewis agreed with Acworth in regarding it "as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives."

To what extent Lewis came in his later years to reject his earlier belief in theistic evolution is more difficult to ascertain. His Oxford colleague Dame Helen Gardner recalled a conversation with Lewis over dinner in which she suggested that Adam was probably a "Neanderthal ape-like figure," to which Lewis coolly replied, "I see we have a Darwinian in our midst."13 Nothing in his published writings suggests, however, that he gave up his long-held view that biological evolution was compatible with Christianity. Nevertheless, Lewis seems to have been favorably impressed upon reading Acworth's unpublished attack on evolution. "I must confess," he wrote on September 13, 1951, "it has shaken me." Lewis's later correspondence with Acworth suggests that he had begun a gradual shift away from his earlier unquestioning acceptance of evolution, but had stopped short of adopting Acworth's antievolutionist stance.

A few years ago a prominent young-earth creationist lamented Lewis's attempt in the 1940s to reconcile evolution and Scripture. "I like to think," wrote David C.C. Watson, "that, had he lived another 20 years,... Lewis would have acknowledged his... error."14 It is doubtful that Lewis would have felt comfortable espousing the views of present-day creationists. He always carefully indicated that he opposed evolutionism as a philosophy, not evolution as a biological theory. At the same time his correspondence with Bernard Acworth suggests that he had come in his later years to entertain more doubts about the claims made for organic evolution than his published works indicate.

1The original letters remain in the private possession of Captain Acworth's son, the Rev. Dr. Richard Acworth, who has graciously permitted us to quote from them and to deposit photocopies in the Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton College. Ronald L. Numbers has quoted a few sentences from these letters in The Creationists (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 153. C.S. Lewis's Letters to Captain Bernard Acworth copyright ©1992, 1996 C.S. Lewis (Pte) Limited, reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown, London.

2This biographical sketch is based on A. G. T[ilney], "Origin of Evolution Protest Movement," Evolution Protest Movement Pamphlet No. 82 (1963); Ronald L. Numbers's interview with Richard Acworth, October 2, 1984; "Capt. Bernard Acworth," Who Was Who, 1961-1970 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972), pp. 4-5; and "Arrest This Man," (London) Daily Mirror, February 14, 1942.

3Bernard Acworth, This Bondage: A Study of the "Migration" of Birds, Insects and Aircraft, with Some Reflections on "Evolution" and Relativity (London: John Murray, 1929), pp. 1, 4.

5T[ilney], "Origin of Evolution Protest Movement"; Bernard Acworth, This Progress: The Tragedy of Evolution (London: Rich & Cowan, 1934), pp. 115, 333-34. E.P.M. publications date the founding of the society in 1932, but no extant evidence documents any activities before 1935.

6C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), pp. 70-71. On Genesis 1 as myth, see ibid., p. 59; on Genesis 1 as folk tale, see C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947), p. 42.

7Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 121. For criticism of Lewis's theory of a pre-Adamic Fall, see Austin Farrer, "The Christian Apologist," in Light on C.S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), pp. 41-42; and C.E.M. Joad, "The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology," The Month 189 (1950): 95-104. Joad's essay, together with a reply by Lewis, is reprinted in C.S. Lewis, Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), pp. 128-37. In his reply to Joad (ibid., p. 135), Lewis elaborates briefly on Satan's influence on the animal kingdom.

8C.S. Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth," in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 82-93.

9Chad Walsh, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 129. For Lewis's views on scientific models, see C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 221-22.

11The Cambridge Review 79 (November 30, 1957): 227; reprinted in C.S. Lewis, Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), pp. 55-56.

12"Auld Hornie, F.R.S.," Modern Quarterly, n.s., 1 (Autumn, 1946): 32-40. Lewis composed a rejoinder, "A Reply to Professor Haldane," which he never completed. It appeared posthumously in C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), pp. 74-85.

13A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990), pp. 209-10.

14David C.C. Watson, "C. S. Lewis and Evolution," Biblical Creation 7 (Spring, 1985): 9-10.

..Mine is not even on the list! LOLOL!"

I appreciate your response. I haven't had time to look at your link in any depth, yet, so won't comment on it until I do.

Glancing over it, I especially found this interesting:

[huge snip]

"... Every time the universe doubles, the perception of time is cut in half. Now when the universe was small, it was doubling very rapidly. But as the universe gets bigger, the doubling time gets exponentially longer. This rate of expansion is quoted in "The Principles of Physical Cosmology," a textbook that is used literally around the world.

(In case you want to know, this exponential rate of expansion has a specific number averaged at 10 to the 12th power. That is in fact the temperature of quark confinement, when matter freezes out of the energy: 10.9 times 10 to the 12th power Kelvin degrees divided by (or the ratio to) the temperature of the universe today, 2.73 degrees. That's the initial ratio which changes exponentially as the universe expands.)

The calculations come out to be as follows:

The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective was 8 billion years.

The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 4 billion years.

The third day also lasted half of the previous day, 2 billion years.

The fourth day - one billion years.

The fifth day - one-half billion years.

The sixth day - one-quarter billion years.

When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of the universe at 15 and 3/4 billion years. The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance?

But there's more. The Bible goes out on a limb and tells you what happened on each of those days. Now you can take cosmology, paleontology, archaeology, and look at the history of the world, and see whether or not they match up day-by-day. And I'll give you a hint. ..... "

Continued here bttt

"What worries me is the description of God that results"

Wisdom

The book of Hebrews, while never identifying Jesus directly as Wisdom, does indicate an equivalence. In verse 3 the rare Greek term apaygasma is used to describe Jesus as the "brightness of God's glory," just as the word is used in Wisdom of Solomon (7:25-26) to describe Wisdom's radiance. Hebrews ascribes to Jesus the same functions that the Philonic/Alexandrian Wisdom literature assigned to Wisdom: mediator of divine revelation, agent and sustainer of creation, and reconciler of God and man (Wisdom of Solomon 7:21-8:1). For more on this word see here.

Hebrews also says of Jesus what Philo says of the Logos. Philo referred to Wisdom as the "charakter of the eternal Word" just as Hebrews uses this term of Jesus. Hebrews also "asserts the superiority of Jesus over a group of individuals and classes that served mediatorial functions in Alexandrian thought," including angels, Moses, Melchizidek, and the high priest. Finally, in Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, though universal in scope, by God's decree rests in Jerusalem, and is regarded as having the role of the priesthood: "In the holy tabernacle I ministered before him, and so I was established in Zion." (24:10) Compare this proclamation with what is found in the Book of Hebrews chapters 3-10 describing Christ as our "high priest" ministering at a heavenly tabernacle."

Much more at the above link.

Thank you so much for the excerpt from Schroeder's "Age of the Universe", Matchett-PI!

And thank you, xzins, for your encouragements! Hugs!!!

Fascinating stuff. What worries me is the description of God that results. I assume humanity was created at the beginning of that quarter billion years or is that assumption wrong? If it is wrong, then how could instantaneous in God's domain translate to lengthy duration with many changes within time?

Indeed, man was created on the sixth day (from the inception space/time coordinates) – but at what point “in” the sixth day, he was created, I cannot say. Also, I believe that Adam was not created in the physical realm but rather in the spiritual realm – the two realms intersecting at various points throughout Scripture.

But concerning domains, I assert that the Father does not “inhabit” domains of any kind – whether space/time (the physical realm) – or beyond space/time (the spiritual realm.) He may however manifest an image in His Creation to convey properties of Himself, e.g. “I am”.

Thus when He speaks relative to a time, particularly “in” such a manifestation in time - it is for our benefit – whether the inception of creation, prophesy, the current heaven and earth – or the one to come.

I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth [it], that [men] should fear before him. That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. – Ecc 3:14-15

Remember the former things of old: for I [am] God, and [there is] none else; [I am] God, and [there is] none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times [the things] that are not [yet] done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: - Isa 46:9-10

Thus when He establishes a thing, it “is” regardless of domain.

But of that day and [that] hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. – Mark 13:32

Thank you so much for your reply!

Please understand that I do not agree with Schroeder on everything. Right off the bat, he is Jewish and I am Christian. I do however agree with his point vis-à-vis relativity and inflationary theory and thus that both statements are true: God created the physical universe in a week (as seen from the inception space/time coordinates) - and also the physical universe is approximately 15 billion years old (from our space/time coordinates on earth).

My leading in the Spirit in reading Genesis chapters 1-3 is that it is speaking to creation and events not only of the physical realm but the spiritual realm as well. In other words, it is not merely a description of physical cosmology but rather is a description written by God, the Creator, Himself about all of His creation – heaven and earth, spiritual and physical.

Thus I read with the language of Scripture before the language of science. To take the first few passages…

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The Spiritual leaning I have received is that ‘waters’ is not literally H2O - but rather spiritually the metaphor for language as in the water of life, the words of God :

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. – John 4:14

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. – John 6:63

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. – Rev 22:1

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, [and] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. – Jer 2:13

And likewise, the words ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ have a spiritual meaning:

Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. – I Thess 5:5

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to [give] the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. – 2 Corinthians 4:6

This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. – I John 1:5

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. – John 8:12

I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. – John 12:46

BTW, if Genesis 1 were a physical cosmology textbook, the order would have been light before water.

Until 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe “was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could ‘decouple’ from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.” Paul Preuss, “The Universe May Be Flat But It Is Nevertheless Musical,” Science Beat, Berkeley Lab (June 5, 2001)

I further assert that those who are stumped by the plants being created before the solar system ought to take note of Genesis 2:4-5 --- that the plants were created before they were in the earth. This also points to Genesis 1-3 dealing both with creation of the physical realm and the spiritual realm. That assertion is further supported by Genesis 2:9 and Rev 2:7. Namely, that the tree of life is in the center of the garden of Eden and Paradise, i.e. spiritual realm.

I also assert the intersection of the spiritual and physical realms - not only the types, such as the Temple and the Ark, but in appearances of Christ after the resurrection, the transfiguration, visitation of angels - and something to which we can all testify: the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (John, Romans 8, I Cor 2, etc.)

As another point you might find interesting, some Jewish mystics do not see the firmament as a location in space/time but rather a boundary between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. IOW, it’s not “there” but everywhere. Further, they propose the boundary is the speed the light.

I agree with them about the firmament being a boundary and not a location, but I have no leading in the Spirit whether the boundary is dimensional (space/time itself) or the speed of light.

Oh, and the word “void” has a particular significance in cosmology. All cosmologies whether inflationary theory, multi-world, multi-verse, Ekpyrotic, cyclic, imaginary time, etc. - require a beginning because they rely on geometry for physical causation.

One form of causation is if not for A then C would not be. If not for time, events would not occur. If not for space, things would not be.

But there is no space, no time, no energy, no mass, no physical laws, no physical causation, no qualia – nothing – in the void. I repeat there is no physical causation in the void.

Again with the Jewish mystics … their term for God in the beginning is Ayn Sof which means “no-thing” — One without end from which all being emerges and into which all being dissolves. God alone is “before” the beginning, transcendent, existing, all powerful and the only possible uncaused caused of all that there is, both physical and spiritual.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

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