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"And the earth was without form, and void"

If the actual phrase is rendered according to Strong's it reads more accurately "and the earth BECAME WASTE AND RUIN", doesn't that change the accepted meaning and along with it all the erroneous assumptions?
The very first sentence should read "A" beginning, not "the" beginning.
I contend that the earth indeed did exist for a very long time prior to Genesis, and a war between the angels and demons(you'll see reference to this in Revelations, because there are 2 wars of this type, one that was and one yet to come) destroyed the earth, and Genesis is a story as told by an observer standing on the earth under dark thick clouds, watching God restore its life and beauty.
This take not only adheres to what the bible actually says, without spiritualizing everything to fit a particular belief, but it also squares with the observable sciences, and is primarily the cure for this silly debate between creationists and evolutionists. The original truth has a tendancy to clear things up.

Links on harmonics in the early universe:

Physics News 481, April 27, 2000

BEST MAP YET OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND (CMB). The CMB is a redshifted picture of the universe at the moment photons and newly formed hydrogen atoms parted company roughly 300,000 years after the big bang. First detected in the 1960s, the CMB appeared to be utterly uniform until, eight years ago, the COBE satellite provided the first hint of slight temperature variations, on a coarse scale, with an angular resolution of about 7 degrees...

The 36-member, international "Boomerang" (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics) collaboration, led by Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, confirms that a plot of CMB strength peaks at a multipole value of about 197 (corresponding to CMB patches about one degree in angular spread), very close to what theorists had predicted for a cosmology in which the universe's overall curvature is zero and the existence of cold dark matter is invoked. The absence of any noticeable subsidiary peaks (higher harmonics) in the data, however, was not in accord with theory.

The shape of the observed pattern of temperature variations suggests that a disturbance very like a sound wave moving through air passed through the high- density primordial fluid and that the CMB map can be can be thought of as a sort of sonogram of the infant universe. (de Bernardis et al., Nature, 27 April 2000.)

Big Bang Evidence Found – May 2, 2001

"The early universe is full of sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet," explained Paolo deBernardis of the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the members of the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERanG) team. "For the first time the new data show clearly the harmonics of these waves." Harmonics In The Early Universe: The CMB Power Spectrum June 5, 2001

The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the "harmonic proportions" of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.

The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution "power spectra" show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.

Cosmological Parameters and Galaxy Biasing – May 22, 2002

[I was asked to re-post this by Alamo-Girl]

I am Christian -- have been all my life. But I have always had problems understanding Genesis the way it is commonly preached.

For example, it is written that God created the "Day" and the "Night" on the first "day". But he did not create the "greater and lesser" lights (the Sun and the Moon) to give light upon the earth until the fourth "day", the same day he created the stars. Therefore, the first three "days" had no 24 hour clock as we know it (the Sun). Those "days" could have been any length of time - even millions or billions of years.

Therefore, it is easy to assume that a "day" with the Lord is not the same as a "day" with man. It is just as easy to assume that when, on the fifth "day", God said, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven . . . etc., that God could have taken millions of years for that event, also.

That said, assume that on the sixth "day", when he said, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind" . . . etc. , that event could have also taken millions of years.

Later on the sixth "day", God created Adam, the Son of God, in his likeness, along with his wife, Eve. Adam is referred to as the "Son of God" in the genealogy of Jesus in Luke, which ends with this passage: ". . . Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God." -- Luke 3:38

Now, that event (the creation of Adam) could have been instantaneous; and we all know that Adam had a son named Cain. Cain married a woman from the east of Eden (the land of Nod), and I assume she was not his sister. So it is possible there were other "men" and "women" on the earth at that time.

My conclusion? The other "men" (those from whom Cain's wife was born) evolved, either from the "waters" as many scientists believe (with the evolution beginning on the fifth day), or from the earth (on the sixth day). But God created Adam, the Son of God, directly, and in his own likeness. And from Adam came both Israel, and Jesus, our Lord and Savior. That is, there are two distinct sources of "mankind": the descendents of Adam and Eve who were created directly by God, and the descendents of man who evolved. This is easier to believe if you read this verse: "And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." -- Genesis 6:1-2

And then there is this: "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen" --1 Timothy 6:20-21

Finally, I bolded the above words "open firmament of heaven" for another purpose. I believe Heaven to be the earth's lower atmosphere -- the air we breath -- the air where the "fowls" fly (see Genesis 1:20) -- that which separates the waters above the heaven (the clouds) from the waters below the heaven (the lakes, rivers, and seas) (see Genesis 1:7).

And, of course, with God, all things are possible.

'And the evening and the morning were the first day.'

In a nutshell, I understand those to be literal days, just like the days we have today. I have no problem acknowledging the fact that God created the universe, and as the master of such, can find no reason to need to resort to God taking billions of years to do what an omnipotent God could do in an instant. The pattern of evening and morning are there as precedent for us.

'And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, [it was] very good.'

If every thing God had created, including man, was good, that in and of itself shatters the myth that billions of years of evolution were necessary to get us to day 6 - implicit in the theory of evolution is the realiziation that what came before was imperfect, and denies the very existance of a Creator.

As a people, we craft answers to fit the apparent problem. Through the centuries, all of our scientific endeavors have us continually adjusting and refining our answers for those same problems. How can a photon travelling at the speed of light occupy the mass of the entire universe (relativistically)? The final scientific answers have not been discovered, nor will they ever. Even today, after millenia have passed, not a single person can create matter from nothingness, nor can any scientist explain how it could be done. The devil is the author of confusion, and his purpose is to lead us away from the truth.

I prefer to believe that God, in His infinite wisdom, created this universe in just a few days, that everything was good before death entered into the equation, and that He loved us enough to send His only Son to die in our place. We, who deserved nothing, were given everything.

I don't think Adam existed before the physical creation because God sought out a companion for him. None of the other created life was found to be a suitable mate for him, so God took a bone from his side and created Eve. If Adam had an existence before his physical body, then Eve would have had one too. I am still puzzled over why this occured, since God knows the end from the beginning, but there is much which we are to take by faith.
The tongues which Paul referred to are the spiritual languages which poured forth on the day of Pentacost. This was a sign to the unbelievers in the same way that the unintelligent babble of the Babalonians was a sign to unrepentant Judah. Since they would not hear the prophets of God, God brought forth his will through those whom they could not understand. Since Israel rejected their Messiah, God reproduced an earlier sign by pouring forth tongues. However, there were faithful persons who heard the language being spoken as their own. Others who did not believe, thought that this display of God's power was only drunkeness. Paul made the distinction that tongues were not understood by the person speaking unless they were also interpreted by another who had the gift of interpretation. This shows that tongues are intelligible to God, angels and man, but that the person speaking the tongue may have no understanding of what is being spoken, and the person hearing the voice may not understand it either, for he is speaking mysteries. Most people speaking in tongues do not understand what they are saying, but it is a form of worship and giving of thanks. They are the right of every born again believer and are manifested in many churches today.
I appreciate the deep thought which you have given to this subject, but I'm not sure we can ever truly figure this all out. I have sometimes wondered if God created with age factored in to his creation. Adam was probably created in an adult form. What if all creation was produced with age already present in it's created form, hence, the chicken did come before the egg. Also God says " the evening and the morning" which in our understanding means one day, and the words are written so that we would understand them.