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Past, Present And Future

-- Click To Expand/Collapse Bible Verses -- Gen ch1:v6-8
Gen 1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
Gen 1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
Gen 1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. (KJV)

Now, the dictionary defines the "firmament" as "The visible arch of the sky". We can naturally equate this term to the "present", or to a surface in spacetime that connects all the points reachable in spacetime by an object travelling at the speed of light 'c' or at a lower velocity.

What does God actually do on this second day? We would appear to have reached this far already with respect to spacetime: yet the "firmament" is there to divide the "waste" of the waters below (the past) from the "waste" of the waters above (the future). It is within this particular surface or family of surfaces in spacetime that we would naturally call "the present" within which God does His creative work. He is not concerned with creating the past,.. only creating the present so that the past would be apparently existent in such a manner as to allow the creation to rest contingently on it own seemingly natural causes. (In the account of the flood, these causes may be the "fountains of the deep" that were broken up whilst Noah was in the ark.)

Whatever filled the abyss of the deep in the former verses of the account we don't know, but we see here that with "let there be light" God created the concept of causality with the laws we see concerning matter's relationship to energy. In this second day God actually creates the space-time (and it's surfaces) themselves in which to place His creation. We may assume the firmament is big enough to place all of His created universe within it: (It may have been effectively infinite, we can not tell even with modern physics for reasons which will become clear later when discussing expansion.)

There is some effort to relate empty space with a "zero-point" energy - to state that even empty space is comprised of energy. In truth all space has some energy density due to the matter within it. Still, we can not tell with what or how we may manipulate any such energy with modern physics.

So not only do we now have physical laws for the universe, we now have an empty universe to place creation within. (In some sense we have answered the question of what was here before the universe, or what is outside... the answer is "well God was here before and was outside." a curt answer maybe but a fact nonetheless.)

We may now equate the term "observable universe" with the term "heaven".

Again God tests His creation to see if it will rest (and continue) contingent upon its causes. We see that the present is causally resting upon the past and the future at some point will become the present. But if the past is subject to the same laws of relativity as the present, and the past is without limit: (the waters in the deep under the firmament are infinitely deep) What exactly is created? If the answer is simply an empty universe, what are we to discern? Only that matter requires a natural first cause, and by the biblical account empty space and time does not. The "firmament" need not be anything except a single moment in time, or rather a single traversable surface of space-time: What is required is that the same "moment" is there "after" it is tested and revisited in "the morning".

If empty space does not require a cause above separating past from future, we may assume that the second day was the time period that God tested this observable universe (heaven);

Modern physics would simply argue that spacetime itself is not necessarily in motion (when without matter),.. rather such spacetime is a surface upon which things "move". If time is merely another form of a "length" such as height or depth (but with a complex coefficient), then God merely has to separate past from future and keep spacetime in one state: the surface would be held constant, even though there could be some "flux" of "future" through the "present" to the "past". In truth, we are simply observing different points on the same surface of "the firmament" in terms of spacetime, and we are not actually changing the surface altogether in a global sense.

If the surface stands on its cause, (it is simply continuous) be it a closed surface or an infinite, we see that we have a "second" day.


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