The Waters above the Heavens

I was thinking today about the first chapter of Genesis, and how there were truths buried there that would have been impossible for a bronze-age shepherd to have come up with, even though he had been given the best Egyptian education: compare Egyptian cosmology and creation accounts, which are typically crude and absurd by our standards, to that of Genesis. For example, consider the fact that plants are created and growing on the third day, yet the sun is not set in the heavens over the earth until the fourth--which would have been absolutely illogical for any human mind to have conceived as the order of creation--everyone knows plants have to have the sun to grow. So here's something in what purports to be a divinely-inspired account of  the origin of the universe, which from the time of its writing around 1500 BC seems directly opposed to all knowledge and observation--seemingly impossible. Until 1965 AD, when cosmic background radiation was discovered, proving that the universe during the ages following the big bang had been filled with what was once visible light, which through the doppler effect later faded into the infrared background radiation we can now observe only with instruments. In other words, the story in Genesis: that first God said "Let there be light" is supported by modern astrophysics--plants grew on the earth in the universal created light, and it was only as that light faded that the sun was necessary to light the earth.

What you have to bear in mind is that Paleo-Hebrew, the language which Moses spoke and in which he first recorded the scriptures, did not have words, nor did the mind of the people of that time have concepts, for the things which God revealed to him regarding the history of time before there was any man to observe it. We don't know how it was done: verbally or through visions, or even by God transporting Moses across space and time to observe the events of the Beginning first-hand, as he did with John regarding the End. But however it was, Moses was forced, when he was writing it down, to use the language and ideas which existed in his mortal brain. So for instance, if you look at Gen 1:7 where it talks about the "firmament" which has always been interpreted as "sky" and the waters above the firmament being divided from the waters below, you have to eschew simplistic, crude interpretations and allow for the fact that Moses could have been using the Hebrew word for "water" as the best approximation for what he saw, having no other word to serve. Similarly to how "day" is used to represent the incomprehensibly long periods of change and growth in which these things occurred.

So with this in the back of my mind, I came across the theory today by chance that hypothesizes that space-time is actually a superfluid. (http://phys.org/news/2014-04-liquid-spacetime-slippery-superfluid.html) And there it is: that verse which has always puzzled me makes perfect sense. Moses saw the cosmos from a vantage point other than our human one, and observed the superfluid of space-time filling the void of space, and expressed it the best way he knew how. Bronze age Hebrew didn't have words to express "zero viscosity superfluid".

Think about that. The Bible, after being ridiculed by centuries of "intellectuals" is still proving that it contains knowledge that was hidden until the most recent discoveries, and was recorded 3500 years ago, when the pinnacle of human learning was all about cosmic eggs, divine scarab beetles, and dismembered deities' genitalia.