And God saw that it was good.

I think we often pass over this particular phrase from the creation account in Genesis without much understanding or comprehension. What does it mean? A bible teacher once said that it meant "goody good", and by that he meant "functionally good". In other words, God had done something that was "way cool" to use a modern colloquialism. In practical terms this means that God created a world that worked well and was all that he hoped it to be.

Anyone who reads the the science press or listens to science programs will know that almost every science discipline is viewed in terms of its relationship to evolution. You cannot hear a program on biology, botany, archeology, earth sciences, even physics without the "e" word being introduced. Questions such as "What is the evolutionary reason for such and such a feature on this plant/animal?" "Where in the process of evolution did this geological feature happen?" What I find irritating is that there has to be some "evolutionary" reason that this or that occurs. Rather than an objective description of the item being discussed there has to be some evolutionary explanation - however ridiculous. One of my issues here - quite apart from the distraction from the actual science itself - is that there is no way we could possibly know. You cannot apply the scientific method since there is no way you can test the hypothesis, nor can you observe the actual process. Sure, you can see a creature with such and such a feature and then another creature without but never the actual process taking place where this becomes that. So the "proven fact" of evolution is conjecture at best. Even if evolution were true the necessity to have to find an evolutionary explanation often ventures into the realm of pure fantasy with scientists grasping at whatever tenuous straws they can to twist the evidence into some sort of sense. I recently heard a scientist attempt an evolutionary explanation for the appendix which made them sound ignorant and amateurish, considering that the purpose of the appendix in the prevention of infection has already been discovered. Their postulations resulted an a complete loss of credibility.

Let us go back the God's statement that is the title of this blog. I am a sometime programmer and occasionally I come up with a program of which I am quite proud. It is functional, elegant, efficient and completely fulfills its purpose. Once set going it will continue until it is completed without error and with no fuss. I think this is maybe a good parallel. God set creation going and it is programmed so well that it just goes on with little or no intervention. It just works. So what sort of creation would it be. Let us say for example it contains rivers, mountains, creatures, plants, planets, stars, galaxies, indeed all of the paraphernalia that goes into an entire universe on the large scale and ecology on the small scale.

God would indeed have two options. He could take an amorphous mass compressed in to an incredibly small space and blow on it and set it going. Wait several billion years (what is a few billion years to someone who has existed for eternity) and watch it evolve into what it is today. Pre-programmed into it is all of the complexity that we now observe. Impossible to prove, but by the same token impossible to disprove. I am choosing the big bang as an arbitrary moment since we have no information reagrding what existed before the big bang and I am not sure whether we can see before the big bang. I believe not. The second choice is to go to some moment in our more recent history and create an already formed universe. If that was the case what would this universe look like? It might have all of the things we see pre-formed. By necessity it will appear to have all of the geological history pre-formed. Again this would be impossible to prove - and by the same token impossible to disprove. Science cannot answer this question. It is like taking my program and instead of starting it at the beginning presetting all of the mid point conditions and then starting it mid way through. To anyone observing my program executing it would appear to have been running since the fist instruction but it would have only been running from the middle. There was no way an observer would know and no way they could objectively determine that.

So it is possible that the statement "And God saw that it was good" could mean just that. That he had created a universe that was already functioning and working as if it always has done with the geological history, astronomical history, all of the observed ages pre-programed into the starting coordinates. Can I prove it? No I cannot. Is it able to be dis-proved? No, science can tell me nothing. What about biological evolution? It then becomes a nonesense. But we cannot know either way. The final question then is when did this happen? The account in Genesis does not tell us when this occured. We can postulate that it was so many thousand years BC but that is pure speculation. If it did occur as a pre programmed event then it could be any time between the big bang and now, maybe several thousand years ago.

Whether it happened like that or some other way I have no idea and all in all I think there are more important issues. I just throw this out there for the taking.