 The word firmament is mentioned 17 times in the King James Version of the Bible. The Day 2 creation account in the first chapter of Genesis describes God making a firmament to divide waters above from waters below. What was this firmament? Understanding what God made on Day 2 can lead to some stunning astronomical conclusions. Coming up on today's edition of Origins, the firmament of Genesis 1 with Dr. Danny Faulkner. Hello my friends and welcome to Origins. My name is Don Chapman and it's my privilege to be your host. During this program we showcase interesting guests who present evidence from science along with other important facts validating the truth of creation and the accuracy of God's Word. Today's guest Dr. Danny Faulkner earned graduate degrees in physics and astronomy and taught at the University of South Carolina Lancaster for 26 years. He has been extensively involved in creation science, writing many articles and serving on the board of directors of the Creation Research Society. Several years ago Dr. Faulkner retired as professor and now has joined Answers in Genesis in Kentucky as a full-time scientist and speaker. Dr. Faulkner it's such a privilege to have you with us. Thank you. Now today we're going to talk about firmament. I've got to tell you that title doesn't do anything for me. And I know this is something that is kind of new things that have happened in you that you want to share with us. Well you're bringing the listeners on board. Don I want to tell you over the past year or two my whole understanding of this has changed, I've changed my mind about stuff and it's rocked my cosmology to the core. So I'm excited about it. You still believe that God made the heavens in the earth. Oh yes, in six days a few thousand years ago but I've got a different appreciation I think sort of where things are and how we put it together. And I think this is important because I've been stymied for decades trying to put together what I consider a good creation model of astronomy. If we can't get something this fundamental right then what hope do we have? So I think we're making progress now. So I'm excited about this. We're excited to share your insights. All right. Well anyway, the firmament or I'll call it expanse is probably a better term for all this. Let's go back to Genesis we should go back to Genesis and read about this. The very first verse of Genesis is in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That's pretty straightforward. You'd think it's talked about separate things maybe but you're looking at those kind of jump out at me. The heavens and the earth. What does this mean? By the way, you may notice that it's heavens here but in some translations it's heaven. So which is correct? Yes. We'll talk about that more in a minute but it's tricky to do this and you'll see why in just a minute but that's the very beginning thing here and many of us including me for many, many years thought that this was the heavens here was the creation of space as we know what we call outer space today. Now of course you know in ancient times the Hebrews, well nobody really understood what we mean by outer space today. It's a different way of looking at things. That's a modern concept. First of all I want to show this photograph to you. That's a photograph of the center of the Milky Way. I took that recently. I was in South Africa and I took this with my camera put on a tripod and had some help with it and fellow helped me do some Photoshop on it but that is a really nice photo of the Milky Way I do believe. You know the Milky Way is our galaxy. It contains a few hundred billion stars and we're just one of those huge, huge array of stars but you know we read on day two. At the beginning of the day one account just as one one but we learned that on day two God made this thing called the Affirmament and I put in there expanse because a lot of modern translations render it expanse rather than it as as firmament and I think that's a better better rendering altogether. And you know going back 45 years ago when I was in high school I read this in the Genesis account and I wondered what is this firmament thing? And I just puzzled over that for years and I'm glad to share with you today some of my conclusions I've reached. Well we know we made it on day two whatever it is and I want to read out here if I could the day two account only found in Genesis verses six through eight here and it says in God said let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters. I'm not going to pass waters there too. And let it separate the waters from the waters and God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse and it was so. And God called the expanse heaven and it says there the evening and the morning or the second day. Notice the expanse is mentioned several times there and the waters are mentioned several times it turns out waters are mentioned a number of times. Lots of water. And the numerous times in the Genesis account of creation. You know 2 Peter 3 talks about the waters going back to the creation being very abundant. So let's note a few things here. By the way this is a photograph of the Pleiades. I didn't take that but a friend of mine did. The Pleiades is a star cluster. It's prominent in the winter sky and it's mentioned three times in the Old Testament twice in Job and once in the book of Amos. Well what can we note about what we've read so far. First of all what we've talked about so far is day one and day two. And day one and day two appear to be different things being talked about. So we need to be careful we don't read into day one some things that maybe were on day two and vice versa. That's tricky and it's caused some rethinking on my part in recent year or so. Also there's waters above this thing. Whatever it is it says it's to separate the waters from below from the waters above. Again water playing a very key role in the creation account. And I've been puzzled a lot really these waters above what are they? Where are they? And what are they doing today? That's a big question and it's changed my way of looking at this entirely once again. And also as an astronomer I'm very interested on stars because well I study stars and people specialize. People do different things in astronomy like stellar astronomy. That makes me a stellar astronomer. You see. I think so. But the stars were not made until day four. So whatever is going on here on day one and day two it didn't include stars. That's right. We need to keep that in mind. Again we don't want to try to bring things from day four into day one and day two. We want to keep day one and day two straight. I think many times we've kind of blurred those distinctions. We need to be very careful because God went to the trouble of making a distinction. He did. And so we need to honor that distinction and maybe there's some subtle clues that we can pick up in all of that. Now remember it talked about the heavens. God made the heavens on day one. Heaven's on earth he says. But then he makes this expanse on day two and at the end of the day two account he equates the expanse with the heavens. God called the expanse the heavens. So it kind of puts us in a curious position. Did God create the heavens two times? Once on day one and once on day two? A quick reading would have you think it's on day one and it's also on day two. And that's tricky. It is. And I don't think he created the same thing twice. He created it once, whatever it was. Now he could be talking about two different things. A lot of different possibilities here. But for a very long time I want to point out that I thought that God made space on day one. And so when he starts talking about this expanse on day two, what is that? What is that sort of thing? And the way we interpret that will have profound effects upon our cosmology and ultimately upon our astronomy. And hey, as an astronomer, as a creation astronomer, I'm keenly interested to find out what kind of model I can build based upon the Biblical data there. I just build models or theories all the time. We creation scientists do the same thing. It's just our worldview is different. We start with Scripture rather than starting with man's ideas about billions of years and evolution of everything and existence. Well, firmament, heaven. These two terms sometimes used interchangeably, it seemed. Well, take a look at the word heaven. The Hebrew word used there is shemaim. When you see that I am ending it means it's a plural. What's interesting is there's no singular form for it. It's a plural form that works for both heavens. So it's never heaven as always heavens. Yes, right. Well, wait a minute. Expanse or expanses. It can work either way. Think of the word deer. You can have one deer or two deer or three deer. It's the same word, moose, elk, same way. You don't have mooses or deers. And you usually tell from the context how many you're talking about. Particularly if it's a subject of a sentence, the verb will help you. It can be plural or whatever. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of times, and by the way, it occurs 420 times in the Old Testament. So there's a lot of usages. That's a lot. But in the vast majority of situations, it's used in the objective case, not the subjective case. By the way, the word is translated heaven most times. I think 398 times either heaven or heavens. 398 times the other 22 times it's talking about things up above us can be the sky above us, for instance. So there's no doubt what this means, really. It's pretty clear. It's talking about things above us. Now, the thing translated firmament, and again, a lot of us today would say expanse because that's most modern translations say that. It comes from the word rakia. Rakia. No, I got to get that sound inside if you want to do it right. Unlike Shemaya, it only occurs 17 times with such fewer instances. It's more difficult to translate. And it occurs over half of those times, 9 of the 17 in Genesis 1 alone. There are the verses right there. So it's only used eight other times outside of that. And even then, it's not talking about the same thing many times. So when it comes down to rakia, firmament, expanse, whatever you want to say, it could have some wiggle room on what you think that it means. And this has always been a problem in trying to decipher this. Well, the day four account comes along right after that. And I'm going to quote here directly from Genesis 14, 1, 14, 15, and 17. And it says, first of all, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens. Quite literally, you would say, I guess, mixing English and Hebrew, you would say the rakia of the Shemayim. I like saying that, rakia of Shemayim, but expanse of the heavens. Those two words together in one's modifying the other and one's in a prepositional phrase with it. Well, what do you think those lights are done? Day four would be, that's the creation of the stars. Yeah, the stars and the sun and the moon. We're talking astronomical bodies. And by the way, I think that would include all the things you can't see with a naked eye, like asteroids and satellites and planets. But I think it's talking about astronomical bodies here. And the next verse it says, and let them be lights in that again, expanse of the heavens, that rakia of Shemayim. And then finally it says, and God set them, talking about the lights, the luminaries in the sky, set them in that expanse of the heavens. The same phrase three times in just a few verses, just three out of four or five verses there. And keep in mind that God had just created this expanse in the day two account, whatever it is, the rakia, and he equated it with heavens at the same time. There's an exact equation made there. God said, called the rakia, the Shemayim, called the expanse, heavens. So I think the fact that God went to the trouble of identifying this Shemayim or the expanse on day two, equated it with the heavens, and then almost, you know, with day three in between comes back to this. And he uses the phrase, expanse of the heavens, expanse of the heavens, expanse of the heavens, three times to tell us where he put the stars. I think it's pretty clear what he's talking about. Wherever he put these lights in the heavens, he put them in the expanse. And that's a pretty strong case I think we can make here. Well, conclusion we reached then is that the expanse is where the stars are. Maybe you could just expand that just mean not just the stars, but also the sun and the moon and other things as well in the heavens there. And astronomical bodies in general going in this expanse that was made on that day. I don't want to get ahead of you, but does that word now become a synonym for space? Well, again, we've got to be careful because space is a modern concept. But yeah, I'm thinking in terms of space, if we want to take the ancient concept... It's the place where the stars are. That's what we would call space. We used to say outer space more in the 60s. We kind of dropped the outer now. But yeah, I'm thinking astronomical space. I'll put it that way. Yeah, that's a good tune. And what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to put it in how the modern people can understand it in a way that the ancients could have understood it because they were the principal audience. And also you have the Bible itself telling you I think propositional truth. And it has to make sense to the original readers. It has to make sense to us. Well, you know some of the ancient people got this. We have here the ancient cosmology. This is a photograph of the celestial spheres or models I used to use in my teaching of astronomy. The ancient Greeks thought the earth here in the center was surrounded by this celestial sphere. It was hard. It was crystalline, meaning it's transparent. We had a glass or something. And you see those little yellow dots on here. These yellow dots are all stars. And those stars are kind of located on this celestial sphere. And the things spun around us as we rotate it each day. I used to use these in my labs to show my astronomy students illustrate some of the principles we see of aspects in the sky. And unfortunately people, they call this the stereomaw. That's the Greek word for this thing. It means something hard and rigid. And unfortunately many people began to read that as the expanse of the firmate, the rakia. They identified their biblical concept with this physical thing. And that led to problems. Again, I could give a whole presentation on that, not enough time today. But I'll tell you this. It causes us then to have pause. We need to be very careful that we don't interpret Genesis in the Bible in general in terms of our current cosmology because it can lead to all sorts of troubles. For instance, this. There's this thing called the Flammarian engraving. It's supposed to be medieval. Here's flat. Over here, flat earth, right? That's not true. People didn't believe in flat earth in the Middle Ages, but that's a common misconception. Here's the sun and the moon and the stars. There's the firmament right there. And here's the edge of that firmament. Maybe there's some water along the edge here. And this intrepid explorer managed to find his way to the edge. He stuck his head out. Exactly. And he's seeing the workings of what's really going on behind. Is that pretty much what you think the people in the Middle Ages believe? That's pretty cool. I think so. That's what people tend to think, you know? That would be my assumption. You could believe this engraving came right out of the Middle Ages. Sure. It didn't. It came from 1888. Flammarian was a French man who wrote a book on meteorology and he used this to illustrate in his book. And it was supposed to represent the medieval sort of thing going on. The 20th century brought a new approach. People then rejected it. We ran into trouble with all of that. So what we did is this became common to believe in the 20th century that the heavens of day one, the creation of very verse one, was the creation of the space of the universe. And I said that was my thinking for a very long time. But then the idea became around the expanse of day two wasn't space but was merely the Earth's atmosphere. And that was a whole new replacement we had. And I think we need to spend a little bit of time talking about how that led us astray at some point. So this led to what we call the canopy model. And the belief there of the canopy model was that the, remember the water is above the expanse. There was water out here above the Earth. And that supposedly protected us from harmful UV radiation. Radio waves could pass out and visible light could come through but harmful UV radiation didn't come. And that would protect us from bad things, why people lived for 900 years before the flood. And the idea was that it collapsed at the time of the flood to produce the waters from above. However, this is largely rejected now. Most creation scientists have backed away from it. Doesn't seem... But not a lot of creationists who are average folks still kind of hold to this, don't they? A lot of them do. I was surprised to learn that. But it just doesn't work physically. And there's some questions exegetically, as we shall see, more towards the conclusion. So if we reject the canopy model, should we not re-evaluate the cosmology here? We need something to replace it with. Yeah. We need to re-evaluate this look at it entirely differently now. And we're going to do that when we come back. We've got to take a break right now. But you're going to, if you've always believed in the canopy model, you want to see what is maybe a better alternative. And we're going to share that with you when we come back. Don't go away. We hope you're enjoying Origins TV. It all started at Cornerstone Television in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We've been producing new episodes for over 37 years now. We praise God for the success of the program and are excited to introduce you to Origins and to us. If you're interested in watching more episodes of Origins, you can find them on our YouTube page. Simply go to YouTube and search Cornerstone Television Network. Click the like and subscribe buttons. Then you'll find the best episodes of Origins in our playlist. You can also visit our website at ctvn.org slash Origins. One more way you can stay connected with us is to subscribe to our free monthly Hope Today newsletter, which you can do from our website. And if you have any questions, call us here at Cornerstone Television at 888-665-4483. We'd love to connect with you. Thank you for watching. We are back. Welcome to Origins. We have Dr. Danny Faulkner with us. And we were talking about firmament in Genesis 1. But right before the break, you were sharing with us that your studies have led you to some discomfort with the canopy theory. But if you're going to take that away from us, you have to give us a viable alternative. Can you do that for us, sir? Indeed, I think I can. Okay. I've gotten really excited about these alternatives. First of all, come to the conclusion from some of the reasons I've already shared. Sure. That the expanse is what we would call outer space today. Okay. The atmosphere, too. It's not real clear necessarily, but I definitely think it is what we call outer space. Yeah. And that then leads to some very interesting conclusions. Three startling conclusions, actually, as an astronomer, these are huge. Okay. Number one, if the expanse, this rakia, this firmament is space, then remember, it's separating waters below, on the earth, waters above. So there must be waters just beyond where that is. If the waters are just beyond, then there must be an edge to the thing. There must be an end to the universe. Wow. And that's something that cosmologists, astronomers, physicists can't even fathom today. And it took me, that's all that, whoa, it's like having a head-on collision. It was jarring, but I'm very comfortable with it now because it seems to come out of the Genesis creation account. Number two, since it expands, the rakias, these things expanded or stretched outward, it's coming from the center and where's it, what's at the center of the earth is. So consequently, the universe has a center and by the way, we're pretty close to it. Again, that's even worse than the universe having an edge perhaps because... We're not the center but we're close to the center. We might be the center but I don't have to be, it's like horseshoes and hand grenades. Close is good enough. But there's some evidence, by the way, dealing with redshifts of galaxies that suggest this is the case, astronomers ignored half for 40 years, but there is evidence to suggest that this actually is the situation. Now think about that. If this vast universe has a center, we happen to be near it. What does that suggest? Suggest there's a creator. We've got some sort of special location. We have a special relationship with the creator. And so consequently, most scientists don't like this conclusion at all. These scientists don't want to go there. Quite a few. And then finally, the water is at the edge of this thing. There's water out there. And you know, they say, well, in space, it's got to be, well, maybe ice or baby vapor. In fact, in the universe, we see evidence of water all over the place. Water is the second most abundant molecule in the universe. But everywhere we happen to see it, it seems to be in the solid or in the gas form. But you know what, Don, there were Hebrew words for ice and vapor. And neither one is used there. It's the word Maya, meaning water. So you're not going to go for gas or ice here. You're going to get water at the edge of the room. And how it stays that way, I haven't a clue, but I'm simply taking God's word at what it seems to suggest here. And on top of that, I know from physics that if water, any state of matter, has any temperature at all, it's going to have to radiate. That is, it gives off radiation. Now it's very far away. It's very cool. Also, I believe the universe is expanding. That's good, well-documented from a cosmology and astronomy. So does that mean the edge is expandable? Probably. I'm thinking that. But as this radiation comes towards us, it gets stretched out and it's sent to longer and longer wavelengths. So here's what I would suggest, based on what I read in Scripture, the universe should be, we should be bathed near the center of the universe by all this radiation coming towards us, long wavelengths. Well, Don, that's exactly what we see. That's what you got. Back in 1965, two astronomers named Penzius and Wilson discovered this uniform radiation coming from all directions. It's called the cosmic microwave background, or CMB for short. And 50 years ago when they found this, this was heralded as being a prediction of the Big Bang and the universe started with a rapid appearance of space and everything. But as it turns out, if someone would have taken the Bible very seriously, they might have been able to predict this before this discovery, had they taken this seriously. So today, we've got an image here of what the background radiation looks like. This is like a map of the entire world. There are so many places on it. I think this may be. I'm not saying it definitely is, but I'm simply saying if this, what I've developed is halfway right, this could be radiation coming from the, from the rakia, the waters above that God created on day two. Wow. And I find that fascinating. This is new, very new. In fact, your audience here is hearing this, some of the first people to hear this. And I think that this represents some nice challenges in this sort of thing. I like to show the Hubble Deep Field. This was taken 20 years ago. Each little smudge you see on there, about 1,700 of them are all galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars. If you held a large grain of sand at arm's length, it would just barely cover this up. That's how small that is, giving an idea of how big the galaxies are. We believe that this is near the edge of what we call the observable universe. The assumption is that the universe is a lot bigger than the universe. I'm beginning to think that maybe the observable universe is the universe and God's allowing us in this late date to finally encompass all of creation. See all of it. See all of it for the first time as a possibility. Well, you know, one of the fascinating things about science is when you discover things, it doesn't leave less. It always makes for more study. There's more to be studied. And you've certainly given us some insight. Let's go back real quick in just a minute to the first verse because one of the things that you said first was that a quick reading of Genesis 1 and 2 almost looks like we make the heavens twice. So how do you reconcile that? I'll come to conclusion. We find the term phrase heavens and earth that God made there. I think it's like an introductory statement of the entire creation account. It's a phrase that says God made everything. And by the way, here are the details of how he did it. So it's an almost like in a written page where there's something in dark print that kind of states what's going to be in the paragraph below. Exactly. And that's what God is doing for us there. Well, that's fascinating and I think it's, I think it makes a lot of sense. Thank you, sir, for your work and thank you for sharing it with us. And folks, I hope it has been meaningful for you. You know, one of the things I love is that in creation, scientists are never afraid to stop looking and developing and finding new truth. And you know, it's God's view that he created you. And that should always be your worldview too. I hope you found this fascinating. I hope you found it enriching. I hope you'll join us again soon for Origins. And until then, God bless you, my friend. Thank you for watching this edition of Origins. If you'd like a copy of the PowerPoint information presented today, you can download an episode guide at OriginsTV.org. 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