What Was the Earth Made of in the Beginning?
The secular story of earth’s origins is a familiar one to anyone with even a vague memory of middle school earth science:
At its beginning, Earth was unrecognizable from its modern form. At first, it was extremely hot, to the point that the planet likely consisted almost entirely of molten magma. Over the course of a few hundred million years, the planet began to cool and oceans of liquid water formed. Heavy elements began sinking past the oceans and magma toward the center of the planet. As this occurred, Earth became differentiated into layers, with the outermost layer being a solid covering of relatively lighter material while the denser, molten material sunk to the center. — "Formation of Earth", National Geographic
We’re told this loudly over and over again, to the point where I don’t think it’d be an exaggeration to say that most people have gotten to the point where they think “it has to be true.”
“If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.” ― Isa Blagden, The Crown Of A Life, By The Author Of 'agnes Tremorne'
But the ironic thing is that though the secularists are quite confident in dogmatically asserting their models as absolute truth (until another one comes along to supplant it), it’s all just a SWAG (scientific wild-animal guess). None of the scientists making bold proclamations about the origins of things were there to observe it, nor is it repeatable, nor is it directly testable. In short, it’s not science—it’s philosophy masquerading as science. We need a better tool than the scientific method or philosophy to answer this question. We need an eye-witness observer.
Now where might we find such a person, and how would He communicate this to us?
The Answer’s in Genesis
There are a couple of passages in Scripture to which we can turn to arrive at an answer to my student’s question:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. — Genesis 1:1, 2
So, there was a lot of water. But the earth’s surface today is about 71% covered with water; that’s a lot, right? Indeed, it is, but we need to keep reading. A few verses later, we discover something more about the expanse of the water that initially covered the earth:
Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good. — Genesis 1:9, 10
Are you paying attention? There was no dry land to be found anywhere on earth until the third day! So, that presents us with two obvious options:
The primeval earth was like a giant Tootsie Pop: lots of deep water surrounding a rocky core, or
A huge ball of water, liquid through and through.
Both options would seem to be consistent based upon what we see in the first ten verses of Genesis, but there’s a whole lot more Bible to read.
A “Formless” Ball?
When I called the nascent earth a “ball of water,” one of my young prodigies asked, “Why do you say it was a ball? The Bible says it was ‘formless.’”
Great question!
We call a small, suspended quantity of water a “drop” (or “droplet” if it’s teensy), and we think of the characteristic droplet shape, like the ones I used to draw in a comic I used to draw (and sell to my classmates!) when I was in middle school (you can see a rendition of it in the photo of the whiteboard…the droplets were cowboys and instead of guns, they carried hair dryers…but I digress). But why does a water droplet have that shape? Why is it big and bulbous at the bottom, but skinny at the top? Well, that’s because the mass of earth draws the water downward—i.e., because of gravity. But in empty space, there is no gravity…especially considering that the only mass on the entire fabric of spacetime is our watery earth, so that coupled with the surface tension of the water holds it together and in a shape more or less sphere-like. You can see an example of this from footage taken on the International Space Station in this video.
But here’s the crazy thing to think about…the inside of the space station is pressurized and heated, so it still behaves like water. But, outside of the station is a vacuum so there is no pressure, and it’s quite cold. When you drop the atmospheric pressure around water enough, it’ll boil at far less than 32 degrees Freedomheit (0 Celcius for the rest of the world), but when the temperature is cold enough, water freezes. So what does water do in an unheated vacuum? Does it freeze, or does it boil? Well, it does both. The water will instantly boil, and the resulting vapor will immediately freeze and turn into ice crystals. Apparently, this is a phenomenon has been seen in space when astronauts eject their liquid waste into outer space, but there is no known footage of pee boiling and crystalizing in outer space.
So why didn’t the liquidy earth instantly boil off and turn into a cloud of crystals? The Bible doesn’t give us that level of detail, but let’s just say that when you are dealing with One powerful enough to speak space, time, and matter into existence, keeping an enormous ball of water from turning into a cosmic snow cone isn’t much of a challenge.
Turbid Water?
A visitor to the class today offered an interesting third possibility for the composition of the earth on the first day—“turbid water.” As far as I can tell from Scripture, there’s nothing to militate against this option, but I’d just assume not muddy the waters with more speculation (that’s a joke right there…you were supposed to laugh). So, I wield Occam’s razor, and press on.
The Answer’s Also In 2 Peter
knowing this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water — 2 Peter 3:3–6
If Genesis 1 leaves us with two options, it would seem to me that the Apostle Peter whittles our options down to just one: the earth started off as the biggest drop of water you’ve never seen—a lifeless blob of water just sitting there on the fabric of spacetime, doing nothing but rotating on its axis, waiting for God to do something with it (Isaiah 45:18). There doesn’t appear to be any room for a rocky core since the entire earth was formed out of and by water, not “water and rock” (or “water mixed with silt” for that matter).
I find this passage quite timely. Did you happen to notice what Peter said about the mockers?
“Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” — 2 Peter 3:4
Sounds a lot like uniformitarianism, don’t you think? It’s…it’s almost as if God saw us coming.
Homework
Genesis 1:5 says “there was evening and there was morning, one day.” How can this be, since the sun wasn’t created until Day Four?