Day 5 - And God tipped the domino
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. – Genesis 1:20-23
In my post Genesis 1:20 - “teem”, I assert that God’s action was not to create fish, but to cause them to teem… more specifically, to “let” them teem. In other words, God removed any hindrance to them teeming. Similar for the birds, this was not the creation of birds, the “letting” of them fill the sky. Let me try and show you this more clearly.
Look at verse 22. It’s peculiar. It says that God blessed His creation, telling them to be fruitful and increase in number. He told the sealife to fill the seas, and the birds to fill the air. But, here’s the thing… God’s very creative action before that was to say “Let” them be fruitful! Let them “teem”. Let them fill “the expanse of the sky”. Why would He bless the sealife and birds to “increase in number” to fill the seas and earth, if His statement verse 20 had already accomplished it? The answer is that He would not have. In other words, He pronounced upon them a blessing for something that had not happened yet.
“But wait a moment,” you might ask. “Didn’t God say, ‘Let the water teem’? Didn’t he say ‘let birds fly… across the expanse’?” Indeed He did! And yet they did not immediately do so. Why? Because the key word in His pronouncement was to “Let” them do it. In other words, God’s first statement was an insurmountable hindrance be removed that previously preventing the teeming of sealife and the filling of the skies. Do you know what that hindrance was? Originally, it was mammals and dinosaurs. Then, God allowed the KT impact to result in the total obliteration of all dinosaurs, and most mammalian, sealife, and bird life that already existed. Except now, for the first time ever, sealife could actually teem, and birds could actually fill the sky. They never could before… or at least they weren’t immediately after the KT impact! But now, their natural predators were gone… mostly. The insurmountable hindrance to their multiplying had been removed. That was God’s pronouncement in verse 20. He had tipped the domino that would finally allow them to flourish. And you know what? They did!
According to the fossil record, fish recovered from the KT impact first, then birds recovered, then whales appeared… all before the land mammal population recovered! This interpretation requires there to be land mammals, fish, and birds already, but not many of them, and no dinosaurs or other natural or large predators… exactly the conditions we saw after the KT impact! In fact, Day 5 is so conspicuously close to what the fossil records show happened after the KT impact, that I believe it. Then, after tipping the domino, God subsequently blessed them with the command to be fruitful and multiply. In other words, His tipping of the domino was complete, and Day 5 could end with God’s blessing, even before the teeming and filling of sky was complete… even before the actual creation of countless subsequent species had really occurred! But, that is okay. Removing the hindrance to their creation was enough for God. He was under complete control, and did all He needed to do at this time.
(NOTE: I am knowingly implying that God allowed some kind of evolution to take place at this time. However, it is not required. God could still have remained involved at every step, creating every mutation and species Himself. So, naturalist evolution is not necessarily the order of the “Day” here. But, whatever the case is, God set it up to happen. The only thing I insist on is that whatever option He chose, all of it happened precisely according to His sovereign will.)
Now, we skipped verse 21. At this point, God has tipped the domino, and put in play the creation (whether directly or indirectly) of all of the fish, birds and other sealife that would eventually fill the seas and skies. And what did this action result in creating? Verse 21 gives us a list:
- The great creatures of the sea — whales
- That with which the water teems — fish, according to their kinds
- Every winged bird, according to their kinds
Now, I find it interesting that whales are listed first. Why? I mean, they actually appeared last in the fossil record! Is it because fish and birds already existed, and whales did not? So Moses gave them special notice? No, I don’t think so. I think Moses was merely summarizing, and that is just how he wrote it. However, just in case someone wants to be a stickler on order, note that whales first appear before the flourishing of land mammals and humanoids. Hence, both the scripture and the fossil record allow the first whales to appear on Day 5, without any need to overlap with Day 6. In my opinion, scripture imposes an order on Days 5 and 6, that the removal of hindrances not overlap Days; there is no requirement on order within a Creation Day that I can see, and no requirement that a certain amount of flourishing be complete. However, should we consider the insurmountable hindrances to whales independent of fish and birds, then the actual flourishing of fish would in fact have to occur on Day 5, for the sake of whales. Another event would be the introduction of some land mammal to the seas (whether it happened naturally, or God did some tweaking). In fact, those are the events according to the fossil record. In fact, not only did whales only appear after fish were flourishing, whales appeared before land mammals began to flourish! It means that God may well have ended Day 5 after the initial creation of whales, and before the flourishing of land mammals. I love that, because no other Old Earth theory that reads the science into the scripture allows for this, but Geocreationism does! It removes a huge hindrance that other Old Earth Theories have, because they must contort the sequence of Days to allow for only loose interpretation of God’s pronouncements. Geocreationism on the other hand, takes an even more literal view of what God says than Young Earth Creationists do, and results in a strict sequence that is backed up by the same fossil record embraced by mainstream secular scientists.
To summarize, God’s action on Day 5 was not to fully create a seas full of sealife and skies full of bird life. His actions were simple. First, He removed the hindrance to flourishing fish, birds and whales in verse 20, and said “have at it!” in verse 22. He tipped the domino. “And there was evening, and there was morning — the fifth day.”
May 1st, 2010 at 8:24 am
>>According to the fossil record, fish recovered from the KT impact first,
>>then birds recovered, then whales appeared… all before the land
>>mammal population recovered!
This statement was not exactly accurate. Land mammals recovered 54 million years ago, and whales appeared about 53 million years ago. However, the land mammals were to undergo another mass extinction event about 33.5 million years ago, and it was the recovery from that event that I was referring to… sorry for the confusion!