How Those That Wrote the Bible, Tora and Koran Did Not Understand How the Sun Works

Executive Summary

• All three books claim to have been inspired by God and that God created everything.
• How do none of these books demonstrate knowledge of how the sun works?

Introduction

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam make grand claims for how their Gods created everything. This article takes the example of what each book demonstrates regarding its knowledge of the sun and compares it to what we know about it in modern times.

What the Bible and Torah Says About the Sun

Christians have stated that the bible contains supernatural information about the natural world. The most extensive passage about the natural world in Genesis. Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament. This is what both of these say about the natural world, which includes a description of the sun, or the output of the sun.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Here, light is described, but there is no explanation of what creates the light.

And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, 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 there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

Again, this is the outcome of the sun and the earth’s rotation, but the phenomena are only explained as the outcome, which is the Earth being lit.

And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants[e] yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

This is described as a person who is constructing an ant farm.

There is no understanding or hint of an understanding of natural processes causing these things and no concept of the time it took for these things to occur. These things all seem to occur at the same time and relatively immediately. After all, creation in the documents of all three religions is 6 days, so everything occurred at once. This process described above took hundreds of millions of years. The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, but the planet was not habitable for the first few billion. For 500 million years, only single-celled organisms existed on the earth.

4.5 Billion Years in Earth’s Development Illustrated in 1 Hour

This video does a time phase of how the earth developed. 

None of the religious documents discussed provides any context regarding the sequence of these events or the large time lag between each occurrence.

What is interesting is that when Darwin published his book The Origin of Species, there was great disagreement among Christians and other religions, as this quote from an article in Pew Research explains.

In November 1859, Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” which laid out his theory in detail. The book became an instant bestseller and, as Darwin had feared, set off a firestorm of controversy in his native Britain.

While many scientists defended Darwin, religious leaders and others immediately rejected his theory, not only because it directly contradicted the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis, but also because – on a broader level – it implied that life had developed due to natural processes rather than as the creation of a loving God.

This basic concern with evolutionary theory has helped drive the decadeslong opposition to teaching it in public schools. Even over the last 15 years, educators, scientists, parents, religious leaders and others in more than a dozen states have engaged in public battles in school boards, legislatures and courts over how school curricula should handle evolution.

This makes it appear that Genesis provides a great deal of articulated information on how things came into being.

This is incorrect.

When one looks at how sparse the explanation of creation is in Genesis, it becomes apparent that there is much less content in Genesis than is generally assumed. As explained in Genesis, everything related to the natural world’s origin can be synthesized in the following sentence.

If you can see it, and if it exists, then God created it.

The fact that Genesis iterates through different items and tells a story has made many think there is more to Genesis than there is. For example, there is an explanation in Genesis that God created fish in the sea and birds in the air. There is no mention of how insects or dinosaurs were made, but I will assume it was because God created them also.

There is a debate about whether to teach evolution in schools; however, the biblical version of the development of all living things is a single sentence. That is, if evolutionary theory is not to be taught, there is not much of an alternative to teach.

The Problem With How Long Life Has Existed on the Planet

At the time these religious documents were — no one anywhere had any idea of how long life had existed on the planet.

This video explains that life on the planet dates back 4 billion years, but for much of this time, it was bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Life began remarkably quickly once conditions for its existence were hospitable. 

The vast majority of those that follow the major religions still have no idea about this, and therefore don’t realize how inconsistent their documents are with the history of life on the planet.

The Conflict Between Genesis and Extinction

There is an enormous problem in explaining the history of life on Earth following Genesis. One reason is that over 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. This is explained in the following quotation from 99 Percent Of The Earth’s Species Are Extinct—But That’s Not The Worst Of It.

The vast majority of species died out from what is essentially old age. A species generally sticks around for anywhere from 1 million years (for mammals) to 11 million years (for marine invertebrates). But don’t get too comfortable. The planet has also been through five mass extinction events, starting at about 440 million years ago. The worst was the third extinction, which took place around 250 million years ago and wiped out 96 percent of life on Earth.

Evolution is only one example of a changing form of species. Another contradiction to the “steady state” presented in Genesis is extinction. Can this fact of extinction and the fact that living things become extinct be taught? An update to Genesis to incorporate extinction would have to be something like the following.

God created all living things — and then caused 99% of them to become extinct.

I can easily propose that biological extinction is as much of a contradiction of Genesis as evolution. Yet, I have not heard of a single controversy regarding extinction among Christians or any other religion. Is this simply because Christians and other religions are less familiar with the planet’s extinction history than they are with evolution?

Religion does not assist in scientific exploration and resists conclusions that it does not like. The societies that have the most robust religious control over them, such as Islamic societies, also make the least scientific progress. As Christianity lost much of its power, scientific progress exploded. However, this is not the story that Christians want to be generally understood, hence the reason they attempt to minimize the perceived conflict between science and religion both today and to an even more considerable extent in history.

The Asteroid Which Hit the Yucatan Peninsula

This video explains the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. 

Something else missing from Genesis and other origin myths in the documents of other religions is that humans have been around for an exceedingly short amount of time compared to most other animals.

Considering the Massive Timeline Across The Five Major Extinction Events in World History

This video points out that there have been five major extinction events in the planet’s history. The first major extinction event occurred 445 million years ago during the Ordovician period. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs occurred nearly 400 million years after the first extinction event. There is no concept of this timescale in any of the religious documents. The religious documents make it sound like the entire planet’s history began when humans were made in God’s image.

Genesis’ Misinformation on the History of Life on the Planet

Genesis sounds like humans were created within a day or so of all other plants and animals, but we know this is incorrect. Hundreds of millions of years pass without humans on the planet. For 500 million years in the earth’s history, there were only single-celled organisms on the planet.

If humans are the primary reason for the earth being here, why did it take so long for humans to appear on the scene?

Its also important to contemplate how recently we know so much of what we know today. The following are just a few things that changed our understanding of the world.

• The telescope was not invented until 1608; before this, all astronomical observations were done with the naked eye.
• The sun-centered or heliocentric understanding of the solar system was not introduced and accepted until hundreds of years after Copernicus first proposed it in the mid-15th century.
• Darwin’s The Origin of Species was not published until 1859, and the theory was not accepted until decades after this.

All of these religious documents were written before we understood the vast majority of what we understand today about the natural world.

No Conflict Between Science and Religion?

What is inconsistent is that the various religions frequently claim that there is no conflict between science and religion; however, as soon as something is discovered that contradicts some claim made in their faith, they put up roadblocks to prevent that view from being generally accepted. Religions cannot outright say they do this, so they say one thing — that they are consistent with science, and then block scientific understanding when it suits them or when they are adequately offended.

The Scopes Monkey Trial

Another example of religion resisting true scientific discovery was the Scopes Monkey Trial. The following is a quote from Pew Research.

At the urging of William Jennings Bryan and evangelical Christian leaders, evolution opponents tried to ban the teaching of Darwin’s theory in a number of states. Although early legislative efforts failed, evolution opponents won a victory in 1925 when the Tennessee Legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation making it a crime to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.”

Soon after the Tennessee law was enacted, the ACLU offered to defend any science teacher in the state who was willing to break it. John Scopes, a teacher in the small, rural town of Dayton, Tennessee, agreed to take up the ACLU’s offer.

The subsequent trial popularly referred to as the Scopes “monkey” trial, was one of the first true media trials of the modern era, covered in hundreds of newspapers and broadcast live on the radio. Defending Scopes was Darrow, then the most famous lawyer in the country. And joining state prosecutors was Bryan. From the start, both sides seemed to agree that the case was being tried more in the court of public opinion than in a court of law.

As the trial progressed, it seemed increasingly clear that Darrow’s hope of spurring public debate over the merits of teaching evolution was being stymied by state prosecutors. But then Darrow made the highly unorthodox request of calling Bryan to the witness stand. Although the politician was under no obligation to testify, he acceded to Darrow’s invitation.

With Bryan on the stand, Darrow proceeded to ask a series of detailed questions about biblical events that could be seen as inconsistent, unreal or both. For instance, Darrow asked, how could there be morning and evening during the first three days of biblical creation if the sun was not formed until the fourth? Bryan responded to this and similar questions in different ways. Often, he defended the biblical account in question as the literal truth. On other occasions, however, he admitted that parts of the Bible might need to be interpreted in order to be fully understood.

Yes, nothing in Genesis or the rest of the New Testament explains the natural world in a predictive way. There is no way to predict planets’ location the way science can. If one explanation is scientifically useless, and the other is highly predictive, the second explanation wins — even if people are offended.

Therefore after putting up road block after road block and for a time making teaching evolution in schools illegal, Christians today claim “there is no conflict between religion and science.”

Leaving Out the Explanation of What Causes Seasons

Here is what Genesis says about how God created the seasons.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.”

Why the Earth Has Seasons

As explained in this video, seasons occur because of the tilt of the earth in its rotation combined with the phase of the orbit around the sun.

Again, this description is similar to the ones before it, only in terms of the outcome- that is, seasons exist. However, there is no explanation of any mechanism that causes seasons to exist. Everything is described as simply coming into being because God wanted it to happen. However, seasons exist for specific reasons, which could have been explained. God could have promoted the authors to write that he both desired seasons and, therefore, he placed into motion a set of conditions that allowed seasons — but again, there is no explanation of this set of conditions.

How Causation And Natural Laws Are Treated in These Religious Documents

There are no natural laws explained in any of the discussed religious documents. The causation is entirely because “God wanted it to happen.”

The way these documents are written is very much that “someone,” in this case God, wanted it to happen.

This is very similar to how modern Muslims think. God wanted something to happen. Therefore, it happened. There is no attempt at understanding or elaboration of the mechanism. What is interesting is that both Judaism and Christianity have gone through a refining process where a more sophisticated explanation is presented to the followers by the leadership than exists in the written word of their respective documents.

Islam, on the other hand, has been less refined. However, regarding how the documents are written, the religions appear more similar in their documents than in their practice and modern interpretation. The quotes from the Koran on the sun are remarkably similar to the quotes on the sun in the Torah and New Testament.

The Conflict Between Natural Laws and Causation and A Diety Wanting Something to Happen

Today, outside of the Muslim world, natural phenomena usually are not described simply by “someone wanting it to happen” but by exploring natural laws.

It is rare to run into people, even if religious, who will remark that it is raining because God wanted it to rain. If this were not the case, people would question why there is a field of study called meteorology, and if they did think this, they would go to their priest or pastor to ask what the weather would be like tomorrow rather than using a weather app on their phone.

And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

This is a re-iteration of what was already stated.

Now that I have isolated and shown the explanation of the sun, or should I say the outcome of its existence in Genesis, let us look at more examples of the description of the sun in the New Testament.

And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
Ecclesiastes 1:5

Here the sun is named. However, there is no explanation of the sun being anything other than a light source.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.
Psalm 84:11

An observation of how the sun rises and sets.

For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.
Genesis 1:14

Here, the sun is used euphemistically and has no connection to being anything other than a source of light.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,
Matthew 24:29

This is a repetition of what is stated in Genesis.

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
Revelation 16:8-9

Here, the moon is named, but nothing scientific in nature is explained. There is no description of the moon’s orbiting the Earth, its relationship to the Earth, its effect on tides, etc. Anyone can look out at the night sky and see the moon, so observing the moon’s existence does not qualify as communicating scientific information or supernatural information.

The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory.
Malachi 4:2

This is a fairy tale regarding an angel’s use of the sun and is not anything that can be called real or accurate.

Who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars;
Ecclesiastes 11:7

I don’t know what this means, but this sentence does not contain any scientific information or insight into the natural world.

More quotes mention the sun in the New Testament, but none describe how the sun works beyond what anyone can tell by living on Earth. The main points that I was able to find in the New Testament are that..

• The sun shines light on the Earth.
• The sun produces heat, rises and goes down, and in the absence of the sun, there is night.

I knew all of these things when I was 8 years old.

The Sun in the Koran

According to this website, the sun is mentioned 33 times in the Koran.

Review some of these instances to see what special information the Koran provides about the sun.

Have you not considered the one who argued with Abraham about his Lord [merely] because Allah had given him kingship? When Abraham said, “My Lord is the one who gives life and causes death,” he said, “I give life and cause death.” Abraham said, “Indeed, Allah brings up the sun from the east, so bring it up from the west.” So the disbeliever was overwhelmed [by astonishment], and Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people. (6:78)

Like the Bible and Torah, this describes the effect of the sun on the earth and notes where it rises and where it sets.

And when he saw the sun rising, he said, “This is my lord; this is greater.” But when it set, he said, “O my people, indeed I am free from what you associate with Allah. (6:96)

Again, this quote describes the outcome of a sun rising. Much of the references to the sun in all of the religious documents I reviewed discuss the sun’s rising and setting.

Indeed, your Lord is Allah, who created the heavens and earth in six days and then established Himself above the Throne. He covers the night with the day, [another night] chasing it rapidly; and [He created] the sun, the moon, and the stars, subjected by His command. Unquestionably, His is the creation and the command; blessed is Allah, Lord of the worlds.

The Koran’s authors copied the length of creation from the Torah.

As with other quotes in all three “books,” the only astronomical entities mentioned are the Earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars. All the things that the naked eye could have seen — unsurprising as telescopes were not invented until roughly 1608 (by Hans Lippershey – and improved by Galileo a year later in 1609 and by Johannes Keppler and then by many others since then).

Telescopes were a specialty item were not used by those of a tiny group until roughly 1650.

Do you not see that Allah causes the night to enter the day and causes the day to enter the night and has subjected the sun and the moon, each running [its course] for a specified term, and that Allah, with whatever you do, is Acquainted? (35:13)

This restatement of earlier quotes states that Allah controls the transition between day and night.

“Until when he [zhu-l-qarnayn] came to the setting of the sun and he found it [seeming to be] setting into a muddy spring and he found near it a community. We [God] said: ‘Oh Zhu-l-qarnayn, either you punish them or show them kindness.” [18:86 (Al-Qur`aan)]

There is a lot of debate about what this quote means.

The Issue With What the Koran Says About the Sun Setting in a Muddy Pool of Water?

Dr. David Wood explains the multiple instances of the Koran, stating that the sun sets in a muddy pool of water. 

Because this video is offensive to Muslims, you have to watch it on YouTube, and it will not show within this article as the other videos can play without issue. This is due to requests of Muslims to YouTube to censor the video. Muslims promote the censorship of material they disagree with — all while claiming they support free speech. Islam has a lengthy history of jailing or killing those who “defame” the religion, which is disagreeing with the religion. However, like Christianity, Islam claims that they are fully supportive of science and that the Koran contains large amounts of supernatural scientific information.

Muddy Spring?

As does this video. Muslim websites add in [as if] to make the verses where this is stated seem less literal to make the verses appear figurative instead of literal. Muslims have adjusted the newer versions of the Koran to add in things without parentheses, making the Koran less literal and then accusing those who are using the original Koran of being ignorant of the Koran. The interest is filled with Muslim websites that provide false information like this that attempt to trick Muslims and non-Muslims alike. 

Muslims tend to get very angry when the quote is interpreted to mean that the sun sets into a muddy spring, as it makes it appear as if the Koran has no knowledge to offer regarding astronomy — which it doesn’t. They point out that in their interpretation, the quote means the sunset along the horizon, and there was a muddy spring there. But that is not what the multiple versus say. The verses repeatedly states that the sun sets into a muddy spring or puddle. It does not state that the sun set into the horizon — that is close to a spring or a puddle. It states the sun sets INTO the spring or puddle, as can be seen in this quote.

I was sitting behind the messenger of Allah who was riding a donkey while the sun was setting. He asked: Do you know where the sun sets? I replied Allah and his Apostle know best. He said: It sets in a spring of warm water.

At least four quotes now state this same thing and are very specific about where the sun sets.

But either way, the quote contains no scientific information. Furthemore there are other quotes in the Koran that illustrate non-existant scientific knowledge such as when Mohammed states that shooting starts are demons or that the moon follows a similar orbit to the sun.

There are a number of other quotes in the Koran that mention the Sun, but none of them are very different from the examples I have presented above.

Is There Any Evidence of Supernatural Knowledge of the Sun or the Solar System Contained in These Religious Documents?

Based on reviewing all of the quotes regarding the sun in the Torah/Old Testament, New Testament, and Koran, I can find no evidence of supernatural knowledge regarding the sun.

These religious documents regarding the sun and the solar system follow similar patterns.

• The documents stop at mentioning just four entities (Earth, moon, sun, stars)
• The documents describe nothing mechanistically — except that the sun rises and sets, which is more of an observation of its behavior from the most superficial perspective rather than how the sun does this.
• The documents state that all of this is because of God and under God’s control, which is not scientific information.
• The information in these religious documents is substantially behind what is known in some parts of the world.
• While it might be thought that their model of the solar system was due to being egocentric and placing their home planet as the center of everything, another explanation is that it was based upon the Aristotlean planetary model dating to roughly 300 BC, which was the dominant view until Copernicus (in only a few places) in 1500s placed the Earth at the center of everything (with “everything” being a very grey area called the “heavens” as there were no telescopes at the time these religious documents were written).

The Orbit of the Planets Around the Sun

The sun is the center of our solar system because it contains 99.8% of its mass. Therefore, all the planets orbit this massive object. While the present model of the solar system with the sun at the center was proposed as early as 300 BC, the solar system was not understood with the sun at the center (what is now known as the Copernican/Galilean model) until centuries after all the already-discussed religious documents were written.

The Aristotlean Geocentric Model of Planetary Orbits

Even though the Aristotlean Geocentric Model provided incorrect predictions of the location of the sun and the planets, it was followed for over 1800 years. This is one of the greatest examples of failing to question a false hypothesis. 

There is no explanation of orbits of the Earth moon or other objects in the Torah or New Testament.

However, the Koran does mention orbits in the following quotes.

It is not allowable for the Sun to reach the moon, nor does the night overtake the day, but each, in an orbit, is swimming. Surah Yaseen 36:40

And it is He who created the night and the day and the Sun and the moon; all in an orbit are swimming. Surah Anbiya 21:33

This mentions the concept of an orbit but does not demonstrate knowledge of what it is or how it works. The statement that orbits are “swimming” indicates a very fanciful understanding of the mechanism of an orbit. There is no explanation of what is orbiting what, what is at the center of the solar system or the existence of a solar system.

How the Sun Works

The sun produces enormous amounts of heat and light through nuclear fusion.

How Does the Sun Generate Its Light and Heat?

The sun, as with all stars — is a giant fusion reactor made up of the lightest elements in the periodic table. The process of fusion converts hydrogen into helium. Two hydrogen atoms that are fused become one helium atom. The new helium atom that now has more protons in the atom’s nucleus. Stars function by combining enormous quantities of helium under heavy gravitational pressure. The sun is roughly 91% hydrogen. It is roughly 9% helium. The sun is then nearly entirely just two elements. 

The two hydrogen atoms naturally repel each other, as they have negatively charged electrons that resist first the (the weak force – which is the force of electrons repelling other electrons). Then, the strong force which binds the neutrons and protons. The force must be so strong that it overcomes the weak force (still quite strong) to produce the fusion. This is what happens in the center of every star. This becomes a self-sustaining chain reaction for millions or billions of years. Our sun is estimated to have roughly 6.5 billion years of fuel before its life ends.

It is this strong force that is released as light, energy, and heat with fusion.

Hydrogen has a single proton and one electron, while helium contains two electrons and two protons.

Considerating the Differences Between Nuclear Fusion Versus Nuclear Fission

Most people’s experience with nuclear topics is fission. Fission reactions are what nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons are based on. These reactions rely on very large atoms, which are naturally unstable and made more unstable through processing. Notable examples of these elements are Plutonium and Uranium.

Fission breaks these large atoms into smaller atoms (creating new elements).

• With fission, more energy is released from large atoms.
• However, with fusion, more energy is released by fusing atoms.

Our sun and all stars work on the opposite side of the nuclear spectrum of the fission nuclear process with which we are familiar. In each case, nuclear manipulation creates new elements that are different from the input elements.

Nuclear Fission Explained

This video does an excellent job of explaining fusion. Fusion is common throughout the universe and is the dominant form of energy and light production; however, it is less well understood as humans have yet to master it. 

The Outcome of the Sun’s Nuclear Fusion

This process produces energy, light, and heat. This fusion process occurs due to the massive gravity of the sun. The larger the star, the more quickly any sun goes through its hydrogen supply.

Any God who created the sun would understand all of this and naturally share this information with the authors of the books that represented that God. This God also would have explained gravity, how gravity creates the sun’s fusion, and that all of the planets in the solar system orbit that sun.

No Explanation of Elements?

Hydrogen and helium are in the periodic table’s upper left and right-hand corners.

Stars turn out to be critical to understanding the elements. The heavier elements like gold are only produced not from the immense gravity of a sun but from the power of an explosion when a sun engages in a supernova at the end of its life. The largest number of protons fused in any sun is 26. As you can see from the periodic table above, some elements have much more protons than 26. 

To explain how the sun works, one must address the existence of elements to explain the fusion of elements to describe how the sun and all stars work (called stellar nucleosynthesis). And it is also necessary to understand how stars work to understand how different elements are created. At the origin of the universe, it was plasma and only hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms, with hydrogen being 75% of the atoms in the universe and 25% helium (with trace amounts of lithium).

How Did Most of the Period Table Elements Get Created?

This highly educational video explains the other elements in the universe besides hydrogen, helium, and lithium, which were the original elements—the combination of star gravitational compression during a sun’s normal operation and supernovas.

Still, even 13.6 billion years after the creation of the universe, the vast majority of elements (98% of all elements) are hydrogen and helium.

• Nothing about elements is explained in any religious documents.
• There is no explanation that the suns are critical to elemental creation.

This is true even though any God who created the universe would have had to have made all of the elements in this periodic table. However, the authors of all the religious documents I discussed demonstrate no knowledge of the elements.

The Easily Available Space to Add a Periodic Table Into the Religious Documents

The God that spoke to the authors of each religious document could have dropped a periodic table with detailed explanations of the table and the elements into each document, added a lot of value, and proven any religious documents’ supernatural inspiration. Unfortunately, we had to wait until 1869 for Dmitri Mendeleev to invent the periodic table.

How There Was Enormous Opportunity to Remove Repetitive or Redundant Passages from the Religious Documents to Make Room

Anyone who has read these religious documents would know they have a tremendous amount of repetition. Here are some examples of this repetition.

• According to Dr. Bill Warner, around 63% of the Koran and 50% of the Muslim trilogy (the Koran, Sira, and Hadith) deals with the kafir, or non-believer, and various ways to strike and kill the non-believer.
• In both the Torah and the New Testaments, repetition is mind-numbing, with Jesus being asked at one point at least five times if he is the Jesus of Nazareth and not some other Jesus from some other place.
• The original books of the New Testament, which date back to roughly 60 AD, were very few in number. Over hundreds of years, more books were added that used the original books as the basis for new chapters or books, which resulted in both contradictions and repetition.
• All of these religious documents desperately need culling and editing.

With the repetition and redundancies removed, there is plenty of room in each of them for an explanation of the elements, how the sun works, the solar system, and much more. However, there is no elementary explanation of anything like these things.

How The Planets Were Left Out of Religious Document Descriptions

By the time these documents were written, it was already discovered that there were planets and that these planets moved. However, the specifics of orbital mechanics were not known. However, far from these religious documents containing supernatural information that was unknown at the time, these documents underrepresented what was known. They do this by not mentioning any of the plants in our solar system. Some thought that the planets moved, but the Earth did not move. This is referred to as the Aristotlean planetary model. It was developed in 330 BC and was influential until the Copernican/Galilean model of orbital mechanics developed in the 1500s.

When the Sun Centered Solar Planetary Model Was First Proposed

Interestingly, people proposed that the sun at the center of the solar system goes back at least to 300 BC. Still, no one until Copernicus, some 1800 years later, was able to get this idea taken seriously due to the notion that Aristotle must have been right as he was so respected.

The Inevitable Errors in Prediction from Following the Aristotlean Planetary Model

This adherence to the Aristotlean model continued even though making orbital calculations based on the planetary model did not work—for obvious reasons. This led to attempts to adjust the model numerous times rather than simply admitting that it was completely wrong. It is curious that a model that provided inaccurate predictions of the location of the planets, sun, etc., continued to be followed for roughly 1800 years. 

Naturally, as the Torah/Old Testament was written before Aristotle, it is unsurprising that the Aristotlean planetary model was not included in them. Still, the New Testament (produced between 60 and hundreds of years after Jesus’s death, with full canonization around 400 AD) also does not mention the Aristotlean model. However, the similarity between the religious documents and the Aristotlean model is that both placed the Earth as the center of everything, with the planets and the Sun orbiting the Earth.

The Broader Problems With These Religious Documents Description of Astronomy

Not only are all of the planets left out of the descriptions of the natural world in the discussed religious documents, but the solar system’s context is the Milky Way Galaxy. As supposedly the God of each of these books created the Milky Way Galaxy knew and knows more about it than any human who ever lived, there would be some description of how the Milky Way Galaxy. However, there is no description of the Milky Way Galaxy or any other galaxy. The only nouns used regarding anything outside of our solar system are the use of the term “stars” and “heavens,” the second being a highly general term that describes what is “out there.”

About the Milky Way Galaxy

There are two billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and our sun is made of these two billion stars. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years from one end to the other (as the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, this is 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days * 186,000 miles * 100,000 light years). Think about this size when a light minute is 11,160,000 miles. 

The Size of the Milky Way Galaxy

This video gives you an idea of the scale of the Milky Way Galaxy.

This video is so extreme that it takes several viewings to get an appreciation of the scale involved. 

• All of this information would have been known to a God who created these things several thousand years ago and billions of years ago, and therefore, it would have been easy for him to explain to the authors of the religious documents that were to be included in the documents.
• However, even after billions of years had passed, the God that spoke to the authors of these religious documents did not see fit to share that the Earth is part of a solar system, which is part of the Milky Way Galaxy (or describe a larger entity by another name).

Answering The Question of Why the Universe is So Large

God could also have explained why the Milky Way Galaxy and the entire universe are so massive. What is the point of creating so much? I asked this question some Mulisms one time, and they said to me, “To show the glory of God,” which seems like an unsatisfactory answer. The universe is infinite and appears devoid of life everywhere we look; we have yet to find a habitable planet outside of our own. Why is the universe infinite but seemingly devoid of life outside this planet? Furthermore, there are enormous swaths of the universe we cannot see and may never be able to see. What was the point of creating these parts of the universe?

Conclusion

The major religious documents discussed are thought to include supernatural information, which means they contain information about astronomy that was unknown at the time. In reality, the reverse is true, as they don’t even reflect what was known about the sun or solar system prior to these documents being written (except for the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), which is currently estimated to have been completed in roughly 400 BC.

The God that is said to have both created everything and been the inspiration for each of these religious documents (although they are different Gods) shared very little of his understanding with those who wrote these documents. This appears to undermine the claim that the God the authors say they represent created anything that the documents say he did. This is left out of all three religions’ communications to their followers.

God Created The Universe — Which Was What?

The important question for the Westside Church of Christ’s assertion is, “What is the universe?”

What Do Christians Present as the Biblican Understanding of the Universe?

What does the Westside Church of Christ — or any other Christian church — consider the universe to be?

• Many books of the Old and New Testament were written at the time, and until their canonization, the only description of the universe was the Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars and the general term of the “heavens.”
• As science has massively expanded human understanding of the universe, religions have begun to say that their God created what scientists have discovered. However, none of the knowledge of what we now consider the universe is described in any of the religious documents discussed so far.
• Religions use information that was never covered in their documents (which they claim were divinely inspired) and comment on it, never explaining that this information was provided to them—and was not provided by them. This is how religion co-opts ideas it did not originate.

This means that God created what now appears to be an unlimited number of galaxies without any of these religious documents mentioning any of this nor explaining how anything worked beyond the understanding that a child at the time could have explained. At no point do any of these religions tell their followers that their God, who spoke through the authors of these documents, was entirely unknowledgeable of the scale of the natural world or how it worked. The question they cannot answer, and are never asked — is why, if their God created the universe, why did he either appear to know close to nothing about what he created or deliberately chose not to share any of this information that he knew as he is the creator with the author of his books?

Reconciliation?

Very few secular sources have any interest in what this article is about. Instead, it is almost exclusively the area of interest for the various religions, which try to backward engineer the current understanding of the sun, solar system, and universe into the very sparse information provided by their respective religious documents to make it appear as if the religious documents predicted what science eventually discovered. They often call the process of trying to make the modern scientific understanding of the solar system, galaxies, and the larger universe “reconciliation.” The reconciliation process involves lying to hide the enormous shortcomings of what all religions initially explained in their documents about these topics.

The following is an example of one of these “coping” videos.

Dr. Feng sees consistency in saying that the universe was created at some point rather than always existed as a significant point in all religions’ favor. The second point he makes is that many scientists were religious and Christian.  However, as most people in human history have been religious, even for social acceptance, this is not evidence that a divine entity inspires the scientist. 

Dr. Feng does not catalog what the original religious documents stated and how they provided no supernatural information, undermining the evidence for divine inspiration or divine involvement in their writing. Dr. Feng does not appear to find it curious or discrediting that so little information from a God with perfect information about everything he created ever found its way into any of these religious documents.

Evidence of Divine Inspiration and Unexpected Scientific Insights Contained in These Religious Documents?

It appears that none of the authors of these documents had any divine inspiration whatsoever and used the information they understood about the natural world in their time without any insight provided by any supernatural entity. However, the opposite has been claimed by members of all three of these religions, and this has been repeated to me by followers of these religions but who have never personally looked into the topic. They can also not provide examples of this divinely inspired scientific information but are confident it must be in these documents somewhere. Furthermore, the authors of the New Testament and Koran provided explanations of the sun and solar system that did not reflect what was hypothesized by Aristotle, even though they were written hundreds of years after Aristotle’s planetary model was presented. However, both the New Testament and the Koran are documents written by authors from the Middle East who lagged behind Greek thinking for hundreds of years. Furthermore, Genesis was taken from the Torah and canonized by the Christians, adopting its explanation of the creation of the natural world. And the book of Genesis was written before Aristotle was born.

On the Trial of Galileo

Galileo was tried before there was no separation between theology and scientific investigation. How things worked at that time is completely misunderstood.