1. Did God really create the Universe?..

 This only have I found:
God made mankind upright,
but men have gone in search
of many schemes.   
 Ecclesiastes 7:29
 

 
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was
over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was
hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light"
and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and
he separated the light from the darkness.
Genesis 1:1-4

 
An Eastern saying goes like this: if you keep on saying "halva candy", it will not make sweet taste. So, if you keep on saying "Let there be light" -  it won't make any lighter. Even if you are God Almighty Himself. The reason is clear: it takes a source of light. And it took the Omniscient only three days to realise this. And to be on the safe side, He created two luminaries at once: the Sun and the Moon.

Let us put aside common sense for a while and assume that the Almighty did manage to create light that could shine by itself, independent of the Sun. But where could it be when the night came? If it exists - it exists always and has to be seen by us, to be around us, not following the luminaries!

And God saw that the light was good. It is incomprehensible why this light pleased Him so. Could He not see well in the dark? Could He not create man and beast able to see as well in the dark?


And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Gen. 1:5)
 
 Our common sense, back in its place, strongly advises us not to believe this rubbish. There was no morning, no evening, no day yet! There was no dawn and no sunset. Because there was no sun! So the time of the day could be determined only by a watch. If the Lord had been clever enough to invent such.

 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning — the second day. And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so.  God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas."   Genesis 1:7-9

 There is not a single word in the Bible that God created the World, the Universe. In never says that God Yehovah is the Masrer of the Universe.
 
 Quite on the contrary, on the pages of the Holy Bible he exists and acts together with other gods: Baal, Molokh, Astarta and what not. These pagan gods are often stronger than He is - and they win over Him many times in the battle for power over people.

And a question comes ready: if God really created everything on Earth, did He also create all these gods? If yes, why did He do so? Just to His own disadvantage, to have decent rivals?..

The God of the Old testament - and the Bible can not deny this - was not God to all the peoples on Earth, but a god of a separate small tribe whom, despite His protection, could be hurt by anyone. And the Chosen people themselves, during their 2000-years-long history described in the Bible, has offended God not once, betraying him, building pagan temples and worshipping outlandish gods. After the death of Joshua the Jewish people were ruled by approximately fourty judges and kings, and most of them paid the "Almighty" Yehovah not too much attention...

All that is described in the Bible in details.
 
And the Earth, as well as the other planets, was not created by the Lord. From the Bible we know that He only created dry ground, the expance, the land - but not Earth! He made a peninsula circumfluous with two seas: the Great (Mediterrarean) Sea and the Red Sea and two rivers: the River of Egypt (the Nile) and the Euphrates, and terminated by the Ararat mountains in the North and the Arabian desert in the South.

All the actions of the biblical God take place on this small piece of land only.  One can think that there were no other land, seas, mountains then. Or - that is even more ridiculouos - that the Lord didn't know anything about them!

And the sky - as it is known to us now - was not made by God, either. He made some expanse, or firmament. And noone knows how it functioned. It's evidently another mystery of the Bible...

Though we know that in the North the Greek gods have employed. Atlas to support the sky. And in the South it could be propped up only with the good will of the Lord Yehovah.

But alas! - this will turned out so unreliable! As a result, one day the firmament gave a lurch, started shaking, fell down on the expance of the land and went all to pieces. So man could breathe more freely, and birds got the opportunity to fly without breaking their wings.

As you see, one can make various deductions from the fact that the Bible doesn't say a word about what has become of the expance of the sky. Was it so hard for the croniclers of the Bible to take a short note like this: "In the year (or maybe century) of such-and-such since the Creation, the firmament began losing its firmness, then dissolving little by little, and disappeared into the thin air due to the process of global warming..."  Maybe then we would be able to make head or tail of this story.

It the ancient croniclers did so - we would have far less mysteries to solve when reading the Bible.

 

"And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth" (Genesis 1:16-17)

 It is possible to call the Moon a luminary  - but that is not exactly what it is. One may also call so a bald patch which reflects the light of the Sun.

The stars in the Bible are so small that there can be no comparison with the "Great" luminaries. So we really wonder why God needed to create those funny little stars. In the daytime they cannot be seen because of the sunlight - and in the night they seem only dust and litter on the expance of the sky...

On reading the Bible attentively I came to an incredible conclusion: the Sun around which our planer goes in our era of enlightenment, and the Sun which "stood in the firmament" in the good old times of the Bible, have nothing in common. They are just namesakes! It means that God definitely took no trouble to create our Sun! He made a special luminary to serve His needs on the certain piece of land. And there are at least three proofs of it in the Bible.

 In the book of Exodus, chapter 10 , one of the plagues of Egypt is described in such way:  "there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days".

What was it? What a strange weather phenomenon? Didnt't the Sun rise for three whole days? Or was it an unusually long eclipse?

The book of Joshua, chapter 10, goes: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. <...>The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day".

In the Gospel of Lucas the Sun did quite the contrary: it disappeared for three hours."It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour" (Luke 23:44) In the old times the day and night were considered equally long, and the day began at six o'clock in the morning. So the Sun disappeared not in the evening hours - that might pass unnoticed - but in the midday! It's remarcable that nobody paid this extraordinary fact any attention - except Luke the visionary. Nor the Jews, nor the Greeks, nor the Romans described this lasting eclipse of the Sun.

Ancient manuscripts by other peoples of the East of that time who had rather well-developed science and culture  (the Chinese, for instance) - give no accounts of the Great 3-day's Eclipse, and of the day the Sun and the Moon stopped obediently above the land of Palestine after the command of a Jew called Joshua whom the Chinese had indeed never heard of.

It makes us think that the biblical Sun and Moon on their trip across the firmament had to follow the special orbits drawn by God Himself to perform certain tasks from Him - mostly to light the chosen path of the chosen people. 

Who made and upgraded the present Sun and Moon which give their light in an equal measure to every one? The Bible gives us no answer.

Unfortunately, we are also unable to find out who was the Creator of the air, the atmosphere which is as vital as ground and water. The Scripture keeps silent again. Could it mean that air was not made by God?..

"And God said, Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." (Gen. 1:20)

Thus, water reptiles and creeping things were the first living beings created by God. And He gave each one of them a living soul so that they could creep more sincerely.

"And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creeps on the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.". (Gen. 1:25)

Everything was extraordinally well-made. Especially the things that crept on the earth. But when one of such things managed to mislead the naive Eve, God became very disappointed in the creeping things that He had so cared for. And in a gust of holy anger He totally deprived them of legs and arms.

And the biblical refrain "and God saw that it was good" sounds funny, too. Does it mean that the Omniscient could not figure out what was going to become of His creative activity? Would it be good or rotten? Did He play by ear, acting without any plan?..

We also wonder how He estimated His creations: from the standpoint of their use or only by aesthetic reasons...

By the way, God also created tics, flies, roaches, worms, bacilli and other nasty things. So when we kill moskitoes or chase away helminths - we kill and chase away God's creatures. And that's what we should not do! They are endowed with a living soul, probably a part of our own one because they have drunk our blood, and the blood contains the solution of our living soul.

And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” (Gen. 1:22)
 
And God was right to bless them. How could they reproduce without blessing? They would never think of any sexual intercourse...

But to some kinds of animals God's blessing was of no avail. No matter how they tried to be fruitful - they died out eventually and disappeared from the Earth.

It was rather a dangerous situation. The balance of Nature had been broken. I daresay that the Lord God should have done something to restore this balance. He could do it on His head - say, bring back to life some dinosaurs with a click of His fingers. But He didn't.

Any common illiterate farmer who has for some reason lost a considerable part of his livestock would try to restore it as soon as possible.
 
What about the Holy Manager with His unlimited abilities? Alas, for the last six thousand years since the Creation He showed out no will, nor the slightest wish to revive at least something the Earth had lost. It's a sad story - and it provides us with food for thought...