26 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



and Earth, or the whole material universe, were afterward to be formed. Modern 

 scientists, in their hunger for a physical cause to every phenomenon, have studied 

 long and hard to account for the first existence of matter and of force. Failing 

 to find in Nature an adequate cause, they are driven to the illogical supposition 

 that they never had a beginning. In Genesis we have the only information the 

 human mind has yet acquired as to their origin. Matter was created. 



In the second verse the Earth, " without form and void," was mixed up in 

 confusion with the other matter destined to form our solar system. This whole 

 mass of matter was in a dead and useless condition, and without any definite 

 shape because it had no force of attraction or motion, no manifestation of light 

 or heat. No force in any form had yet been caused to act upon or through 

 matter. We know that this must have been the condition of things at that time, 

 for we are told that "darkness was upon the face of the deep," (the "deep" 

 here mentioned was not the deep of ocean, for water as such could not then 

 exist, but the deep of chaos). Attractive forces, whether molar, molecular, or 

 atomic, produce motion, motion produces heat, and cosmical heat and light are 

 inseparable. All forms of force are transformable into light, and without these 

 forces light is a physical impossibility. Force, like matter, is held by so-called 

 " modern science " to be eternal, and to be an inseparable accompaniment of 

 matter. Yet here we are taught that matter once existed without any power 

 to attract, repel or influence other matter. It would ever have remained so, 

 and would now relapse at once into its original chaos but for the brooding 

 spirit of God. Force is not a property of matter but an attribute of spirit. 

 When the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," or hovered 

 with creative power over this unmeasured expanse of dead matter, the particles 

 were made to attract one another and they rushed together producing an 

 enormous conflagration. If, as the chemist asserts, the light of a common 

 fire is due to the clashing of atoms of oxygen and carbon, and the intensity of 

 the calcium light results from the concussion of the atoms of oxygen and hydro- 

 gen in the blowpipe, it is easy to conceive that the first collision of all the atoms 

 in the universe would produce no ordinary illumination. 



When matter became capable of attraction and motion it was for the first 

 time prepared to obey the command : " Let there be light." Dividing the light 

 from the darkness could not refer to the alternation of day and night due to the 

 rotation of the Earth on its axis, though many thus explain it ; for the Earth was 

 not at this time a distinct planet but a part of the nebulous solar mass, and the 

 Sun and Moon were not appointed to divide the day from the night till the 

 fourth day. The term "light" is, without doubt, used here in the abstract as 

 now separated from the darkness of all the past. The passage would, perhaps, 

 be more correctly understood if rendered : And God called the light what we 

 call day, or day-light, and the darkness what we call night. 



This ends the first creative Day. At this point in the history of the matter 

 of which our Earth formed a part, it had reached the condition in which the 

 nebular hypothesis first takes it up. 



