How is it possible for any sane person to believe such nonsense, when everybody with a grain of common sense knows that light and darkness depend on the sun, as day and night do?
And this is said to have constituted the first day’s work. If any man will read it carefully he will perceive that the composition is of a nature to entertain simple-minded people, children, who are unable to understand the ordinary phases of nature.
The second day’s work is very droll.
Verse [6]: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,” etc.
Verse [7]: “And God made the firmament,” and divided the waters which were under the firmament and the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so.
Verse [8]: “And called the firmament heaven.”
There is not a particle of sense in this.
If the firmament is heaven, and heaven the atmosphere, we know that we cannot have any water above the firmament. We may have clouds, or a certain quantity of moisture, but no water. If the atmosphere is overloaded with moisture, that moisture is sure to return to the earth in the shape of rain or other form.
This portion is important to pious persons, that they may know where their souls go when they go to “heaven”—to the atmosphere!
Theologians and religious writers contend that this earth was in a state of aqueous solution. That is all wrong. We have not oxygen and hydrogen enough to produce such a state with. Besides, if it was in an aqueous solution what became of the sixty-two elementary substances that never enter into the composition of water? Nor can the majority of the elements be held in suspension by water. The specific gravity of the different elements cannot be suspended to please anybody. Elisha is supposed to have performed that miracle; he made an axe-head swim ([2 Kings vi, 6]). This same man also beheld a chariot of fire and horses of fire with which Elijah went to heaven. It seems surprising that men who claim to know something of science insist upon this miraculous supernatural work. They ought to know better. They ought to know that neither God nor man can stop the chemical action of the elements in the presence or absence of the sun’s heat. They ought to know that no supernatural power can suspend nature’s forces, or nature’s laws. They ought to know that no spirit, whether belonging to God or not, can effect such an aqueous solution as these pious gentlemen would have us believe.