On Lawn's Journal: Genesis as Kindergarten Science, day 3

And said God, "lets gather the waters under the heavens into one place, and lets see it dry."
Called God the dry "Earth", and the collection of waters he called "Seas", And saw God "that's good".

For those just tuning in, think more mashup than advocacy. Kind of like The Cleverly's 'Mo Diggity', bringing something new into a more rooted history. This takes current cosmology on the start of the universe and sees if we can tell it through a hopefully not too stretched interpretation of Genesis 1.
The first day was all about creating dimension and light, which was recast as the big bang. The second day was a creation of expanse, which was cast as the great inflation.
We discussed how cosmic flows are 'waters' in some sense like calling our galaxy the 'Milky Way' instead of the cloudy way, which fits the nature of fluid motion seen in the universe. And ultimately the water we know and experience everyday is separated from the cosmic flows, and that water is the physical liquid designated as waters under the heavens that we experience every day.
So today we look at the creation of land, and the separation of the land and water, and I can't help but wonder if in the previous entry I would have better said that the water we experience is refined from the basic hydrogen that makes up much of the fluid motion of the cosmos. Refinement being a process of separation which allows for some elemental changes as well.
Because matter and energy are not created or destroyed. The Big Bang did not create matter or energy, but energy did create space. Even today dark energy is how we account for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
From the cosmic refining of matter into the elements, we have another two ways to see separation of water from land. The outer Kuiper Belt water from the inner rocky planets past the snow zone, and later a more intense separation of water locked in hydrous rocks that appear dry.
Earth received water from both sources, and possibly the seeds of life from the water beyond the snow line of the solar system and from what was locked into rocks in front of the snow line. Mostly from the inner solar system.
But oceans didn't appear until that water was extracted from melting the rocks as the kinetic energy of many collisions melted the earth's lithosphere, and then the earth cooled again to below 100 degrees Celsius.

Up to this point the whole story of the creation of earth could have been told from the context of the whole universe, or just our solar system. But now we have something called 'Earth' under the heavens. Both possible interpretations of the story line are merged from this point on.

And said God, lets bring forth on the ground grass, the plants producing seeds and the tree -- fruit, producing fruit according to its type, whose seed is within itself on the earth. And so it was, grass on the ground, the herb producing seeds according to its own kind and the tree producing fruit with seeds within itself according to its kind. And God saw it was just right.

So essentially we have the gymnosperm plants and the angiosperm plants, which diverged 240+ million years ago, evolving mainly 100 million years after that into unmistakable fruit. That is tens of millions of years after we see land based animals which are not yet mentioned.

I need to write up more on this, but if we accept that waters are discussed before oceans are formed, earth is formed before the Sun appears, then this follows the pattern of giving us a confusing confligration of what we experience now with its kind. And here it is more egregious as we could have just said 'grass' and even 'trees' but it went further to clearly designate gymnosperm and angiosperm plants.

Is it so egregious that I have to change it? I'm going to go back to my target audience to decide. Is a kindergartener going to be confused when they learn later that plants they understand and eat as grains / seeds vs fruits didn't exist as such at this time? But even beyond that there are trees with both gymnosperms and angiosperms as well as regular plants.

Still while exceptions exist this description is pretty well rooted what they experience. Grains come from plants, and fruit mostly comes from trees or woody vines. Is it going to be rooted well enough that they can slip in later the concept of a progenitor plant that existed before what they experience now?

Now I haven't once said that this version of Genesis is what was intended all along, I'm just seeing if it is useful. And to be useful to kindergarteners, as discussed before, taking some liberty to place things as they experience them today in a context of what it emerges from is not a bad way to teach them. But at the end of the day that is left for the reader to think about for themselves.

All I'm going to say is as a college textbook this wouldn't fly, but having taught preschoolers through 10 year olds, such compromises to find something rooted in a child's experience are made all the time and even necessary.

And given how adults scoff at the pedantic wrestling of academia even today, it seems like I can expect a preference for this kind of rooting from bronze age people.

Hey, maybe Stephen Hawking was right!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

God is Gravity! And what better preschool example of gravity do we have, than how liquid flows downhill!

Re:

[On Lawn]

You might have missed my previous post, I agree and want to add that to me it is even a bit more than that.

There is a complex interaction when you see a milk jug full of water hit by a bullet, or see the flow of plasma on the sun twisted by gravity and magnetic fields, or the plasma of the big bang as the expansion of the universe pulls it apart.

But they can be summed up as a expanding force vs a force of cohesion in all of them. Gravity is a force of cohesion on a cosmic scale, but so is magnetism. And at