Why was the initial light of Genesis 1:3 not good enough for the sustenance of animate and animals, and why was the sun not made right at the start?

This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘The Creator and the Creation Stories’ (2001).

There are several questions here, as you see, and it is a topic on which we shall have to bear with one another as we think about it and come to our tentative conclusions.

Some people hold that the sun, mentioned at day four in Genesis, was created at day four, and not before then; so that the light of day one, when God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light (1:3), was not the sun’s light. It is perfectly understandable, even in scientific terms, that the original light was simply photons, and God caused a bursting out of photons in the mechanism of the universe, which provided Earth with light.

That theory is given credence by the fact that in Hebrew, two different words for light are used in these passages. There’s the word ʾōr, which means ‘light’ and is used of the light in day one; and then there is the word māʾōr, which means ‘light-holder’, ‘light-giver’ or ‘lamp’, which is used of the sun and the moon in the sky in day four. There’s a difference, then, between light as such, and a light-holder, light-giver, or lamp. So if you wish, you can say that the original light was photons and then the sun was made subsequently on day four.

The question goes on to say, ‘Why was this initial light not good enough for the sustenance of animate things and animals, which now require sunlight for life?’

If you hold that the sun was not made until day four, it raises a question about the plants and other things having been made on day three, as they require light for their growth and health. So, I’m not quite sure. But if you regard the light of day one as merely being photons, it wouldn’t be enough to sustain plant life. That’s perhaps a supposition; but I have a difficulty with the idea that it was just photons, for the simple reason that day one tells us that when God made the light, he ‘separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night’ (vv. 4–5); which seems to me to be talking in our everyday language, and refers to the fact that here on Earth we experience daily about twelve hours of light and about twelve hours of darkness. That’s easy to understand, if our light is coming from the sun and the earth is twizzling around it so that you get alternating day and night, light and darkness, with the sun in the same place vis-à-vis the earth. But if you had photons coming in from outer space in all directions, you wouldn't get alternating light and darkness, day and night, unless you somehow had the light of photons focused at one position in the heavens, which then becomes rather complicated. And I’m not scientist enough to solve that one.

My own view is that when day four talks about God making the sun, moon and stars, its chief point is the purpose for which they were made. You will notice that God says he ‘let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years’ (v. 14). God made ‘the greater light [sun] to rule the day and the lesser light [moon] to rule the night—and the stars’ (v. 16). These all were then planted by God, as far as we’re concerned, for signs and guidance. We know how important that was in the ancient world. Farmers had to rely each year upon the constellations, their risings and settings, to know when it was time to sow their seed. The revolution of the earth around the sun once a year gave us the idea of years and the passing of the years; and then the cycling return for the mechanisms of harvest and sowing, and so forth, and so on.

I think, therefore, that the sequence is likely to have been that when the earth was first made it was shrouded in water. When the sun was created, therefore, there might have been some indication of the change between light and darkness, as there is to a certain depth in the oceans, though not at the real bottom. When God created the firmament and made space, and the waters were gathered together in one place, the sun would have become visible, even though it would have perhaps been there all the time. When it became visible, then day four explains God’s purpose for making it and the other lights. That is the thing that seems most likely to me, but of course I would not want to be dogmatic and rule out other explanations.