In The Beginning

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is the well-known opening sentence of Genesis. There is plainly no reference to any antecedent of the beginning, and none to 'nothingness'. Hence, there is no textual support for two prominent theological theses--the eternality of God, and that God's act of creation was 'ex nihilo'. The sentence is equally plainly at odds with the concept of God as 'in heaven', i. e. the text states that there are multiple heavens, and, more important, it locates God outside any of them. So, not only is the popular image of God as 'in' heaven without textual support, so, too, is the Ptolemaic equivalence of 'extraterrestrial' and 'divine'. Accordingly, Heliocentrists, notably Galileo, who have been accused of heresy on the grounds of denying that equivalence, are not at all contradicting the Biblical text.