When modern readers encounter the Bible’s descriptions of the cosmos, they often picture a primitive “snow globe” universe: a flat earth covered by a solid dome that holds back a celestial ocean. Critics argue this proves the Bible is an ancient, unscientific book, locked into the flawed cosmology of its time.
But is that what the Bible actually teaches?
The scriptural account of the heavens is more sophisticated and a subject of more internal debate than most people realize. When we look at the text carefully, we find less a rigid, outdated model and more a description of the universe’s fundamental structure—one that has prompted vigorous scientific and theological research among creationists today. The question isn’t just what the Bible says, but what it means. And the answers reveal a fascinating intersection of language, science, and theology that touches on some of the deepest questions in modern cosmology.
The Expanse and the Waters
The key passage for biblical cosmology is Genesis 1:6–8 (ESV):
And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven.
The crucial Hebrew word here is raqia, translated as “expanse.” The King James Version famously rendered it “firmament,” from the Latin firmamentum, which implies a solid structure. This translation choice has heavily influenced how readers have pictured the Genesis account for centuries.
However, the Hebrew root of raqia means “to spread out,” “stamp out,” or “stretch.” It implies something that has been spread or extended, but doesn’t inherently demand it be solid. As ICR’s Henry Morris noted, the word basically means “expanse,” and biblical critics have incorrectly tried to argue that it implies a firm boundary of some kind. The word appears seventeen times in the Old Testament, and its usage ranges from the atmosphere where birds fly (Genesis 1:20) to the heavens where stars are set (Genesis 1:14–17) to the transcendent space above the angelic host (Ezekiel 1:22). This range of usage strongly suggests raqia describes an extended space or expanse, not a single rigid object.
This raqia separates two bodies of water: the “waters under the expanse” (clearly the oceans, seas, and lakes on Earth) and the mysterious “waters that were above the expanse.” Understanding the nature of the raqia and the location of these “waters above” is the central task of any biblical cosmology. Over the years, creation scientists have proposed several distinct models to explain this framework, and the debate among them has been surprisingly vigorous.
The Rise and Fall of the Vapor Canopy
For much of the 20th century, the most popular creationist model was the vapor canopy theory. This proposed that the “waters above” were a vast, globe-encircling layer of water vapor in the upper atmosphere.
The appeal was obvious. A vapor canopy would have created a greenhouse effect, contributing to the mild, pre-Flood climate described in Genesis. It would have shielded the Earth from cosmic radiation, potentially contributing to the long lifespans of the patriarchs. Most significantly, its collapse was proposed as the source of the forty days and nights of rain during Noah’s Flood—the “windows of heaven” opening (Genesis 7:11). For decades, the canopy model appeared in creationist textbooks and popular literature as near-consensus.
It didn’t hold up.
More detailed scientific analysis revealed problems that proved difficult to overcome. A canopy holding enough water to sustain a 40-day global rain would have created a runaway greenhouse effect, raising surface temperatures to lethal levels. As ICR researchers later acknowledged, thermal modeling showed that even a modest vapor canopy would have pushed global temperatures far beyond what biological systems could tolerate. There were further difficulties: it remained unclear how such a canopy could have remained gravitationally stable before the Flood, or how it would have collapsed uniformly rather than in patches.
The willingness of creation scientists to move away from a popular model when the evidence demanded it is worth noting. Scientific progress—even within a framework of biblical authority—requires following the data. The canopy model’s decline opened the door to more ambitious cosmological proposals that better fit both the biblical text and the physical constraints.
A Cosmic Boundary at the Edge of the Universe
The most developed alternative comes from physicist Dr. D. Russell Humphreys, whose work on creation cosmology spans several decades. In his 1994 book Starlight and Time, Humphreys proposed a model in which the raqia refers to the entirety of interstellar space, and the “waters above” are located not in the atmosphere but at the very edge of the universe.
The key insight is the biblical language of “stretching out” the heavens. Passages like Isaiah 40:22 (“He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in”) and Psalm 104:2 appear throughout the Old Testament. Humphreys took this language seriously as a physical description: God began with an initial mass of water, then stretched out space itself, carrying the outer waters to the boundary of an expanding, finite cosmos.
This framework has a remarkable implication. If the universe has a center and an edge—rather than being infinite and centerless, as many secular cosmologists assume—then general relativity predicts that clocks near the center of a massive gravitational field would tick at different rates than clocks at the periphery. Humphreys proposed that during the expansion events of Creation Week, the Earth, located near the center of a bounded universe, experienced significant gravitational time dilation. While billions of years’ worth of physical processes occurred in the outer reaches of the cosmos (allowing light from distant stars to travel vast distances), only ordinary days passed on Earth.
Humphreys continued refining this model well beyond his initial publication. In a 2008 paper published in the Journal of Creation, he introduced additional time dilation mechanisms based on the metric expansion of space itself, demonstrating that relativistic effects during cosmic expansion could accelerate the arrival of distant starlight far more than his original white-hole model alone predicted. Vardiman and Humphreys later summarized this updated cosmology in a series of articles through the Institute for Creation Research, showing that the model could potentially account for starlight from even the most distant galaxies within the young-earth timeframe.
The model also connects to observational evidence in an intriguing way. In 2011, astronomers discovered a massive cloud of water vapor surrounding a quasar more than 12 billion light-years from Earth—the largest known reservoir of water in the universe, containing 140 trillion times the water in Earth’s oceans. As ICR reported at the time, the discovery of enormous quantities of water at the far reaches of the observable universe is at least consistent with what the Humphreys model would predict: remnants of the original “waters above” carried outward during the expansion of space.
This aligns with Psalm 148:4, which calls on the “highest heavens” and the “waters above the heavens” to praise the Lord, suggesting these waters are vast and still exist in the highest reaches of creation. The cosmic-boundary interpretation takes this as a literal, ongoing physical reality rather than a poetic memory of pre-Flood conditions.
Does Genesis Borrow from Ancient Near Eastern Cosmology?
A third approach addresses the language of the text from a different angle entirely. Some scholars argue that Genesis uses “phenomenological language”—it describes the cosmos as it appears from an observer’s perspective on Earth. The sky looks like a dome. Clouds hold water. In this view, God isn’t giving a technical, scientific description but is communicating truth in a way that is visually understandable to any culture at any time.
Critics often take this further, arguing that the biblical writers simply adopted the prevailing cosmology of the Ancient Near East, which typically involved a solid dome holding up a celestial ocean. The implication is that the Bible’s cosmological statements are scientifically incorrect because its human authors were men of their time, limited by their culture’s assumptions about the physical world.
Many creation scholars find this argument unpersuasive for several reasons. First, the theological framework of Genesis is radically different from its neighbors. The Babylonian Enuma Elish describes the cosmos arising from violent conflict between gods—Marduk splitting the body of Tiamat to form the sky and earth. The Egyptian cosmogony involves Shu lifting the goddess Nut above the god Geb. Genesis describes a single, transcendent God bringing the universe into existence by His spoken command. The contrast is not merely one of monotheism versus polytheism. It’s a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between God, creation, and order.
Second, the borrowing argument often assumes that any similarity in vocabulary proves dependence. But cultures living under the same sky would naturally develop some overlapping terms for describing it. The existence of a word like raqia doesn’t prove the Hebrew writer had the same concept in mind as a Babylonian priest any more than two English speakers using the word “space” necessarily mean the same thing by it. Context determines meaning, and the Genesis context consistently treats the raqia as something God made—a space He created—not a solid object He defeated in battle.
The phenomenological reading has an additional subtlety worth considering. Even modern scientists routinely use phenomenological language. We speak of “sunrise” and “sunset” without anyone accusing us of geocentrism. If Genesis 1 uses observational language to describe real events, that is a feature of clear communication, not a sign of scientific error. The question is whether the text intends to teach a specific cosmological structure or whether it is describing the results of God’s creative work in terms any human observer could recognize.
Open Questions and the Road Ahead
Creation scientists do not have a single, agreed-upon model for the cosmos of Genesis 1. That honesty matters. Each interpretation has genuine strengths and real weaknesses, and this remains an active area of research and debate within the creation science community.
The Humphreys model, while the most mathematically developed, still faces questions about whether the specific conditions required for significant time dilation would have obtained during Creation Week. ICR’s ongoing cosmology research program continues to explore these questions, working through the tensor equations of general relativity to test whether a bounded, young universe is consistent with the full range of astronomical observations. Other creation physicists, like Dr. John Hartnett, have proposed alternative relativistic models that arrive at similar conclusions through different mathematical pathways, suggesting that the basic insight—that time dilation in a bounded cosmos can resolve the distant starlight question—may be robust even if the details of particular models evolve.
The precise nature of the raqia and the physical state and location of the “waters above” are not definitively settled. What physical form would these waters take if they exist at the edge of a vast, cold universe? How does the ongoing expansion of space affect them? These are not trivial questions, and they require rigorous work in biblical studies, linguistics, astrophysics, and general relativity to answer well.
None of this uncertainty invalidates the biblical account. Uncertainty about mechanism is normal in science—it’s what drives research forward. The core claims of Genesis are clear: the universe is not an accident. It was formed by a purposeful God who brought order out of formlessness, established the heavens, set the boundaries of the cosmos, and separated the earth from the celestial realms. Whether the “waters above” are a shell at the edge of the universe or something else entirely, their purpose in the text is to declare the glory and majesty of a Creator who is bigger than the cosmos He brought into being.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse (raqia) proclaims His handiwork (Psalm 19:1). That is the central, non-negotiable claim of biblical cosmology. And the ongoing scientific exploration of what that expanse is, physically, represents some of the most exciting frontier work in creation science today.
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The questions about the Bible’s cosmological language deserve rigorous investigation—and that investigation is happening right now. Answering these questions requires careful work in biblical studies, physics, and astronomy by researchers committed to the authority of Scripture. If you want to help equip scientists who are tackling these big questions from a framework of biblical authority, consider supporting one of the active creation science projects at Go Fund Creation.
