Worlds in Collision
The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.
(Revelation 8:10-11) ESV
“Worlds in Collision” is the title of a book by Immanuel Velikovsky in which he proposes, that some of the Exodus plagues were caused by successive close approaches to Earth by the planet Venus.
His idea was that Venus was originally a comet. Velikovsky was the first to help us (that’s me and the Holy Spirit) understand the role that astronomy has to play when we harmonize the Bible with science. Fortunately there’s no need to deny any science, break any of the laws of physics, or appeal to conspiracies. It’s simply a matter of understanding the assumptions which have been made in interpreting our observations of the cosmos.
We all have the same evidence. Our choice of paradigm determines what we think it’s evidence of.
– Matty’s Razor
Velikovsky’s book “Worlds In Collision” is helpful because it’s divided into sections that deal with the possible role of the planet Venus in the plagues of the Exodus, and the activity of the planet Mars during the ministry of Isaiah. For us, a fan of SciFi and fantasy, who just happens to have a passion for the Bible, it was perfect.
The other worlds which may or may not collide are the bodies in our cosmological system which have interacted with the Earth at times in history, and which may be part of the fulfillment of prophecy.
It didn’t take us long to realize that making the case for a Geocentrospheric system was going to need a way to account for observable phenomena for which the explanations have been derived by assuming heliocentricity first. A specific example, which used to come up a lot in Twitter arguments about heliocentricity, is the retrograde motion of Mars. What is retrograde motion? Why does it matter?
Faith is believing in something that you can’t see, because of evidence.
– Faith, definition
Back in the early 2000s, while we were at Calvary Baptist Church in Carrboro, NC, we plotted an orbit for the planet Mars on a piece of paper with a compass and a ruler. It needed an epicycle in it. We figured this out before we knew what an epicycle was. It made perfect sense to us, but we needed to understand what the difference between retrograde motion and epicycles was in technical terms.
We needed a book that would explain to us how popular science (SciPop) accounts for epicycles by using retrograde motion. Epicycles and retrograde motion are two ways to explain the same thing, the difference being frame of reference. There’s a cool story about my Atlas of the Universe miracle.
Retrograde motion is the path that Mars would plot as seen from the frame of reference of the sun. We’re not on the sun, we’re on the Earth. We don’t observe retrograde motion, from our frame of reference on Earth we observe an epicycle.
Having this in mind, while pondering the source of sediment which buried billions of fish in Noah’s flood, lead to one of those penny-drop moments which can only be the work of the Holy Spirit. What if the some of the sediment under which the Earth was buried in Noah’s flood came from Mars when it was on a close approach to the Earth? This is Hypothesis 4.
The reason for creation is the manifestation of sentient life with free will.
– The Reason for Creation
No doubt you’ve heard it said that the Lord created the universe from nothing. The doctrine is known as ex nihilo. The thing is, that’s not what the Bible describes nor what our passage tells us. We’re told elsewhere that the world that we can see was made from things that we can’t see. We can’t see atoms and molecules, but they’re not nothing.
If a body of water called the deep was present before God said “let light be” then obviously the water was used as the source of Hydrogen for nucleosynthesis. The worlds in collision are the world of established Christian doctrine vs. the world that the Bible describes because they’re not the same thing.
Our perceptions change over time. Our frame of reference doesn’t change, each one of us has an absolute frame of reference, it’s who we are: our point of view. How we understand what we see from our frame of reference changes.
Worlds in Collision – Navigation
| Section | Title | Scripture |
| 1 | Worlds in Collision | Genesis 1:1-2 |
| Mars | 2 Kings 17:30-31 | |
| Mercury | Revelation 8:8-9 | |
| Venus | 2 Peter 1:19 | |
| 2 | Ex Nihilo vs. Ex Abyssi | Genesis 1:1-2 |
| Katartizó: κατηρτίσθαι – were framed | Matthew 4:21-22 | |
| Salvation | Romans 10:9-10 |
Salvation
- Call upon the name of Jesus Christ,
- believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
- confess your sin.
Read through the Bible in a year
| Reading plan | September 17 | |
| Linear | Daniel 7-9 | |
| Chronological | Daniel 10-12 |
Matty's Paradigm 