Mr. Majestic, thanks for the lengthy reply.
I will try to put a few points to try to see an alternative. I don’t necessarily believe what I am going to say; just trying to see the points from another angle.
Most of the time I try to think "from the other side" myself to test my own conclusions, but when faced with other people's ideas one can still sometimes be surprised and have a few 'a-ha! -moments. That's the fun in debating. I know you don't believe these things exactly, but I choose to reply to them one by one here as if you did:
The thing I thought about the water canopy is this; if the water of the seas was taken up (if that were possible) and there were no problems with it being high in outer space, then the pressures would be taken off of the earths crust, therefore it would reduce the pressure on the tectonic plates reducing the amount of movement and activity that causes the problems and catastrophes on earth. This obviously didn’t happen any time in the recent past, but it is a thought that I have considered if it might make any difference to the way the plates and volcanoes react. It would also take away the problem of Tsunami’s, being that the seas would be a lot smaller.
Religious people often complain that their ideas haven't been tested properly by science, or that science poo-poos the idea right away, but the various canopy models have actually been studied surprisingly thoroughly, by mathematicians and physicists who initially believed in the canopy model (it's all in the link in my first post here; a lengthy read, but interesting). 'Outer space' models have been proposed as well.
You have an interesting 'hypothesis' here though, and one I haven't seen before and haven't thought of myself. The thing here is that in this context we must combine 1) what we know about the universe with 2) the biblical story.
There's no point in even arguing the canopy thing if we view the first part of Genesis as being figurative and not literal. If Adam and Eve were figurative too, that would kinda negate the point of ~6000 years of human existence, but most of the big Christian religions and their followers believe the latter. And JWs too. So that's our starting point.
So if we say the oceans were lifted 'on high', or created there in the first place (out in space), and then put in place later (notwithstanding that I haven't actually researched how this would have affected the continental plates and their formation and movement), this would have had to have happened less than 6000 years ago to fit the biblical story (because otherwise we're back to having earth quakes in paradise).
That is to say; the lifting could have happened at any time if one believes in an old earth (as JWs do), but the 'putting it back' would then have to coincide (in this context) with mankind's first sin, and subsequent banishment from paradise (because earth quakes etc. are part of the 'punishment').
The Bible even doesn't say it happened then, so we'll have to move it up to the flood. That means that all (or most of) the waters in the oceans would have been placed there from outer space during the flood, and that subsequently, earthquakes, tsunamis etc. etc. started to happen.
A little late for being a punishment for Adam and Eve's sin, and there is absolutely nothing that physically shows this happened within the last 4-6000 years (or at all, I should say). There's also the problem that if water were to drop through the atmosphere like that, it would be boiling hot when it hit earth, even if it started out as ice. But we can put that problem away on the supernatural "bank account" for now.
There is a third problem here too, that when postulating a hypothesis that will support the biblical account, one has to actually include the biblical account in the first place, and it clearly says that the oceans on earth were created on the third day, by "gathering together" the waters and separating them from land.
Velikovsky wrote about interplanetary collisions in times past (fitting it in many instances with the biblical accounts of the flood, Joshua and the sun standing still, etc..). If he is right and god used such drastic action, there would have been a lot of debrie floating about as a result. If this is to be believed, then that could explain why there are these rocks shooting around, which would have not been there had man on earth been good….
This is really a scientific statement, or hypothesis if you will, and has to be backed up with data. Have there been huge planetary collisions? It certainly seems that way, but within the last 4000 years or so? I'm not sure I even have to say anything more than that. But in case I do; you'd think such collisions would have also made a huge impact on other civilizations, and while many have flood stories, you'd have to find stories and astrological or astronomical findings in manuscripts coinciding with it, and the sun standing still etc. too (same time period etc.). And evidence in geology, etc.
There's also the point that a just God probably wouldn't let these rocks hurl around afterwords so they could hurt innocent people in the future, who had nothing to do with the sin... Oh wait.... *slaps forehead*
As for the harmful radiation, you could say that the sun warms up the earth, being just the right distance away. You could then ask the question, was it only the earth that needed to be warm? If it was gods will for men to live on other planets, then it would be needed for other planets as well. [....] So it is not so much that god put our atmosphere there to protect us, which it obvioulsy does, but more for a regulating of temperature, and so the sun is there for other planets too….
I'm not following this exactly. Other planets could have been placed in similar orbits as the earth (but on a different 'plane'), to get the same heat. They wouldn't crash or need to interfere with each other. Especially not if created and put in place that way. And/or there are billions of other planetary systems he could use and place a planet 'just right' in each one of them for this purpose.
But my point was really that there is harmful radiation coming from the sun, but also from the rest of the universe. If directly created (and sustained), the sun could have been made in a way that would make it harmless to us (and the other planet's life) in the first place. No dangerous particles or dangerous electromagnetic radiation. The universe could have been a "radiation free" place. Of course - this would have been a rather different universe from the one we know, but since God created it from scratch and can do what he wants...
The atmosphere (and the magnetic field of earth) protects us, but it seems a little 'sloppy', redundant and ineffective to first create danger in a place supposedly specifically tailored to sustain physical life, for then to create protection against the danger you first created. Plus, the atmosphere only protects us to a certain degree as it is.
The points that I have made above are trying to defend the theory that god might not have made the earth in such a bad fashion and that what we see as "how the earth is made" could have been made according to the belifes in the bible and the "perfect earth". It would certainly take some faith to believe……
There is the problem of the time period involved (approx. 6000 years to the sin) as discussed above, and the lack of physical, geological evidence, but rather evidence to the contrary of a dynamic earth with drifting continental plates for hundreds of millions of years (long before mankind, both on an evolutionary and biblical time scale).
PS On the point of exploding stars, I don’t know for sure, but, I didn’t think that they have found an exploding star inside our own galaxiy. Again, if this is true, maybe exploding stars was a thing of the past as the universe expanded, and all that we are seeing now is a delay in time going back millions of years to when the universe was much younger. If I was out to prove the "perfect earth", then I would suggest that exploding stars was a thing of the past….
Since we know quite well how stars 'work', our own sun included, we know that at some point in time the star will have used up its fuel, and will explode/implode. We can follow the life - death cycle of stars throughout the universe, and combined with the knowledge about our own star, there is nothing to suggest that exploding stars are a thing of the past.
