The Days of Creation with Aaron Kemp

At the University of California in San Diego. He currently attends Shadow Mountain Community Church with his beautiful wife and three children. Aaron has been especially successful in passing on his passion for creation to his son, who aspires to be a Christian paleontologist.

So, we are happy to have

What is her name?

We are going to not share that information.

Okay.

So, we're excited to have him come and present for us tonight on the Days of Creation. So, with that, Aaron, go ahead.

Thank you very much. Can everybody see my screen, hopefully?

Yes, we can see it, although you're sharing the part of PowerPoint where we can see all of your upcoming slides and stuff.

How is that?

That looks perfect.

Okay. That's great, Aaron.

Go ahead.

Why Study Creation as a Christian Doctrine

Well, thank you for that introduction and thank you for the opportunity to share tonight. So, the title of my talk is going to be The Miracle of Creation. And as Terry said, I graduated from UCSD. And just as a little tie-in, I wanted to share that the UCSD seal has one of the verses we're going to be talking about tonight so, kind of cool.

I've always liked that about the seal. So, by way of introduction, I just have a few things to talk about. Why is it important to study the creation account? What are the common interpretations of the creation account?

Why call it a miracle, as I've done in this topic? And what do the experts say, quote unquote? And what are the implications of taking an old earth view of the creation account? And finally, what are my goals for tonight?

So, we'll just jump right in. And if you have a question, please put it in the chat. And I think Terry and Robin are going to help sort of collect those. Sorry, I don't have two screens so I won't be able to see questions at the same time.

But please throw something up there if you have a question. So, why study creation? Isn't it enough to just love Jesus? And so, of course, it is possible for true Christians to have a sincere disagreement about the meaning of certain texts in the Bible and Genesis 1 in this case.

But, and trusting in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is of paramount importance, of course, as is believing in the triune God of scripture, the resurrection and the second coming. At the same time, we must remember 2 Timothy 3 .16, that all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

And at the time that Paul wrote this, most scripture that was widely available was the Old Testament. As you'll see, there are far reaching implications to how we read the creation account. And why do we refer to the creation account as a miracle?

Sorry, I just need to minimize my controls up here.

Oops, sorry.

Sorry about that. Miracles in the Bible, at least the ones that we think of are the ones that were witnessed by other people, sometimes thousands of people, such as the Red Sea Crossing. And in contrast, the creation event was not witnessed by anyone except God himself.

And it did not involve preexisting physical matter. Everything was created out of nothing. So we don't think of the creation event. And when we don't think of the creation event in the proper categories, it can lead to improper analysis, such as subjecting the events to scientific laws that are in effect today, but were not in effect necessarily during the creation week.

Competing Views of Genesis 1

And so many interpretations, which one is correct? Obviously, we're coming from a young earth creationist perspective where creation is six consecutive 24 hour days. And it states that the creation event happened 6 ,000 to 10 ,000 years ago and rejects the secular geological record that became popularized in the 19th century.

I personally tend towards the 6 ,000 year age. And there's also old earth creationism often called the day age theory and states that each day of creation is actually a epoch of time made up of millions of years.

I believe Hugh Ross is the main proponent of this view today. Theistic evolution where God uses evolution to create all life. This view assumes that the secular geological record is correct as given by academia.

The framework theory, finally, it's kind of become popular in maybe the last decade or so where the narrative of Genesis 1 is poetic and not meant to be taken literally. The method of creation is left as unknown and really unimportant.

But typically this assumes that the earth is 4 billion years old. So all of these other views, different flavors of old earth, old universe, accept the secular record. Now, just a few experts, quote unquote.

Dr. William Lane Craig, who you've probably heard about, is a world-renowned apologist and philosopher. He's best known for developing the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God. And he has in probably about the last two years or so really dived into the study of Genesis, the first 11 chapters to come up with his perspective on what he thinks about this.

And so when he was doing sort of an introduction to this, he made this sort of blanket statement that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are troubling for everybody. So it's actually not just Genesis 1 that's an issue, it actually goes into the first 11 chapters.

All of that is considered troubling. And then he gave a talk, which was 37 different lectures. And it was where he was kind of going through all of these topics of creation and giving his perspective on it.

And he was asked a question in the last, actually the last talk, and he sort of, he kind of let the cat out of the bag, I guess you could say, where he says, so I'm presupposing the geological timetable here that is accepted in modern science and asking, how can we best integrate our theology with what we learned from contemporary science about the origin of life and biological complexity?

And you can watch, I supplied the links there. It's really something, some of the things he says in there, but just by way of summary, he puts the Bible, the biblical story of creation under science very explicitly.

Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew and popular conservative commentator for the Daily Wire. Though not a Christian, he believes that the Old Testament is true and inspired by God. And in one of his podcasts, he was talking about Sarah, the wife of Abraham.

And he said this, Sarah is sort of the first real female in the Bible in the sense that, in my opinion, the Adam and Eve story is largely meant to be a metaphor about human nature. But once you get to Abraham, you start with the actual history of the Jewish people.

And that again would be starting in Genesis 12. Matt Walsh is a well-known conservative thinker and outspoken Roman Catholic, like Ben Shapiro, he works for the Daily Wire. It might seem like I'm picking on the Daily Wire.

These are just the guys that I listen to. So this is what I hear. But he gave this quote, which was just so striking in response to a question that one of his listeners had about reincarnation. And he said, well, in a certain sense, yeah, we are reincarnated in the sense that our bodies are made up of atoms, seven billion billion atoms to be precise or sort of precise.

And when we die, those atoms don't die with us. They are recycled back into the world and they become other things. Just like the atoms in our body right now were other things. And if you trace it back far enough, as Carl Sagan talks about, we are the stuff of stars.

We are literally stardust. We were made from stars and we are in a sense, you might say, reincarnated stars. And that just, it's really hard to square that with a biblical account, but this is what happens when you accept a scientific basis and then put the Bible under that.

And so there you have it. So Genesis 1, as I've said, is just the tip of the iceberg. How you read the creation account will shape the way you understand the rest of Genesis and indeed the rest of the Bible.

Just a few difficult questions arise that if we can't accept Genesis 1 through 11 as actual history, we find why did God speak in such a way so as to mislead us in the foundational text of the Bible? Did Adam and Eve exist as described in the text or were they merely allegorical figures?

If there was no actual first Adam, how does it make sense for Jesus to be the second Adam? So that gets into the whole redemptive history. And did God really destroy the earth with a global flood or was it just a local flood of the known world contrary to what the text states?

And finally, if we cannot accept the miraculous events of Genesis 1 through 11 as historical, how can we believe in what was described in Genesis 12 onward? And just so we're clear, Genesis 12 through the end of Genesis has plenty of miraculous events.

And now how does the New Testament, how does Jesus and the New Testament writers, how did they treat Genesis? The book of Genesis is quoted or alluded to 24 times in the New Testament. And Genesis 1 through 11 is included in eight of these references.

Nowhere in the New Testament is Genesis treated as anything other than historical fact. I included this quote from Augustine that I really like, the new is in the old concealed, the old is in the new revealed.

So what that means is, you understand the Old Testament by way of the New Testament. That is the proper method of interpretation of the Old Testament. And just one example of Jesus quoting from Genesis 2 .24 in Matthew 19, when he was asked about divorce, Jesus answered, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

The Purpose of the Talk and the Nature of Genesis 1

So again, what are my goals for today? I would like to demystify the text of Genesis 1. So you have a clear way to understand the text as well as its relation to the rest of scripture to engender in you a passion and off for the creation event as it's the biggest miracle of the Old Testament by far and to give you a powerful apologetic, not based in science, but based on God's holy word.

And I'm a big proponent of the fact that apologetics is really its primary purpose is to make us bold, not necessarily always to convince although that does happen, but it actually emboldens us and strengthens our faith.

And the key thing to take away that I'd like to talk about is, and I'll refer back to this kind of throughout the presentation, is that the events described in Genesis 1 were not scientific in nature, rather they were supernatural historical events.

So this is an important category to keep in mind as we go through. And it's critical to interpreting. So God spoke and by the power of his word, everything came into being that now exists. And many Christian organizations attempt to apply scientific principles to the creation day events in order to explain how this all happened.

This often creates confusion as well as interpretive theories that are easy to reject. So I'm kind of taking sort of maybe a slightly different perspective. We'll go on. So what I'm gonna do is now that that's the introduction, now I'm gonna go through the days of creation and make some different applications and just hopefully together you'll see where I'm going with this, as it makes sense.

Day One: Light, the Heavens, and the Trinitarian Work of Christ

So day one, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, verse one, the first verse of the Bible, we see first of all, that God creates everything both on earth and above the earth and that he does so on six consecutive days, which we will discuss in further detail in later slides.

What is important to note here is that God created everything that exists and that nothing exists apart from his creation work. And the New Testament even emphasize and testifies to the truth of this.

And furthermore states that Christ was intimately involved. So this is definitely a Trinitarian work. From John 1, 1, we see in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. So we have the pre-existence of Christ and Christ integral work of Christ and his creation as part of the Trinity.

And then in Colossians 1, 15, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

And he is before all things and in him, all things hold together. So now we see, starts getting into the details of the description of the earth in verse two. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

You'll note also that I include Genesis 1, 1 through 2 as events occurring on the first day, not at a prior time. There are Christians that believe in a gap of millions of years between verse one and two, but they aren't getting this from the text as written.

Here we see that though God created the cosmos, verse one, it was yet incomplete. Verse two describes its current state of creation. There is more work to do and God is preparing to do that work. The earth is described as formless and void, or you could say disorganized and lifeless.

And though it was disorganized, this does not imply that the matter was preexistent, waiting for God to form it into something. This is the error that the Mormons make. God created the materials with which he would now build and populate the earth.

So it's all God's creation at all stages. Now we see the first word spoken verbally and recorded in the Bible in verse three. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good.

And God separated the light from the darkness. So in addition to creating light, he also passes judgment on it, noting that it is good. It's also critical to note here that there were no light sources created at this time.

Only the light beams were created at this moment. And this is something that I'm gonna flesh out in later slides. Also, we have to ask just how much light was created at this point. This is a critical question to answer in order to understand what happens on day four.

And just as a sort of a preamble, this is probably the most novel part of the presentation. So just stick with me. So let there be how much light. Stars are the main sources of light in the universe, but they haven't been created yet.

So we have a problem. What light was created? Well, we know at the very least, there was light created, which would create a day and night cycle. That's verse five. But again, there's no light source, only light.

So let's think about how this might look. So I made a crude picture here, and I hope you're all laughing at my silly dad jokes. So using the description here, we can begin to imagine what this might've looked like.

Light waves shining on the earth, but with no source. But what about the other light from the other stars? So you can see here, I have a diagram of a future sun that does not yet exist, but we have light waves emanating from that region of space.

So the idea here is that you have future light sources that haven't been created yet, and they're all shining on the earth, but the actual sources of that light are yet to be created. So that's the idea that I'm trying to get across on day one.

So sourceless light, that's kind of what I'm calling it, for lack of a better word. As crazy as this might sound, there's no other day of creation week on which light is created, but rather only light sources.

The text of Genesis 1 .3 does not set a limit to the light that was created, such they would only refer to light from the direction of the sun. Since we know that the sun does not exist until day four, it follows that God placed the sun in a place where the supernatural light was emanating from.

If we extrapolate to the rest of the stars in the universe, we now have an orderly plan by which God set all of the stars in the sky to take over the work of shining the light that was previously created.

This is also consistent with the other days of creation such as on day three, dry land was created, and on day six, land animals and man were created. The days of creation are related to each other in this way, one to four, two to five, three to six.

We'll see more of this pattern in future slides. One happy byproduct of this, something that I've just kind of wrestled with over the years, and you've no doubt heard this objection from skeptics and critics of Christianity that distant starlight is a problem, the DSP, you might say.

It states that the light that we can see from earth has traveled way too far for the universe to be young, 6 ,000 to 10 ,000 years old. And stars that we see that are 13 billion light years away would not be visible since the light would still be traveling to earth.

But since we now see that the light was already in existence on day one, there's no difficulty at all. The light was created mature, just as the rest of God's creatures were made mature. He made the chicken first, not the egg.

So in this case, he made the light first, not the stars. It's always important if you come up with something new, and I claim this is new, somebody else might've come up with it, but this is, I haven't seen it described really in this fashion.

But a possible objection to this perspective is that God calls the light day and the darkness night. So how could light from other stars, for i .e. not the sun, refer to the light that was created on the first day?

To counter this, let's consider that the stars and the moon are referred to as lesser lights to govern the night. And we'll see that later in the chapter. As the sun, greater light, governs the day. Though the stars and moon do not give off near enough light to be considered daylight, they nonetheless serve a similar purpose by providing at least some light at night.

In summary, I'm categorizing the stars and the moon into the category of day, since they serve the same function as the sun, just to a lesser degree and at a different time. So I hope that makes sense.

It's definitely probably the, like I said, the most novel part of this presentation. Speaking of the word day, yom in the Hebrew, there's a great deal of confusion over what the days of creation week refer to, as we've already discussed.

And we see in verse five, God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning the first day. There are two interpretive clues with which to determine what is meant by the Hebrew word yom, which can be a 24 hour period or a longer period of time, depending on the context.

Each day consists of an evening and a morning. Jewish days begin at sunset. Each day is enumerated, first, second, third, which indicates a well-defined period of time. Taken together, there is really no doubt about the nature of these days, despite the seemingly endless debates on the topic.

But there is even more biblical evidence outside of Genesis, as we'll now see, evidence that it's referring to 24 hour days. First of all, it should be noted that creation week is designed to be the model for our work week.

So in Exodus 31, 17, we see it is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel, that in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day, he rested and was refreshed. There's no other astronomical reason that we have our week structured this way, as there is, for example, with a day being 24 hours, which is one rotation of the earth.

The fourth commandment is inextricably tied to the days of creation, and most certainly relies on the creation days being six literal days. So Exodus 20, the chapter with the 10 commandments, starting in verse nine, six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

On it, you shall not do any work. The Jews were commanded to keep the Sabbath day holy, which could not have meant anything other than a normal solar day. In order to understand what the Sabbath day was, they would necessarily need to know what the other six days meant.

And the penalty for not recognizing this was death, as seen in the case of the man found gathering sticks on the Sabbath. So this was not a trifling matter. How can you have solar days before the sun?

This is a very often cited objection to the normal days of creation week. Though this might seem like a valid challenge in truth, there is a very clear explanation. In order to have a normal 24 hour day, two things are necessary.

One full rotation of the earth, light shining on the earth from a specific direction while the earth is rotating. Such light was created on day one as we've seen. And though we are not told specifically that the earth was rotating, this is implied by the text where it states there was evening and morning the first day.

So obviously there was rotation going on. The days did not change from the fourth day onward, rather the sun took over the duties of shining on the earth as the supernatural light had previously been doing.

So that kind of gets back to my previous description with the diagram. So this chart is something I'll refer to throughout where I'm classifying the days of creation into domains and rulers. So we've finished day one, which is light.

And then day four and day five and day six will be sort of what populates those domains. And orderly here does not imply that the text is an allegorical poem. God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.

Day Two: The Heavens and Waters

And he did so to model what our week should look like. So day two, and God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters. So one common theme of the creation days is the idea of division, light from darkness, waters from waters, et cetera.

The earth based on verse two seems to be mostly or even completely composed of water, maybe other trace elements. God is preparing the world to be populated in stages. In verse seven, we read, and God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the earth.

I'm sorry, under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so, and God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning the second day. While creating the cosmos, God is also naming the various elements of his creation.

In this case, heaven, a general term for the space above the earth, the detailed description of what was summarized in Genesis 1 .1. He's creating the atmosphere between the upper waters, just clouds or potentially an aquatic canopy that existed up until the flood and the lower waters, which would later become oceans and seas with air in between such that all life could be sustained.

And once again, there's no ambiguity here about the space of time in which this happened. It was evening and morning the second day. So we have atmosphere and oceans. Oceans here, meaning just the water that was remained on the surface of the earth.

Day Three: Land, Seas, and Vegetation

Day three of creation week. So God is gonna create land and seas here in verse nine, we read, and God said, let the waters under the earth, I'm sorry, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place and let the dry land appear.

And it was so. God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together, he called seas. And God saw that it was good. To complete what is summarized in Genesis 1 .1, God now creates the earth.

Rather than separate continents, this dry land was likely one large super continent often called Pangaea, but this topic is beyond the scope of my presentation tonight. It's amazing to think about the sheer spectacle of dry land appearing while untold amounts of water are displaced into various seas.

Let plants and trees come forth. And God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit, which is their seed each according to its kind on the earth. And it was so.

Though dry land has appeared, animal and human life cannot be sustained without plants and trees. So God calls for fully mature plants and trees to appear mature because the plants yield seed and the trees yield fruit.

This pattern of mature creation will continue throughout the week as we have already seen. Another thing to note here is each according to its kind. That is that God did not progressively create plants and trees from a common ancestor.

Each kind had its own seed and its own fruit. And it was so. Verse 12, the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds and trees bearing fruit, which is their seed each according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning the third day. It is emphasized in verse 12 that everything came to pass just as God had said. The earth is now fully prepared to be populated light, atmosphere, waters and dry land.

And again, this all happened within a normal day cycle. So halfway there, we made it through three days of creation. Just a reminder, just want to reiterate, Genesis 1 was not a series of scientific events.

It was supernatural and historical in nature. Therefore, we do not apply scientific laws to Genesis 1 since supernatural events break scientific laws by definition. So day four, we're getting to the rulers section as I've called them.

Verse 14, and God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.

And it was so. So we've reached a transition point during creation week wherein God begins to populate the canvas that was created on the previous days. First, he's focused on creating the lights to take over producing the light, which he created on day one.

That was my perspective with the diagram for day one, which we referred to earlier. We also know that these lights had a special purpose. They would need to be visible immediately. It wouldn't work to use stars for days and seasons if the light that they were shining was still traveling to the earth.

In verse 16, and God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars. Not only did God create all of the light sources in the cosmos, he also assigned specific jobs to them.

Most of the focus here is on the sun, the greater light, and the moon, the lesser light. This idea of rulers that we have discussed already is even emphasized here explicitly. And probably one of the biggest understatements of all time, Moses records all of the stars being created as an afterthought, practically.

So I think some translations say, and the stars also. Verse 17, and God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.

And God saw that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning, the fourth day. Once again, we see that everything happens according to God's command, such that there can be no ambiguity about what has occurred.

And just kind of a corollary, Exodus 26 through 31 chapters lays out the precise instructions for building of the tabernacle. And Exodus 35 through 39 describes these instructions being carried out to a T.

And coincidentally, Exodus is also attributed to Moses. So a very similar idea of the declared command of God, and then that being carried out. In that case, it was being carried out by the Israelites.

Day Five: Sea Creatures, Birds, and the Meaning of Tannin

So day four, the earth is now fully ready for animal and human life. Day five of creation week, the birds above and the sea creatures below. Verse 20, and God said, let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.

So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves with which the water swarm according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Almost as though God is thumbing his divine nose at Charles Darwin, God creates creatures of the air and the sea at the same exact time. The reason that's a problem for evolution is that birds come long after sea creatures in the evolutionary timeframe.

Also note that God is filling the expanse of the heavens and the depths of the seas fully with mature and fully developed animals. So again, not progressively created beings. And just as a reminder, they were eating fruits and vegetables.

And God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning the fifth day. God's creatures are commanded to fill the realms in which they live.

This is both his blessing and his command to them to be able to reproduce more of their same kind. This same exhortation will follow on day six as well.

Sorry about that.

I know everybody was looking forward to a spreadsheet and we've come to the spreadsheet portion of the presentation. So I just wanted to dive in a little bit of a word study on this verse. So God created the great sea creatures.

That's a very interesting word, Tannin. And I just have to confess, I'm not a Hebrew expert, but I did do sort of an informal word study of all the times it appears in the Old Testament and how it's translated by different English translations going back to 1611, the King James Version and then comparing that to the 20th century and 21st century translations that we have.

And then down here at the bottom, this is kind of the most important part where we have the incidence of the word that is used to translate this word Tannin the most. So you can see in the King James Version in 1611, we have the word dragon very predominantly being used the entire time, almost 78 of the time.

Every other English translation in the 20th and 21st century, they mostly use the term jackal, 48%, 44%, 48 and 44%. So jackal is the most common. So this word Tannin, it appears 27 times in the Old Testament.

That was on the previous slide. And as you can see, the English translations that were completed after usually translate it as jackal, whereas the King James typically renders it as dragon, whether it be a land or ocean beast.

In fact, 20th century translations nearly remove dragon as a rendering altogether. I don't claim to be a Hebrew scholar, but this is certainly not the way, and this is not the way to do translation. I'm not claiming that.

But there was most certainly a shift in how English translators understood this word Tannin. It's important to realize that all people, Christians and non-Christians alike, are influenced by their own worldview and is thus understandable why Bible translators under the influence of a Darwinian paradigm would seek to render this word in a way that did not contradict the common scientific view of their day.

And just as a final note on this, the term jackal that was used as a translation, it seemed to be used when it was always referring to a land beast, they would use jackal. If it was an ocean beast, they would use some other term like sea monster or whale or something like that.

Now, just another brief excursus, just because I'm just kind of fascinated by whales. This presentation is not meant to address evolution, but rather to talk about the text itself. But it's nonetheless important to note, as I alluded to earlier, the inherent problems with the timeline of the Bible versus the Darwinian timeline.

You can see here a nice clean diagram of how supposedly this small land mammal evolved into what we know today as modern whales and dolphins. So Genesis 1 is making the unambiguous claim that both fish and marine mammals were created at the same time, every living creature that moves with which the water swarm according to their kinds.

So obviously we know marine mammals would be included in that. This is a huge problem for the evolutionary paradigm because marine mammals evolved many millions of years after fish and even after reptiles, birds and land mammals.

You can see here land animals starting with a jackal-like creature called Pakicetus, this is an artist's rendering, are said to have evolved into marine mammals, whales and the like. This should create a huge problem in your mind when you think about the compatibility of evolution with the Bible.

So just to kind of sum this up, the evolutionary timeline from land-based small mammals to massive marine mammals is very short in the context of natural selection, taking only about 10 million years for Pakicetus to turn into a fully mature dolphin, I'm sorry, fully miniature dolphin.

There are a multitude of mutations needed in order to complete this transformation, but let's just focus on one amazing adaptation, the blowhole. What are the features? All breathing is now done through a hole in the back, which effectively has become the new nose.

This hole must be able to stay completely closed while submerged, otherwise the lungs will fill with water and result in drowning. And finally, and this is one of the most amazing characteristics, I think, the muscles that control the nostril covering are relaxed when the animal is submerged, and they contract for the brief moment when it comes up to breathe.

You can imagine how difficult it would be if this process existed in reverse, that meaning that the animal would have to exert control over its blowhole for all the time it was submerged underwater, obviously a lot of effort, but it's not, God made it the way that he did so that they wouldn't have to exert that only when they come up for air.