What first caused the earth to be fixed and motionless when it was created?
A viewer asks about the causal mechanism of a fixed earth as it first appeared, not the ongoing maintenance of its fixity.
Answer
As it first appeared, if there is nothing to move it, it is going to stay fixed. You have to have a force if the earth is going to move. If you just put it in open space, and by the way the space itself had to be created in order to put the earth in it, that is part of the heavens: in the beginning I created the heavens and the earth. Heavens is a complicated word, but in the first instance it means God created space, because space is not nothing; it is a physical something, discrete. We cannot sense it with our senses, we cannot see it or feel it, but it is there. That has to be made, and then the earth is made inside that space. But for the earth to move you would have to have a force in the space to move it, and since that was not there, the earth is fixed. That is the causal mechanism for the initiation period: if there is no force, it is not going to move. Then there are other reasons why it is maintained, but that would be the reason it started out fixed.