The wise man has nothing to say against known facts or against science itself.

I do complain of the haste and animus with which many men have used unformed and crude science to contradict the word of God. This is not wisdom or reverence.

To summarize, we have two grand facts opening Genesis 1:
- The original creation;
- The wasteland it became, presumabl,( by analogy of other use of the same words in scripture) by an act of God's judgment.

There is more evidence: A passage in Isaiah (45:18) seems formally to contradict the notion that God created the earth in a state of waste and emptiness.
[Ed. "chaos" is an unfortunate word that had become a traditional theological term for tohu/bohu, but it implies disorder, which the Hebrew words do not; furthermore, the use of tohu/bohu elsewhere clearly refer to the absence of humans and their influence, not to absolute emptiness or useless waste.]