A woman recently recounted for me a conversation she had with a friend several years ago. Somehow their talk turned to the woman’s trust in the Bible when it comes to the creation account. The friend said, “You’re not telling me that you actually believe that mythological nonsense!” In response, the first woman said that she did, in fact, believe that God created the universe as indicated in Genesis. Her friend reacted in dismay. “I’ve always considered you to be an intelligent woman.” This response is typical of someone who assumes that the creation account of Genesis is nothing but ancient mythology. But is that really so? Do people really have to throw their brains out the window to believe what the Bible says about the beginning of the cosmos? Let’s look at the first eleven verses of the account of creation in the book of Genesis: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that it was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” Together these made up one day. And God said, “Let there be space between the waters, to separate water from water.” And so it was. God made this space to separate the waters above from the waters below. And God called the space “sky.” This happened on the second day. And God said, “Let the waters beneath the sky be gathered into one place so dry ground may appear.” And so it was. God named the dry ground “land” and the water “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the land burst forth with every sort of grass and seed-bearing plant. And let there be trees that grow seed-bearing fruit.” (Genesis 1:1-11) And so the Genesis account goes on, moving from the forestation of the earth to the creation of fish and sea life to birds to land animals to human beings. Now it is important to acknowledge here that the point of the Genesis account is not primarily to explain the process of creation but the origin of creation. And yet the more we learn through science, the more we understand the astonishing truth of the ancient biblical text. For example, Gerald Schroeder, an applied physicist trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), writes, “During my three decades as a scientist active in applied physics and oceanography, and a 25-year immersion in the study of biblical tradition . . . the most exciting discovery . . . is that the duration and events of the billions of years that, according to cosmologists, have followed the Big Bang and those events of the first six days of creation are in fact one and the same. They are identical realities that have been described in very different terms.” In recounting his own journey from agnosticism to Christianity, astrophysicist Hugh Ross, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, writes of searching the world’s holy books for some explanation of the awesome wonder of the universe: While I found words of interest and beauty and truth in each one, each reflected the limited (now known to be erroneous) scientific knowledge of its time and place—each one except one: the Bible. . . . From the first page I could see distinctions. The quantity and detail of scientific content far exceeded what I found in the other books. To my surprise, the scientific method was as clearly evident in Genesis 1 as it is in modern research. Most impressive of all, the four initial conditions and the sequence of major creation events—not just one or two, but more than a dozen—all matched the established scientific record. As I pondered how this accuracy could have been achieved, even if the book were written much more recently than scholars estimated, I calculated the odds that the writer could have guessed the initial conditions and correctly sequenced the events . . . and I discovered that the odds were utterly remote. Only one conclusion made sense to me, the conclusion that the Creator of the universe had something to do with the words of Genesis 1. What Ross and others have been learning in recent years through the disciplines of astrophysics and cosmology is the equivalent of my discovering not only that my car’s owner’s manual accurately describes the detailed workings of my car but that it was written by an author living in fourteenth-century Turkey who had never ridden anything more technologically advanced than a camel.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 07:34:39 +0000
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