Creation

So where did it all begin? What do we know about the universe – not just the world – we live in?

Ask a random person on the street how the universe began, and they will say, “The Big Bang, of course. Everyone knows that”. Indeed, the Big Bang is the commonly accepted scientific theory for the origin of everything. There are some ‘problems’ with the theory which have challenged it down the years, but there are precious few theories which the seasoned pedant would fail to find fault with. Moreover, many of the questions surrounding the validity of the Big Bang have been answered, and, being no scientist, I am certainly not trying to gain any MIT qualification by giving you a thesis on the intricate astrophysics of the universe’s origins here.

The most common questions associated with what we know from science about creation are about how the implications of this knowledge affect our religious beliefs. An easy starting point is the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:3 – “God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light”. Imagine a loud explosion accompanying this verse, and it’s as good a description of the Big Bang anyone writing thousands of years ago would be able to come up with.

So what is the problem there? Well, the obvious issue is that the Big Bang – the start of everything – is described in verse 3, not verse 1. What happens in the first two verses of the Bible, then? Verse 1 actually tells us, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So, not with a Big Bang then?

The answer to this lies purely in how one might define creation. If we take the example of a ship, at what point might this ship have been created? Was it created when it first set sail? When the mast was raised? When the final piece was slotted, riveted or hammered into place? Or further back? Was it created on the drawing board? Even a master shipbuilder might admit that, whilst his blueprints show he has created something yet to be physically built, he himself is standing on the shoulders of giants, using discoveries which our ancestors pioneered centuries ago.

So when God created the heavens and the earth, does this mean they were already in place, before the Big Bang, even though we know from science this was not the case?

No – let us take a look at the second verse of Genesis 1. “Now the earth was formless and empty.” So our planet had no shape then. That is because, although God created the blueprints, the builders had not yet begun their work on the universe. And these builders? The very laws of physics and science we have come to discover and be fascinated by.

You may ask me why a God with the power to do anything would need to obey the laws of physics. To this there is a simple answer. If we go back to our shipbuilder and look at not just the blueprints but the finished article, we might see the fastest, most economical, reliable, unsinkable, most luxurious, largest ship ever. But it would not be able to fly. Had the shipbuilder wished to create something which flew, he would have designed an aircraft.

Had God wished his laws of physics to be malleable or disregarded completely, he would not have created a physical universe for us to explore. Why spend centuries discovering the laws of motion, gravity, magnetism and evolution, only to see things appear out of thin air? That would make no sense at all.

So, what about other religions? Do they agree with the Judaeo-Christian Biblical account? Arguably the closest neighbour to Christianity and Judaism is Islam. The Qu’ran mentions the creation of the universe thus: “The heavens and the earth were joined together as one unit, before We clove them asunder”. After this, Allah (God) “turned to the sky, and it had been (as) smoke. He said to it and to the earth: 'Come together, willingly or unwillingly.' They said: 'We come (together) in willing obedience'”. This follows scientific knowledge of the post-Big Bang formation of the universe, with all the elements within cooling, becoming denser and finding form (which the Bible, as we already know, states the earth had none of before these events).

The Hindu religion takes the view of several universal ‘cycles’, each cycle beginning anew, suddenly and violently, after the previous one has been destroyed. This is concurrent with a theory that new universes begin from the singularities inside black holes; all the matter necessary to begin a new universe is contained within the singularity which then explodes outwards to form another Big Bang.

Did our universe begin from inside a black hole of another one? Who knows? Certainly this may never be provable by science, but as far as religion is concerned, is it unfeasible that God created a universe previous to ours? Perhaps he wishes to see if we can avoid whatever mistakes the inhabitants of his other realms made. Obviously this is conjecture whether your perspective is religious, scientific or both, but is no less interesting.

At the risk of firing too many of the world’s creation origins at you, I will leave you with two more. Shinto, which states the universe began like an egg, from which matter was drawn out to form heaven and earth. And a line from the Aborigine traditional stories: “Suddenly dawn arose and Il-ba-lint-ja was flooded with light for the first time”.

Does science disprove religion with the discovery of the Big Bang? From this evidence, certainly not. The stories which have been circulating throughout our religious traditions have in fact been validated. Most of the stories themselves correlate with each other, though they are told in different ways.

Science and the Bible are in complete agreement concerning how the universe began.

Introduction

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”

This revelation from Albert Einstein is oft-quoted but rarely, it seems to me, borne in mind. As a Christian myself I know many believers who see the pursuit of science as largely irrelevant and scientists as the ‘them’ in a ‘them and us’ mindset. Going to extremes, one may find those who dismiss scientific findings as going against Scripture, and therefore plain wrong.

But is science really the enemy of Christianity, or any religion? A serious proponent of their religion would surely risk alienating their relevant agnostics by claiming that science is somehow not the truth. And driving potential believers away hardly fulfils the evangelical duties Christianity and other religions would like.

“The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality.”

This is not an uncommon viewpoint. Here Richard Dawkins, arguably the world’s most famous atheist, tries to establish the Bible’s importance as purely cultural, and not at all historical.

However, science itself has shown this opinion to be completely uninformed. Archaeology has most recently been the best friend of the Bible within the scientific fields, unearthing stark evidence of many Biblical events and settings. So whilst I might argue on the one hand that religion should not shun science, on the other I could fight the case for why science should not be used to disprove religion.

Of course, it is true that there are many things science might not disprove, such as fairies at the bottom of the garden. But, trivial attempts at parallels aside, there are also plenty of aspects of our existence which we know to be true, such as morality, conscience and love, which science may never be able to prove or disprove.

Is there not a much greater connection between what we know and what we believe? Why would we have we been taught down the centuries to believe in the miracle of who we are but yet ignore the discoveries we make when we exercise our own innate curiosity? Do the marvels we discover have to mean we must reject the teachings of thousands of years?

I think there is a far more intrinsic and intimate connection between the seemingly clashing worlds of science and religion than some would have us believe. Using the Bible as a starting point, and involving whatever I discover about the world’s other religions, I am going to find out whether what we know now is simply what we have known all along.