Smoodock's Blog

Is it, “In the beginning, God…” or should we say, “In the beginning, BANG!!!?” According to one of the most popular or most widely accepted explanations of the beginning of our universe, both among natural scientists and even some believers, about 13.8 billion years ago (but even this isn’t agreed to by all scholarly explanations, some conclude 16 to 20 billion years ago), everything that exists, past, present and future, was compressed or condensed into an infinitely tiny singularity, some even claim absolutely ‘nothing’ existed. Nevertheless, however one may term it, it was infinitely dense and hot, and for no particular reason it suddenly burst forth into existence. A kind of envelope expanded at the speed of light with all matter finding its place somewhere in the wake of this sudden expansion of what we call space.

“In the realm of the universe, nothing really means nothing. Not only matter and energy would disappear, but also space and time. However, physicists theorize that from the state of nothingness, the universe began in a gigantic explosion about 16.5 billion years ago. This theory of the origin of the universe is called the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory does not explain how the universe began. The theory only explains how the existing universe could have developed.”[1] (emphasis mine)

“The observable universe could have evolved from an infinitesimal region. It’s then tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing.”[2] (emphasis mine)

In other words, science speculates about how our universe “could have developed” or “could have evolved” and claims that its speculations are accurate enough to teach our children in our schools! They conclude that gravity was produced and gradually drew stars together to form galaxies, among which we would find our own galaxy, within which there is Earth. One day, but not immediately so, Earth would contain all life that we know exists in our own experience. How this life came into existence involves another speculation entirely, but for now, the place, for that life that we know, came into existence some multiple billions of years ago (or so it is claimed). Earth was acted upon by gravity to orbit the sun, which also would have been drawn into and found its place in what we would call the Milky Way Galaxy.

This, or a reasonable facsimile, is what most natural scientists believe occurred. Once again, nothing put forth here is according to the scientific method, but to be fair, neither could it ever be tested in that manner. It is speculation or perhaps we might call it conviction or even a worldview among scholars. This is what makes sense to them about how everything began. Put simply, according to the scientific opinion posted above: nothing existed. There wasn’t even a somewhere, because space or a place to put things didn’t even exist. What would that look like, if you could have been ‘there’ (?) to observe nothing **happening**? What would it look like to observe somewhere coming out of **nowhere**? And, keep in mind that there is no intelligence behind its occurrence; so, for no particular reason: BANG!

Well, what about God? Is belief in God as the Creator of all things, any more scientific than what our esteemed scholars have told us? First of all, we cannot make the Bible into a scientific textbook. It isn’t one, nor does it pretend to be. The Bible is a book of faith. It is all about trusting God to have spoken through certain men, who were moved to write down what they heard God tell them. While the whole is expressed in words humans used to explain what they understood God to say, what we find between the Bible’s front and back covers is understood by believers to be the word of God. What we understand the Bible to say about our beginning is that an infinitely complex Being produced a similarly complex universe equipped with life—vegetation, animal (including birds and insects) and human life, and, yes, humans and animals are different. We are not, simply put, a higher form of animal life. God did this! Supreme intelligence brought about the complex universe, we call our home, and he produced it all intact, not gradually, vis-à-vis from the very beginning the complexity and the intelligence, which we understand this universe to collectively embrace, existed intact.

So, is, “In the beginning God…” more reasonable than “In the beginning BANG…”? I guess that would depend upon one’s worldview, or what makes sense to the observer. Certainly, from where I sit as a believer, God makes more sense, because it is easier to believe that supreme Intelligence is responsible for such a complex universe equipped with life that is equally complex. It is certainly more reasonable than nothing **happened** …because, in as much as I can tell, if nothing happened, we wouldn’t be here!

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[1] HBJ; General Science, 1989, page 362.

[2] Alan Guth, P. Stelnhardt; Scientific American, May 1984; page 128