BEGINNINGS

Big Bang, Emerald Beach, FL

The Day with no Yesterday

The book of Genesis doesn’t go into a lot of detail about how the vast universe we inhabit was created, but to say that on that first day with no yesterday God created the heavens and the earth. But of course, the Bible isn’t a science book. There’s not much to glean from how we arrived on this planet either, except to say that in the final act of the creation story God created man in his own image, both male and female. God wanted human beings to care for the earth and to commune with Him. The Biblical account lays no claim to the process of creation, just its origin.

Lawrence Krauss just published A Universe from Nothing. His credentials as a renowned cosmologist are pretty impressive. He candidly states in the opening sentence that “I am not sympathetic to the conviction that creation requires a creator”. He goes on to discuss the church’s position of First Cause or an eternal creator by countering with the question, “What is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one”? Hmmmmm. Well, personally, I’d say an intuitive faith that is grown by spending time in communion with our creator and reading the inspired word that became flesh in His Son for starters. Krauss basically acknowledges that the universe began with a Big Bang that resulted from the unstableness of “nothing-no space, no time, no anything” and random chance generated the rest.

Francis Collins has also recently penned a book on the Language of God after heading the project to map the entire human DNA, the code of life. His own journey from atheism to being a devout believer has convinced him that science and religion can find common ground encompassing both faith and reason. And he references the Anthropic Principle that our improbable universe is finely tuned to give rise to human existence. Collins was astounded by the elegance of the human DNA code and concludes that a creator God that is not limited by natural laws, time or space could have initiated the Big Bang that scientists now agree brought our universe into existence.