The Bible, scientists - and the universe

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Added: Mon. Aug 15, 2011 1:54pm
Posted in: Religion & Spirituality

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Genesis, which is, in part, the Biblical description of the creation of the universe, is presumed to have been written by Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit during the forty years that the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness (1450 - 1410 B.C.). As such it was written by a man who had no knowledge of the universe, who didn’t know any theories about the big bang or inflation, or acceleration, or any of the other current theories that describe the creation of the universe.

Yet for a man so unlearned, he seemed to put into simplistic terms a series of events that closely parallel scientific thinking today. For scientists today to diminish or demean what he spoke of nearly 3,500 years ago is to diminish or demean any incomplete theory or changed scientific fact. Do they decry that at one time leading scientists of the day decreed that the atom was the smallest building block of all in the universe. So often theories are rudimentary, based on current knowledge and the ability of a person to extend and refine that data.

The leading thinkers of their day may have misplaced the center of the universe as being our earth, but they recognized there was more to the universe that just the earth, and that those other bodies had regular movement. As man accumulated more data and more information, those theories where modified or discarded, and new, fuller, richer theories replaced them.

And so it is with the creation of the universe as described in Genesis. Moses suggests there was a dark period wherein there was no light. Scientists today ready accept the idea that there was the Dark Ages in the universe around 100 million years after the Big Bang. Scientists tell us today that the stars did not exist at the inception of the universe but came to be more than 100 millions years after the big bang.

In reading Genesis you see the universe slowly unfold, one phase at a time. When viewing the cosmic timeline, you see a similar unfolding of the universe. Scientists gleam their information through telescopes and spacecraft and sophisticated mathematical theory. Moses had none of that at his disposal, but, according to Genesis, he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Who is to say where any scientist gets his inspiration for proposing some new theory? It could be observation, a coming together of disparate data, or perhaps a dream while asleep. Whatever the source, whatever the inspiration, it is all antidotal to the main fact that someone extended our knowledge through well-crafted theories. If nothing else, these theories serve as building blocks to newer and better theories.

While some dogmatic religious believers of the literal bible take the duration of the time lines to be exact, that is 7 earth days to produce the universe, most people, scientists and lay people alike, understand those seven days were not to be taken literally. The idea of 7 days, one week, was an easy technique to explain a profound idea to uneducated people.

Sadly, many scientists read the story of Genesis and discounted it completely, simply because not all of it can be taken literally. They fail to understand that Genesis gives us the very first theory of how the universe was formed; it was the start of cosmology. It was Theory I in the long lineage of scientific theory. It needs to be respected as the starting point for all that we know and think we know today.