"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).
I recently encountered another blogger who wrote that (apart
from the text of Genesis) we can’t know anything about the creation of the
heavens and the earth because we were not
there. That statement is partly
false and partly true. It is of course
true that we literally “were not there.” Only God was present at the beginning. But it does not follow from that that we
cannot know anything about that beginning.
This last weekend, looking through a backyard telescope, I saw the tiny
deep green disc of the planet Uranus and the deep blue dot of the planet Neptune. At that moment I was looking back in time,
that is, back into the past. It took their
reflected light 2.4 hours and 4 hours to travel from their respective surfaces
to reach my eye as I looked through the lens.
The
point is, there is a lot more in life that we can personally witness (an event
down the street or across a valley) than by merely being immediately present. Amazingly this truth includes time
itself. When we look into the heavens we
are in fact only looking into the
past since every bit of light we see took time (a lot longer than most of us
have been around) to finally reach our eyeballs. That is exciting news! This truth gives us a window into God’s
creation. I believe the Big Bang
happened. For me that event demands a “banger,”
who is Almighty God. Conviction of the
truth of the Big Bang does not rest on conjecture. Using our best telescopes scientists actually
observe past events (in on-going
motion) within our universe which is expanding out from an initial “zero-volume”
singularity. We know from observation therefore that all time, space, matter, and energy came
into existence out of nothing. More
detail on that observable list of
facts which point to the absolute beginning of the universe out of nothing will
be forth-coming. Stay tuned for my next
blog!
Pastor Gary Jensen
Zion Lutheran Church
Snohomish, Washington
Well written! What do you say about Stephen Hawking's argument that “time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there [was] no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; the earth is a sphere, it doesn’t have an edge so looking for it is a futile exercise.”
ReplyDelete1. Dr. Hawking’s arguments actually contribute nothing to advance the self-existence of the universe, including its alleged eternal existence. Put crudely, the cosmos is clearly here, but how did it get here?
ReplyDelete2. Theists argue that God, by definition (and by the implied need for a creator who stands outside and above the cosmic order) is not bound by our time limitations. This is actually logically demanded of an agent who creates time itself (as well as space, matter, and energy). Time, as we know it, is our experience as finite creatures.