Immanuel Lutheran Church Study Forum

I'm a firm believer that science and theology both point to the same truth. There are a lot of antagonists of faith that point to the creation story in Genesis as to simple and to short (time wise) to be accurate. They then use this dismissal of creation as a reason to dismiss the entire Bible. When I come up against these arguments, I like to keep a couple of things in mind:

1. God explained the creation of the universe to Moses, an 80 year old nomadic goat herder, in a way that he could explain it to others in 2000BC.
2. The first thing created was light. While science has told us how to use light in our daily lives, it still can not tell us what it is (particle, wave, or something else).
3. The next 3 days are basically all the matter in the universe being organized into planets, solar systems, etc. Science tells us this process involved gravity. Gravity is (believe it or not) still just a theory because its power source is unknown (you don't have to change the gravity batteries). Doing work like keeping us from drifting into space without using energy violates the scientific laws of thermodynamics.
4. Man doesn't come on to the scene until day six, essentially after God has finished creating. There are no human witnesses to anything earlier.

As an interesting point of discussion, PhD Astrophysicist Gerald Schroeder (in his book 'Genesis and the Big Bang') proposes that because of time dilation due to gravity and speed proposed in Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the (24hr)days at the center of the Big Bang would roughly correlate to the geological eras on earth theorized by many scientists today.

Thanks Tom. I also am convinced that science and theology describe the same truth. One of my favorite quotations is this by Werner Heisenberg, the father of Quantum Physics (originally in German): “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” The creation story is so beautiful and lyrical. It is also magnificently effective, unlike any detailed scientific explanation could ever be. Not that it would even be possible to explain God's creation of everything in a scientific way since He exists independently of everything we can observe and study.

The following popped out at me this time in my NKJV Bible:
Genesis 1:1-2 It's amazing that I could suddenly see something new in these passages that I've heard and read over and over again since my youngest years. Maybe I wasn't fully paying attention. The annotation for verse 2 states that the heavens and the Earth were originally created as stated in verse 1, no doubt perfect, but then they became without form and void (verse 2) and were no longer the way He originally created them. God then renewed what was in a chaotic state—"chaos into cosmos, disorder into order, emptiness into fullness." (that's a quote from the notation on verse 1 which also says that the Hebrew word for "created" is a word that means "to fashion anew.") Maybe God causes the cosmos to go through cycles of being and non-being, void and formlessness interspersed with created order. If so, it would mean that something other than God Himself existed even before the creation that we currently see!

On that theme, it is interesting that the days are evening to morning. I heard a Rabbi explain that in Hebrew evening (coming darkness) has the connotation of chaos and morning ( coming light) has the connotation or order. This implies God directly intervened supernaturally to reverse the trend toward entropy, or the natural decay of order into chaos. This reversal of entropy is one of the arguments that directly challenges the theory of evolution.