Creation: Big Bang, or what?
Creation according to God? Or according to science?
Scientists talk about the 'Big Bang' theory of the
appearance of the universe. How does the Big Bang compare with the Bible's
description of creation? 'Big Bang', says Science...
 The
scientific approach says that in the beginning, before the universe
appeared, there was nothing. And at some stage, there came the biggest
'Big Bang' ever: a tremendous explosion of energy, matter, and of course,
light. There never was such an explosion of light, either before or after this
event.
In scientific terms, in the cosmology of Physics, the
Big Bang theory states that that the universe appeared from nowhere as an
extremely dense and hot state, about 13.7 billion years ago (±2%). This is
based on observations indicating the expansion of space as indicated by
the Hubble red shift of distant galaxies, taken together with principles
of cosmology. If these observations are extrapolated into the
past, they show that the universe exploded from a 'gravitational
singularity' - the tiniest pinpoint of the most extreme density and
temperature, as predicted by general relativity, which contained all the
matter and energy of the entire universe.
What
scientists cannot explain is WHY. 'Let there be Light', says the Bible
We can read this in the very beginning of the Jewish and
Christian Bibles, in a
book called Genesis. Here are the words from the New International
Version, Genesis chapter 1, verses 1 to 5:
 "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was
formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the
Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be
light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He
separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and
the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was
morning—the first day."
How should we interpret this?
The word Genesis in Hebrew: בראשית, in Greek:
Γένεσις, have the meanings of "birth", "creation", "cause",
"beginning", "source" and "origin". It is the first book of the Torah, the
first book of the Tanakh and also the first book of the Christian Old
Testament. As Jewish tradition considers it to have been written by Moses,
it is sometimes also called The First Book of Moses. Bible
scholars are generally in agreement that Genesis was 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.) This society would be of
semi-nomadic herdsmen, living in a period that we would call the late
bronze age in that region, just entering the iron age; this ties in with
descriptions in the Old Testament that refer to bronze, copper, iron, etc.
So, how would God describe the stages of His creation to semi-nomadic
herdsmen? The concept of counting in 'hundreds' appears in Genesis 6; the
concept of 'thousands' does not appear until Genesis 20. So, how would you
explain to bronze-age man the concept of 13.7 billion years? (Can you even imagine it yourself?) I would
explain creation in stages, or phases; around 3,400 years ago I would
probably call them 'days'.
(And what is time, to God? In the New Testament, 2 Peter 3:8
says this, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord
a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." Just
expand that to the whole timescale of the life of the universe.)
 Big Bang:
The First Day
So
the first 'day', the first stage of creation was "Let there be light". And
there was the biggest blaze of light the universe has ever seen, in the
massive explosion of the Big Bang. What a wonderful description; what a
wonderful picture the Big Bang event creates in the mind's eye!
Big Bang and Scientists
I am a
scientist; I studied Physics, Electronics and Control Engineering at four
universities. And I have no problem with reconciling the story of
creation as read in the Bible, with the scientific Big Bang theory. To me, they are
the same thing.
Example: Suppose you are a scientist. How would you explain the scientific
story to semi-nomadic, uneducated, mostly illiterate tribesmen in the semi-desert
regions of Maasailand in Kenya today? Would you not explain the Big Bang
in pretty much the same way that God does in the Bible?
Big Bang: something to
think about
Remember: 1: Science explains
what happened - they call it the Big Bang; but science cannot explain
why creation came about. 2: The Bible tells us
that God decided to create; and he did. It's the same story. And here we
are today.
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