In the beginning: Science and the Bible

The Bible has outsold,  and continues to outsell every other book in existence. It is of course extremely controversial even among believers, and no more so than in the so called clash between Science and faith.  I want to start by saying that we have arrived neither in science,  nor in our understanding of the Bible.  Too many believers confuse what the Bible says, with their interpretation!  Concerning this, hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation,  is complex. Furthermore we all tend to interpret it,  and in fact life in general,  though the lens of our pre-determined world view. Very few seem to be aware of this,  including scientists.

The church is often cited as being the least progressive when it comes to accepting new ideas.  But Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,”  documents how favourite and widely accepted scientific theories resist change by the Scientific community.  Furthermore, the debates are not always honest. The ancient Greeks hide the fact that the square root of two is not a rational number.  It contradicted the then current “theory of everything!”

One such revolution centred around whether the universe had a beginning (Genesis 1:1a). About a hundred years ago the steady state theory was widely accepted (Google it). It hypothesized that the universe had always existed. This eliminated the inconvenient truth of the existence of a creator to whom we are accountable. The observed redshift in the wavelength of light played a major role in the overthrow of this theory. It was widely resisted and there are still those who are hanging on.

The red shift is similar to the Doppler effect in sound. We  experienced this as the change in pitch of the siren, as an ambulance moves past you. The red shift allowed scientists to deduce that the universe is expanding. It ultimately lead to the theory of the big bang.  But please note, the theory is a description of what Scientists think happened.  An explanation as to its cause,  is completely absent from the theory.

Much of modern science either implicitly or explicitly throws out the God hypothesis. That is that God is the cause of anything is ruled out as inadmissible without evidence,  and without debate.  Most of the time it makes perfect sense. Certainly many things have natural causes, and do not require intervention by God.  However, since the beginning of the Universe must have a cause, the only alternative at that point  to the rejection of some form of god hypothesis boils down to  “In the beginning, nothing created everything that is out of nothing.”  That the true God is the God of the Bible however,  does not immediately follow!

Father, we need to acknowledge that we are all biased, that we all operate out of our understanding of reality, and that that understanding is shaped by a multitude of things. Lord if You are really there, and I believe Your are, it's something of an inconvenient truth. Furthermore, Your Word tells of this  ability we all have to rationalize what we don't want to believe (Romans 1:18). But we don't know what we don't know,  and the ratio of what we know to that of what we don't know is of the order of infinity! We do, however need to know that we have not believed cunningly devised fables. Thank You Lord that You have promised we will find You when we search with all of our hearts (Jeremiah 29:13), in Jesus Name Amen