God Truth and Creation

"Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man... In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive"

The Nobel Prize-winning work on the Background radiation brought to mind those words of Einstein. Once upon a time I studied Astronomy at University and would then probably have been able to read the original papers. Nowadays, I'm pretty much an ex-scientist, so I'm reliant on the news sites to inform me. Even at such a distance from the science, I can still get a buzz from such a breakthrough as this.

It beats me why so many religious people have a problem with this idea of a Big Bang. I'm prepared to accept (as with so many things) that it's because I'm under-informed and a bit thick.

I'm in a motel typing this - let me reach over and get the Gideon bible and use it for once for something other than as a coaster or a fly swat ...

Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"

Great - I don't think any scientist could claim to have disproved that statement. They may fervently believe, but it's one of those statements that is not in the realm of science.

Note there's no further detail on how he did it, which makes me wonder how the idea of a Big Bang could be so threatening.

Incidentally, one of the things that excites me about the early history of the Universe is that apparently there was a point before Time itself was created. Even more remarkably, the Fundamentalists agree. It's only by verse 5 that God creates Time, just before teatime on the first day:-

Genesis 1:5 God called the light "day" and the darkness he called "night". And there was evening and there was morning - the first day.

I think Fundamentalists and Cosmologists have more in common than they care to admit.