This transcript is autogenerated
In the Beginning (OHP 1)
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1: 1)
When I was a young boy, I became obsessed with astronomy about the age of 7 or 8. Blame that on the Apollo space program. I saved my pocket money for nearly 3 years to buy my first telescope £30.00 in 1972 was a lot of money. I used to gaze up at the sky gazing at the stars and literally spend hours and hours looking at the moon. One of the first things I learnt, was that astronomy is a very cold hobby. The clearer the nights the better the star gazing, but the clearer the nights the colder it was. By the age of around 13 I could work out where the planets and constellations would be in the sky and on any given day what phase the moon was in. But behind all that my mind often wandered to the immensity of the universe and questions like how did it all got there? How come it was all so big?
As a matter of fact, scientists today are still trying to figure that out. Every once in a while, NASA or the European Space Agency will shoot off a rocket or build a large hadron collider and say something like.
“This will help us gain an insight into the origin of the universe”.
It would seem on the face of it that Genesis chapter one has the same purpose, to tells us about the origin of the universe. So, let me go back to the opening and ask the question. How did it all begin? Genesis 1:1 tells us. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. So how did it all begin? Maybe the BBC’s professor Brain Cox can help Let me quote what he said in his 2017 book “The infinite Monkey cage”.
“The first thing to emphasise in such discussions is that we don’t know how the universe began and we don’t know what the fundamental building block are. Just because we don’t have the answers doesn’t mean we don’t have much to talk about”.
That’s fair enough, often scientists are not actually making the claims that some who speak on their behalf say they are. They are not in fact saying what they believe is final and conclusive. Neither are they saying something is not true, merely that they are not yet able to see or measure the physical evidence to scientifically accept the position of a universe directly created that is presented in the bible and offered by people of faith
World Renowned Cosmologist Professor Carlos Frenk said this in 2014.
If the question is what happened before the Big Bang, the answer is, “I don’t know”.
The Biblical accounts in Genesis lay down a story of the battle between good and evil which have laid out undisputed patterns for people across time ever since. These accounts of the beginnings of all things deeply connect and affect us because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. And they were written down and can make us a little clearer about who we are as humans if we study them. A great dramatist like Shakespeare we know that what he wrote is more true than just words on a page because it helps us understand the human condition. But the Bible uses poetry and metaphor to also help us understand the human condition. Some will make the mistake of saying it is wrong to approach the Bible in that way. But maybe the bible is more true that a list of scientific facts maybe its true because we can also abstract truth out of it supernaturally. Maybe we it's true because it can be applied in the same way numbers are true. Don’t make the mistake of saying Biblical stories are not true. Did you know that numbers are only an abstraction from the underlying reality but no one in their right mind thinks numbers aren't real. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent because the abstraction gave us so much knowledge and the power to use them. Once humanity developed mathematics, we became so powerful we could almost move the world it seemed. Certainly, it was our knowledge of physics and mathematics that allowed us to escape this earth and stand on another heavenly body.
But then you think wait a minute maybe it's more to truth than just measurable scientific reality. Perhaps the answer to those questions is really the job of the or the Christian theologian or Philosopher, not the scientist. And it at this point we can approach these opening verses in the knowledge that the truth they tell is the greatest possible extraction of the mind and the will of God revealed for anyone who would truly seek it.