There has been much made in recent years of the clash between creation and evolution, of the idea that our world was brought into being either by the actions of a benevolent God, or the actions of blind natural forces. This disturbs me because, as a trained scientist and a believing Christian, I truly believe there is no conflict between the laws of nature and the laws of God.
Let me explain. If we accept the argument that blind forces of nature brought our world into being and set into operation what scientists call evolution, it still leaves us with a gigantic question that no scientist has yet answered. The big bang theory, summarized simply, states that in some primordial past, billions of years ago, there was a huge cataclysmic explosion, causing a dense conglomeration of matter to be broken up and expelled to the far corners of the universe, thereby creating the contents of the universe as we know it today. Scientifically, this raises the question of where that material was before the big bang, and more importantly, how it got there. This question of the ultimate source of the universe, for me, points to the only answer possible, that at some point in the distant past (as present concepts of time recognizes) something was created from nothing. My conclusion is that if you look closely enough at the evidence, or lack thereof, divine creation becomes the only viable answer to many of the questions science raises.
Another favorite theory of scientists is that the universe is expanding like a giant balloon. This may be what their scientific data causes them to believe, but consider this when a balloon expands it is expanding against an opposing force, and expanding into something. If you are within the balloon observing that expansion form the inside, there is something beyond the balloon’s outer skin. It is expanding into something. Scientists who use this theory to explain the observed expansion of the universe would do well to consider what might be on the other side of their balloon.
The above points raise another issue. The Bible tells us that time has no meaning to God. A day is as a thousand years. I contend that science has difficulty explaining time in a real concrete sense in the same way it can length for example. Length is usually defined in terms of multiples of a vibratory amplitude of an atom or subatomic particle. One can argue that if you carry the unit of comparison small enough, that one will reach a point beyond which a smaller unit of length cannot be used for the definition. But for most practical purposes, the foregoing suffices. What the foregoing implies about length and time is that the best we can define is an interval of either and not some sort of absolute definition.
Science can carry any explanation for ’natural’ phenomena so far until it runs into a wall beyond which scientific theories cannot penetrate. At this point science must either accept the frustration that this wall engenders, or accept that God carried out his creative process as he said in the Bible. But since God does not have regard for what we men call time, is it not feasible that what we see as a natural developing process was brought into being by God to begin with, in some time last past.
The deeper question is whether it is more important to know where we came from or where we are going. Science and other educational disciplines would tell us that we must understand our past to understand out future. If we would only return to God’s blueprint for past, present, and future, we would indeed know where we had come from, and where we are going.