CHAPTER 1
A Creation Story for Our Times
TED BURGE
The Big Bang and subsequent physical and biological evolution arefirmly established beliefs in the minds of nearly all scientists. When setside by side with the story of creation in Genesis, they appear to givea more convincing account of the material creation. But the two accountshave different purposes. The scientific one, of course, makes no mentionof God. Genesis, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the divinetruths of God and creation and God's relation to humankind.
Those parts of Genesis that reveal primitive ideas about the materialaspects of creation can be revised without disturbing most of those divinetruths. We have much evidence in the Bible of the evolution of theconcept of God, particularly in the Old Testament, but belief in him asCreator and our dependence on him remain firm and unchanged.
In the light of our present scientific knowledge and of subsequentevents in history, perhaps the writers of Genesis, inspired by God's continuingrevelation of himself, would have written something like this:In the beginning, God said "Let there be ...," and he created the unifiedforces of physics, with perfect symmetry and prescient precision. Andout of nothing, and into nothing, God, by a free decision, set up thespontaneous production of particles, in newborn space and time, producinga silent, seething sphere, infinitesimally small and unimaginablyhot. There was onset and evolution, the first stage of creation.
During a tiny fraction of a second, an expansion took place, and theperfect symmetry of the forces was broken, step by step, as the temperaturedropped, to produce the forces of nature we know today.
God's well-tuned laws made innumerable particles, of every requisitekind, in a steadily expanding chaotic cooling sphere. And the universecooled for nearly a million years, until electrons could stay joinednuclei to form familiar atoms. There was onset and evolution, thesecond stage of creation.
With atoms and molecules as building blocks, the attracting force ofgravity took over, and after about a thousand million years, God saw thefirst stars and galaxies forming in an expanding cosmic universe. Therewas onset and evolution, the third stage of creation.
Individual stars contracted under gravity and became hot enough fornuclear fusion to produce chemical elements not seen before, until, afterabout ten thousand million years, stars were exhausted by theirradiance, and God saw them begin to die, some dramatically, by explodingas supernovas, releasing all the known chemical elements. Therewas onset and evolution, the fourth stage of creation.
And God saw that it was very good, for now all the ingredients wereavailable, and gravity formed a second generation of stars, some accompaniedby planets and satellites, including the Sun, Earth, and, later, theMoon, in our galaxy of the Milky Way. There was onset and evolution, thefifth stage of creation.
Bathed in alternate daylight and darkness, during the next thousandmillion years or so, conditions on Earth became favorable for the eventualgeneration of life. There was onset and evolution, the sixth stage ofcreation.
During these last three thousand million years, life has evolved asGod intended, and through numerous cycles of birth, survival, procreation,and death, species have multiplied and progressed, plants andanimals of every kind, and some have become extinct, until, a mere threehundred thousand years ago, there arrived, in the likeness of God, Homosapiens, intelligent humans, with freedom to choose, living together incommunity, knowing good and evil, pleasure and pain, aware of honordue to their dominion, and acquainted with death. There was onset andevolution, the seventh stage of creation.
And the universe entered the Age of Humanity. Human beings havehardly changed in physical form during the past forty thousand years,but their beliefs have evolved, their knowledge has grown, and their understandinghas deepened.
And God saw that it was good, but it was not good enough, for freewill led to sin and suffering, and guilt and disbelief could lead to despairand the death of the human spirit.
So God sent his only Son, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among usas Jesus of Nazareth, suffered, died, and rose from the dead, and showedhis glory, full of grace and truth.
And that was the beginning of the new creation.
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Ted Burge is Emeritus Professor of Physics of the University of London and formerDean of the Faculty of Science. He also holds a degree in theology. Burge is theauthor of Atomic Nuclei and Their Particles, Lord of All, Hear Our Prayer,and Lord for All Seasons.
The Alpha and the Omega of Space and Time
ROD DAVIES
The study of the origins of the universe is, I believe, both a scientific anda religious voyage of discovery: scientific because we use the techniquesof the scientific method—exploration and deduction; religious becauseit contains the element of awe and wonder, and it stimulates questionsabout purpose and ends.
The current scientific view is that the cosmos began with a Big Bang.The universe is expanding from a compact phase of condensed matter atthe beginning of time.
As we examine the more distant galaxies, we are probing further backin time as a consequence of the finite speed of light. When I first cameinto astronomy in early 1950, the light from the most distant galaxiesthen detected had been traveling for a billion years—one-fifteenth of theage of the universe. Radio astronomy today can take us closer to the BigBang: to within three hundred thousand years.
This arises out of observations of the cosmic microwave background—the"afterglow" of the Big Bang itself. This form of radiationis extremely uniformly distributed across the whole sky. But in the pasttwenty years slight inhomogeneities have been detected. Encoded inthese variations are the earliest clues we have so far detected as to howthe universe came to acquire the structure it has today. It was these slightvariations of density and temperature that were subsequenly to be reinforcedby the...
