TEACHING THE
SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS IN ORIGINS
Geologists, Physicists and
Biologists have investigated and found the earth came about as a planet 4.5
billion years ago after a Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Why so? Well the Big Bang is supported by the
continual expansion of the universe and categories of elementary particles
found. Geology examines depositon of
rocks and deformation in earth forces. All point to very long times like the
physicists say. Biologists are supporters
of Darwin’s Natural Selection as the origin of species and Miller experiments
that brought forth amino acids, the building blocks of life. Yet it’s just theory with problems. Big Bang requires movement well in excess of
the speed of light, whose absolute value is a physical principle. And the
expansion indicates the need for 5 times more matter than what we see, hence
the postulation of Dark Matter. Darwin’s theory has been shown to not generate
enough mutation by a long shot. So everybody believes in evolution, but isn’t
sure of its cause. Yet this is all
common in theorizing. More to come.
Science isn’t the “chiseled in stone” stuff many people believeTeachers often
leave students with the notion that “It’s all figured out,” when in fact it’s a
big room full of arguers.
When I ask Christians what they think of
creation, quite a few say they believe in a 6-day creation as Genesis
describes. Well, except that there are 2 stories of the creation—something most
folks don’t realize. This first in Gen.
1 through Gen 2:3 is what everyone has in mind, but Gen. 2:4 says “These are
the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth.”-- quoted from
the KJV so in good faith to traditionalists. Literally, one day. Well, they say, the second passage is
figurative, just a shorthand way of writing the creation story, not literally
one day. Okay, but what of the firmaments?
You can’t just accept the 6-day thing without accepting the firmaments
in the story of Gen. 1.
Ah, we are dumb moderns don’t know
what a firmament is, do we? The KJV translators have translated it quite
correctly from the Hebrew. It comes from
metalworking. And the technique has existed since at least 2500 BC. A firmer
is a hard surface on which metal is shaped.
Start with a once-melted blob of metal (think copper) and pound it with
a hammer over the firmer. The result is
a metal firmament, which through the
pounding process is further hardened.
But what if you want a curve to make the shoulder piece of a coat of
armor or a cup or bowl? Then the firmer
is a hardened stump carved into a dome, with the curve you want. The toughest, strongest piece ancients knew
was a metal firmament. Thus KJV Genesis vs. 7 tells about God dividing an
enormous water into two waters by using a firmament that was named the
heavens. That is, the heaven firmament
is like an inverted bowl to which stars and moon and sun were attached. Below this firmament was another flat one
that held the land and the seas.
Here’s the picture. The universe was like a vast waters within
which earth, a flat disk, sealed to a bowl-shaped sky, floated submerged. The heavens have tiny holes, the stars,
which leak and that is where rain comes from as it forms clouds first. This was the common understanding of what the
world was like throughout the Middle East 4000 years ago. What people thought they knew is perhaps how
God talked to them. Obviously He
couldn’t start with a lecture on Quantum Field Dynamics to shepherds. Yet if you believe a literal Genesis 1, it
means you accept it all. An inverted bowl sky is hardly good science today. Yet maybe God was really interested in sin,
death and faith far more than proving what the world looked like. The moral
story is what God’s word is all about. Men are sinners from birth. Even the universe’s laws have been changed by
sin
Secular scientists would hardly care,
but believing Christian scientists do.
There are several possible explanations.other than accepting a flat disk earth.
Was God clever enough to talk in accurate science poetic language that some
ancient shepherd would understand? When He talked about the firmament of
heavens was He talking about the barrier between the physical universe and the
spiritual domain, but shepherds still think it meant the sky? Or is the answer
locked in a prehistory absorbed into all things? Surely Adam was an
enterprising fellow who might have noticed a recently split rock with a sharp
edge. He could have attached it to a
stick and fashioned an axe. Then felling
a tree, he noticed that there were rings which he could reason, form each
year. Hence the tree might look like it
had been alive100 years—but it was only created a week ago Tuesday. How does Adam explain such things? Well, he figures that God has embedded a
“prehistory” in the tree. Those narrow
rings thirty years earlier indicate drought. (Fun to speculate, isn’t it.) Indeed He had to have put a prehistory in all
of nature that we can track and use it for whatever purpose we can find.
Like finding oil. Current oil evolution is thought to start
with dead critters settling in the sea so rapidly that they don’t rot fast
enough—what’s called a reducing environment. Organic matter forms in a layer. Heat and pressure then cause a cake of cooked organic
matter called a bitumen. Then with more
heat and pressure done over the right amount of time, the blob of organic
material yields oil and natural gas. The
gas rises rapidly and often manages to escape ultimately into the air. The oil most often is trapped in an impermeable
rock (tiny porous spaces that don’t connect well to each other. By process, the permeability increases and
the oil migrates into a porous reservoir rock.
Oil company geologists don’t give a fig about Darwinism and the
selectivity of species. They just have a
prescription that, if done with modern science, allows us to find oil in one out
of 3 wildcat wells--or even better. Old timers who just followed trends found
oil in an oily area about once in 12 holes.
“Russian drilling program” of blind random jabs into the earth find oil far
fewer times. So the science, or whatever you want to call it, works. “Works” is
all Conoco-Phillips cares about.
Likewise, Christians who work as scientists
postulate theories based on facts, not spiritual beliefs. Many have settled on
this. The Genesis story is allegorical
in its science. Ps. 90: In the Lord’s
eyes a thousand years are as one day and a day as a thousand years. Maybe each day in Gen. 1 is several million
years. Whatever the case, the 4th law of thermodynamics states that
entropy (a measure of disorder) either remains unchanged or increases in each
reaction. Hence Death is a law of
nature. And that is where God, who exists in the spiritual realm, steps
in. The laws governing tiny sub-atomic
particles say the states they occupy come about by chance, probabilistic
chance. Who watches or determines their outcomes? Quantum physics says there
can be nobody. It is just probability,
an indeterminate thing. (The winner of the lottery is just a chance thing.)
Faith says otherwise. God is guiding the outcomes. Then God, the author of the
play, steps into the play (an unheard of thing!) to change the outcome. Hence
any scientist who really considers himself an careful thinker, needs to
consider that there might be a spiritual dimension, and a Being capable of
making a world of stunning beauty in its laws as well as its scenery (and quite
unobservable by normal methods of science). A Creator Being, far higher than
all the creatures of the world could even grasp. Would such a Being, be a
Cosmic Saddist, such as the God of
Islam, who just watches mankind writhe and go down to hell, or the God
of Judeo-Christianity who comes bearing hope for sin and a relationship with
Himself? That’s what we need to teach.
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