Christian believing and “the big bang”

Writers of the Old Testament creation stories found their voice during a pivotal time in human development. 800 years before Christ, individual thinkers from around the globe began to thoughtfully and purposely document ancient wisdom. The Hebrew writer of the creation account in Genesis clearly had access to other ideas about the origin of the world and to elements from other historical traditions. And yet, even as some of it appears to be derived from the Babylonians, the first chapter of Genesis is as different from their narratives as it is similar.

Not for this Hebrew thinker a self-dependent earthbound existence, lived at the whim of the gods and of the fates, as the pagans believed. Not for him the fixed state of a universe that had always existed, as the Hindu believed. Using the childlike metaphor of a week of days, this divinely inspired writer introduced us personally to the Creator in a narrative of creation that continues to startle and amaze.

While scientists and humanists are still trying to determine what came before that magnificent burst of creation energy—what possible combination of multi-verses or subatomic particles had merged in that way—I am not. And believers all around the earth are not. From nothing to something. “He spake, and it was done” (Ps. 33:6, 9).