God -- The Bible -- Science

PREFACE

What follows are my opinions.  They are not intended to prove anything and certainly not intended to offend anyone.  I view myself as a Christian but many of my Christian friends would disagree due to various doctrinal conflicts.  I don’t think God is exclusive to any specific religion and  is present in all religions.  It is not my intent to prove that God exists but rather to ask the Atheist to prove that He doesn’t.

What follows is my simple comparison of the Bible’s description of the creation to what science currently believes.  The important thing here is that while the Bible requires faith it is the same for science because neither can prove their positions.

God--the Bible – and Science

The atheist doesn’t believe in God but he believes in science and challenges those who believe in God to prove He doesn’t exist.  But when challenged to prove that God doesn’t exist the atheist cannot offer any scientific proof.  In fact Richard Dawkins – the High Priest of Darwinism – when challenged to explain how the complex DNA and RNA molecules came into existence as a random event he admitted he could not explain it.  Instead he said “it must have happened because we are here.”  The idiocy of this statement is lost on the atheist whose faith is in science.  But to believe that some random combination of chemicals could produce these complex molecules would lead to the logical conclusion that they could have just as easily combined into a birthday cake.  So it seems that science requires the same level of faith as faith in God requires.

Allowing for some poetic license it seems that the Bible describes the Big Bang or “First Cause” pretty well.  The Bible says that God created the heavens and the Earth and the Earth was without form and void..  Science tells us that all energy was created with the Big Bang and was a swirling incredibly hot cloud of particles that eventually coalesced into the stars and the earth.  Then God separated the waters from the waters and divided the waters from under the firmament from those above the firmament.   According to what science believes the energies released began to coalesce into mass laden molecules and ultimately into the stars and planets.  Given some latitude for poetic license the Biblical description of the second day seems to track science.

On the third day God gathered together the waters into one place and let the dry land appear and the seas.  This seems to track the scientific belief that the Earth was formed out of the swirling mass of particles into our planet which was  incredibly hot and surrounded by gas.  As the Earth cooled the gases cooled and formed the seas and atmosphere.  The Bible and science seem to agree up to this point but then the sequence of events begins to diverge.  The Bible claims the next step was the creation of grass and trees  but the fossil record shows no plant life of any kind in the Cambrian or Pre-Cambrian beyond something akin to pond scum.  The Cambrian fossil record shows an abundance of sea life but grasses and plant life first appear in the Ordovician period.   In fact the sequence of events between the Bible and the fossil record greatly differ from this point on, but it is the sequence not the actual events.  The Sun and the Moon are created after the Earth but science claims that the Sun was created first and the Moon after the Earth.  The first life appears in the Cambrian Seas and the Bible and science agree on this point but the Bible claims that flying fowl were created at the same time but once again the fossil record doesn’t show any flying animal until much later. 

This brings us to the sixth day which roughly equates to the Devonian period when land animals first appear.  The Bible lumps the rest of creation into this sixth day ranging from the creation of the first land animals to the creation of man.   The fossil record shows the evolutionary history of the Earth in much more detail than the Bible but roughly they parallel the development of life on Earth.    The huge difference comes with the creation of man.  The Bible is very clear that God created man in His image while the scientists point to the fossil record that shows a path from primitive apes to modern man.  This fossil record for mankind has some questionable entries and assumptions but even so the record is very clear that man did not appear fully formed as we know him today.  To accept the Biblical explanation would require God to look somewhat like Michelangelo’s version of God which would mean that God is tangible, Heaven is tangible or at least a physical place, and that Hell exists.  Furthermore, once God is accepted as real then Satan must be real as well.  

Since the Bible was written people have believed that if God created man in his image that when they look into the mirror they see an image similar to God.  But science tells us that everything in the universe is energy and that the Big Bang created all of that energy.  That would lead to the conclusion that God is energy and that when He created man he created man as an energetic image – which we know as our soul.  Our physical bodies are mere shells – containers for our souls while we serve our time on Earth.  Certainly it would be asking too much for science to accept this explanation because it would require accepting God, but viewing man ‘s soul as the image of God then the creation story in Genesis seems to closely parallel the scientific view of the creation.

As I said at the outset these are just my opinions and I have no proof of anything.  I simply looked at the Bible and compared it to various scientific articles and descriptions and found what I saw as parallels.  You may or may not agree.