On Time, Science, Creation, and the Evolution of Faith
I’ve been reading Finding Darwin’s God By Kenneth Miller, and i must say it is meeting my expectations. I expected to find a reasonable approach to the debate (still?) between evolutionary scientists and creation scientists, given that Dr. Miller is a leading participant in such debates. While i find his stance in this book a tad too heavy-handed against fundamental creationists, it is very pleasant to find someone who discusses this issue with arguments i can agree with.
I have not finished the book yet, but just read a chapter dealing with the issue of “old earth” or “young earth”, and it has inspired me to give my thoughts on this issue. though many of my friends who are not scientifically-oriented, and even many who are, find great problems with introducing science and scientific reasoning and discovery into their religious views, i fully embrace it! it is very exciting. all it takes is thinking outside the box, outside the dogma, religious or otherwise.
It is true that taking a literal reading of the Biblical account of Creation week leaves little room for geology and physics and biology to intercede, but it does not by any means exclude them. For example, from Genesis we gather that the entire world, the sun, the moon, and the stars were created in one week, along with the flora and fauna therein, yet it DOES NOT say that this happened specifically 6,000 or 10,000 years ago. Additionally, the Bible implies, rather clearly, that the Earth was ALREADY there before God started created life on it. This is not to say that i believe God came after the Earth, but that the Bible does not explicitly state that the Earth was created on creation week, just that it was formless and empty (a very probable description of an early Earth to me, after all, the Earth formed from molten rock). In this way, the literal reading of Genesis still leaves room for science.
Now, i won’t actually get into my attempts at constructing arguments on every point of Creation, but i do want to leave one thought, actually the thought that purposed this post. The idea deals with the astronomy side of the argument against a young Earth, that being the light we see from very distant stars. We all know that the speed of light is a constant, and therefore, if a star is calculated to be many many many lightYEARS away, that means that that light we see has taken many many many years to reach us. there is no way around this, because the speed of light is the same now as if was when God set it into being, many many many years ago. Here is the exciting part, however, because where a fundamental creationist would have to work around this or an atheistic astronomer would dismiss God all together, i see the element that only makes God all the bigger. Time. it all boils down to time. but time is relevant. time is the 4th dimension that we live in, but it also only exists so long as we keep track of it. saying that God is outside of time is no new theological thought or breakthrough, but i honestly believe many-a-church-goer does not really think deeply about that. God is OUTSIDE time, meaning, he is in a greater dimension BEYOND the 4 that we live in, or the 3 that we see. furthermore, God is, was, and will be. God just is. what this means to me is that he is constantly and always (redundant, i know) in ALL time. (on a side note, what really made me think of what being in all time really meant was the description of how Doctor Manhattan, from Watchmen, experiences time) God is just like that, i believe, though on a far grander scale. as an illustration: God is creating, now, billions of years ago, what we will experience tomorrow. There is no reason that God, being outside time and in all time simultaneously, could not create the stars at the same moment he is creating life, but in what we would experience or describe as a gap of billions of years.
what an Amazing God we serve! science only makes me dream and experience a far greater God than the ancients could ever imagine.
