Beginning.
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
Genesis 1:1
Every child raised in a Christian home can recite the verse from memory at the drop of a hat. Every child is informed of the existence of an omnipotent God who designed the universe before its existence and created it from nothing. They are told the creation account. How this God also performed this feat in only seven days, as if it were some cosmic feat of strength performed by an omniscient magician.
The Creation account teaches us our role in the universe. It shows the majesty of God without ever giving insight into the minuet details not explained in the Bible. Would it diminish the God of the universe at all, if perhaps the creation account were not a literal telling of how the universe was created? Are theories like evolution really so intimidating that instead of embracing science, we reject it like a leper?
Having been raised in an Assembly of God church, I was raised on the Seven Day Creation account. I was told that God formed Adam from the dust of the Earth and breathed life into Him. When a suitable helper was not found in Creation, God, in his infinite wisdom, removed from Adam a rib and created Eve. Adam and Eve were given to one another in every way. They were perfectly suited for one another down to their very DNA.
If this God who had the insight enough to create his homo sapiens with the ability to reproduce, could he not also have the insight to guild a single cell across a millennia in order to eventually form the man he would name Adam? If God is outside of reality and time and if reality and time are simply agents that God has created for his creations, could he not spend mere seconds guiding his creation for millions of years?
There is, of course, the problem with the Genesis account. The Creation account is a beautiful description of the creation of the universe for the audience that was receiving it. Even today, we can look to the book of Genesis for a fantastic depiction of the God of the universe, but it should not necessarily be taken literally by modern Christians. With science constantly progressing and the potential for singularity to be but a few decades away, it is now more than ever necessary for Christians to understand the ways of the universe.
The universe is expanding. Every day, scientists unlock new ideas and facts about Creation of which our forefathers could have only dreamed. We will be faced with varying degrees of intensity from science in retaliation to our beliefs. It is not our worldview that should be shaken by these new revelations.
God gave this universe to his creation with the intent of exploring it. Through his creation, we see an insight into the mind of God Himself. We see the detail of the universe and the amount of time that it would take to orchestrate such majesty is incomprehensible to the human mind. We can see the moving of the planets and the shifting of molecules. God has created everything from the inconceivably large to the infinitesimally small.
This God, this architect of Creation could have created the world in seven days just like the book of Genesis tells us. He could have created the world so that it would appear as if it were billions of years old although that would make God a deceiver and that does not fit with our current paradigm. God could have created the world six thousand years ago and perhaps our assumptions and conclusions about the life of carbon are incorrect. It is also possible, however, that God being outside of space and time and completely unaffected by it, created the universe billions of years ago and watched as every single atom that he set in motion merged and converged until we have an early form of the universe we now experience.
If this were correct, then God would have to guide and nurture every single aspect of his creation. He would have to be the ultimate micromanager. Would not a God who nurtured every single cell of his human creations seem more loving and more infinitely patient than a God who simply threw everything into existence?
The Creation account shows us the beauty and captures the essence of the majesty of the Creator of the Universe, but the God of the Universe is so much more complicated and delicately constructive than any book or any story could ever possibly conceive. No author could ever capture the true beauty of a God sitting over his creation nurturing it until it has reached its full potential. The image is like that of a man sitting over a puzzle box with a pair of tweezers. He delicately moves every single piece into it’s perfect location until the beauty and complexity of the puzzle is more than breathtaking to behold and is impossible to unravel.
