Creation,
a Biblical Theme
By Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the January 26, 2013 Sabbath School Lesson
“When
I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a
child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” 1
Corinthians 13:11, NIV
When a child is born, its world consists of a bassinet
or crib with occasional forays to a dressing table or Mother’s arms. Mother’s
face often appears like a benevolent deity hovering above and bringing food and
comfort. Father also appears at times but Mother is the primary force in the
newborn’s universe. With her positive nurture and Father’s support, baby grows
and develops, and his horizons expand. He discovers that the house has more
rooms than just the nursery. Crawling and eventually toddling about to explore
those rooms helps him to develop an understanding of his place in the family.
If he has siblings, he learns about them. He also learns about other creatures
if the family has pets. He learns about ownership and boundaries. In short he
learns about his universe—a universe that consists of the rooms of his home.
Eventually, he makes supervised forays outside where he
discovers the universe is a bigger, more expansive place than he had imagined.
The universe now includes the family yard, where he soon discovers that there
are other yards that extend beyond his ability to see, but even though he
cannot see them, he understand that they exist. He also may have experienced
additional environments by going along on trips to the grocery store, the
church, the park or some other semi-frequent but perhaps regularly visited
location. Each of these experiences informs him about his universe as far as he
is able to understand what his senses and his rationality tell him. The grocery
store may teach him about food and how to acquire it. The park may teach him
about the beauty of the natural world. The church may provide him with a structural
paradigm on which to hang everything he experiences.
As the child grows and understanding increases, the
boundaries of his universe expand further and further beyond those he knew in
his nursery. One day, he may reach a point where he looks over what he thought
was another boundary to discover that there are no boundaries to his universe. He
may see that experience as threatening the paradigm he has structured his
understanding of the universe on, or he may see the paradigm as what brought
him here in the first place and use it as a stepping stone to peer over the
wall into the vastness of the universe and ask questions and seek answers to
things he never considered before.
When we are born, we are a very large part of our
nursery universe. In fact, the way we are cared for, we can come to feel that
we are the center of everything. But when we are grown and discover that we are
one of billions of people living on an infinitesimally small speck of a planet
in a spiral galaxy that is not particularly significant among billions and
billions of other galaxies, we come to understand that our impact on the actual
universe is very small. This can be devastating if our self-esteem is fragile,
or it can be humbling in a productive way if we allow it to inform our
perspective.
Anciently, man was understood to be the crowning act of
Creation, and everything created was seen as being for his benefit. Even woman
was seen as only an adjunct to man’s supreme dominion over Creation. This
understanding, held to be an absolute truth, led mankind to see the Earth as
the center of the created universe and as all the creatures of Earth orbited man’s
dominion, so the entire universe orbited man’s planet. Ptolemy, who structured
the solar system on these lines in the second century, was believed to be so
correct that his explanation of the universe was accepted for over a thousand
years. While this position may seem arrogant to us, today, back then it was
accepted as readily as knowing that summer is warm and winter is cold. But
eventually that changed. As mankind looked over the fence into what was beyond,
he found that astronomy and mathematics revealed a different story. But some
saw a threat to the generally accepted paradigm.
When Copernicus and others used the tools of science to
show that the Earth was not central to the solar system but that rather the Sun
was, he was met with the arguments of the scientific apologists of the Catholic
Church. Fortunately, since his major work was published practically on his
deathbed, he did not personally have to deal much with these arguments. However,
these arguments took much the same path as those of the “scientific”
creationists today. Instead of seriously considering the evidence and the
possibility of a new paradigm, they simply looked for flaws and expounded on
those as though the whole edifice would fall if it had some flaws.
In the case of heliocentrism, Copernicus had assumed
that the planetary orbits were exact circles as opposed to the ellipses they
actually are so there were eccentricities in his calculations. Rather than
examine the significance of those eccentricities to determine if a refinement
of heliocentrism was in order, its opponents simply used those flaws as an
excuse to reject the theory in its entirety. As a result, the Catholic Church,
which was a dominant power at the time, was unable to shift to the new theory
of celestial mechanics for almost a century. This was in part due to their apologetic
approach to new theories and also to a belief that faith should inform science
and not vice versa.
In many ways, the paradigm that these two tools of the
church is founded on still persists, today. Although it is severely tried and
perhaps rickety at its foundations, they believe the prevailing biblical paradigm
must be preserved at all costs. Rather than consider that vastness of the
universe and the time frames implied in that vastness as well as that of the
geologic strata, the efforts of the church are primarily directed at pointing
out flaws in the theories in the vain hope that the whole edifice will come
tumbling down and the Genesis account will be seen for the scientific text they
feel it is. In spite of the fact that it has been over a century and a half
since Darwin published his “Origin of the Species” which began much of the
controversy. That hasn’t happened. Instead, the passage of the intervening
years has only seen the evidence grow in support of vast ages and evolutionary
development.
Sadly, the church could be a beneficial power for the
advancement of science if they would abandon their insistence on the
immutability of biblical literalism as it pertains to scientific research and
understanding. If theologians and philosophers could instead look at the
evidence present in the natural world around us and use the tools of
mathematics, physics, and observation just as the theologian, Isaac Newton,
did, the benefit to mankind might be immeasurable. We spend much intellectual
effort in defending the literalism of a Bible that did not even exist prior to
the mid-second millennium, BC, exodus from Egypt. One wonders what we might
have accomplished instead with those intellectual resources.
No one seriously believes the Earth is the center of the
universe anymore. Even the Catholic Church eventually abandoned that position
after arguing vehemently for it as being the only possible biblical position.
Maybe it is time our faith matured to the point we can relegate to the dust bin
of history the idea that Hebrew poetry of the Exodus was intended to be universal,
scientific truth. Because the universe may be infinite and our understanding, however
great, remains finite, there remains a place for faith. But faith does not need
to be blind, or why would God create us with the capacity for rational thought?
This is the same God that the Bible tells us says “Come now, let us reason
together…” Isaiah 1:18, KJV
Perhaps in the area of origins is our greatest challenge
to develop a rational understanding of our universe. This is because beyond the
celestial mechanics, beyond the quantum physics, and beyond the search for a
Unified Theory, the question still remains, “Where did it all come from?” As
much as they may challenge the Bible, Evolutionary Theory and vast-ages geology
do not eliminate the existence of God. If anything, they almost demand it. However,
they may lead us to a God who is far beyond our “God-in-the-box” understanding that
depends so heavily on a literal understanding of sacred text. They may lead us
to a God whose awesome presence transcends space and time. Once we turn loose
of what we feel He must be, we might discover that this God, who sustains the
billions and billions of galaxies in the cosmos yet knows the number of the
hairs on our heads,[i]
is able and willing to carry our understanding to the fullness of a potential
only He can presently understand.
