2005-09-18 / Knight Ridder / By Issac J. Bailey
God created the world in six days.
But were those six, 24-hour days?
According to scientists, the average day 4 billion years ago was only six hours long because a hotter Earth, which resembled common-day Mars, was spinning faster on its axis. It has since cooled, and the spinning has slowed, creating longer days.
According to faith, God doesn't operate in time as we understand it. How could he? He is the past, present and future all at once. A thousand years to him doesn't mean much.
In that context, even decades of suffering on Earth shouldn't seem all that daunting, considering we have an eternity with which to experience joy.
God spoke, and the universe was created.But did it appear in the blink of an eye, fully formed?Or, if we'd had front-row seats to the creation, would it have looked like a "big bang," one in which an unimaginably loud and large explosion hurled all the matter and energy in the universe throughout space for the first time, shaping stars, galaxies and planets?
Science tells us that's what happened when the universe formed. But it can't prove exactly why the explosion occurred. They tell us the "big-bang theory" proves the universe is finite, that it wasn't always here, that there was a beginning, about 15 billion years ago our time. They tell us the universe is still being stretched as the energy from the big bang continues making its way through space.
Faith tells us God is infinite, that he was here before there was a here.
The ongoing debate pitting science versus religion is beyond useless.
Science is based on hard facts, the kind that can be studied and restudied and tweaked, the kind that can be disproved or confirmed by using the correct mathematical equations or biological realities. That's why evolution and the big-bang theory make sense. We'd have to ignore the similar genetic makeup of human beings and other species - in some cases they are more than 95 percent alike - and such things as microwaves and 4-billion-year-old rocks to belittle or dismiss science.But science doesn't have all the answers. Theories are tweaked or changed when more credible, verifiable evidence is discovered, and only then.Science one day may be able to tell us which combination of genes makes which of us most susceptible to which disease and can tell us much about the how of our evolution over eons.
Faith tells us why we are here. And why we matter.
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