Part One: Faith

Chapter One: Elementary My Dear

1.1 In the Beginning...

In the Old Testament, a collection of the most sacred texts of Judaism, incorporated in part by Christianity and Islam, we are told how God created the earth in seven days.  Stephen Hawking and other physicists within the scientific community tell us that the creation of existence, i.e. the big bang, took only a matter of seconds (actually we are talking fractions of a second). 

The Bible, according to James Ussher, a seventeenth-century Irish bishop who, upon calculating all the "begats" of the Old Testament, concludes that the earth was created "on the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd day of October, in ... 4004 B.C." and is therefore about 6,000 years old. 

Science tells us the that the earth, this massive ball of rock we call home and which all now agree we plummet through space upon, did not come into being until billions of years after creation and is fairly finely estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. 

These are not very compatible views to be sure, those between the traditional and the rational.  Animosity exists between the two because although the majority of the faithful have reshaped their beliefs in order to accommodate some of the hard truths of scientific inquiry, there are still many of the Faithful who refuse to have it any other way than as it was for our ancestors.  The Scientifics have, likewise and perhaps to their discredit, done less than their best to incorporate Faith into their world view as irrelevant or un-provable.  Not all, to be sure, and I will look at some of those who have broached the intermarriage of Faith and Physics in later sections. I will also examine the Bible, it’s authors and their historical limitations, as well as the Bible's overall relevance in today’s world in 3.3 The Holy Bible (note: not yet online).

Jews, and later on Christians and Muslims, have all shared the biblical account as the unquestioned truth of the creation of the world, and of man, for many generations. However, with the advent of the renaissance, and of scientific discovery, most of the Faithful today have adapted to the idea that the creation of the earth (proper - not the universe) took a good bit more than seven days to become the living bio-sphere that we call home. These enlightened members of the Faith will also readily acknowledge that the creation story is a parable, while holding that the truth of creation (as a divine act) remains intact.

More difficult to acknowledge, gaining ground from both theists and atheists only in the last century, is the notion that creation is a “work in progress”.  This is an important concept, as we will discuss in more detail in Part Two, because both religion and early scientific theories, have engaged in an ideological struggle to maintain a universe in stasis. Neither group wanted to suggest (or even conceive of) an ever changing, or evolving, world; a common trait between the opposing groups, though for similar but slightly different reasons.  To show the world as a fixed and immutable “creation” was essential to maintaining an orderly existence both theologically and scientifically.  Faith and Physics share more commonalities, as we shall see.

 A disparity persists between the rationalists and the traditionalists because at an emotional level, I believe, while the faithful have often, albeit grudgingly, modified their beliefs in order to accommodate the hard truths of scientific inquiry, the rationalist minds have not, in the eyes of the faithful at least, done their "part" to incorporate an innate human notion of Faith into their scientific world view.  An idealogical jelosy has set into the theists, feeling like they have carried the burden of adaption, while the atheists take ground but do not give any.  This is of course a generalization, but the human population being the creatures we are can and should be generalized (as well as individualized- we are a forest made of trees).

There are, of course, many other religious texts from around the world which attest to different creation accounts. Many of these mythologies have only arrived here (and made generally aware of) in the west within the last 50 or 60 years, gaining momentum in the 1960s and 1970s.  Today there are few of us who have not at least heard of, or come to some understanding of the fundamentals of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, etc. 

With this infusion of new religious thought into western society, we have a golden opportunity to gain a greater understanding of Faith through comparison - or the branch of study known as Comparative Theology. Comparative Theologists  recognize that basic truths are true in any language, culture, or religion.  This science of theological analysis may be the key science to bringing about philosophical reconciliation.  Without this concept of the universality of truth, all hope of understanding the nature of our existence, through science or religion, would collapse.

The written word, however, does not represent the earliest of our spiritual inklings. In order to gain a better understanding of our religious and spiritual roots, we need to look much farther back.  Before the Bible, before even the times of Abraham.  We must look back to The Beginning...

Further Reading: ;

The Biblical Creation Society http://www.pages.org/bcs/  

Stephen Hawking, The Big Bang, and God by Dr. Henry "Fritz" Schaefer III  http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9404/bigbang.html  

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