Creation: The Full Story

Our culture is fascinated with creation, which seems strange when our scientists have come up with a seemingly better explanation of how everything came to be. The whole world is enamored with evolution, and that word is used to describe the development of everything, including human beings and the entire physical universe, and cognitive thought, as well as all physical life. But creation as revealed by God has an even broader application. I would like to describe the whole view of spiritual creation and physical evolution. Maybe that would make it easier for you to decide which seems most correct to you.

In the beginning, there was nothing, not a single thing except God. God made light before He made anything else. “Light” in this sense should not be understood through our primary understanding of light as a form of physical radiance because “light”, in its primary definition, did not yet exist before God created the physical universe. There existed no stars and no sun to provide “light” in its primary meaning.

Consider, rather, a secondary definition of light: perception, cognition, illumination, not the luminosity of the physical universe but something non-material. Consider it as something spiritual, like thought. We all have a spiritual capacity to think, to perceive, to “catch on,” to “see the light.”

Creation of the Spiritual World

The first thing God created was the spiritual world, containing uncountable angels, purely spiritual beings brought into existence out of nothing, having no mass, no size, occupying no space, suddenly appearing before the physical universe was made. They came into existence fully mature: no infancy, childhood, or adolescence like we experience. They were fully able, immediately and clearly, to perceive that God made every one of them instantly in one act of creation, very much different from human perception of our own origins.

But there is more to this story. God made each angel an autonomous person able to choose to love and serve God or to refuse and pursue their own ambitions. To be able to freely choose what God offers, without compulsion – what an immense honor! Also, what a risk: being capable of rejecting what Gods offers and choose differently. That would lead to chaos.

Who, other than God, would know what each sovereign person must choose in order for everyone’s choice to be in complete harmony? Choosing against God would bring chaos, disorder, not the “light” that was omnipresent to begin with, but darkness, blind darkness, night.

Creation of the Physical Universe

After separating darkness from light, God created the physical universe, consisting of matter and energy. He positioned it in four-dimensional space and time. Who can say how long ago it happened? It started at the beginning of time, when darkness was separated from light.

This is the first occurrence of matter and energy, the physical universe. Humans have always been interested in unravelling the secrets of the universe. Some have spent their whole lives trying to understand the universe. Some have postulated bizarre ideas: for example, that the universe is eternal, that it always was and always will be. Some have postulated parallel universes co-existing together.

However, in 1931, Father Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest postulated that the universe had a beginning when all matter started off compressed into an infinitely small space. The origin of the universe occurred when this small space exploded. This is the theory I like best because it postulated a beginning, and therefore agrees with God’s revelation, which He did reveal as happening “in the beginning….”

The Big Bang Theory

When Pope John Paul II addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1986, he praised their endeavors to discover the truth about nature. He expressed his admiration of their Big Bang Theory thinking it was probably the way the universe started and thought it agreed with Sacred Tradition. Steven Hawking believed in the Big Bang Theory at that time but later reverted to conviction that the universe is eternal. Note that the Christian teaching of “world without end” applies only to the recreated universe after the end of the world.

The Big Bang Theory was useful because, using mathematics, astrophysicists could calculate the time for the primordial matter to evolve into atoms, molecules, planets and galaxies. The difficulty is that at the original condition before the Big Bang, nobody knows how to apply the natural laws governing the universe to predict anything, let alone the concept of time.

Black Holes and Dark Matter

 The same is true for black holes in space. If a heavenly body is so massive and so dense that even light cannot escape its gravity, it does not lend itself to be understood mathematically. When a heavenly body becomes a black hole, it is called a singularity.

There are also portions of the universe that are invisible to us and cannot be examined. They are called dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy combined account for 68% of the universe. These unseen portions of the universe can be confirmed mathematically, but they cannot be confirmed visually. Their interface with the rest of the universe are called an event horizon.

I don’t like this proposition because it leaves 68% of the universe unknowable to human scientists. I think God created the universe to be eventually understood by humans basically to the same extent that celestial mechanics and medicine are understood. We likely have to wait and see what develops in the future.

There is a book, Reinventing Gravity by John W. Moffet, which proposes new algorithms that can resolve the problem of singularities mathematically. The author argues that perhaps gravity is not uniform throughout the universe. He proposed gravity with a variable effect and found through mathematics that it does not require dark matter or dark energy to make current theories work mathematically. There is a new YouTube video very similar to this argument.

The Laws of Nature

 Physical bodies, especially living plants and animals, change with evolution, but the laws of nature – such as gravity, electro-magnetism, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force – do not change. They are found to be absolute and stable throughout the universe and time. Gravity on a planet in a distant galaxy behaves exactly as gravity on earth.

Likewise, the small atoms of matter do not change through evolution. If one compares a newly-made atom of carbon, a result of nuclear fission, for example, it would be identical in all properties with a carbon atom that were present in the original formation of the universe.

When Creation Occurred

Scientists say the physical universe began 13.7 billion years ago. What a long time that is for us who are locked in the dimension of time! I wonder how long it seems to God, who exists outside of time, or for the spiritual beings who were made before time and who, like the spiritual souls animating our bodies, will never cease to exist.

How illustrative the Big Bang Theory is concerning the origins of the physical world, then. An unimaginably huge explosion from an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense, origin at the beginning of time, exploding and expanding with immense force and power, seemingly ordered but filled with chaos, collisions, explosions, perils at every quarter; and, for us, accidents, sickness, sadness, and physical death, for us and every other living, physical being. (Read A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking for more on this.)

Comparison of Creation and Evolution

Doesn’t it seem possible that the angelic spirits who chose against God would perceive, through the physical universe, the consequences of disharmony with God? It starts with the stars and planets, with the cataclysmic way the universe began: horrendous explosions, unimaginable temperatures, colliding bodies, matter forming stars, blowing up, condensing, colliding, forming planets, some re-igniting into new stars, continuing until our own day. It all seems ordered, but there is much chaos and uncertainty, ruin and sometimes destruction in the universe.

The same chaos continued when living organisms appeared on our planet. Although organisms are seemingly ordered and in ecological balance, but together with these organisms chaos and destruction reign on an individual basis, especially with animals. Strong animals hunt down and devour weaker animals, in some cases their own offspring. Frightening as the animal world is (the world of dinosaurs, for example), the insect world is even more brutal. Surely, intelligent persons ought to get the point that the physical universe mirrors the chaos that follows from choosing for self, regardless of what God chooses.

Then human beings appeared, the first physical life forms able to think, to realize that they exist (.e., self-awareness). They are persons. God’s Word reveals that the first human beings were enticed to disobey and do what God did not want them to do. From that first disobedience, the human race plunged into the same darkness and disorder that the whole physical universe is in.

The Christian Story

The historical tradition passed down to us, most likely preserved by divine revelation, is that one of the fallen angels, the most powerful one, took the form of a snake and moved on the earth. That would, theoretically, have put that angel under the dominion of human beings. No wonder the mandate to “subdue and rule over” everything that moves on the earth (Genesis 1:28). It’s no simple task for human beings to subdue and rule over rebellious angels.

Now we have some explanation of what is going on. We humans are in a titanic struggle against the spirits of darkness. This command to subdue and rule really is preserved by divine revelation. Cain was jealous of his brother and was sulking. God told Cain: “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:5-7). How would you feel if you heard God tell you that directly? Would you then murder your brother?

Even so, the rebellion continues. So, in the fullness of time, the promised Descendant of the first woman appears. He is the one who will carry out the mandate to subdue and dominate everything that moves on the earth. Surely this has to be a description of the “End Times”.

How much more time should be given to those who, after observing the physical universe for billions of years, still refuse to obey? The promised Descendant came with a “gospel”. The original meaning of “gospel” was not “good news”, as we understand it today, but “good” in the sense that it is reliable. It was the official documentation of what a magistrate will hold the people accountable for when he arrives; it should not be doubted. The news is still “good” in that some persons will be glad to hear it, but, primarily, it is “good” because it is reveals exactly what God wants.

Conclusion

The promised one came. His “good news” was and still is accepted, but not by all. He set up a procedure to offer salvation to all who are willing, but many do not accept it. For two thousand years, persons have fought against it and are still trying to destroy it.

If this revelation is true, how close can we be to the end of God’s patience, to the end of time, to the end of all rebellion? At the end of time, as we know time, all persons will experience the final separation of darkness from light. We humans too will be separated into children of light and children of darkness.

Doesn’t this seem a more plausible explanation of the origin and purpose of the physical universe that the scientific theories of evolution?