Cosmic origins (1)
Genesis begins with these words:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The word 'beginning' suggests time. This is how time began. Before there had not been time. Time itself is not an easy concept, and modern thinkers can spend a lot of energy trying to explain it. But it is a useful word, nonetheless.
Apart from the word I am not going to use the next two nouns in this sentence are 'heaven' and 'earth'. And this is where we need to look at the broader picture, because both words are often used in the books that follow Genesis. We need to interpret both in this wider context.
Heaven is used in three ways in the Bible: the atmosphere (where the birds of the heaven fly), space (where the stars of heaven are), and there is the phrase 'the third heaven' used by a writer in the first century AD as being somewhere he went 'whether in the body or out of it, I do not know' and saw things he could not find words to describe.
When people pray that God's will be done 'on earth as it is in heaven' they are thinking of two realms: the physical, the cosmos as we know it, and where God is in a manner non-physical, or spiritual. The contrasts can be restated as the material and the non-material, the seen and the unseen, the physical and the spiritual. So they are contrasted, and they are linked too: we are apparently promised a 'new heaven and a new earth' as the final cure of the spoilt universe we live in.
So our first sentence is simply saying:
"Time began when Elohim willed the material and the non-material into being."
The key part of the message here is that both modes of being, the physical and the spiritual, were brought into being. This is where we need to be critical of some scientists who propose that the only things that can possibly exist are those things that can be examined scientifically, measured by physical observation. This act of faith is theological rather than scientific, as, being purely negative, it does not allow either validation or refutation. One is tempted to call it the science delusion.
And the further message of the first sentence of Genesis is that they were not an accident: they were willed into being. This implies a being with a will, and this seems to me a possible way to avoid the use of a word that may create images in the mind of an old man on a throne. This is the real dichotomy. Is everything there is a result of a chain of accidents, or the outcome of a will that it be so? The materialist believes (as an act of faith) the first option. Those who have experienced the spiritual dimension in their lives believe (also as an act of faith) otherwise.
How easy is the 'it is all a sequence of pure accidents' theory? Well some mathematicians have calculated the chances of getting the universe we have got by accident as one chance in 10 to the power 55 (1 followed by 55 noughts). Here are some of the dependencies even for there to be the possibility of life on our planet: if the strong nuclear force were just a few percent stronger, the sun would have burnt up all its hydrogen fuel in less than a second; our earth is just the right distance from our sun to allow water to exist in liquid form, which is vital for life to exist; our sun is one of very few suns that have a relatively stable heat production, essential for life; and the origin of the complex DNA code of life, which is acknowledged to be the best of more than a billion possible codes, so the chances of this arising purely by accident are astronomical. There are many more dependencies than those just listed, and if any single one were missing this planet could not sustain life.
The mathematical dimension of the 'it is all a sequence of pure accidents' is just one aspect of the difficulties that those who follow this hypothesis face. There is an even more fundamental problem. For the total atheist there is the question: how could something (which has a measurable beginning) come from nothing?