The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

Did God create it? Or did it just kind of happen?

I’ve read several of Stephen Hawking’s lectures about the beginning of the universe, and studied other hypotheses rather desultorily, but none of them answer my question. Is it because the question is irrelevant? Dumb? Probably. I’m certainly no cosmologist, or scientist, or time theorist. I’m not even in the same neighborhood with those guys.

But my question makes sense to me; it just doesn’t seem to make sense to anyone else. Anyone who counts, anyway. So here’s the question. If there was a big bang, and the universe was created in trillisecond, what was it created out of? Hawking says asking that question is like asking what’s South of the South Pole. Irrelevant and meaningless, because there’s nothing South of the South Pole. And he talks about the theory of relativity, and quantum physics, and how the universe was “created,” but not what it was created from. That’s bad grammar for emphasis.

In my little pea-sized mind, you/we can’t create something from nothing. If I want to create a bookcase, I need wood. If I want to create an ice-cream soda, I need ice cream. If I want to create a universe, I need universe material. Lots of it. That’s just me, of course. Someone who barely understands the basics of why gravity works.

The only two logical hypotheses for me are 1) there was a whole bunch of universe material available some time, and it got all squinched up and became a singularity and boom, the universe, or 2) somehow the universe was created out of nothing. So this narrow range of possibilities, I guess, accounts for a bunch of other theories: the string theory, the parallel universe theory, the space/time continuum theory that time is basically a circle, and probably a dozen or so others.

Of course, if something was created out of nothing, someone or something had to create it. Which opens up the God door. And raises the question: where did God come from? See how difficult this is for a poor little pea brain like mine?

In Catholic school, they taught me that the answer to the question: Had God a beginning? was No; He always was and always will be. That’s obviously one of the Great Mysteries. But the truth is, hard as it is to believe, I lean toward that theory rather than the theory that the universe just popped into being from out of nowhere.

It’s interesting to me that atheists and many (if not most) scientists can believe the something out of nothing theory instead of the God theory by creating all kinds of unprovable exotic ways it could have happened that way. On Tuesday of next week, or 50 years from now, will one of those theories be proved? Beats me. But right now I’m not getting on that boat.

The truth is there are mysteries out there that can’t be solved by experimentation. To come up with a solution you have to take a leap of faith – be born again, in a way. Put aside logic and convention and believe. In string theory, parallel universes, God, whatever. And do that without provable evidence.

But if I tell you the universe was created by no one from nothing, or that time is a continuum and this sort of thing happens every 100 billion years or so, or that God did it, you really can’t refute it – no matter how implausible it might seem — as long as the hypothesis answers the available facts. Which to me shows what rude, close minded jamokes Bill Maher and others like him are who make fun of someone else’s belief in God. Until something’s proved either way, if something ever is, one theory’s just as good as another.

I believe in “God.” Not Charlton Heston or some other old white guy in robes, not Morgan Freeman, not Groucho Marx or Whoopi Goldberg or George Burns, but a God whose shape and form are unknown to me. I believe because in my life I’ve experienced what I choose to call proof. I believe, as Jesus said, that God is good, and that good is God. And that God is interested in our well being. I don’t know why that should be true, but I believe it is. Perhaps God is simply a consciousness that exists in the universe. Perhaps God only created the circumstances in which we could be created, and we happened, and now God feels responsible. Beats me.

That does, however, lead me to evolution. Which is just about the craziest idea I ever heard of. Survival of the fittest works, obviously, but I have a hard time believing that a rat developed wings in response to its current circumstances, so it could survive in the future. Please. I can see it developing longer, faster legs. Bigger teeth. Whatever. But wings?

I lean much more toward the chaos theory of evolution.