Comment: Unbelievable Religious Origin Explanations
The Christian religious explanations for the creation of the universe, Earth and, more particularly, humans have always seemed incredible to me.
Let us take the approach of the traditional Christian who is on the softer end of bible interpretation. I am using Marcus Borg’s description of a traditional Christian from his book The Heart of Christianity. Essentially the traditional Christian believer sees the Holy Bible as the true Word of God and Jesus as the son of God and part of the Trinity. Being on the softer end, though, some of the Bible may be interpreted metaphorically such as the story of Genesis to incorporate the developments of science.
So here’s my guess of the modernised Christian story.
15 billion years ago (that’s 15,000,000,000 years) God created the universe - all known time and space - in the same way as hypothesised by scientists as the “Big Bang” theory. However the scientific explanations do not involve God. Now, you should remember at this point that God’s overall objective is to create us some 15 billion years as the only living creatures with both physical and non-physical (”soul”) forms. As you know souls can join Him upon death for people obeying God’s laws. Back to the story. Then about 10.5 billion years later God created Earth (consistent with the latest scientific theories) and some 500,000 years later created simple life forms. It’s important to remember that God created the rules of the universe that gives us the apparent order we find and, as part of that, evolution. But God intervenes, presumably, to ensure that He gets the outcome He wants. So even though Evolutionary theory suggests that all living things, including humans, got here by a combination of chance and selection, the chance may be illusionary as God needs to manipulate the processes to achieve His outcomes - human beings. So through a relatively meandering process of evolution and appearing as if driven by purely selection and chance, humans appear some 150 000 years ago - 15 billions after the start of the universe - according to God’s design.
Let’s fast forward to some 2 500 years ago when God decided the time was right to directly influence humans by appearing. He chose a small wandering tribe in the Middle East to start His work. It was a good start but more was needed so some 500 years later God placed his embodiment into this Middle Eastern tribe in the form of Jesus. For over 30 years Jesus preached around the Middle East, gathered followers and performed miracles for before dying, resurrecting and returning to God (even though in some sense he is God). This cleansed our original sin as described in the metaphorical story of Adam and Eve though it isn’t clear how we have the same original sin in the more scientifically-aware version of Christian creation. From that point his teachings spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond through disciples like Paul (Saul of Tarsus).
So we have a couple of major choices. We can believe the scientific explanations as they stand without God. Or, we can except those explanations but believe God developed the rules and intervened selectively to produce us. Surprisingly there appears to be no verifiable physical evidence of God intervening contrary to the scientific explanations. I should mention that our lack of knowledge about beginning of life and universe should be no justification for hypothesising a god. In fairness though adding a god does make many people feel special and have something better to look forward upon death so perhaps that isn’t a completely unhealthy delusion. I guess Richard Dawkins would disagree.
Alex McCullie
