For all the common misperceptions out there about conflict between faith and science, it can be easy to miss when their voices sing in beautiful harmony. Consider, for example, what each has to say about our beginnings, namely that our universe had a beginning.
In the realm of faith, the first words of the Bible found in Genesis 1 declare “In the beginning…” Genesis is an ancient text and certainly not intended to make scientific claims. But, it does speak to the experiences of our ancestors in faith, which we share with them today—a collective sense that the entire cosmos was birthed by God in a sacrificial act of love and that God is present with us in this creation.
In the realm of science, the idea that our universe had a beginning is a relatively new one, only about a century old (and, thank you, Edwin Hubble). Before that, science thought that the universe was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Today, advanced telescopes give us the ability to look back at the oldest light in the universe—essentially, a baby picture of what our universe looked like right after it was born!
If that’s not mind-boggling and wonder-inducing enough, consider these two facts about our beginnings:
The arrow of time is real. What we experience as time began when our universe was born. We are aging and so is it.
Your ‘matter’ is billions of years old. According to astrophysicists, the building blocks of all matter—the quarks and electrons of which we are all made—formed as the universe cooled just after the Big Bang.
Today scientists wonder if there was something before our Universe, in which case we may need to redefine what we mean by the word ‘universe.’ Was our universe born in empty space, whatever that might mean? Is our universe one of many possible universes? Regardless of what answers science may discover, the universe in which we live indeed had a beginning, and what we experience as time and matter began at that moment.
We should never conflate science and the Bible—that is, we should never misuse one to try to “prove” the other. But, we can and should joyfully take note when they sing in harmony!
Photo credit: Detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe from 9 years of WMAP data. https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/121238/index.html
