In The Beginning

In The Beginning

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Ever since people have had the ability to look at God’s creation and ask “How does that work?’, we have been working to unlock the secrets of the universe. And over the estimated six thousand years we have been doing this I believe we have done a good job. Mankind’s first theories were not the most scientific; we now know it is not deities that cause rain to fall. We know stars are not pinholes in the cover of darkness but other stars. We understand the earth is not the center of the Solar System, but all the planets revolve around the sun. Yet, all of these were once accepted truths.

Science, for all of its claims, is neither exact nor is does it have all the answers. Think of scientific discoveries as a kind of scaffolding. Each new discovery is built upon the discoveries of the past, like scaffolding is built on the previous level. However, as new and better instruments are built, as new truths are found because of these instruments, the scaffolding gets torn down and rebuilt. The scaffolding is never torn down completely, perhaps a level or two, and each rebuilding builds the scaffold a bit higher, again just a level or two. An example of this happened with me. I took a biology class in college (I was about fifteen to twenty years out of high school at the time), and on the first day of class the teacher asked the class how many kingdoms there were (all life is classified into different kingdoms) and I answered to myself (thankfully) “three; animal, plant, and single-celled life forms”, this is what I learned in high school. I remember thinking this is going to be a long semester when the instructor said “If you said five you’re right, if you said six you’re right”. I soon learned that molds were moved from the plant kingdom to become their own kingdom and bacteria were moved from single celled kingdom to its own kingdom. The sixth was bacteria that live in the more inhospitable places; high heat, extreme cold, water with high sulfur or salt contents, and the like. Between the time of high school and that college class, the classification scaffolding had been torn down and rebuilt. This is a continual process and one that may never be complete.

But there are times when the knowledge gained by science causes a problem. One such problem occurs within the field of physics. There are two theoretical fields of physics; general relativity which deals with gravitational fields to understand high mass, large scale bodies, such as stars, galaxies, etc., and the quantum field which deals with magnetic fields for small scale, low mass objects like molecules, atoms and other small pieces of matter. Now the problem; the theories that explain general relativity and the theories that explain the quantum field are not compatible with each other, they will not work together. One of the few times this is a real problem is in areas of small scale and high mass, such as what some scientists believed happened immediately following the theoretical Big Bang. Physicists cannot give any mathematical evidence the big bang happened, the two theories cannot be made to work together to answer the questions.

For decades physicists have been searching for what has come to be known as the Theory of Everything. Scientists believe this theory can be used to explain everything in the Universe but most importantly how the two theories of general relativity and quantum field can be used to work together, and thereby give to mankind the mathematical explanation of how the big bang worked. So far, there has been no real progress in discovering this theory and some in the scientific community have come to doubt this Theory of Everything even exists, looking elsewhere to find a way to explain how these two theories can work together.

Talk about not being able to see the forest through the trees. People can be so dense sometimes that they don’t see the answer that is right in front of their noses. This Theory of Everything is not a theory, it is a fact, and everyone in this church knows what this theory is, as does every believer in the world. I read the proof of this before I started the sermon. Genesis 1:1 states “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Not only did He create everything, He created the laws and reasons everything works the way it does; all people have done is discover the Laws God has put into motion for everything to work according to His plan. God is the Theory of Everything, He is the reason why the universe exists and works as it does.