Cosmology or Faith

The Importance of Developing a Christian World View

By Rev. Jim Thompson, author of The Physics of Genesis

Copyright Jim Thompson, www.physicsofgenesis.com, all rights reserved.

Chapter One Why Faith Fails

One of the most remarkable passages in the Bible is the Fifteenth chapter of Pauls first letter to the Corinthians. Many of the ideas that fill this book will be drawn from the extraordinary words found in that chapter. It often happens that the most provocative ideas are overlooked on first reading. I believe that is the case with the Corinthian letter. There is a single sentence there that challenges the way many Christians think about their faith. This is that sentence: But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. (I Corinthians 15:13) Many casual readers expect that sentence to say the exact opposite of what it says. In their minds they read it this way: If Christ has not been raised then there is no resurrection for the rest of us. But that is precisely what the text does not say. Look at it again. The sentence claims that unless resurrection is an ordinary part of life for every last one of us, Christ could not have been raised. Pauls sentence and the way it is often misread illustrates the difference between faith and cosmology. The sentence that Paul actually wrote is a cosmological claim. The mistaken way in which many people read it (If Christ has not been raised there is no resurrection for the rest of us) is a faith statement. Cosmological statements offer assertions about how the universe works. They are an attempt by the person who makes such statements to express the premises and presumptions that govern the way s/he actually lives every day. They are statements about the world not about religion or God. One of the most important reasons many people struggle to sustain a religious faith is rooted in the presence of a gap between their cosmology and their beliefs. I would go so far as to say that this is the major problem that accounts for the weakness and ineffectiveness of the Christian Church in much of the world today. Faith, for many people, is a broken off part of their life that consists in ideas that are quite different from the premises and assumptions that shape their daily activities. They have two starting places from which they begin each day. One set of premises shapes the way they interact with the world. A very different set of premises determines the way they worship and pray. Whenever such a separation is in play the inevitable result is a faith that gives very little direction or comfort to living. As a matter of fact, under those conditions religion can actually confuse and complicate lives. For many people the only bridge connecting their religion and their life is the thin bamboo reed of miracle. The world they inhabit on a daily basis can only be intersected by their beliefs by means of an unexpected interruption of the normal course of events. It is fair to Cosmology or Faith- Page 1 -physicsofgenesis.com

say that the only thing that makes people like that different from secularists is the fact that they somewhat irrationally sustain a spark of hope that such interruptions are possible, a hope that often makes it harder for them to deal with real world problems in a timely and effective way. For people who operate with two starting places the world of the Bible has the quality of a fantasy realm that might impinge on ordinary life now and again but is not the real world. Their relationship with God does not require belief so much as it demands the willing suspension of disbelief. Their lives are split between those things that they know and various religious ideas that they believe in. Under those circumstances, their belief system cannot function in a useful way and they cannot make effective use of the Bible in dealing with lifes challenges because for them the Bible is a kind of alternate reality. Its stories and teachings belong to a world that is different from the place they spend most of their time. The Bible is supposed to be a message from the Creator of the universe who, speaking directly to us, is telling us exactly how He made the world we inhabit and how that world works. If the Bible is what it says it is and if God is who He says He is then the Bible should give us a huge advantage in dealing with life in both its temporal and eternal dimensions. But we cannot use it that way if we only draw our religion from the Bible but cobble our cosmology out of other sources. I have been working as a hospice chaplain for many years. In my experience with people facing the moment of death I have noticed a clear pattern. In these situations of ultimate extremity religious faith is not a useful predictor for how a person will react. The thing that makes a difference is the extent to which a Biblical worldview has shaped a persons cosmology. Those who have long lived in a world where the dead are expected rise again arrive at their final moment with a confidence and inner peace that eludes those for whom Jesus resurrection is only a matter of religious belief. In many cases those for whom resurrection and eternal life are only doctrinal concepts endure a terror greater than atheists who have at least arrived at a cogent understanding about the mechanics of life that gives their death coherence. In the face of death it is more important to know that dead people rise then it is to believe that once upon a time in a far away land a great king named Jesus rose from the dead. The faith that Jesus rose from the dead tells me that a miracle took place but that kind of information does nothing to diminish the sense that what is happening to me is catastrophic. Belief in miracles does little to provide context and definition to events that are actually going on especially when those miracles happened to someone else. The question we face at the moment of death can be stated this way: Is death truly a catastrophe or is it the gate to resurrection and a new life? That is not a faith question. That is a cosmological question. It is not a faith question because it will in due time be answered empirically for each one of us regardless of our religious background. Death will reveal what it reveals. The great questions about eternity may begin as faith questions but they never end that way. The ultimate reality revealed by death will not turn out to be one thing on Sunday and another thing the rest of the week. It wont be one thing in one culture and another in a different culture. The claims of the Bible will either prove empirically accurate or factually wrong. In the end faith will either become Cosmology or Faith- Page 2 -physicsofgenesis.com

sight or it will become nonsense. The religious conflicts that roil our world are like debates between researchers about the meaning of an experiment whose results will not be known for years. Those debates might be interesting but in the end they are futile and unnecessary. As Jesus said, Nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light (Luke 8:17). In the final analysis no worldview will ever remain a matter of private opinion. Some people will be right and some people will turn out to be tragically wrong. The problem we face is that life is organized in such a way that we each individually have to select and operate within some kind of worldview before all the data is in. We all have to roll the dice and nobody gets to say I pass. It is at this point that the way in which we read the Bible becomes important. The big question is: Is the Bible merely a collection of statements reflecting the religious beliefs of certain persons and communities (who are as unknowing as we) or is it really a definitive message from the Creator accurately describing the origin, history, and characteristics of the universe He made? Pauls statement that if there is no resurrection of the dead then Christ has not been raised shows us that he demanded of his hearers that they make a defining choice between cosmologies. It is important to notice that this was not the only instance in which he put cosmology first in his preaching. In his summary of Pauls message to the citizens of Athens, Luke tells us that Paul preached to them Jesus and the resurrection (Acts 17:18). At the end of this encounter Luke reports that the response of the people there was centered around Pauls presentation of the concept of resurrection itself. The text tells us that when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, We will hear you again on this matter(Acts 17:32). The issue that they wanted to hear more about was a cosmological and not a religious question. When Paul was called before the Jewish high council to explain his message his defense again centered around the issue of the resurrection of the dead per se, a matter of cosmology. He summarized the case against him insisting that concerning the hope and resurrection of the dead I am being judged! (Acts 23:6). In his trial before Governor Felix Paul summarized his public message saying, I have hope in God, which they themselves also accept, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust (Acts 24:15, emphasis added). In pointing this out I am not trying to challenge the fact that Paul preached a message of grace and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. That message is permanently enshrined in his letters. The issue here has to do with Pauls public preaching and with the priority he observed in presenting his ideas. Clearly Paul worked very hard to teach the public a Biblical worldview in which the resurrection of the dead is an ordinary part of real life for everyone. Those who publically teach the Christian faith (and every believer is called to that) should consider Pauls example. It may be that when inviting people to believe in Jesus we would do well to begin by directly confronting secular worldviews, teaching in their place the Biblical worldview and demonstrating its superior value. There are two reasons for considering this approach. In the first place, we have seen that faith that is not rooted in a Biblical cosmology normally does not generate enough coherence to actually change lives. If every attempt to draw on Biblical teachings requires us to ask for a miracle to overcome the ordinary and proper course of events Cosmology or Faith- Page 3 -physicsofgenesis.com

then it is likely that our faith really is an escapist fantasy. Such a fantasy can inspire and comfort us when times are easy but it is not strong enough to overcome deadly challenges or to guide difficult decisions. To face lifes great challenges we need real facts rooted in a real world. We get those facts from our cosmology not our faith. This means that faith and cosmology must mutually support each other or faith will be toothless and cosmology will lack the conviction necessary for it to shape choices. In the second place, the Christian faith itself only makes sense in the context of the Biblical worldview. We will explore this issue in greater depth in the next chapter. For now I simply want to point out that it is impossible to accurately teach or believe the so-called religious ideas of the Bible while dismissing its cosmology. As we will see, the real issue at stake in the debates about evolution and the Bible do not have to do with how things began per se but rather the more basic idea of salvation, particularly salvation won on the cross through the death of Jesus Christ, an event whose meaning is drawn entirely from the Bibles unique view of natural and human history. There really is no point in teaching the Gospel unless we also teach the cosmology of the Bible. Any presentation of Christianity that is willing to dispense with the worldview of the Bible is doomed to ineffectiveness. Today this poses a difficulty because many people wonder if the cosmology of the Bible, particularly the account of creation presented in the first chapter of Genesis, is credible. It was in response to a need to demonstrate the complete credibility of the actual Genesis account as written without compromising or modernizing its content in any way that I wrote the book The Physics of Genesis. This is not the place to review the content of the text of Genesis; all that is discussed in the Physics book. But this is the time and place to challenge believers to engage in a new kind of study. Many have studied the Bible as a book of faith. The time has now come to look beyond that and begin a detailed and careful study of the Bibles worldview with the intention of making its cosmology our own. If we want our faith to be a strong and a steady guide to living every day we must be sure that our faith and our cosmology are equally grounded on the Word of God. Only when that kind of consistency is in place can we make confident choices and live with internal coherence in a changing world.

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Chapter Two Why Intelligent Design is Not Helpful for the Christian Faith

Not long ago I attended a School Board Meeting where the agenda featured a measure that encouraged teachers to be prepared to discuss the theory of Intelligent Design along with the teaching of evolution if the topic should come up in a classroom discussion regarding origins. It was a lively meeting to say the least. Teachers from the biology department showed up en mass to protest a policy that seemed to encourage even the briefest mention of Intelligent Design. Their pleading, accompanied by tears and threats, centered on their claim that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an effort to sneak Christian ideas into their classroom. The faculty had apparently determined that such an event would spell disaster for the history of civilization. In this book, I want to leave aside the whole debate about evolution and creationism. I deal with that issue in The Physics of Genesis where I demonstrate that there isnt much of a difference between the two positions and show how neither is useful for advancing the cause of science or for helping us move toward a Biblical worldview because neither position finds support either in nature or in Genesis. In this book I want to focus on the Biblical issues that are at stake when we talk about the topic of origins and why the popular idea of Intelligent Design fails to address those issues. The doctrine of creation taken by itself in isolation isnt a hugely important part of a Biblical worldview. As a careful student of this material (spending years with these texts in the production of The Physics of Genesis) I can say that if a person took every verse of the Bible that deals with creation in isolation from all other themes and typed them out single space one wouldnt come close to filling two pages with text. This is so because the Bible is focused on the topic of salvation. In particular, the center of the Bible is Jesus Christ, predicted, present, and promised. Jesus himself made this point when, following his resurrection, he met privately with two of his disciples and, as Luke reports, beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself (Luke 24:27, emphasis added.) The point was that Jesus was the subject of every part of the Old Testament (the scriptures at that time). In the Letter to the Hebrews Jesus is quoted as saying about the Bible, In the volume of the book it is written of Me (Hebrews 10:7), meaning that if you ask what the Bible is about, the answer is that it is about Jesus. When we teach or defend the Bible (and remember all Christians are expected to do this) we need to be sure that our words are congruent with the Bibles message which means that we have to keep the focus of our study and teaching on Jesus. This is especially true when we are trying to understand the real issues at stake in the debates surrounding Genesis and origins. To see how this is so we need only return to the fifteenth chapter of Pauls first Letter to the Cosmology or Faith- Page 5 -physicsofgenesis.com

Church in Corinth. In that chapter we read the following verses: Since by man came death by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive (I Corinthians 15:21-22). The issue driving that passage is the question, Where did death come from? The answer given is that death came into the universe by means of the disobedience of one particular man named Adam. Gods response to that disaster consisted in sending the one man Jesus whose obedience and sacrifice opened the doors to resurrection life for all who believe and began a process that will culminate in the renovation of the cosmos. This is the point that almost all participants in the creation debate fail to understand. The entire weight of Christian teaching about the way of salvation rests on the verbatim accuracy of the account of creation presented in Genesis chapters one through three. Specifically, if death entered the world prior to the sin of Adam (as any theory of evolution demands) then the death of Jesus Christ makes no sense. Jesus death only solves the problem of death if death actually entered the world only through Adam. If Adams disobedience was not responsible for bringing death into the world for the first time then it is impossible to see how Christs obedient death resolves the crisis into which both man and nature have fallen. If Adam did not bring death into the world as the Bible says in Genesis it turns out that Jesus choice to die for the sake of the world was a tragic mistake based on an ignorant misunderstanding of natural history. If death is an ordinary part of nature whose reign preceded the existence of mankind by eons (think of the death of planets and suns) or even by days (think of the lifespan of a single fruit fly) Jesus sacrificed his life for no reason because his obedient death could only have addressed the sin of one man which turns out to have been inconsequential. This in turn means that all the Biblical claims about Jesus have to be lies. Paul tells us that by Him [Jesus] all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him (Colossians 1:16). But clearly this claim must be false and Jesus could not have been the Creator if he thought that death entered the world through Adams disobedience and it was not so. We would be forced to acknowledge that Jesus apparently did not understand what really happened at the beginning of all things which would seem to indicate that he wasnt there. We could keep following this line of argument back through every claim in the Bible and step-bystep unravel every theological assertion ever made but what it boils down to is this: the Genesis account of the creation and the fall into sin has to be exactly right in every detail or the Christian faith is null and void. This is so not because the idea that God created the world is so important (once again, we could actually set that idea aside with little immediate damage to the faith) but because both the doctrine of salvation and the deity of Jesus Christ stand in the balance in dealing with the question of origins. This brings us back to the debate about Intelligent Design that took place in that School Board meeting I attended. Evolutionists pretend to think that Intelligent Design began as a religious movement. In reality research into Intelligent Design began in 1951 when biophysicist Harold Morowitz began work to identify the informational content of a cell. Then, in 1958 chemist Cosmology or Faith- Page 6 -physicsofgenesis.com

Michael Polanyi laid the philosophical foundations for ID research in his book Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, a study that challenged the paradigm of atheistic materialism that had dominated science since the middle of the 19th century. Evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, and Thomas Watson always admitted that the world looked as if it had been designed. However they challenged their followers to ignore the evidence of their eyes and assume that it was not designed. In their writings they made it clear that they did not offer this challenge on the basis of any research but did so in service to an atheistic ideology that they found personally attractive. As an aside it is worth noting that the only reason that some of the scientists who have been attracted to ID are religious is because they obviously find the ideology that motivates evolutionists less compelling and so are willing to explore avenues of study that are observationally based. Intelligent Design research begins with the evidence that evolutionists demanded that we ignore, namely the simple observation that the world appears to be designed. ID is an attempt to determine if it is possible to define properties that reliably identify an object that has been intentionally designed. It then moves on to test these parameters for predictive accuracy and subject those tests and their underlying mathematical operations to falsification. Eventually ID hopes to apply these methodologies, once demonstrated and broadly accepted, to various artifacts and systems of nature to determine if a substantive argument can be made in favor of a hypothesis that they reflect intentional design. That work is still in its very early stages. The question of who might have designed these artifacts and systems or for what purpose is not addressed by ID. I believe that exponents of Intelligent Design are to be congratulated for participating in a much wider effort that seeks to drag biology into the 21st century. Hundreds of scientists in countless disciplines have concluded that the time has come to force that worn-out 19th century enthusiasm called Darwinism to release its death grip on biological science. Discoveries in physics, information theory, chaos theory, paleontology, and natural history, many of them now more than a century old, make it clear that those biologists who cling to the tenants of Darwinism have some serious explaining to do. In The Physics of Genesis I review many of these discoveries and outline some of their implications. I also admire those who are willing to explore the usefulness of an approach to biological studies that includes the possibility of Intelligent Design for standing up to the inquisitorial tactics of the Darwinian establishment. They are helping reinvigorate research in a field long dominated by antiquated thinking, dogmatism, racism, and ethnocentric prejudice. I do, however, contest the notion put forward by the biology faculty at that school board meeting that Intelligent Design is a Trojan horse cunningly assembled in order to sneak Christian ideas into the classroom. I suspect that the situation is actually the reverse. Intelligent Design seems to me the greater danger to Biblical faith than evolution. I would see the same sort of danger arising from creationism which is a very different thing from Intelligent Design with its own intellectual and institutional history, but I offer my critique of creationism in The Physics of Genesis. Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that there may be physical, mathematical and logical reasons for favoring the probability that the world we see is a product of rational design rather Cosmology or Faith- Page 7 -physicsofgenesis.com

than random accident. As a scientific matter their claim might well prove over time to be sustainable. From the point of view of a Biblical scholar the problem is that even if their proposals stood up to falsification by prediction and experiment the theological result of Intelligent Design could never yield anything more than support for a form of Deism. Deism is the conjecture that the universe is the product of some sort of Cosmic Intelligence who designed the thing like a gold watch, wound it up, and set it to running. Those who see Intelligent Design as a stalking horse for Christian teaching assume that any theory that proposes that some force that sounds like a god may have played a role in the origin of things represents a confirmation of the claims of Genesis and supports the message of the Bible. Actually, Intelligent Design does nothing of the sort. The unique claims of Genesis center on the idea that God created the universe in exactly six earth days, that humankind was formed at the end of the sixth day, and that sin, death, corruption, and a host of other evils entered the world for the first time soon after and did so entirely by human agency. Intelligent Design contributes nothing to advancing any of these ideas and that poses a problem for a Christian. The problem is that it is the specific theological assertions that I have just described rather than some vague notion that there might be a creator out there somewhere that provide the foundation of the Christian worldview. Any Christian who assumes that in some way Intelligent Design saves the day for the faith is badly mistaken. The reason I think it might be better for a Christian to support the teaching of evolution in secular schools is because Darwinism is so obviously founded for the purpose of promoting an atheistic agenda. If a person is not already a committed atheist Darwinism with its absurd conjectures, wild speculations, piles of fake evidence, and endless appeals to spontaneous self-generation and other impossible notions is not a credible idea. More specifically, anyone who draws their picture of the world from the Bible will automatically know that the biggest problem with evolution is that the Creator never seems to have heard of it (perhaps he didnt get his copy of the Origin of Species). People who are attracted to Darwinism will not likely be folks who are overly scrupulous about conforming their thinking or conduct to the content of the Bible. This does not necessarily mean that such people are not religious. Many Darwinists, in fact, claim to have a Christian religious commitment and I am sure they do. But that commitment must necessarily be a matter of emotion and tradition (a kind of greeting card sentimentality) that has nothing to do with the cosmology that actually shapes their day to day living. Their real worldview tends to be rooted in a rather odd collection of beliefs known as philosophical materialism. In The Physics of Genesis I explain some of the tenets of Materialism, demonstrate how creationists and evolutionists share exactly the same ideology, and explain why that philosophy is no longer tenable in light of advances in quantum physics and information theory. Intelligent Design (ID) is a little different from evolution/creationism. ID does in fact look like it might have Christian content but this is an illusion. In truth ID does nothing to challenge the fundamental paradigm upon which both Darwinism and creationism are based; it is still mired in materialist assumptions. The danger is that while the atheistic musings of evolutionists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are likely to cause believers to rise in defense of their faith, the Cosmology or Faith- Page 8 -physicsofgenesis.com

theological language employed by a few Intelligent Design writers might entice some Christians to accept its soft Deism as an adequate expression of Biblical teaching. Such acceptance would result in the quiet and unintentional but disastrous abandonment of authentic Christianity. The proper way for a Christian to deal with the question of origins is to let the Creator himself answer our questions by making Genesis the starting place for our research. For reasons that we will demonstrate in the next chapter such study will yield results that are not just a little different from Darwinism, creationism, and Intelligent Design, it will yield results that are stunningly different. These same results, however, turn out to be consistent with fresh approaches to the question of origins emerging from 21st century research, particularly in the afore mentioned fields of quantum physics and information theory. The astonishing correspondence between the text of Genesis and discoveries flowing from these areas of research is a major topic of The Physics of Genesis. The issues posed by Intelligent Design expose a problem specifically related to the question of how we interpret the Bible. The question is the one we posed at the start of this book, the question of starting places. As we interpret the Bible do we begin with the premises of human research and culturally approved assumptions or do we start with the claims of the Biblical text and then allow that text to provide the primary data we use to assess the veracity and usefulness of human research? In other words do we try to talk to the Creator and tell Him what he can and cannot say or do we let the Creator speak to us? As a matter of pure logic the right answer would seem obvious, but in reality we usually do the opposite of what would seem to be the logical thing. It would seem logical to assume that God would know more about origins than we do because he was there and we werent. Any logical person would give deference to a message about creation that comes from the Creator. But we dont do that. We almost always start with the word of man and try to accommodate the Word of God to human predilections and culturally bound preconceptions. That way of handling Genesis can only express an assumption on our part that the creation account is a human contrivance rather than a message from the Creator. But what if that assumption is wrong? We would have lost any possibility of finding out what really happened in the beginning. With the wrong set of assumptions in place even if God was telling us exactly how the world was created and how it works we wouldnt grasp the message because we would be too busy trying to accommodate His message to our favorite notions and habitual thoughts about those topics. In the end it would not be the things we dont know but the things we think we know but that are not so that would keep us from ever unlocking the mystery of creation. To hear a message from God we first have to let ourselves be addressed by God. It is to the question of how we can make that happen that we will turn in the next two chapters.

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Chapter Three The Importance of Being Addressed

Over the years I have observed that people are both attracted to and repelled by the idea that there is a God. On one hand, seekers find their way to Churches or Bible classes every week. Ostensibly, they come looking for a word from beyond the domain of the ordinary. At the very least they would appear to want to be exposed to a wisdom that is a little better than their own thinking. On the other hand, many of these same people are easily offended when a difference pops up between what God has to say and certain opinions, values, and bits of information drawn from human sources that have gradually become part of their mental furniture or the mindset of their culture. Main stream denominational Churches have responded to this problem by seeking a gentle balance between the Word of God and various popular notions. They have sought to mitigate some of the more radical claims of the Bible by way of interpretations that make it easier for people to accommodate the Biblical message to consensual ideas. The problem is that many of these same people soon find that the Christian faith they are learning in these Churches is boring. The ideas they hear sound a lot like their own thinking sprinkled with a bit of holy water. Such people often abandon Christianity claiming that it just didnt work for them. The reason that it didnt work is that they never really had a chance to try it. As a result many of those denominations that accommodate Gods word to fashionable opinions now face declines in membership and participation, declines mounting into the millions. The greatest challenge set before all of us when we set out on a journey to seek God is the fact that we must face the question, am I actually willing to be addressed by the Creator? This is a question quite different from the question that sends us out on the journey in the first place. That question usually went something like: Am I willing to search for answers? I suspect we could all say yes to that. But the success of our search will be determined by our response to the very different question: Am I willing to listen when answers are given? When confronted with Biblical passages that are difficult to accept, passages I call radical scriptures, the nearly universal response is to try to remove the story or claim from the realm of fact and set it into some kind of framework that does not challenge conventional thinking. Without thinking much about it most people turn the Genesis account of Creation into either a form of mythology supposedly rooted in ancient cultures or an inspirational poem whose details dont matter because it doesnt convey detailed information anyway. In the same way Jesus claim that you can move mountains by the power of your thought becomes for them a metaphor for personal transformation rather than insight into the nature of the cosmos. Various prickly demands and judgments related to sexuality or money are explained away as reflections of customs and values from a by-gone age. Cosmology or Faith- Page 10 -physicsofgenesis.com

When we apply this approach to the Bible sooner or later we manage to smooth the whole thing out to the point where there is nothing there that could offend anyone. The problem is that we will also have turned the Bible into a book that would hardly interest anyone either. Somewhere along this path the Bible becomes a mirror of our own thinking rather than a window into the eternal. Is it any wonder that so many people decide that they can live quite happily without the insights from such a bloodless, expurgated book? Once its offensive edges are interpreted away the Bible is incapable of telling us anything we didnt already know. When we approach the Bible as student or teacher (and, again, we are all called to be both) we need to remember why we opened its pages in the first place. We came to the Bible precisely because we were tired of our own opinions. Our way of looking at the world was not working as well as we hoped. The wisdom of the world including its scientific notions did not turn out to be as impressive as we were led to expect. We wanted more, we wanted something better. So we turned to Gods Word. But then it is as if having resolved to give up fast food in favor of fine dining we arrived at the restaurant and ordered the food only to douse the whole plate with cheap ketchup. In the case of the Bible we start reading but as soon as it begins to say things we didnt expect or dont want to hear we either translate those ideas into harmless platitudes or give up studying the book altogether. Are we or are we not willing to be addressed by a transcendent, eternal Creator whose perspective and wisdom are never going to be the same as ours? Once again, the real issue comes down to starting places. Do we insist on starting with own thoughts hoping to season the ordinary with just a touch of the infinite? Or are we willing to start with Gods thoughts and measure popular ideas and familiar customs by what the Creator has to say? If we begin with Gods word as our starting place we have the chance to gain a perspective on life that is completely different from anything culture can offer. In my book The Physics of Genesis I demonstrate what happens when we begin with the idea that the universe was actually created in six earth days in precisely (word for word) the way it says in Genesis. It turns out that when we do that we gain a stunningly different picture of what our universe is and how it operates compared to anything we might glean from the tired nexus of creationism/evolutionism/Intelligent Design that dominates current discussion. It is obvious that evolutionism will never tell us anything about the world that we didnt already know. Evolution is born of the materialist presumption that there never was or will be anything that transcends human experience with the material world and the thinking generated by that experience. By definition Darwinism cant challenge ordinary human prejudices and mental habits because it embodies and reflects them. The reason that both creationism and Intelligent Design do no better is that they begin with the same worldview as Darwinism but then try in their separate ways to bend the data so they can squeeze God into that world someplace. What you get when you do that is an ugly combination of bad science and bad theology. But when we begin with Gods Word as our starting place we have the opportunity to encounter a completely different way of looking at the universe which, in turn, generates the potential for innovation and change. It turns out that the Creator has a useful thought or two to share about how the universe began and Cosmology or Faith- Page 11 -physicsofgenesis.com

how it works. When I listen to creationists, Darwinists and Intelligent Designers prattle on with their latest musings I think of Gods derisive challenge to Job and his friends and suspect that He may be thinking the same thoughts about them today:

Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:2-7, emphasis added)

Throughout this book we have been drawing insights from the fifteenth chapter of Pauls first letter to the Church at Corinth. Near the end of that chapter he makes a solemn announcement: Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption (I Corinthians 15:50). In saying that Paul is informing us that there is a very great separation between what God knows and the opinions generated by human culture. In the rest of this chapter we will consider why that difference is there and just how great that separation is. The prophet Isaiah tells us that the kingdom of God is the realm of the eternal: For thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy (Isaiah 57:15, emphasis added). When we hear that word eternity we often draw our reference points from our own experience. We experience time as a sequence of moments or events that seem to flow from a beginning to an end so we infer that the word eternity must mean that God is someone whose life simply spans a longer sequence. The reality is that eternity is a concept that has no relationship at all to the sequence of moments and events we experience as time. Eternity is not a matter of having more time it is the quality of timelessness. The relationship between time and eternity is like the relationship between numbers and infinity. Infinity is not a matter of more numbers, the concept of infinity has no relationship at all to numbers. What this means is that it is not possible to relate Gods experience to human experience. This is what Paul was saying when he warned us that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Spirit and matter normally have nothing to do with each other. There is no point where they can come into contact or even correspondence in the ordinary course of events (that is, barring divine intervention). Spirit can choose to enter the realm of matter (that is what the life of Jesus is about) but matter cannot attain knowledge about or contact with the realm of Spirit. This means that we cannot balance wisdom that comes to us from eternity with any supposed knowledge produced within the time/space domain. If the Eternal has made its wisdom available to us that wisdom necessarily cancels out every piece of knowledge accumulated within the realm Cosmology or Faith- Page 12 -physicsofgenesis.com

of sequential time if that information contradicts the divine revelation. All human knowledge and beliefs, no matter how ancient or widely accepted they may be, arising as they do within the limits of the time domain, must be rejected as false if they should negate information that actually finds its origin in an eternal source. Human moral standards or social practices that contract a direct divine communication must be repudiated as errant. None of this is a matter of religious belief or churchly morality, all this is a matter of strict logical necessity. Wisdom from an eternal source (assuming that it actually does arise from such a source) cannot logically be treated on an equal footing with temporal wisdom nor can it be handled as if it were merely additional to knowledge secured within space/time. An authentic revelation from an eternal source is by definition utterly incommensurate in value and authority to all experiential data generated within the realm of linear time and sequential events. If God chose to reveal exactly how he created and structured the world that revelation, no matter how impossible it might appear to us, would immediately supercede all speculations and conjectures generated from our own resources. As we have seen, should we decide to subject such a revelation to evaluation and correction by our own pre-existing notions that decision would necessarily mean that we had concluded (whether or not we admitted it) that the assertion that the material had a divine origin was a deceptive claim. If we really believed that the Creator had actually made a particular statement we would not reject or even amend it. The problem, of course, is that we may not be confident that a particular statement actually does or does not come from an eternal source. In that case we face a dilemma. On one hand, there is a possibility that a certain so-called revelation might have originated within human history and culture. In that case it would be a mistake to grant it special status. On the other hand, if we marginalize a message that really does come to us from beyond our space/time domain not only do we lose information of unimaginable value but any religious beliefs, social customs, philosophies, personal behavior choices, and scientific research based on assumptions rejected by that revelation would likely be falsely held and even destructive. This, then, is our dilemma: looking as we do through the tiny window of space and time we can never render a judgment about a purported divine communication with complete confidence this side of death. This means that we have to make a choice. We must either believe or reject a given message without ever being sure that we are doing the right thing. The incommensurate relationship between realms eternal and temporal means that we cannot temporize or compromise on this point. This is, once again, a matter of logic not dogmatics. Since the Bible insists that it is a message coming from an eternal source outside time and space and since it contradicts many tenants of contemporary human understanding we must either accept what the Bible tells us in its entirety no matter how exotic its claims or we must reject all of it as a tissue of lies. It does us no good to subject it to emendation, re-interpretation, or correction because any effort to do that itself expresses a decision on our part to reject its claims of divine origin. There is no way to connect divine wisdom to our experience if doing so involves using two starting points equally weighted, one eternal and one temporal. Nevertheless, we try to do precisely that all the time. Recently I ran across a Bible commentary that commended St. Pauls views about marriage by suggesting they represented a fairly enlightened opinion in the context of Cosmology or Faith- Page 13 -physicsofgenesis.com

the times in which St. Paul lived. This is an example of trying to interpret a message from two equally weighted starting points. Are we to accept Pauls ideas because they correspond (somewhat) to currently popular customs? Or are we to evaluate our customs on the basis of the message Paul taught? We cant have it both ways. Only the second approach respects Pauls own claim that he spoke by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit (II Timothy 3:16). By definition, the first approach reduces Pauls words to the rambling musings of a first century scribbler.

If God is speaking to us we have no choice but to give absolute priority to the divine message. Logically, there is no other way in which an authentic divine message could be received. But once we have read and studied what God has said it is then entirely appropriate for us to go back to human knowledge and experience and connect what we have learned from our study of Gods word with the best of human science, philosophy, mathematics, history, and every other discipline we have in order to assure that we have properly understood and are making best use of the information we have received. We should, in other words, always begin with the Biblical text but that doesnt mean we end there. In The Physics of Genesis I demonstrate how an understanding of certain aspects of quantum physics makes it much easier to understand the message of Genesis. I suspect it is no accident that our culture is being swept up today in a fresh debate about origins. God seems to inviting us to re-examine questions of origin because we are better able to understand his message on that topic than we could at any point before in our history. People today long to be addressed from beyond time and space. Some eagerly search the auric realms for cosmic insights. Others gaze at the skies watching for signs of alien visitation. Many of us just look for a miracle from Heaven. But overlooked in all this seeking there is likely a Bible sitting around somewhere in your house right now. That Bible claims to be a message from outside our space/time domain. If the Bible is what it claims to be the question has never been, will we ever receive a message from beyond? The question has always been will we hear the message that has already been given? Our answer to that depends on our answer to the question that began this chapter. Are we willing to let ourselves be addressed? In the final chapter of this book we will look at one technique of Bible study that we can use to make sure that we do hear the message when God speaks.

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Chapter Four How to Let the Bible Speak for Itself

We have seen that we often do not experience the Bible as an encounter with God because we try to accommodate disturbing Biblical statements to our favorite preconceptions about how the world works. If a passage contradicts history or science as we understand them most of us subject that passage to some form of special handling. Some spiritualize the text turning it into a collection of mystical truths that end up looking like notions embraced by just about every other religion on earth. Others treat a radical passage as an artifact of culture which has the effect of making it inapplicable to our lives. Most people avoid the problem by simply reading through an offending passage as if it wasnt there. Following any of these paths of interpretation we eventually start to wonder why we are reading the Bible at all. Why pay attention to the words of a so-called god who never seems to have anything new or interesting to say? We have shown in this book that we can avoid that kind of spiritual burn-out if we let the text address us with an authority greater than that possessed by our peers or teachers. But how can we make sure we are letting the text address us with authority? Is there a technique or rule that can help us? There is. It helps if we observe a rule of thumb, a sort of prime directive for Biblical Interpretation: Unless the text itself gives warrant for doing otherwise, every Biblical text should be read in its strictly literal sense. Let me be clear about this. The Bible uses more than 200 different kinds of figures of speech. The text is full of parables, similes, metaphors, allegories, typologies, fables, and symbols. A proper approach to the Bible requires that we read such figures of speech for what they are. When in Matthew 23:37 Jesus compares himself to a mother hen who would gladly gather her chicks under her protective wings, we are not asked to believe that Christ suddenly sprouted feathers and began clucking. But what happens when the text tells us that Jesus was seen walking on the surface of the Sea of Galilee? Is that a metaphor? Some would say it is. I have heard many sermons celebrating how Jesus comes walking across the troubled waters of our lives, implying that the story is inspirational, the sort of tale one might tell a child who is afraid of the dark. But the story itself recounts in some detail the terror experienced by the disciples who, sitting in a boat, thought they were seeing a ghost. They dont seem to have thought that Jesus night journey was a metaphor and since those who were there thought the event was real, we should too. The reason we need to take this story and others like it literally is that the story suggests that reality possesses qualities that we do not yet understand. Whatever our world is like, it is a world where Jesus thought it no miracle to walk on water. It is very likely that most of us may not see the world that way but that would seem to be the point of the text. We may not be seeing the Cosmology or Faith- Page 15 -physicsofgenesis.com

world as it really is. We may have to take a fresh look at the way we have been taught to define reality. At the very least we have to admit that when it is taken literally the report about Jesus walking on water becomes interesting. That alone is a major improvement on a spiritualized or inspirational reading of the story that accommodates its exotic claims to our existing prejudices. In general I can say that a Bible that is allowed to speak for itself is a Bible that will keep us awake at night while a Bible that offers nothing more than metaphors and allegories will always prove an effective sleep agent. The worst thing we can do is to dismiss every interesting event reported in the Bible by calling all such events miracles. As I study the Bible I am moving toward the conclusion that there are very few if any miracles in the Bible. I say that because events that seem strange to us are never treated as extraordinary by those who perform them. The agents of Biblical miracles do what they do without theatrics. They dont even seem surprised when things happen that contradict popular expectations. I suspect that we would experience what some call miracle stories as descriptions of ordinary occurrences if we could see the universe from the perspective from which the Bible was written. In that context I think it is interesting that when in the story about his night journey Jesus invited Peter to get out of the boat and join him Peter was doing just fine out there on the waves until conventional thinking took over and he panicked. (The whole story is told in Matthew 14:2233 and for the record I have to admit that while I have often walked on water the location was Minnesota not Israel and the weather at the time was a bit chilly.) What does a story like that prove? It doesnt prove anything. The story certainly isnt offered as proof of Jesus divinity as many interpreters suggest. Readers of the Bible already know that Jesus is God. The New Testament makes that claim from beginning to end. If Jesus is God we would naturally expect that he would be able to walk on water. We would, in fact, anticipate that He would be able to do a lot more amazing things than that. The story about Jesus and Peter walking on water is not a message about Jesus, it is a lesson in cosmology. The report clearly intends to hint that reality is organized in such a way as to include possibilities that might never have occurred to us had the story not been told. The story is a cosmological revelation which means it is meant to challenge us to re-examine conventional assumptions about the kind of universe we inhabit. This kind of re-examination can produce interesting results but only if we engage the text with attention to its literal claims. Many people make it harder for the Bible to address them than it needs to be because they insist on agreeing with everything they read in the Bible starting with the first time they read it. It is interesting to notice that Biblical characters almost never seemed to feel that way. Standing before the presence of God both Abraham and Moses had the temerity to reject to His face certain plans that God had announced. And they were not alone. Job and Jonah did the same and the Bible tells us that many of Jesus own followers did not believe in him even after witnessing his death, resurrection, and ascension. All this is as it should be. Human resistance to new information is a good thing. The tendency to consider an unusual claim carefully and to demand evidence is what keeps us from shooting off in Cosmology or Faith- Page 16 -physicsofgenesis.com

dangerous directions. If someone immediately welcomes every claim they encounter in the Bible one of two things is happening: either they are not understanding what they are being told because many Biblical claims are from a commonsense viewpoint clearly outrageous or, more likely, they are not treating those claims as serious information. They are not, in other words, reading the text literally. The rule that Neils Bohr applied to quantum physics, Anyone who is not shocked by quantum physics has not understood it, goes double for the Biblical text. It is good to read the Bible with a critical eye. The citizens of a city called Berea were selected for special praise in the Bible precisely because they were initially skeptical of St. Pauls preaching. The text tells us that these were more fair minded than those of Thessolonica in that they received the word with all readiness and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so (Acts 17:11, emphasis added). The first hearing of a Biblical claim is never meant to be the final reading. God never challenges us with a take it or leave it proposition. Every Biblical claim is accompanied by an implicit invitation to do some research. The presumption that it is wrong to be skeptical about Biblical claims actually guarantees that ones knowledge of the Bible will always remain at a Sunday School level and that whatever faith emerges will never mature into a complete cosmology. We need to remember that the Bible addresses us with a message from beyond space and time. A communication from beyond our limited domain would necessarily exhibit the quality that some writers call high strangeness. The message would present a picture of the world that we would naturally experience as disturbing because it would reflect a perspective radically different from our own. I would go so far as to say that if we actually could read the Bible through and not find parts of it disturbing and even unbelievable that fact would, by itself, prove beyond doubt that the book did not have a point of origin beyond our world. It is perfectly fine to read the Bible and find parts of it unintelligible and even distressing. What is not okay is to dismiss the text on those grounds. When we dismiss any kind of communication simply because it is new, different, or makes us feel uncomfortable we risk remaining stuck in the ruts of our own thinking. I come back to the point that we all hunger to be addressed by something or someone beyond our ordinary experience. We all want to know more than we know right now. We want to do more and do better things than we are doing right now. The only way we can give ourselves a chance to fulfill those longings is by letting ourselves be addressed when a Biblical text confronts us with the quality of high strangeness. We shouldnt blindly accept the claims of such a text. We should be like the Bereans and subject every claim to skeptical examination. But we should also be open minded enough to give the claims a hearing. To do that we must, in the end, continually return to the prime directive as our guide to Biblical interpretation. We will never gain anything from study of the Bible unless we habitually give preference to the literal reading unless the text itself gives us clear warrant to read it another way. Exploring the Bible with a mind that is receptive to its message cracks open the door to fabulous adventures. Wouldnt now be a good time to let the adventure begin? If you want that to happen find, buy, or borrow a Bible today and begin seriously reading it. Treat each sentence as a claim that is meant to be accepted as fact. Dont ask yourself if you believe a particular statement. Instead, ask yourself, what must the world be like for this sentence to be true? As your study Cosmology or Faith- Page 17 -physicsofgenesis.com

unfolds a cosmology with very clear and consistent characteristics and boundaries will emerge. As that cosmology gels the various religious teachings offered in the text will start to make logical sense perhaps for the first time. The Bible will begin to speak to you with compelling force. You will begin to realize that this material isnt religion, this is a description of reality. For the first time you will have a definite sense of where you came from, why you are here, and where you are going. When cosmology and faith come into congruence you will find that the foundation has been laid for an integrated, powerful, and fruitful life.

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