The story is told of a science professor who constructed a planetarium, a precisely scaled model of the universe. A student came into his office and asked him who made it. The professor said, “No one.”

The student laughed and asked again, “Come on, who made this fantastic piece of precise work.” The professor replied, “No one. It just happened.”

The student became confused and angry, and the professor said, “Well, if you can go out of this class and look at nature around you and believe it just happened, you can also believe this precise piece of work just happened without a creator.”

Genesis 1

Over 40 years ago, a Christian thinker by the name of Francis Schaeffer wrote a little book called Genesis in Space and Time. What he argued was to get rid of some of these heated endless debates, one of the ways to begin is by asking, What is the least Genesis 1 and following must be saying for the rest of the Bible to make any sense.

Whatever the complexities of symbolism and literary genre and the relationship to science and so forth, there is an irreducible minimum these chapters must be saying for the Bible to have any coherence at all.

 What does Genesis 1 and 2 tell us?

They tell us some things about God, some things about human beings, and some things about how Genesis 1 and 2 fit into the whole Bible and into our lives.

Some things about God.

We reflect on the God who made everything, so we begin in Genesis.

Genesis 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth

1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

12 And the earth brought forth grass, herbs yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after their kind: and God saw that it was good.

18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

21 And God created the great sea-monsters, and every living creature that moveth, wherewith the waters swarmed, after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind: and God saw that it was good.

25 And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the ground after its kind: and God saw that it was good.

31 And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

So, the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

Much of twenty-first century culture is convinced contemporary scientific thought is fundamentally incompatible with the opening chapters of Genesis.

An important fact is, there is more ambiguity in the interpretation of these chapters than some Christians recognize.

Some Christians are convinced these chapters read responsibly insists the world is not more than 4,000 years older than the coming of Jesus. Others insist it is entirely compatible with vast ages.

Some think each day represents an age. Others insert a huge gap between verse 1 and verse 2. Some see this as a literary device: Creation week is a week all right, but it is symbol-laden and full of other things rather than describing a literal week. Others devote their energy to comparing it with other creation accounts in the ancient world in which it was written.

Some say that the Christian documents are basically shaped along the lines of those Babylonian myths. There are huge diversities of opinion amongst Christians, let alone amongst those who want to write the entire account off.

Genesis is a mixed genre that feels like history and really does give us some historical details. That is, history which takes place in space/time/reality, and is full of demonstrable symbolism, and sorting out what is symbolic and what is not is very difficult.

Another important is, there is more ambiguity in the claims of science than some scientists recognize.

The media for some time has focused on the fresh literary adventures of people like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others. Together their writings comprise what is now sometimes called the New Atheism. There have been robust responses that have been written of various sorts, challenging their views.

All of these books written against God and Creation are predicated on the assumption of philosophical materialism.

Philosophical materialism says, all that exists, all that can exist is matter, energy, space, and time, and nothing else. So that anything that claims to go beyond that or belong to some domain that cannot be reduced to that must necessarily be dismissed, even laughed at, and should immediately be abandoned.

In spite on those views, there are many front-ranked scientists who are Christians.

When you do the math, you find that there tends to be a preponderance of science teachers and math teachers and the like over against arts and psychology and English literature teachers.

It’s not that anybody who is a scientist can’t be a Christian. Statistically, that is, with all respect, nonsense. There is a  little book by Mike Poole, God and the Scientists, or another one edited by Dembski called Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing.

There is more debate going on than is sometimes perceived.

There is a problem. Even if you allow some understanding of origins that belong to the dominant modern paradigm, the one that says our entire known universe developed out of a big bang something like 15 billion years ago from highly condensed, unimaginably condensed, everything, a big bang that eventually became our universe.

Sooner or later you’re forced to ask the question, where did that highly condensed material come from?

Alan Guth, in his book called The Inflationary Universe, tries to work it out, he says this very, very condensed material which ultimately exploded in the big bang emerged out of nothing.

He has to admit that his physics doesn’t work, he says, yes, but at the big bang there is what physicists call a singularity.

This Singularity is an occurrence in which the normal laws of physics no longer work. That means we don’t really have any access to them. At that point, the wildest speculation begins.

That causes a critic, like Berlinski to write, a mathematician and philosopher, Berlinski writes a polemic against the ideology of neo-Darwinism and how he finds its dogma to be unsupported and tyrannical.  A lot of stuff that gets into print is simply nonsensical. Alan Guth’s derivation of something from nothing is simply incandescent horse manure. He says, Don’t tell me you’re deriving something from nothing when it’s transparently obvious to any mathematician that this is incandescent nonsense.

This book investigates potential neo-Darwinian fallacies, specifically regarding a priori assumptions, that may have led to weak scientific methodology and praxis. It was proposed that five concepts must be true for neo-Darwinism to be true.

An attempt to carefully examine these concepts, all five seem to be assumed a priori so as to dictate the outcome of neo-Darwinism rather than letting the evidence speak for itself.

Paul Gross, evolutionary biologist, says, the central claim of evolutionary biology, is that an unguided physical process is sufficient to account for the emergence of biological complexity and diversity. Filling in the details of that process remains a subject for debate among evolutionary biologists.

There are complications in the domain of science that show there is not simply a solid wall, a solid front, that makes it impossible for Christians who want to bow to the authority of Scripture and Christians who really want to learn from science to talk intelligently with each other.

         How does intelligent design differ from a theological doctrine of creation?

Creation is always about the source of being of the world. Intelligent design is about arrangements of preexisting materials that point to a designing intelligence. Creation and intelligent design are therefore quite different. One can have creation without intelligent design and intelligent design without creation.

There’s a joke that clarifies the difference between intelligent design and creation. Scientists come to God and claim they can do everything God can do. Like what? asks God. Like creating human beings, say the scientists. Show me, says God. The scientists say, Well, we start with some dust and then, God interrupts, Wait a second. Get your own dust.

Just as a carpenter must take preexisting wood to form a piece of furniture, so these scientists have to take preexisting dust to form a human being. But where did the dust, the raw materials, come from to make a human being?

From stars? And where did stars come from? From the big bang? And where did the big bang come from? From a quantum vacuum fluctuation? And where did that quantum vacuum fluctuation come from? At some point such questions must end.

Creation asks for an ultimate resting place of explanation: the source of being of the world. Intelligent design, by contrast, inquires not into the ultimate source of matter and energy but into the cause of their present arrangements, particularly those entities, large and small, that exhibit specified complexity.

Although creation and intelligent design are logically separable (you can have one without the other), many who hold to a doctrine of creation also believe that creation exhibits clear marks of intelligence. Biblical texts Psalm 19:1 (“The heavens declare the glory of God; / the skies proclaim the work of his hands”)  Romans 1:20 (“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.

Thus, many who hold to a doctrine of creation are also proponents of intelligent design. To many theists it seems perfectly reasonable that a creator would create a world in which the creator’s intelligence was made manifest. How the world exhibits design, however, is still a matter of dispute

Many theologians resist intelligent design’s fundamental claim that the natural world exhibits objectively discernible design. God would ultimately be behind all the design in the world. Thus, for instance, any design evident in complex biological systems would have to be ascribed to God.

Whatever one makes of intelligent design, one of the dominant debates of the day, as a scientific theory, there is a version of it which is almost inescapable. There have been groups of people (mostly Christians but some non-Christians ) who point to what they call irreducible complexity.

That is, structures in the human being that are so complex it is statistically impossible to imagine how they could have come to be by chance or chance mutation or mere selection of the fittest or any of the standard appeals that are made in traditional Darwinism.

This irreducible complexity demands you postulate a designer. There are some non-believers who argue that point, as well as Christians who argue that point.

Then some argue back (many unbelievers and believers), “Yes, but that might simply mean we don’t know enough about the mechanisms. If you start filling God in wherever we don’t have an explanation, then you’re putting God into the gaps of our ignorance, but as we learn more the gaps get filled up and God gets smaller. We don’t need a God of the gaps!”

Many writers who are not Christians in any sense by their own declaration sometimes speak of their marvel, almost to the level of one could call worship, at the unimaginable complexity and splendor and glory of the universe.

If you begin with this God, the testimony to his greatness in what we see all around us is mind-boggling, and it takes an enormous act of will on the part of the most cynical  scientists instead to look at it all and say, It’s just physics. Stop admiring it, there’s no design. It’s just molecules bumping into molecules.