In The Beginning - The Creation Story

        

          "God said, "Let there be light..."

I love early mornings.  I sit here at my desk gazing out of the window watching the darkness of night, slowly being replaced by the light of day.  In the summer, at a certain moment, the birds awaken and begin their song of praise to the Father, thanking Him for bringing them through another night, another time of darkness.  Our God is Light and that is what distinguishes Him from all other deities that men worship.  With the light that the God of the Universe brings comes life.  Life not only in the physical sense, the light that the animals thank Him for daily but light for the souls of His children on earth.  This light, of course, is Jesus.  Every moment of every day God continues the work of creation.  The sun arrives to brighten the physical world and for those of us who believe and desire Him, He enters in and sheds His light and brightens our soul.  

The light of God's sun melts that which is frozen on earth and the light of God's Son, Jesus, infuses our soul with joy and peace. This is the reason that God created the world, to share Himself, to share His light, His Creation with us.  Breathe deeply of the morning air and inhale the recreation of the first day in which God said, "Let there be light."  

Star Stuff and the Round-About at Bernards Star...

This week I have been watching some YouTube videos dealing with space and the incredible data that has been collected by the Hubble Telescope. What I have heard and observed this week has convinced me that we do not always see things in the reality that they reside in without the help of a powerful lens. Take for example our picture today. It shows part of the sky as seen by the Hubble Telescope.  The brightest points are all within our galaxy, the Milky Way. They are the objects in this photo that are closest to us and the word close is a tiny bit on the inaccurate side because the light from these stars may have begun the journey to our eyes hundreds of years ago.  What we see in this photograph is not what any of the stars or galaxies look like today, no, using the Hubble lens, we are seeing what they looked like hundreds, thousands, or even billions of years ago.  The scientists can peer further and further back into the past almost to the point where they can see the hand of God putting a match to the fuse on the concentrated ball of matter that was the center of the Big Bang.  As strange as it seems, scientists are more and more becoming more and more convinced about how intelligently the universe has been designed.  The calculations made by these scientists show that if the Big Bang had lasted a nanosecond more, or if there was just a little bit more or less matter at the time of the explosion, the universe would not have formed.  The odds of all of these random factors lining up just perfectly are, excuse the pun, astronomical! 

 Our home, the Milky Way Galaxy contains about four hundred billion stars.  You and I live, love, and die on a blue marble near our sun which is about twenty-seven thousand light years from the galactic core. We are in the Orion arm of the galaxy.  As impressive as that may be, our illustration to the left shows dozens upon dozens of galaxies of all sizes out there.  All of them at distances that make making a visit to them quite impossible for us to contemplate.  While all this is breathtaking, it makes us "bags of mostly water" as a creature on Star Trek once called humans feel a bit puny and quite non-essential to the bigger picture. The Big Bang was instituted by God with YOU in mind.  His calculations from the very beginning included you in them.  Every calculation was perfect and over the eons, our earth was formed, life began, and soon man walked the earth, subduing it and mastering it as God tells us to do in Genesis. When the time was right, you were conceived in the furnace of passion and in about nine months you began your sojourn through space and time. 

God went through a lot of trouble to create you.  Everything had to be in place for you to arrive and He saw to it. In Genesis, when God was finished with all of the work he was doing, he looked it over and saw that it was "very good." What we forget is that God, who lives outside of space and time, saw each of us, and he pronounced us as "very good" too.  This is an important concept because it validates the life of every person who ever lived as being from God and destined to return to God. So, on those days, and all of us have them when the boss is cranky, the baby is crying, the bill collectors are calling, take the time to remind yourself how very important and precious you are to God.  He made only one of you and there will be no Mark II model, you are it. You have been created out of star stuff and placed in this universe to do a job that no one else can do.  For heaven's sake, do it! 

Creation in 7 Days or Evolution - Why Not Both?

On one side of the aisle, we have the people who believe that God created the world in seven days while on the other side we have those who believe in evolution.  Those that believe in creationism believe because the story is written down in the Bible for us. Those that believe in evolution have their story showing in the very rocks we walk on.  Who is right and who is wrong? 

I do not think that how this world came into being is something where one can be right or wrong. Both beliefs have points that are well taken and both beliefs culminate in the same point in time, the arrival of mankind on the earth. 

What we are dealing with here is cause and effect, or rather, the ultimate cause and effect. In the creation story featuring Adam and Eve, the cause is easy to see, God created light and created everything from that point including all plants and animals, fish of the sea, creeping things and as His crowning achievement, He created man in His own image. 

In the story of evolution, we are still dealing with cause and effect, or rather, once again, the ultimate cause and effect.  Science has proven that the universe as we know it started with a big bang, an explosion that sent matter to all of the ends of the universe.  The matter in some cases became stars while in other places the matter formed into planets that orbited the stars. In one particular place in the universe, on a rather small planet covered with liquid water, life formed in the primal ooze. Years passed and simple forms of life became more complex and eventually, mankind appeared and took charge of the earth.  Creationists are horrified that this story is believed by anyone. It seemingly removes God from the equation, making Him unnecessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. God is the ultimate source of life and it was he who created the big bang.  I've always thought of the big bang as God creating light.  After all, in Genisis, we are told that everything was a formless waste.  God, in instituting the big bang created light and began the process of creating life.  That was the first day of creation. The Psalms tell us that for God one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day, which is one way of saying that for God a day can be a long time as humans measure time. So for God, a day or even seven of them could be millions of years as our clocks tick away hours.  

As a Catholic, I am free to believe either of the scenarios.  I choose to believe both of them.  I know for certain that God in his love for us set the entire universe into motion. I believe that he is the Ultimate Cause in the universe.  I believe He is a loving Father who always does what is best for His children. How he created the universe and our world is not so important.  What is important is that he did so.