Is it possible for one to be a Christian, believing in Creation as it is recorded in the Bible, AND believe in the Big Bang Theory at the sametime? Does being a Christian mean you cannot believe in the Big Bang. Is it contradictory to believe in both? Does the Bible support the Big Bang Theory or the Big Bang Theory support the Bible? I’d like to hear your thoughts on this one.
This is a good question. I often think about it myself and I have never been able to come to a conclusion except to say that the bible goes against the scientific explaniations of how life started. It’s very confusing.
Maybe God made the Big Bang?
God saw that it was empty and without time.
Let thier be spacetime sayeth he; Bang! And God saw that it was good.
There are many christians who claim to believe in the conventional scientific view of the age and origin of the universe, so it appears to be possible. There’s nothing contradictory in thinking that GOd set off the Big Bang, and planned the universe in advance so that humanity would inevitably come into existence. It’s only a certain kind of biblical literalist view that insists on a recent, literal 7-day creation.
The big bang is and the idea of a very old universe appears to be pretty contradictory to a literal reading of the bible.
Literal is definitely the keyword here.
Sure, why not? You just consider that the Big Bang is what Genesis 1:1 means by, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In other words, in the beginning God created everything, and it made one almighty bang when He did it.
I’m a Christian, and I believe in the Big Bang and the 12 billion-year-old universe, or whatever the figure is this week.
But according to the bible, God created the world in 7 days right. Well, if you believe science, and you can see dinosaur bones you know that they were here first. If god created all life in these 7 days then why were the dinosaur all extinct before man even walked the earth?
DDG, you wouldn’t last long in alot of Texas churches… not that that is a bad thing…
Scott
Not all Christians (myself included) believe that the Bible is supposed to be a science book, or swallowed whole without chewing.
Yes, or course. You just have to recognize that the bible is largely metaphorical and not a documentary work. This may not be your Sunday school teacher’s interpretation, but I’m not aware of the bible itself stating that is must be taken literally.
Maybe it took God seven days (six, actually) to set the events in motion.
Maybe the “Sven days” refers to the first seven days after the Big Bang, when God started it all, and it just went from there.
Maybe a “day” is different to God than it is to a human.
Maybe it’s a metaphorical tale.
There are lots of ways to justify belief in science and in God.
Crazy Chicka, read Isaac Asimov’s short story, “Darwinian Pool Room” (it’s in the book Buy Jupiter for one way to reconcile it. That or I’ll be happy to give you my “Programmer’s View of Creation”.
CJ
I am Christian and can see no reason God could not have used the the big bang theory. He uses anything he wants to use. Why should we be so arrogant as to think he can only do what we choose to believe? [He cannot be put in a box.]
My mum used to say when we heard thunder that it was God bolwing, so maybe someone will come along and say the “big Bang” was really God farting…
Well personally I believe that if Jesus didnt exist, christianity would still be a valid religion. Im also willing to understand the bible as any other great work of religion or philosophy, even if everything in it is metaphorical.
The view that the bible is, in every respect, a literally and factually correct account of What Actually Happened is
(a) relatively modern, and
(b) held only by a small minority of Christians,
so, in general, there is no problem about being a Christian and simulateously accepting the insights of modern science regarding the development of the cosmos.
Those Christians who do hold the literal view are (i) very voluble, and (ii) largely concentrated in the United States, and this perhaps affects the view of Christianity which many Americans have.
Quite why this view should have taken such (relatively) strong hold in the United States is a fascinating speculation, but not one for this thread.
The big bang theory and the theory of evolution are taught in virtually all Catholic secondary and postsecondary schools in the United States. So obviously the Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the U.S., does not have a problem with either. Catholics are not required to take a literalist reading of scripture as regards history or science.
The big bang theory and the theory of evolution are taught in virtually all Catholic secondary and postsecondary schools in the United States. So obviously the Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the U.S., does not have a problem with either. Catholics are not required to take a literalist reading of scripture as regards history or science.
I think DDG said it best, although comments by others, including Mangetout and UDS, amplify the line of thinking involved. A belief in God as Creator only requires that you believe that He created; the how is open ground for scientific investigation.
I can recall a 4th-grade history book that tried to give one a feel for what life was like in Revolutionary times. It contained the phrase “In George Washington’s day…” Now, I refuse to believe on the basis of the literal words of that book that George Washington only lived one day. And the Bible needs to be read with the same degree of common sense.
To say that the account in Genesis 1 is a myth is not saying anything about its truth value, but rather what its literary genre is. It is not and does not pretend to be a natural history account; it’s written in a reiterative style (think of Goldilocks and the Three Bears for a modern equivalent) that by repetition and insistent focus tries to direct one’s attention to certain facts about the Universe:
[ul]
[li]It is the product of God’s creative work.[/li][li]It was created by His Word. (“And God said… And there was…”)[/li][li]It was created sequentially.[/li][li]He considered it all as good.[/li][li]After the creation of man, He set aside a time of rest and refreshment, and set the example by Himself resting from His creative work. This is, for any good Jew, the sanctification of the Sabbath as an integral part of creation; Christians tend to miss this insistence on man’s need for renewal of body and spirit as an integral part of creation.[/li][/ul]
None of this is, in essence, contradictory to the findings of science about cosmology and planetary origins, though if you try to assign specific times to the particular events listed you start running into problems. The point is, you aren’t supposed to. It’s a dramatic and forceful statement of God’s act in creation, not a pedestrian account of the mechanisms He may have used. Its real truth value is reduced, not enhanced, by any insistence on regarding it as a literalistic account.
One of the finest bits of making religion and science walk hand in hand, by the way, is the insight that immediately following the Big Bang the temperature of the Universe was at 6 billion Kelvin – too hot for anything but photons. And, of course, photons are the massless particles carrying electromagnetic energy, most evident to the unenhanced senses and hence named after the wavelengths of light – Scripturally the first thing created.