The Knowledge of the Glory

Is the Big Bang one line of evidence confirming the Bible's assertion that things seen were made from nothing visible?

Christian theologians often state that God created the cosmos ex-nihilo: that is to say, out of nothing. The Bible actually says something slightly different. It says God created the things we can see out of nothing visible (Hebrews 11:3). This may seem like a minor quibble, but to me it has significant implications.

The Bible presupposes that God created natural stuff out of the spiritual. The consequence of this is different than if it was created out of nothing at all. If it were created out of nothing at all, I suppose the universe might after all be closed to all outside influence as some scientists and philosophers claim; but if it was created out of spiritual stuff, then it can have an invisible spiritual back door.

The first piece of evidence I give you is the Big Bang. Interpret the data as you please, it proves there was a time when our universe was not. Before the moment of the Big Bang there was nothing we could have seen. This is about as direct evidence for the scripture proposition as can be imagined, but it does not prove the unseen was spiritual.

For those who deny the Big Bang, there is another line of evidence showing that the seen comes from the unseen. This is the nature of atomic and subatomic particles.

How do atoms confirm scripture? The solids we see turn out to be largely composed of emptiness—of atoms which are practically invisible. However, since we can “see” the components of atoms with electron microscopes, I do not consider them to be the things which the Bible calls unseen; subatomic particles are not the ultimate physical reality.

It turns out that subatomic particles are composed of smaller entities known as quarks, and those in turn are probably manifestations of even more fundamental entities known as strings. Quarks are universally accepted by physicists, but strings are not yet. When we get to the level of strings we can no longer see, even indirectly, but can only theorize, devise experiments and test hypotheses through carefully conceived experiments. Here perhaps we are on the borderland of the things unseen; here, perhaps, we are in touch with entities that probe out of the spiritual realm into our own universe.

Or we may just be discovering another level of the physical. At any rate, the seen is clearly composed of the unseen.

To demonstrate that the seen world is ultimately a manifestation of spiritual realities, I will have to take another tack. I will do so in another post.