The God Theory by Bernard Haisch

Author:Bernard Haisch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609250140
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser Conari

CHAPTER 7

INTO THE VOID

“God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” This simple but profoundly elegant statement from Genesis has, for three millennia, revealed an insight into the mysterious nature of our material world. It portrays light as the first manifestation of creation. Great Gothic cathedrals—Chartres, Notre Dame, Cologne—were built to let light stream in through magnificent stained-glass windows, in which halos of light surround the countenances of saints. As faith gave way to scientific rationality in the era of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, however, there was no longer any getting around the apparently blatant contradictions between the newborn science and the ancient scripture.

Within the scriptures themselves, there are contradictions. How can light have appeared on the first day of creation when the sun, the moon, and the stars—obvious sources of light in the sky—were not created until the fourth? The sequence is wrong; it is out of order. Regardless of what astronomical unit of time—perhaps billions of years—you substitute for the allegorical “days” of Genesis, the chain of events is wrong at the most fundamental level. One could well imagine outspoken Wolfgang Pauli, a revered father of modern physics, blasting such a retrograde notion of creation with his legendary dismissal: “It's not even wrong!”

By that he meant: It's beyond wrong. I was not particularly concerned about this scriptural discrepancy when I was eighteen years old and immersed in the spiritual life as a fledgling seminarian. The surprisingly modern position of my monk-teachers was that this was an ancient allegory whose purpose was to elucidate the workings and consequences of good and evil, not define the laws of physics. Such an enlightened attitude struck me as a welcome sign of progress since the dark days of Galileo's persecution for heresy. Besides, as important as light is, it comes and goes at the flick of a switch. It was surely matter that mattered. That is the stuff of which the stars, planets, and we ourselves are made—atomic matter, the stable stuff of the universe.

Is there any insight into the nature of matter in sacred scripture? Are there any tangible, quantifiable physical laws expressed there? I was not aware of any, and felt I had better things to explore than ancient mythology. In the context of modern astrophysics, the perceived shortcomings of Genesis were an absolute non-issue to me. Cosmology was explained by the Big Bang, the Hubble expansion, and the cosmic microwave background, not some implausible creation myth. One could, of course, generalize light to mean simply energy and thus claim a reference to the Big Bang. That seems like more of a stretch than a revelation to me, however. After all, God didn't say, “Let there be energy.” That would have been different.

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