What if God Has Nothing to do with the Creation of the Universe?

Most of us were taught as children that God created the world in seven days. As we grew older, however, we learned about the age of the earth, evolution and the Big Bang, the primordial explosion of matter throughout the universe. The Big Bang probably occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, and the earth itself was formed about nine billion years later. Humans in the form of home sapiens developed perhaps 100,000 years ago. Consequently, if we think of “creation” as the history of the universe from the very beginning until the origin of the human species, it took billions of years, not seven days! How is it possible to reconcile these two radically different stories of how the universe was formed?

One way to reconcile the scientific account and the Biblical account is to interpret Genesis as a metaphorical account of creation. God still created the universe but He did so over an extremely long period. We could even look for passages in Genesis that seem consistent with this metaphorical explanation. For example, perhaps we could interpret Genesis 1:3 (“Let there be light and there was light”) as the Big Bang. We could interpret Genesis 1:27 (“God created man in his own image”) as God putting evolution in motion, knowing that the human species would come into existence billions of years later.

The problem with this approach is that it really doesn’t make any sense, does it? The authors of Genesis knew nothing about the how the universe was created. They were restating ancient legends in powerful, poetic language. Besides, would an omnipotent God really start with a fourteen billion year warm-up before getting to the main act? God as Creator is an idea developed by our pre-scientific ancestors who had no way of conceiving how the universe could be formed without a divine hand. Isaac Newton, probably the greatest scientist in history, knew nothing of the Big Bang, subatomic particles, black holes or quantum physics.

All that has changed. Scientists are steadily unraveling the mechanism and cause of the Big Bang by studying deep space and learning more about subatomic particles. For example, scientists at the Fermilab, one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the world, are trying to confirm the existence of a new subatomic particle, called the Higgs boson (or colloquially, the “God particle”) which may explain how all other particles are held together. Paradoxically perhaps, learning more about the behavior of subatomic particles may be the most promising path to understanding the vastness of the universe.

In The Uncertain Believer, I suggest a very different approach to reconciling the idea of God and creation: A modern conception of God has nothing to do with creation. Consequently, we can stop worrying about the role of God in the Big Bang or evolution and concentrate on a conception of God that provides a framework for living. That conception of God can have much greater meaning than the traditional God of the Bible by inspiring us to be as good as we can be. That leads to another paradox: Conceiving of a God that does not have the power to create the universe can lead to a God that has a much more powerful influence in our lives.