Text Proverbs 8:22-35
Where was God in the creation of the universe, and what difference would it make if God were not there at all?
Those are Advent questions. They are mind-boggling questions. They are questions beyond the range of science. They are questions that only religion can pose.
I invite you to join me tonight for a brief but wild ride through the universe in search of God. It’s a long-distance trip and in order to get where we want to go, we’ll have to ride on the wings of science for a ways. We’ll let science take us as far as it can, and then let the Bible carry us from there.
Current scientific inquiry can take us all the way back to the second verse of the Bible, in Genesis 1, where we read that prior to creation, the universe was without form and void. Genesis and science both bring us back to the same place. A point at which there was nothing there.
Creation is the event that put something there for the first time. Science tells us that this event was something called the Big Bang or some variation of that. As near as we can figure, this thing called the universe came into being about 15 billion years ago. Something happened that triggered a fantastic explosion of matter.
Why do scientists believe that? Quite simple, really. If you trace the paths of all the large objects in the sky and work backwards along the same trajectories, everything ends up in the same place.
The question of what happened at creation, is a question for science, not religion. Science has much better tools than religion for figuring that out. But in asking the question of what happened at creation, we have reached the limit of where science can take us. In exploring the creation of the universe, we find that we have to go to at least two places that science cannot reach.
First, there is the issue of reverse infinity, or negative infinity. Did time come into existence with the creation of the universe? If so, that implies that there was a point at which time did not exist. If that is true, then how was time created? That’s really a more interesting question than how was the universe created, and it’s not something science can answer. On the other hand, if time did not come into existence with creation, then time must have already existed before creation. If time existed before creation, then creation doesn’t take us back to the beginning at all. We have to go back further than creation and again, that takes us into a place where science is not equipped to go.
So it is left to us in the religious field to try and provide some sort of explanation for time from outside the realm of science.
Genesis is a good place to look. It has a profound comment on this situation couched within its story of creation, in the very first words of the Bible. Notice that Genesis does not say, “In the beginning, creation.” It says, “In the beginning, God.”
Therein lies a way of solving the problem of time. God is not bound by time. We say this in our creeds and in our faith statements when we speak about life everlasting. With God, you never reach a point at which time ends. With God, time stretches on to infinity in eternal life.
If God is not bound by time in the future, then it works the same way in the opposite direction, in the past. There is no point at which God ends and there is no point at which God begins. Whether time existed before creation or whether it began at creation does not matter. With God, there is no unaccounted for emptiness lying there before time came into being. With God, there is no unaccounted for emptiness if time existed before creation. Either way, God was already there.
This exploration of the concept of time leads to the second issue, the creation of something from nothing. Science deals with systems and laws and cause-and-effect. There is nothing in science that can or ever will explain the creation of something out of nothing. How can time not exist, and then suddenly exist? Where did the components of the matter that blew into existence during the Big Bang come from? How could the concept of directions, of north and south, not exist and then suddenly exist?
At some point in any discussion of creation, you run into a huge wall with the transition between when nothing existed and when something existed. How do you get something out of nothing?
God is the only answer I know to the question of how do you get something from nothing. With a negatively infinite God, there never was a time when there was nothing. Psalm 89:12 speculates that there was a time when north and south did not exist. And then suddenly they existed. But they didn’t come from nothing because something was there. God was there.
Genesis puts to rest the scientific dilema of something being created out of nothing. The universe was created out of something. It was created out of God. The universe was created because God made it happen. We as Christians declare that to be true. If we are smart, we leave it up to science to explore how that universe came into being and has developed into what it is today.
In trying to imagine a universe without God, we have to admit, first of all, that it just might be an impossible task. We don’t know of any way to explain how something comes from nothing. There is no way that the universe, what we know as reality, could exist if not for God. The question of what would the universe be like without God has a very simple answer. If you could erase every thought from your head, every feeling, every sensation so that it was all just a blank, that’s what the universe would be like without God. It would be, just as Genesis says, without form and void.
Since a universe is not possible without God, for purposes of our Advent exercise, we will have to change the formula. Instead of asking what the universe would be like without God, let’s ask, what would the universe be like if God were not the God revealed to us in the Bible?
The God revealed in the Bible has four main characteristics:
Power
Faithfulness
Love
Wisdom
Imagine a universe ruled by a God without those traits.
Power. Let’s go back to the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang was an enormously tricky thing to pull off. If the universe expanded too quickly, all matter would be scattered too quickly for anything to form. Nothing would come of it. If it expanded just a tiny bit too slowly, it would collapse on itself and nothing would happen. There was no margin for error.
The matter that expanded had to be remarkably smooth as it blew across space, otherwise it would create such turbulence that nothing could hold together. All would descend into chaos. Yet it had to have just a tiny bit of roughness, scratchiness, otherwise the matter could not have been able to clump together to form stars and the earth and all the other components of the universe. The velocity of the explosion and the composition of matter both had to be exactly right to an astounding level of perfection, or the universe would be chaos.
I submit to you that only a God powerful beyond our comprehension could exert that kind of control. Had God not been as powerful as the Bible claims, any attempt to create a universe would produce a chaotic wasteland in which nothing could ever get organized enough to amount to anything.
Faithfulness. Our universe is governed by laws: of gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, chemistry, physics. It is, to a large degree, predictable. It has patterns, seasons, continuity. It runs on order and logic. All these things are what make science possible. We can understand the universe because we can count on it being, in most ways, the same today as it was yesterday. The earth will orbit the sun in a predictable way, chemical reactions will occur faithfully, providing food and oxygen, our senses will give us accurate and reliable information about our surroundings. That could happen only in a universe in which God is faithful.
We can count on God to be who God is. We can count on God’s universe to be what God made it to be.
If God were not as faithful as Bible claims, we would live in a baffling, magical world. That may sound like fun and sheer fantasy. But imagine living in a world where things happen for no reason, where the only way anything ever survives is by sheer luck. A universe in which God is not faithful would be a nightmare of insanity.
Love. Imagine if everything in the universe were 100% reliable and predictable. Imagine a world in which everything happens according to a plan, a formula. It would be very easy on God. It would be easy on us. No problems, ever. Religious people with a “control freak” view of God believe the universe is like that.
But if the universe were like that, then nothing new would ever take place. Imagine a universe in which choices do not exist. Where life simply repeats itself in an endless cycle. Nothing ever changes or evolves. I don’t think you could call that life at all. It would be a robotic world, a sterile world of machines, performing exactly as programmed. It would be a universe in which nothing surprising, interesting, or important would ever happen.
A world without love would be a world that existed only for the creator, shared with no one.
Wisdom. How do you create a universe that balances the opposite needs of faithfulness and love? That preserves enough order so that we can understand and depend upon it, yet creates enough change and spontaneity and chance and surprise and choice so that what we know as life can exist? It takes incredible wisdom to figure out how to keep those in balance.
Genetics provides insight into how God reconciles opposites to achieve balance. How does God demonstrate faithfulness, preserving order and dependability? Through the use of DNA replication, a template system that makes offspring the same as their parents. This process transfers thousands of traits from one generation to the next so that there is continuity. So that baby humans do not come out as ostriches, or bacteria, or cabbages but as something very much like what the parents were.
At the same time, God uses random genetic recombination, jumping genes, and mutation so that at each birth a new person is created, a person entirely different from any that ever existed before. Possibililty and change have been built into the system. If God were not wise, God could never have accomplished such a system. All life would be lurching between the twin extremes of chaos and meaningless mechanical existence.
If God were not wise, the incredibly delicate balances of nature required to keep such diametrically opposed concepts as faithfulness and love in balance would be impossible to achieve. Agnostics point to the intricate systems and laws of nature and say that these are what run the world, not God. But there is nothing scientific in such proclamations. In science, you don’t get something from nothing. Processes do not create themselves; laws do not create themselves.
Power does not just happen. Faithfulness does not just happen. Love does not just happen. Wisdom does not just happen. The universe works because “In the beginning, God.” The universe works because God is powerful, faithful, loving, and wise.
What does that have to do with Advent?
The wisdom of God determined that what makes existence most worthwhile is relationship. So God created us and the universe to share relationship. Relationship cannot happen between strangers. We cannot share any relationship with God if we do not know God. But a God of negative infinity is so far beyond us that we cannot know anything about God unless God chooses to make it known, unless God chooses to come to us and reveal it.
Advent is about the coming of God to us. Emmanuel, God with us. The first step in God coming to us was the creation of a universe built on faithfulness, love, and wisdom to reflect what God is, so that we would know who God is.
Look about you. From the tiniest particle of matter to the vastness of the greatest galaxie, God is there. The whole universe declares that God has come in power, in wisdom, in faithfulness, and in love to share the gift of life.
And that is only the start. God keeps finding more and better ways to come to us, to reveal more and more to us about who God is. The best of those ways is just over the horizon. Christmas is coming.