Less Than the Blink of an Eye
Mar 17, 2006
This morning, I read an article with great interest and could hardly wait to share it with all of you. Scientists have some new insight into the formation of our universe. Here's the money quote:
"In that trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space through a process known as inflation. At the same time, the seeds were planted for the formation of stars, galaxies, planets and every other object in the universe."
First, the universe was nothing and then, in "less than the blink of an eye," it was everything. You see, I believe that God created the universe and all the physics necessary to hold it together. We all get to explore and experiment to find out His secrets. (Not unlike how our relationship with Him grows.) But when the astronomers and mathematicians and physicists look deeper and farther into the universe, they always find more mystery - which is cool.
But I was really thinking about a theologian and scholar I like to listen to who translated a certain verse in Genesis a little differently. "It wasn't 'let there be light,'" he said. "It was really 'Light, BE!' and in that one word 'be' everything was." And I love that image, such power and command. It seems the scientists have found it too. Nice.
Yeah -- the collected knowledge of science is just a set of models that we use to describe our observations. So, yeah.
You might enjoy the Shocken translation of the first 5. Great read straight through. They try to put as much importance on the rhythm/meter/rhyme of the original Hebrew as they do on the semantic meaning of the words. Makes sense, considering much of what is written down today was once the oral history of the Hebrews, and there had to have been as much meaning in the inflections and placement of phrases as on the functional meaning of them? Anyway, all that to say, you get a lot of that kind of "Light, BE!" feel from an out-loud read of it. Fun stuff.