What If?: An Interpretation of the Bible and Our Universe
I believe in God, but I haven’t always. There were many different reasons I strayed away from religion, but one of the most convincing ones was the discrepancies between the Bible and science. But the more time I’ve spent thinking about the subject, the more dots I’ve connected between the two, realizing that the Bible doesn’t necessarily contradict science, but may rather be the artistic telling of it.
When you talk to a child, you explain things to them in a way they can comprehend. So, what if that’s what God was doing with us in the Old Testament? What if the stories we’ve taken literally were merely intended as devices to help early humans understand their surroundings?
One of the greatest incompatibilities with Christianity and science is how the universe came to be—the former believing God created the world (and us) in seven days, and the latter insisting it all started with the Big Bang and evolution. But if you pay close attention to Scripture, it seems to be more synchronized than we realize.
For example, in Genesis 1:3, when it states, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” what better way to describe a cosmic collision? And then again in Genesis 2:7, it says, “Then the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life; and man became a living soul.” And if you look at the Big Bang theory, it says the exact thing: “Earth was born from a cloud of dust and gas some 4.5 billion years ago, along with the rest of the solar system.” A ball of gas and dust whom we later–millions of years down the line—formed from.
As for Adam and Eve, maybe they weren’t real people (or at least not the first two humans), but rather used as a story to illustrate our ability to choose between good and evil, the lesson closest to Christianity’s core—free will. In fact, maybe that’s exactly what the Bible means when it says God made us in his image—we have the capacity to think, feel, choose and create.
But even if God is real, this brings up an even more important question: is he good? I might not have been completely forthcoming before—I think deep down I always have believed in God. However, I haven’t always wanted to. Again, a few reasons for that, but the biggest one being I couldn’t understand how a good God could be okay with creating a defective universe, whose inhabitants are subject to seemingly unnecessary pain.
And truthfully, I’ve never found an answer for that, but there is an interpretation of the nature of our world that may provide some insight: What if God is not outside the confines of good and evil? Rather, what if he is the embodiment of good, and his absence is evil, in the same way that darkness is the absence of light? Because I have noticed something about our environment—it seems everything has its opposite, its balance. There’s land for water, light for darkness, hot for cold and even good for evil. Whether or not the amount of pain in this world is truly justified, I’m in no place to say being from a middle class family in a first-world country, but it does seem to follow this pattern of polarization at the very least.
At the end of the day, this is just the beginning of a theory, an evolving attempt to connect the dots between a tangible world and a spiritual one. Many questions remain unanswered, and perhaps always will in this lifetime, but I guess that’s part of where faith steps in.
