“Oh Lord my God When I, in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made: I see the stars; I hear the rolling thunder; Thy power throughout The universe displayed. Then sings my soul, My Saviour, God, to Thee, ‘How great thou art.’”
Every autumn, if I get out to a dark enough night sky, I look out at M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy and the most distant object visible to the naked eye. I always feel awe at knowing that that the light falling into my eyes from M 31 has taken a little over two million years to reach me. Yet this is our closest neighbouring spiral galaxy, with thousands of millions of others extending thousands of millions of light years in every direction. I am reminded that God’s scale is not human scale, God’s scale extends across thousands of millions of cubic light years of space and over thousands of millions of years through time.
When I was a teen, in personal conversation with the Reverend George Searcy, our minister at Oliver United Church, he pointed out that the Bible is not, and does not purport to be, a scientific text. This freed me to recognize that the knowledge our God given intellect discovers through Science does not threaten faith in God. Rather it enhances my wonder at God’s creative power. God’s creative dynamic can most surely encompass evolution by natural selection, just as it involves relativity and quantum mechanics, along with much else still totally unknown to us.
I object to that quiz purporting to be Science, yet containing the utter nonsense of denying God’s own scale with the absurd suggestions that dinosaurs and humans coexisted and that our Earth cannot be a few thousands of millions of years old.
