On God's Creativity

I recently encountered a link (http://imgur.com/a/pPJmj#0) to a posting of a grade four Science quiz that I thought must surely be a parody.  It turns out to be real, the mother of the child who brought it home sent Snopes.com a message to verify the child as hers and that she will transfer her child to a different school next school year.

“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.

Space, Time, and ...

I have come to realize something that never seems to get discussed in popularized presentations of Einstein’s theory of relativity: It implies at least a fifth dimension to the make-up of the universe we experience.

In the case of a single dimension, a linear universe, the only possible difference in location and/or movement has to be on a straight line, ahead or back. Deflection from that straight line, to one side or the other, results only from the existence of a second dimension to form a planar universe. Euclidian geometry is based on the two dimensions of the plane and, of course, it breaks down at the larger scale of our whole earth, a sphere that curves into a third spacial dimension. In space differences in location and/or movement can occur ahead or back, to one side or the other, and above or below. Yet in reality, movement also requires time and existence may be separated by duration. Time gives our universe a fourth dimension to permit possible differences in location and/or movement ahead/back, side to side, above/below, and in time. Thus, we sense our most familiar experience of our universe.

Yet Einstein tells us that the entirety of space/time curves at mass. Gravity is curved space/time. If space and time curve, they must curve into ... an aspect of existence other than space and time themselves. Only the existence of yet a fifth dimension to our universe could accept curvature of space and time together. Without such a fifth dimension space/time could not curve. Thus, we must live in a universe defined by a minimum of five dimensions.