Trying to relate...
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Trying to relate the Creation accounts in Genesis with modern science is tricky but not impossible. Long ago, Martin Luther offered sage advice on this matter:
... one must accustom oneself to the Holy Spirit's way of expression. With the other sciences, too, no one is successful unless he has first duly learned their technical language... Now no science should stand in the way of another science, but each should continue to have its own mode of procedure and its own terms.
(Luther's Works, Vol. 1, p. 47)
Theology (which is itself a science [the Science of God]) and the physical sciences each have their own legitimate realms and so need not conflict.
One such connection between theology and the physical sciences is evidenced in the text's account of light preceding the creation of the sun (1:3, 6). This could be compatible with the Big Bang Theory and its claim that the energy created by the Big Bang is still being transmitted, ever inflating the universe or even other parallel universes (Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality, esp. pp. 22-56).
If instead the Trinity doctrine is the focus of treatment of this text (on grounds that God speaks in the plural at some points in these accounts), Martin Luther cites a helpful image first written by Augustine: "The Father is the Mind; the Son is the Intellect; and the Holy Spirit, the Will" (Luther's Works, Vol. 1, p. 50).
... one must accustom oneself to the Holy Spirit's way of expression. With the other sciences, too, no one is successful unless he has first duly learned their technical language... Now no science should stand in the way of another science, but each should continue to have its own mode of procedure and its own terms.
(Luther's Works, Vol. 1, p. 47)
Theology (which is itself a science [the Science of God]) and the physical sciences each have their own legitimate realms and so need not conflict.
One such connection between theology and the physical sciences is evidenced in the text's account of light preceding the creation of the sun (1:3, 6). This could be compatible with the Big Bang Theory and its claim that the energy created by the Big Bang is still being transmitted, ever inflating the universe or even other parallel universes (Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality, esp. pp. 22-56).
If instead the Trinity doctrine is the focus of treatment of this text (on grounds that God speaks in the plural at some points in these accounts), Martin Luther cites a helpful image first written by Augustine: "The Father is the Mind; the Son is the Intellect; and the Holy Spirit, the Will" (Luther's Works, Vol. 1, p. 50).
