The Divine Universe

Whoever composed the first chapter of Genesis was a genius, but his or her genius is seldom recognised. This story of creation is not just inspired poetry, a beautiful hymn that was probably part of the regular worship of the second temple; it celebrates a brilliant discovery. Two and a half thousand years ago an intensely observant and deeply insightful philosopher poet pondered about the nature of the physical world.
The author was by no means the first to recognise that the world had not always existed from eternity, that it had a beginning, and to believe in divine creation. Australian aborigines recognised this in prehistoric times and had their own stories of how the world came into being. There were similar traditions in other parts of the world. Much more impressive is the brilliant realization that the world did not come into being suddenly, but involved a process of development, directed by God (Elohim). The poet used his or her powers of observation, intuition and deduction to describe that process in much the same way that Darwin did to sketch out the process of animal evolution. The accuracy of the description is astonishing.
There is only one serious correction we would want to make today. We know now that the stars appeared before the planets. Dry land appeared above the water that at first covered the earth due to wrinkling as it cooled and shrank; and this happened billions of years later than the formation of the first stars. But, apart from their positions and motion as bright spots of light, the poet knew nothing of the objects in the sky. The mistake was not due to any misinterpretation of the data available at the time, but to a lack of almost any data at all.
Apart from that, the order of events is consistent with what scientists believe now. The appearance of light may not have been the very first event now known to science, but it is very close. Before photons established themselves as stable entities, the universe was in an extremely chaotic state. The moment when the universe became transparent and there was space between the photons was indeed a critical point in cosmic history. It was the separation of light from darkness.
There are two main differences between the Genesis hymn and big bang theory. The most noted one is the difference of timescale – six days compared to some 14 billion years. This current figure is not set in concrete, of course. Some new discovery may cause astronomers to revise their estimate radically. This kind of thing has been happening with quite disorienting frequency in recent years.
The other difference is the amount of data available to the modern cosmologist, compared to what the poet had access to. In fact, no single member of the scientific community possesses all the data that has accumulated during the last fifty years. It is distributed among hundreds of specialists who share only their most significant new discoveries.
There are many who notice only the differences between the Genesis account and the contemporary scientific one, and they pass a negative judgment lacking in any historical perspective.
There is also an eccentric religious movement from the U.S.A. that uses pseudo science to discount the current description of the evolution of the universe. But this is not science; it is religion, and it springs from a somewhat superstitious attitude to the Bible, similar to extremist Moslems’ attitude to the Koran.
So, sadly, it seems there are many people unable to appreciate the genius of the inspired author of one of the world’s greatest religious works of art.