I believe the egg came first and am an evolutionist. The evidence for evolution is staggering. (No, humans did NOT evolve from monkeys.)
I am also a non-denominational creationist. Quantum theory is even based on the fact that nothing (including the creation of the universe) happens unless there is a consciousness there to observe it. Despite what Einstein said, I believe that God does in a way play dice with the universe. The idea that God or Truth or unqualified Wholeness would in any way require order or discipline is simply unreasonable and not true. Nothing could ever be, ultimately, more chaotic than God's Will.
The way I see it, religion is based on faith whereas science is based on experimentation.
They are based on totally different ways of viewing the world, so I see neither correlation nor disagreement between the two. You either believe in religion or you don't. We shouldn't try to prove or disprove it because it is not based on proof; science is. That is not to say the science is infallible. Science is evolving.
I believe the Bible and all religious writings are the works of humans even if God may have inspired them. Therefore, I conclude that the Bible is not perfect. The creation story of Adam and Eve to me is another of the Bible's parables and that the age of the Earth is also distorted because of human error or simplicity in the stories.
Life arose as the result of an initial unplanned, chance event, through the hand of science, followed by a deliberate, planned event through the hand of God.
The folling gives a theory that is close to my own.
A QUANTUM GOD? by Quittenton, Richard
· Professor Stephen Hawking closes his famous best seller "A Brief History of Time" with the queries, "why does the universe go to all the bother of existing" and "who created Him (God)". These are by far the most important questions facing humanity because our whole philosophical foundation rests on the answers.
· If the universe exists because of a random accident there can be no ultimate reason for our existence. Thus even if we colonized the entire universe we would only be doing what termites do, expand the colony and propagate the species. We would simply be termites of a higher order.
· We cannot "prove" scientifically whether the universe was created or not, or whether a creating God exists or not. The best we can do is to examine what scientific evidence we have and decide where is the most likely probabilities. Science tells us now that our universe is incredibly fine-tuned. There are some 30 or 40 physical variables governing the make-up of matter, which must be almost exactly what they are now for our universe to exist in its present form. For example, if the force of gravity were only a tiny bit different, the universe would have either collapsed upon itself long ago, or expanded so rapidly that no galaxies could exist. There would only be wisps of radiation hurtling through space. If the speed of light were only a tiny bit different, the sun would be either too hot or too cold for life to exist on Earth. If the forces holding the atoms together were only a tiny bit different there could be no hydrogen or suns, which bring life to the universe. The list goes on.
· Science also tells us that in a truly random creation there is no known reason why all these variables should have the values they have. The probability is that they would be vastly different. It would be as if there were a monstrous slot machine with 30 slots, and with the first and only pull on the lever all 30 variables fell precisely into the right slots with all the right values. The probability of this happening is so low that many cosmologists now believe it is more likely that the universe was not an accident, but must have been created.
· But how could this be? Science believes that primordial space was a vacuum and hence inherently unstable. Then terrestrial quantum mechanics predict that matter can accumulate in this vacuum, and that this matter eventually exploded in a big bang to create the universe through one mechanism or another. These "terrestrial" quantum mechanics exist only because we exist. We have no idea whatsoever what really existed before the big bang. We now enter the area of "possibilities", not probabilities.
· Let us speculate that matter did arise in the vacuum of primordial space, perhaps slowly over infinite eons. Let us speculate also that this matter was some form of energy, in a form we might or might not recognize. We do know already that energy can exist in many, many different forms, thermal energy, kinetic energy, acoustical energy, light energy, electrical energy, radioactive energy, magnetic energy, gravitational energy, and perhaps psychic energy, as well as other forms we have not yet detected. We know too that energy flows readily from one form to another. Thus electrical energy becomes thermal energy when passed through an electrical heating element. Thermal energy becomes kinetic energy when used to boil water to expand steam through a turbine. Kinetic energy regenerates electrical energy when the turbine drives an electrical generator. Finally we know that energy, at least as we know it, and mass are interconvertible, one into the other, through Einstein's famous equation, the equation of the atomic bomb.
· We can speculate therefore that matter accumulated in primordial space in some form of energy, a speculation based on terrestrial quantum mechanics. We can speculate further that this energy slowly clumped together, through some mechanism totally foreign to our knowledge of terrestrial physics. We do know that at the elemental level, life is made up of energy, not proteins or vitamins or whatever, just minuscule packets of energy. We know too that energy, as in the laser, can self organize into a pattern. Some scientists believe also that life arose on Earth through the chance combination of elemental particles. It is not unreasonable therefore to speculate that the clumping energy in primordial space slowly self organized into a life form, a life form of prodigious power, and of a nature totally foreign to our understanding of life. We know this life form as God. This is thus one possible origin of God, for God must have an origin too, as Stephen Hawking most aptly noted.
· But why does the universe exist, as Hawking also asked. If the universe was created, as now appears most probable, it would have been an enormous, monstrous task. The total matter in the universe is so large as to be beyond comprehension. To create this huge amount, and to balance it so finely that it had to permit the emergence of life is far, far beyond human understanding. Clearly the universe does not exist solely for humanity. It is far too big for that. Our own galaxy would have been sufficient. Why the billions of other galaxies? The sheer immensity of this task is so enormous that there must have been a reason of comparable immensity to warrant the effort. One possible reason of such immensity is survival.
· We know that all forms of energy slowly degrade, gradually becoming entropy, the state from which no work can be obtained. Thus hot objects cool, losing thermal energy. Moving objects slow down, losing kinetic energy, and so on. It might be therefore that the energy of God was degrading, even if only ever so slowly, over untold and continuing lengthy eons. If this were the case, God would be slowly dying as God's energy gradually converted into entropy. If this was the situation it is at once obvious, and indeed inevitable, that any such sentient life form with the innate power to create a universe, would evolve some Plan to ensure its survival.
· The end object of any such Plan must be the generation of new energy, energy over and above that invested in the Plan itself. This is critical, otherwise the energy is simply being recycled, and thus is not a net gain to the life form behind the Plan.
· Science accepts antimatter and positive and negative energy. It can be postulated therefore that the Plan required the provision of an environment where positive or negative energy could be produced in some manner that did not involve the conversion of mass into energy, as that would be recycling. This environment might thus permit the evolution of life forms with the ability to generate a pulse of positive or negative energy through some conscious act of will alone, a pulse of psychic energy. The Plan would be completed with the flow of the positive energy to God on the death of the life form.
· We know this positive energy as our soul.
· At death the soul screens itself in effect, going into the great energy pool of God if it is positive enough. Thus it would flow through the cosmos as a part of this pool, part of God. Even now souls from all over the universe must be going into this big pool. Recently new planets have been discovered in space and since there are billions of suns besides ours there must be billions of planets besides ours. It would be the mission of the dominant life form on all such planets to develop a soul. Thus while the energy of a single soul may well be infinitesimal, the collective energy from all the souls across he vast universe, and over the eons the universe will survive must be more than enough to justify the monstrous effort. Otherwise why do it?
· It is clear this effort is relatively recent. Our universe is only some 16 billion years old. What was going on in those untold eons before the emergence of the universe? Why is our universe so young? Evidently the evolution of God and the development of the Plan was a very slow process indeed.
· The human brain has been developing over thousands of years. It was during this ongoing development that the soul must have emerged, as the psychic link with God. It would have emerged as the consequence of the development of free will, the conscious ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil.
· It is the decision to activate free will which generates the psychic energy pulse. During life, thought and actions are all funneled through the brain. These mold the psychic energy, making it more positive with good thoughts and actions and more negative with evil ones. Thus at death the soul, which has stored up this psychic energy, has acquired a definite energy pattern. If this is sufficiently positive, it evidently meshes with the energy pattern of God, and so flows automatically into the energy of God, and so increases this energy pool by the energy content of that soul.
· The need for free will to generate an energy form akin to God is so important for humanity that the event has been handed down in allegorical form, in the story of Adam and Eve, where Eve exercised her free will in the taking of the forbidden fruit.
· It is also evident that in possessing an energy form akin to that of God, man is indeed "Made in the Image of God", a pure energy form. The concept of energy is a very recent one, going back only some 250 years the first steam engine. It would have been utterly meaningless for Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed to talk about "energy", so they spoke of the Father, in a male-dominated society. It is significant now that God appeared to Abraham and Moses and Paul as fire and light, pure energy forms. So too is the entry of God into those at Pentecost as "Tongues of Fire".
· Thus this may be why Jesus could tell his disciples with confidence, shortly before he was taken away to be crucified, as reported by John: "On that day you will understand that I am IN my Father and you IN me and I IN you".
· It may be that here Jesus was trying to tell them, before anyone had ever heard of anything called "energy", that the Father was a pool of living sentient energy and that He, Jesus was in this pool and that they would be in this pool too.
· As a pure energy form, it is evident that God has no gender. God is neither he, she, nor it. Obviously therefore it is just as fitting for a woman to serve God as a priest as for a man. In fact it is more fitting, since on the average, women offer more psychic energy of the soul than do men, as a glance into the churches, temples and prisons of any nation will confirm. There are more women than men in churches and temples, and more men than women in prisons.
· Thus if the Book of Genesis were being written today, in the knowledge of today, it might begin:
o "In the Beginning, God fixed the Numbers of Creation. God fixed two numbers, the Strong Nuclear Force, and the Weak Nuclear Force, to operate at the smallest level of existence, the level of the nucleus of the atom; and a third Number, the Force of Gravity to operate at the largest level, the level of planets, stars and galaxies. Then God released enough of God's own energy to provide the substance of the universe, in a great fiery explosion. And God watched as the first two Numbers formed this substance into gases which could burn to provide light and heat for eons; and as the third Number formed these gases into burning suns with planets of the right size and distance from these suns, so that life could emerge on these planets. And some of this life evolved and formed a brain that could form fields of energy. God knew that some of these brains would continue to evolve, until they formed an energy field, which contained a soul, with an energy field, which could merge with the great energy field of God, through the passage of the energy of this soul at death into God's field of energy. And this passage was the ultimate objective of God's Plan, for God wanted the energy of souls. God watched this evolution and saw that it was good. Then God rested. God fixed other Numbers of Creation also, but these three numbers are recorded here so that you might understand the simplicity, the wondrous order and the purpose of the Act of Creation by God".
· This then is the Destiny of Humanity, our reason for existence, to develop a soul that can merge with God and flow throughout the cosmos as a living, sentient field, supporting this and other universes unto eternity.
· In summary, this hypothesis states that God arose out of a pool of primordial energy generated in the unstable vacuum of the cosmos by a random quantum fluctuation; and that God then released enough of God's own energy to create the universe with conditions fixed in advance so that life with souls would evolve, with the energy of souls eventually flowing into the energy field of God, to augment this field.
· Thus life is the result of an initial unplanned, chance event, from the hand of science, followed by a deliberate, planned event, from the hand of God.
· In this concept then, there is no gap at all between science and religion, only a solid bridge.
