top of page
Pools in the Desert
Science, the Bible and Life
Search
The starting point for being a Christian is who you are now. Paul talks about our status in life and tells us not to worry too much about changing it (in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 7, verses 17 - 40). We don't have to be anything in particular or special in the world to be important to God. He chose us before the beginning of time (Ephesians, chapter 1, verse 4). Paul writes that if we are married we should stay that way, although if married to an unbeliever and he or she wants a divorce then we should let them go. If we are single, then it's fine to stay like that, although getting married is good as well. Anyone who was a slave should work out their Christian life in their current situation, but it's good to obtain freedom if possible. His point is that we need to live as Jesus tells us now, as we are. If we then end up changing status, then that is fine and we should continue living as Christians in our new lifestyle, but our changed situation in itself doesn't make us any better or worse as disciples of Christ.
Sometimes when reading this passage we can get the feeling, "O dear, that means that I should put up with my lot in life and not try to better myself." However, this and other passages discussing similar issues, are not talking about that. God is indeed interested more in who we are and how we are living than what status we have in society, but social reform is a very Christian concern and many Christians have rightly been involved with the improvement of conditions in the workplace, the education of children, the equality of women, the abolition of the slave trade and so on. Jesus told us to treat others as we would want them to treat us, so the enhancement of life for others is an obvious outworking of that.
If, though, you are a woman who is not being treated equally to the men around you, if you are from an ethnic minority that is disadvantaged because of discrimination by society or institutions, if you have a disability and your skills are being overlooked because people can't see past physical or mental differences, if it has been drummed into you that you are less important or less significant than others by your family, friends or school, or if you are feeling cornered by the knock-on effects of positive discrimination, God loves you as you are, wants you to come to him as you are and surrender your life to him, wants to use you in his Kingdom and is eager for you to play your role in his Church - now.
Whoever you are and whatever your situation, God's heart is for you.
If you fit none of the descriptions above, then the same applies: God loves you, wants you to come to Him and live your life with him - now. You might be a middle-class, white, heterosexual, middle-aged, British man or woman, living in middle England, perhaps with a generally successful and peaceful life; neither the difficulties of deprivation nor the comforts of affluence make us of less interest to our Heavenly Father. “I know the plans that I have for you,” He said, “plans to prosper you, not harm you – to give you a hope and a future.” (Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 11) That was spoken to a nation going through a hard time and about to experience worse, not to people living at ease. God’s heart is for everyone, always.
Of course, if you are able to improve your situation, then that's great as well. If you can't then you can still live an amazing Christian life; if you can, then you can continue to live that amazing life once your circumstances have changed. God is for you now and has an incredible life ready for you today.
I've been asked to comment on an article which states that all memory of what happened before the Big Bang was erased by the brief period of what is known as inflation, just prior to the Big Bang itself. The article in question is not the only one to make this point. It is actually a very interesting topic in several ways and raises two immediate questions: what does the inflation model tell us, and how likely is it to be correct?
Looking in depth at the Big Bang left a few anomalies for cosmologists. Therefore, a model was proposed which removed some of those anomalies. The idea was that just before the Big Bang, a tiny fraction of a second after the beginning of space and time, the size of the Universe grew massively over another tiny fraction of a second. This growth is called inflation. After that incredibly brief period of rapid expansion, inflation switched off and the Big Bang itself took over, with a much slower rate of growth of the Universe. What happened during inflation is said to have provided the starting configuration for the Big Bang itself and many people have written that it is not possible to work out what happened before that. Of course, that doesn't stop physicists from wanting to know and trying to come up with methods to find out.
The biggest problem with inflation as a model is that there is no clear cause for it and there is no obvious reason why it stopped - the physics involved is currently quite vague. It does, though, provide a means of ironing out several problems with the Big Bang, which is why it is taken seriously. Of course, if inflation did really remove all means of knowing what happened before, trying to find its cause is a meaningless exercise. We would then be left with all sorts of possible scenarios which can never be tested: time and space began an instant before the inflation; or space had been growing exponentially forever (inflating since infinitely before the Big Bang) until the final stage of inflation occurred, which is the only part that left any record for us; or perhaps our Universe grew out of the collapse of a previous one. There are other feasible variations around this theme, but if the final moments of inflation wiped out all memory of what came before, then we shall never be able to investigate. I can't imagine cosmologists giving up on such an intriguing quest in a hurry and until the case is proven to be hopeless.
We need to remember, though, that all this presupposes that the Big Bang and inflation did actually take place. At the moment, given the physics we know and the observational evidence, an inflation-Big Bang model fits the data better than any other scientific theory. However, there is a huge amount that we don't know, about which I have written before: dark matter and dark energy are thought to account for vastly more of the Universe than what we do know about, and if we ever end up unifying all of the fundamental forces, that could revolutionize physics even more than quantum mechanics and relativity did in the early 20th century. Who knows what that might end up meaning for our understanding of the origins of the Universe? I think that, however much there is always a temptation to hold onto what we already know, we have to accept that a fully unified description of the fundamental forces and an understanding of dark energy and dark matter could well totally rewrite scientific cosmology. We could even end up losing the Big Bang forever.
bottom of page