Text Proverbs 8:22-35

Where was God in the creation of the universe, and what difference would it make if God were not there at all?

They are mind-boggling questions. They are questions beyond the range of science. They are questions that only religion can pose.

let us take a  brief  ride through the universe in search of God. It’s a long-distance trip and in order to get where we want to go, we’ll have to ride on the wings of science for a ways. We’ll let science take us as far as it can, and then let the Bible carry us from there.

Current scientific thinking can take us all the way back to the forth  verse of the Bible, in Genesis 1, where we read that prior to creation, the universe was without form and void. Genesis and science both bring us back to the same place. A point at which there was nothing there.

Creation is the event that put something there for the first time. Science tells us that this event was something called the Big Bang or some variation of that. Something happened that triggered a fantastic explosion of matter.

Why do scientists believe that? Quite simple, really. If you trace the paths of all the large objects in the sky and work backwards along the same trajectories, everything ends up in the same place.

The question of what happened at creation, is a question for science, not religion. Science has much better tools than religion for figuring that out. But in asking the question of what happened at creation, we have reached the limit of where science can take us. In exploring the creation of the universe, we find that we have to go to at least two places that science cannot reach.

First, there is the issue of reverse infinity, or negative infinity. Did time come into existence with the creation of the universe? If so, that implies that there was a point at which time did not exist. If that is true, then how was time created? That’s really a more interesting question than how was the universe created, and it’s not something science can answer. On the other hand, if time did not come into existence with creation, then time must have already existed before creation. If time existed before creation, then creation doesn’t take us back to the beginning at all. We have to go back further than creation and again, that takes us into a place where science is not equipped to go.

So it is left to us in the religious field to try and provide some sort of explanation for time from outside the realm of science.

Genesis is a good place to look. It has a profound comment on this situation couched within its story of creation, in the very first words of the Bible. Notice that Genesis does not say, “In the beginning, creation.” It says, “ I am the Beginning and the End; the Almighty God. ”

Therein lies a way of solving the problem of time. God is not bound by time. We say this in our creeds and in our faith statements when we speak about life everlasting. With God, you never reach a point at which time ends. With God, time stretches on to infinity in eternal life.

If God is not bound by time in the future, then it works the same way in the opposite direction, in the past. There is no point at which God ends and there is no point at which God begins. Whether time existed before creation or whether it began at creation does not matter. With God, there is no unaccounted for  emptiness lying there before time came into being. With God, there is no unaccounted for emptiness if time existed before creation. Either way, God was already there.

This exploration of the concept of time leads to the second issue, the creation of something from nothing. Science deals with systems and laws and cause-and-effect. There is nothing in science that can or ever will explain the creation of something out of nothing. How can time not exist, and then suddenly exist? Where did the components of the matter that blew into existence during the Big Bang come from? How could the concept of directions, of north and south, not exist and then suddenly exist?

At some point in any discussion of creation, you run into a huge wall with the transition between when nothing existed and when something existed. How do you get something out of nothing?

God is the only answer I know to the question of how do you get something from nothing. With a negatively infinite God, there never was a time when there was nothing. Psalm 89:12 speculates that there was a time when north and south did not exist. And then suddenly they existed. But they didn’t come from nothing because something was there. God was there.

Genesis puts to rest the scientific dilema of something being created out of nothing. The universe was created out of something. It was created out of God. The universe was created because God made it happen. We as Christians declare that to be true.

In trying to imagine a universe without God, we have to admit, first of all, that it just might be an impossible task. We don’t know of any way to explain how something comes from nothing. There is no way that the universe, what we know as reality, could exist if not for God.

The question of what would the universe be like without God has a very simple answer. If you could erase every thought from your head, every feeling, every sensation so that it was all just a blank, that’s what the universe would be like without God. It would be, just as Genesis says, without form and void.