B. I want to raise a couple of points. First, my comment about the biblical passage Genesis 1:14, “And God said, ‘Let their be lights in the expanse of the sky....’ ” This doesn’t sound like magic to you? I imagine a robed and gray-beared sky god spreading his arms, and in a deep, resonating voice speaking the words “Let their be lights in the expanse of the sky,” and suddenly the sun and moon appear. Again I ask you, that’s not magic?
I put forward the possibility that the Bronze Age author of the text had no idea what else to say. It’s been suggested that he never named the “lights” because the surrounding peoples worshipped the sun and moon as gods, and he didn’t want to give those heavenly bodies any more mention than was necessary.
I will ask one more time, does this passage not ring with magic? His mere words alone were enough for the sun and moon to appear in the sky. No other creative mechanism is even hinted at, and so often I have heard that indeed, God’s word alone was enough for the creative act to occur. Magic!
A. Now on to “a universe from nothing,” which is actually the title of a book by Lawrence Krauss. Is the universe truly from nothing? Doseofreality asks, “Why do people assume the big bang came from nothing?? Nothing doesn't go Bang.”
I want to take you back to 1916. Einstein predicted that year that large gravitational fields should magnify objects behind them. The proof came ten years later when a distant galaxy was photographed with two smaller galaxies on either side of it. Those two galaxies were identical to one another because they were images of a more distant galaxy hidden behind the galaxy at the centre of the trio. We all understand that a lens magnifies images and the phenomena photographed in 1926 is called gravitational lensing, but how does it work? Einstein predicted that the space around a massive object would be warped. The lens, in this instance, is simply warped space. Think about that for a moment. The only thing magnifying the distant galaxy is empty, warped space. We think of empty space as containing nothing, of being a void, so what is there to warp? It must be space it self. We think of empty space as nothingness but in fact it must be something. As Krauss says in his book, “nothing is something.” In this instance space must behave as a fabric that can be twisted and distorted so as to act as a lens. This is not something we can grasp in our every day experience, but we can show it through observation and experimentation.
Though the Big Bang may appear to come from nothing, in this case nothing likely is again something, that we don’t yet understand. Physics, at least, is working toward an understanding, a greater understanding than is found in the simple words, “And God said, ‘Let there be...’”
