A Double Dose of Revelation
Dual Revelation: it's a term more ominous than its definition. Most have heard of the Bible's Book of Revelation, the book of messages given to the apostle John by Jesus while John was in exile on the Greek island of Patmos. Yes, those messages can be unsettling to those who do not have faith in Jesus Christ, but now that I have your attention, you can rest easy knowing that I'm not going to recount prophecies of doom. Dual Revelation is a term that refers to what the Bible, the book of Scripture, reveals about God's creation, both supernatural and natural, and how it overlaps with the book of nature, what observation and science reveal about the natural world, but also what the Book of Nature reveals about the natural world beyond what the Bible explains.
Let's start with the book of the Holy Bible. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1 NASB). It doesn't get more direct than that. There is no mention of a back story because none is needed. God existed, and God created the heavens and the earth. The book of nature has a similar story, which I'll address shortly. Over the next six “days,” God continued with a series of miracles, from creating light to a world teeming with life of all sorts. I distinguished days with quotations because some hold to a literal interpretation of them being 24-hour periods, thus making the earth 6 to 10,000 years old. As I will discuss in subsequent posts, there is strong evidence to show that the days of creation are metaphorical.
At this point, it is essential to note the sequence in which God's creation came into being. As Dr. Hugh Ross said, "I couldn't escape the stunning (and unique) consistency of the biblical texts with scientists’ emerging discoveries about the universe, with natural history, and even with current concepts they couldn't have begun to imagine apart from supernatural inspiration."[1]
This presents a segue to a brief introduction to the book of nature. The book of nature is not, in fact, a book. Rather, it is a metaphor for collective scientific knowledge, both empirical and theoretical. As with the book of Scripture, starting at the beginning, we'll also begin the book of nature at the beginning.
Namely, the Big Bang Theory. Based on recent observational data (collected over the last century), the universe is expanding. The rate of expansion is accelerating, but I will get to that later. If scientists were to reverse the direction of the expanding universe, it would lead back to a single point of space that is almost infinitely massive, infinitely hot, and infinitely dense. Imagine all the matter in the universe that we can see, and much of it that we cannot, being compressed so small that it could be balanced on the tip of a sewing needle. For unknown reasons, that single point of space-time, encompassing 11 dimensions, began to expand rapidly, to the extent that the event was derisively referred to as the Big Bang.[2] The title is misleading because there was no bang.
We have two different accounts of the same event, the creation of the universe. There is good reason to believe that the book of Scripture and the book of nature are two sides of the same coin. In subsequent posts, I'll discuss why merging of both accounts provides the most comprehensive and truest picture of what happened at the beginning of the universe.
[1] Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008), 9.
[2] Ibid, 49.
