Is the Bible literally accurate? Was the world created in six days? On the seventh day, did God rest? Did this all happen thousands of years ago…or millions?
Can you even comprehend what a million years looks like? Feels like? I mean, can you hold that kind of a number in your imagination? Is there any path allowing you to relate to that in a meaningful way?
Dig this: A man named Paul Sereno–a National Geographic explore-in-residence and paleontologist at the University of Chicago–has recovered, assembled, and displayed “a dinosaur with a strange jaw designed to hoover up food” with a vacuum-like mouth, having teeth only in the front. The dinosaur is said to have grazed in what is now the Sahara Desert 110 million years ago.
Are you listening to this? I said 110 million years ago.
Is somebody kidding me here? Are we saying that mammals walked this earth 110 million years ago? Does anybody have even a beginning idea, even a primitive concept, of how long 110 million years is?
Now you tell me this: How is it possible, in the face of evidence such as this, for anyone to claim with a serious face that God created the earth and gave it Life a few thousand years back?
Now, what is really astonishing, what is really mind-blowing, is the realization that 110 million years is like yesterday in the history of the Universe. Our earth is one of the youngest of the planets in the cosmos.
What does that do to your mind? Does it kind of rattle things around a bit? Does it sort of shake things up?
And where does God fit into all of this? Did “God” create the heavens and the earth? How? When? For what?
I was asked, a few years ago, by Matt Lauer on the TODAY show on NBC, what is God’s message to the world? “We have only 30 seconds, so could you put it into one short paragraph?” I told Matt I could do better than that. I could put it into five words…
“You’ve got me all wrong.”
I don’t think we understand a thing about the Universe. Not a doggone thing, on the scale of Reality. And I don’t think we understand a thing about God. Not a doggone thing, on the scale of Ultimate Reality. We have the arrogance to think that we do…and that arrogance is leading us to kill each other. (SEE: The New Wars of Religion, The Economist, Nov. 3-9, 2007, an 18-age special report on faith and politics, mentioned in this space two days ago.)
Do you think we might, one day, actually grow up? Actually admit that we know nothing…nothing…about God and Life and Ultimate Reality?
Yet if this is true, where does it leave us? Ah, yes, that is the question, isn’t it….
As for dinosaurs, is it possible that the real dinosaur here is the Creationist Doctrine of some religions, a dogma that would have us believe that all life on the earth was created a few thousand years ago?