By: MARGARET BROWN
Margaret Brown is one of The Resident’s longest standing contributors and has lived in the Algarve for more than 20 years. As well as Point of View, she also writes Country Matters twice a month.
In the Old Testament, the first chapter of Genesis is a comprehensive and lyrical assessment of how the Universe began, including the evolvement of everything we know as the natural world.
Attributed to Moses through known historical fact, the book is dated from 1446BC.
That God, accepted in biblical terms as having neither a beginning nor an end initiated this out of emptiness, directed every particle to its rightful place and continues to take an active role in his creation, is a lot to take on board in the 21st Century: and to do it in six days?
It is worth remembering that life divided up into seconds, minutes and hours by Greenwich Mean Time has not always been so, but was lived for millennia according to human circadian rhythms.
The rising and setting of the sun and phases of the moon had governed life from the beginning and in the Bible it was written: “A day is like a thousand years” (Psalm 90), echoed in the New Testament as “A thousand years are like a day” (2Peter v 8), which goes some way to rationalising the first Chapter of Genesis.
Because new scientific discoveries and the theories of cosmologists have a ring of truth and today are widely available through the media, they are used as argument against the theory of Divine creation.
To believe either way requires a leap into the unknown but whereas science feeds only the mind, a benevolent Creator offers nourishment to body, mind and spirit sufficient to sustain through the ups and downs of existence.
There are other firmly held theories of how it all began but none as polarised or hotly disputed as these two assumptions: but at least the presence of a divine Creator offers hope for the future.
