Genesis 1:1 (NIV)
¹ In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The whole Bible begins with the simplest and yet most mind-blowing concept of all:  An eternal God who created everything.

 These days a lot of people seem to have a harder time accepting these two biblical assumptions than the people of the past.  Some chalk it up to us being more informed, or more intelligent, or more scientifically advanced.  But when you think about the fact that some of the greatest scientific minds that the world has ever known, such as Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, and a host of others, accepted these facts as axiomatic and not at all incompatible with either intelligence or scientific thought, it should make us pause before we claim that the reason we don’t believe is because of our higher intelligence.

Some people wonder where God came from.  The simple answer is that God didn’t come from anywhere; He always has been.  This is hard for a lot of people to accept, but that ‘s because we are finite beings who are firmly stuck in the time-space continuum, and it is impossible for us to really grasp something/someone who exists outside of space and time.  When you talk about God, questions like “where does He live” or “when did He begin” have no meaning.  He doesn’t live in any specific location like we do, because He is not bound by space and is not a part of the universe that He created.  He is present everywhere in the universe at the same time (which is why He can hear the prayers of everyone in the world simultaneously), but He is not trapped in the universe that He created as we are.  Some have tried to understand this by talking about additional dimensions that we can’t see that God must be “in,” but even that doesn’t help us finite beings really understand a being who is infinite and who exists outside the universe as well as being ever present inside of it.

There is also a lot of talk these days about where the universe itself came from.  It seems that some people think that belief in a Creator God is somehow “unscientific.”  But actually it is no more unscientific than any other theory of origins – it just allows for the supernatural to play a part in creation instead of restricting possibilities to purely natural processes.  The facts of physics actually support the idea of a supernatural creator in that they state that every effect has to come from a cause sufficient to produce it.  And an all-powerful God who exists outside of the universe (no matter how hard that is to fit into our finite brains) would definitely be a cause sufficient to create the universe we see.  Without God, we actually end up having to believe that the universe somehow created itself by some kind of massive explosion, basically from nothing (since if anything existed to explode before the explosion, then there has to be a cause for that something!).

But the God of the Bible, the way that He has revealed Himself – infiinte, all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and filling the universe (omnipresent) – is an adequate first cause.  Everywhere we look, we see elements of design and intelligence in the world around us, in the solar system, and in the galaxies that we see around us.  Even our very DNA is loaded with information so cleverly constructed that a single microscopic gene can hold volumes and volumes of information, everything needed to fully construct whichever organism it is designed to produce.  All of the pieces of our world fit together in ways that have filled true scientists with awe and wonder thoughout the world and throughout history, and that are the envy of engineers and designers .  (A lot of our newest breakthroughs in scientific areas like flight, microengineering, and even medicine have been influenced and informed by structures and chemical elements of birds, fish, and even insects!)

The fact of the matter is that every modern “scientific” idea about the origins of our universe and life in it are unproven and untestable theories.  But in the Bible we have received an eyewitness report from the only being who was actually there when the universe began, and He has told us exactly how it happened and who created it.  Our options are to join with the greatest minds in history to believe the testimony of our Creator God, or we can choose not to believe and to try to make up our own stories of how things got started.

As for me, I believe God.