God and the Astronomers

"WHEN A SCIENTIST writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters. My views on this question are close to those of Darwin, who wrote, “My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design in the details.” However, I am fascinated by the implications in some of the scientific developments of recent years. The essence of these developments is that the Universe had, in some sense, a beginning—that it began at a certain moment in time, and under circumstances that seem to make it impossible not just now, but ever—to find out what force or forces brought the world into being at that moment. Was it, as the Bible says,

“Thine all powerful hand that creates the worldout of formless matter”?

No scientist can answer that question; we can never tell whether the Prime Mover willed the world into being or the creative agent was one of the forces of physics, for the astronomical evidence proves that the Universe was created 15 billion years ago in a fiery explosion, and in the searing heat of that first moment, all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed.
[.....]
....we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. All the details differ, but the essential element in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.This is the crux of the new story of Genesis. It has been familiar for years as the ‘Big Bang” theory, and has shared the limelight with other theories, especially the Steady State cosmology; but adverse evidence has led to the abandonment of the Steady State theory by nearly everyone, leaving the Big Bang theory exposed as the only adequate explanation of the facts."
(God and the Astronomers, by Rober Jastrow :9-10, 14)


I have a few thoughts on some of that...and maybe I'll write them later. One note, be careful of the words he uses. You might be scratching your head wondering why he is an agnostic if "...the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world." There are reasons for what these fellows believe, same with Darwin. As I am not an agnostic, I disagree with them.