The Biblical WorldModel

Christians believe the Bible tells us true things about the world God made.

We can also study that world for ourselves. We can look through telescopes. We can examine rocks and fossils. We can study living things. We can measure what happens and learn the rules by which nature normally works.

So we have God's Word, and we have God's world.

They come from the same God.

The question is how to understand them together.

That can be difficult.

Most scientists today say the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. They say Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The Bible seems to give us a much shorter story of creation and early history.

Many Christians wonder what to do with that difference.

Do we change the way we read the Bible?

Do we reject what scientists see?

Maybe those are not our only choices.

There is another question we should ask first.

Think about Adam

The Bible says God made the first man, Adam, as a grown man.

Adam did not begin as a baby.

Imagine a doctor meeting Adam the next day. The doctor does not know that God just made him.

The doctor examines Adam's bones, teeth, muscles, and organs.

Everything says, "grown man."

That is a good observation.

But then the doctor says, "This man must have spent many years growing up."

That would be wrong.

Adam's body was mature.

The years of growth had never happened.

What the doctor saw that day was real.

The past he expected was not.

That difference matters.

Think about the wine Jesus made

The Gospel of John tells us that Jesus once turned water into wine at a wedding.

Normally, wine has a history.

Grapes grow. They ripen. Someone picks them. The grapes are crushed. The juice ferments.

But that did not happen to the wine Jesus made.

It was real wine.

Someone studying it could have measured what the wine was like.

But those features did not come from the normal history of growing grapes and making wine.

Again, what was there was real.

The usual history behind it had not happened.

Now consider a modern example.

Imagine a new video-game world

Imagine starting a large video game.

The computer builds a world by following rules. It makes mountains, forests, rivers, caves, and valleys.

You enter the game one second after the world appears.

There is a river flowing through a deep valley.

Now imagine you are a scientist inside the game.

You study the river. You learn how quickly water wears away rock. You measure the valley.

Then you work backward.

You calculate that the river would need ten thousand years of game time to carve that valley.

Your measurements could be right.

Your math could be right.

But there is still one question you cannot answer from that calculation alone:

Did the river actually carve the valley?

Maybe it did.

But maybe the computer made the river and valley together when the game began.

If so, ten thousand years tells you how long the river would take to make the valley.

It does not tell you how long the valley has actually been there.

The valley could be one second old.

That is the main idea we want you to see.

Working backward can tell us how long something would take to form. It cannot always tell us whether it actually formed that way.

That does not prove Earth is young.

It does mean that a calculated age and an actual history are not automatically the same thing.

Then the game keeps going

After the game world begins, things start happening inside it.

Rivers keep cutting into their banks. Trees grow. Storms come. Rocks fall. Volcanoes erupt.

Those things are now part of the game's history.

So if you enter the game much later, you have a problem.

Some things were there when the game began.

Other things happened afterward.

How can you tell which is which?

You cannot simply assume everything you see was there from the start.

You also cannot assume everything you see was made by the processes happening now.

You have to investigate.

We think the same question is worth asking about the real world.

How much was there at the beginning?

Every story about the universe has to start with something.

The usual scientific story begins with a universe that already has matter, energy, and dependable rules. It then describes a very long history in which stars, planets, Earth, and life develop.

Genesis begins its story differently.

God creates a world that is already ready to work.

There is light.

There is land and water.

Plants can reproduce.

Animals can reproduce.

The sun, moon, and stars do their work.

Human beings begin as living people.

So the two stories may not begin at the same place.

That could explain part of the disagreement about time.

If God made a world already ready to work, working backward may go too far.

It may pass the real beginning.

Our calculation could describe how long nature would need to make something.

But God may have made it as part of the world's beginning.

Again, Adam gives us the simple picture.

A doctor could work backward from Adam's adult body and describe years of normal human growth.

Those years still would not have happened.

But the world did have a real history

This does not mean everything we see was made at the beginning.

After God created the world, real things happened.

People lived.

Animals reproduced.

Rivers flowed.

Rock wore away.

Mud and sand moved.

The Bible also tells us about Noah. Noah's family and the animals with him were saved through a great Flood that covered the earth.

If the Flood happened on the scale the Bible describes, it would have changed the ground in major ways.

That gives us two simple questions:

What did the Flood do to the earth?

And:

How can we tell the difference between what was there from the beginning and what happened later?

Those are questions we can investigate.

What about scientific dating?

Scientists have many ways of studying the past.

One important method looks at atoms in rocks. Some kinds of atoms slowly change into other kinds. Scientists can measure how much has changed and use that to calculate an age.

The changes are real.

The measurements are real.

The calculation can also be correct.

But the same basic question remains:

What was there when the rock began?

If we know the starting point, working backward can tell us a great deal.

If we assume the wrong starting point, the calculation may describe a history that did not actually happen.

That does not make scientific dating worthless.

It tells us exactly what we need to investigate.

What do we know from measurement?

What are we assuming about the beginning?

What happened afterward?

And does the history we calculate match the history that really happened?

We do not have every answer

We do not claim to have solved every problem.

There are hard questions about rocks, fossils, dating, heat, living things, and the stars.

Some of our ideas may turn out to be wrong.

If they do, we should say so.

We should not reject a real observation because it is difficult for us.

We should also be careful not to confuse an explanation of an observation with the observation itself.

The Bible is our authority.

Our explanations of nature can improve.

That is why this is an ongoing project.

God's Word and God's world

The basic idea is simple.

God made the world.

God also gave us His Word.

The Bible tells us things about the beginning that no human being was there to watch.

The world around us gives us things we can observe and measure today.

We want to understand both together.

That brings us to two questions:

How much was already there when God made the world?

What happened after that?

Those questions are the doorway into this project.

We invite you to explore them with us.