In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made.

Relax. It begins with a sunset.

The sky was afire with magnificent textures of red and gray, orange splashes overlaying brilliant blue – in short, it was easily one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen, one that Impressionists would die to be able to paint. I watched it evolve; running in the evening, I saw it transformed from brilliant white sunlight shimmering through layered grays to the fiery canopy of colors that impressed my son when I picked him up from day care.

“Wow,” he said, “It must have taken God a long time to paint all of those clouds!” - and so I sighed.

As strange as it may seem, cosmologists believe that before the primordial fog cleared, before light could travel unhindered through space, sound waves reverberated freely throughout the universe.

I have followed evolutionary debates with great interest – though it’s not my intent to rehash them here. It’s revealing enough that I always find it interesting when the “Creation Science” types take the stand. As a rule, they have no evidence of their own, only holes in other people’s ideas, and some of those require quite a stretch of the imagination. There’s something dishonest, I believe, in stretching the definition of “science” to such lengths to justify their faith. In my own personal journey from faith to doubt – and back to faith again – the blind denial of such evidence has always struck me as funnier than the disbelief of Thomas after the Resurrection.

Even though the “Creation Scientists” have re-invented themselves in the last decade, it is still a challenge of us versus them, of believers versus the pagans, the wholly unnecessary “war” between science and religion. A duality without compromise, a duality of the imagination, no quarter asked or given.

The sound waves may have originated in the first instant of the universe's life, when the cosmos underwent an extraordinary expansion. In fact, some astronomers would rather call the Big Bang the “Big Stretch.” Within a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, a region of space smaller than a proton is thought to have ballooned to the size of Earth.

I rummage through our bookshelves, and find it, a book on ecology aimed at his grade level. There, clearly outlined, is the water cycle. Clouds, sun, and river dominate the picture. Nowhere is there a Deity compelled to hand-paint wisps of water vapor in the atmosphere, nowhere are there angels flitting to sculpt shapes pleasing to the eye. Re-reading it with him, I ask him why he thinks God is enslaved to such menial tasks – why he limits his God like that. It’s heavy for a seven-year old, but I remember my own crisis of faith, and will not let him stumble into it on his own.

“But where does God come into it, Daddy?” he asks, and I see the concern on his face.

So I smile.

Vacuum-spawned particles are constantly flickering in and out of existence around us, arising from and sinking back into the void. During inflation, this process, like everything else in the universe, was magnified tremendously. The rapidly expanding early universe imparted enough energy to these particle wannabes that instead of quickly subsiding into the vacuum, they remained in the real world.

Recently I finished reading a smugly atheistic science-fiction story – patronizing in its own assumptions, condescending towards the old-fashioned theist believing in a bearded grandfather God who has nothing better to do than sit around and paint clouds. That sort of condescension is exactly the attitude I want to avoid; after all, I am not an atheist, let alone a smug one. Yet I do not wish my son to ignore the evidence of the world around him, the grand spectacle of nature and natural processes. It’s one thing to ask for belief in the unseen, but even Thomas wasn’t asked to disbelieve his own eyes. Indeed, it was quite the opposite.

It’s interesting that prior to Darwin’s time the point of science was to illuminate the workings of God by discovering how the natural world worked - and by describing it. The idea was often referred to as Natural Theology, and it simply claimed that the Divine showed Itself through the natural world around us. Psalm 19:1-2 might have well been the motto of Natural Theology, saying: “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands, day after day they pour forth speech, night after night, they display knowledge”.

The above paragraph is important. Science does not define the natural world – it can only describe it, following it’s own logical rules. I wonder why those who believe most feverently that the Universe – the natural world – was created by a divine power, seem the unable to accept the description of that creation unless this Divine Power – limitless and all-powerful – is shackled to a design plan of seven days, four thousand years, the occasional unevidenced worldwide flood and a miracle or two every so often just to keep the rabble in line.

God works in mysterious ways, son – who are we to tell the Divine how to do things? Maybe, just maybe, God works through the nature that It created. Maybe it’s possible that this duality, this conflict between the evidence of science and the beliefs of our faith, is only a problem if we make it one. Why is it necessary to give up theories of convection currents to say “What a beautiful sunset God has made”?

He smiles at me, and seems to understand, and I love him. I could say that certain endorphins flowed from a series of neurons to another, that certain endocrine glands all performed their function – and that would be true. Yet the same event could simply be described as “I love my son”, and that is as true as any chemical equation. The difference is just in a point of view, and as my son tries to tickle me when I give him a hug, I know exactly which point of view I want to keep.

The sudden influx of countless particles from the vacuum was like a stone thrown into the dense particle pond of the early universe, sending out ripples--pressure waves. And pressure waves through a gas are nothing more than sound waves. The entire universe rang like a bell.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made.

Relax.