Episcopal Press and News

'Big Bang' Discovery Provides Common Ground

Episcopal News Service. August 19, 1992 [92179C]

The momentous findings supporting the "big bang" theory of creation provide a common ground for two old antagonists -- religion and science. The discovery of ripples of matter, indicating that an explosive birth billions of years ago led to today's expanding cosmos of stars and galaxies, reinforces religious themes that order was created out of chaos by divine intervention, some scientists and theologians agree. Many scientists would consider the idea that God created the universe "a more respectable hypothesis at this point in time than at any time in the last 100 years," said the Rev. Frederic B. Burnham, a science historian and director of the Trinity Institute in New York City. "Both the contemporary scientific account and the age-old biblical account assume a beginning," said Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich at a 1990 colloquy on origins at the Washington National Cathedral. "And its essential framework, of everything springing forth from that blinding flash, bears a striking resemblance with those succinct words of Genesis 1:3: 'And God said, Let there be light.'"