Origin Story #2 of 5

Thoughts on David Christian’s Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

Most versions of the modern origin story

      no longer accept the idea of a creator god

Because modern science

      can find no direct evidence for a god. (Origin Story, p. 25)

By faith we know

      that the world was created by the word of God,

so that what is seen

      was made out of things which do not appear. (Hb 11:3)

Our faith has always and will always live in a world with alternative stories. Faith wouldn’t be faith otherwise, would it? That’s how the Gospel of Matthew ends: “And, this story,” the alternative story about how Jesus’ tomb turned up empty, “is still told… to this day”. (Mt 28:15)

Let’s stick with David Christian’s alternative Origin Story for a while. Or, maybe his is the dominant story, and our Origin Story is the alternative. His story with no god “because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god.” (p. 25) Or, our story about how “In the beginning God” decided to call heaven and the earth into being. One believes that science alone dictates how things are. The other, acknowledges that “by faith we know that the world was created by the word of God.” (Hb 11:3) Does one story have to die that the other might live?

Christian’s Threshold number five brings us into our part of the scientific story. It’s the story of how life somehow took form on our planet: “The spooky thing about life is that, though the inside of each cell looks like pandemonium—a sort of mud-wrestling contest involving a million molecules—whole cells give the impression of acting with purpose. …The appearance (or, perhaps, illusion) of purposefulness is new.” (p. 76)  How life happened remains, for the scientific story, a mystery. The author uses words and phrases like “perhaps” or “maybe” or “seem to be”. That’s okay. It’s fair to imagine, as he does, that maybe meteorites seeded early Earth with many of the raw materials of life…” (p. 88) We couldn’t have science without imagination, could we?

When telling his origin story, these eight “thresholds” describe “key transition points” that “give shape to the complicated narrative of the modern origin story”. These eight threshold describe “major turning points, when already existing things were rearranged or otherwise altered to create something new…” (p. 11) It’s tempting, for those of us who believe that the universe was created “by the word of God”, to insert our God of Creation into Christian’s “thresholds”. I’m tempted to say, “See, that’s were God comes in”.  

However, that’s not how our God of Creation story goes. God doesn’t just show up now and then to help the universe traverse the tough thresholds. The first Christians sang hymns like this:

      All things have been created through Christ and for Christ.

            Christ himself is before all things,

            and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:16-17)

Somehow, our creation hymn frees me to hear Christian’s Origin Story with a certain wonder and delight. I don’t have to cram God into the story. He’s just there.