The Big Bang or a Power Behind the Big Bang

When I read the title for this assignment, the first thought that arose in my mind was something a psychology professor said in regard to science. This professor was a wonderful lady with an amazing intellect but on this day she said something that made many people in her class angry. She said people who think solely on the lines of Christianity and creationism could not become scientists, and therefore psychologists. She said the complete knowledge of the evolutionary theory was necessary to complete a psychology degree. This experience was my first with coping with someone who was openly against the belief of creationism. I did not think she could be right in making this statement. By the end of the semester in her class, I found myself doubting my biblical faith and beginning to believe the evolutionary theory was correct. My grades improved and I thought I was learning what I needed to understand for my field. I am getting ahead of myself in discussing this so let me begin more slowly.

My parents ceased attending church when I was nine years old. I had a bible background but not much of one. I knew of Adam and Eve as supposedly the first man and woman as well as many other bible stories. My mom read these stories to me before sleep each night as I found them amazing. It has been many years since I was a little girl and experienced childlike, unquestionable faith in my God. This incident in college when the evolutionary theory seemed more real to me marked a point in time where I could have fallen atheist or kept my faith. I said a prayer in earnest for a sign God existed and the thing I never believed would happen occurred that week-we conceived our little boy.

I know evolutionary theorists will doubt and say I would have conceived my son anyway. I do not believe he would be here without that prayer. His conception brought my faith in God back. Although I have been through a couple of difficult times in trust and faith in God since my son's conception seven years ago, it has not made me budge from my knowledge God is there and he loves me.

For there to be a God, there must be an intelligent design behind the creation. My beliefs in the evolutionary theory came about as I saw the lab rats in experimental psychology act in a way humans likely would if we were encountered by the same stimulus. In this case, we fed the rats' sugary material over plain material and they consumed the sugary material more. I began looking into Darwin's Origin of the Species and identified with him-until that prayer.

Often I have joked with my mom that believers in the evolutionary theory and those who believe in creationism are not that different. There are adherents to creationism who believe the world is only 6,000 years old but others adhere to creationism and believe it to be older. For some, the belief in the Big Bang and the evolutionary theory is as far as it goes. For others, there was action behind that Big Bang. As much as I don't want to disappoint my Christian friends, I lean toward two possibilities-that the days measured in the bible were not "days" in our sense but periods of years. The other possibility is our methods of analysis of dates are wrong and God allowed it to appear this way for us to question.

In life there seems to be two types of people. One type believes in their own intelligence and all answers can be found. The other type believes all questions will not be found this side of the veil. The people who are prone to believing all answers can be found are prone to believing in the Big Bang and evolutionary theory. For these people, their sense of their own intelligence often leaves them too proud to believe someone could be out there who is greater than they.

I have one qualm with the creationism versus evolution debate. I believe in creationism but we evolve every day. As we learn, transform, and understand ourselves better, we evolve. Therefore, evolution and creation simultaneously exist. I suppose this has been the case since the beginning of time. The real debate is about the time and no one has lived long enough to understand how long that has been.