The Bible and Science...
The world is threaded by two kinds of great stories---those told by the world's many ancient scriptures and those told by modern studies. Both kinds of stories are instructive, sometimes even inspiring, but both are linited.
The two greatest stories in the world, those of the Bible and science, are bankrupt if taken on their own. They cannot pay their debts. They often claim to explain everything and then they cannot do it. Both great stories tell the truth but neither of them tells the whole truth, and both of them tell things that are either untrue or misleading.
The Dominican Biblical Institute aims to help weave the threads together, particularly those of the Bible and science. There was a time when the stories of religion and science blended into one. It can happen again---a story that is even more inspiring than of old.
The challenge then is to tell the story of the universe in a way that does justice to both science and the Bible, and that is open to the truth of all the world's scriptures and studies. Weaving such a story is not easy. In fact it is never finished and, at best, is a work in progress. But we can begin.
California, 1929
In 1929, a California based astronomer named Edwin Hubble dicovered that the stars, instead of being set in place, were all moving steadily away from each other, at speed, as if from a single centre. The universe was not only immense, it was expanding. Later, by measuring the distances and speeds, it was possible to calculate when the expansion started-over 13 billion years ago! For many scientists, that is when the universe began. So here we begin our story. The scientists may modify their views—some already have—but we are now certain that the universe is unimaginably old and vast.
Hubble worked from a telescope on the ground. Later his work inspired a much greater telescope, in space—the Hubble Spacecraft, which probes the universe and helps to unfold its story.
The story may be told in many ways and from many viewpoints. Here it is very human-centred, divided into only two major sections-—before and after 500BC—and each section has three parts, or ages or phases. Theses six phases often seem full of gaps, overlaps and reversals, yet they form a single story. Each phase contains at least one major development.