Reading my earlier post, it seems as if, in some ways, I 'took leave of my senses' and cast reason to the winds. In a sense, I suppose I did. In those days in the Elim Pentecostal Church, there was an expectation that you believed the whole bible - it was all true, and the implication, in becoming a Christian in that church, was that I did believe it all.
When I became a Christian, I had 'sorted out' some things in my head already - those difficult 'three way' conversations with Isobel and her dad. But there was a lot of stuff that I was, in the end, forced to 'take on trust'. Not long after becoming a Christian, I went off to university, as I said in my previous post. My initial aim was to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and then to join the army as an officer. That idea went out of the window fairly rapidly, for a variety of reasons, not least among which was that I became very interested in physics, and 'swapped' to become a physics major at the beginning of my second year. I then did a practical research project in low-temperature physics - studying some of the properties of superfluid liquid Helium. At that point, I knew what I 'wanted to be when I grew up' - a low temperature physicist. Which I became, gaining two higher degrees and spending many years working in a laboratory on experiments concerned with superfluid turbulence.
In one of those experiments, we were actually attempting to model what might have happened in the very early universe - right after the 'Big Bang' event. The idea was that the evolution of vortex lines in liquid Helium might be analogous to the evolution of cosmic strings in the very early universe. This required me to study some cosmology - and that brought me face-to-face with a problem I had largely been ignoring - the Book of Genesis. It had, I suppose, been obvious for quite some time that I couldn't, in all honesty, maintain a belief that Genesis was literally true - there was simply too much evidence pointing in other directions, but I had ignored it. Now, in order to remain true to myself, I simply couldn't - I had to try to tackle it.
I have, over the years since then, battled with these questions. I touched, briefly, on these issues in two earlier posts. I am reasonably satisfied, in my own mind, that the universe probably did come into existence via a 'Big Bang', of more-or-less the same sort as described by the cosmologists, but with one important caveat - that God spoke the word which started it all off, and was involved, as He still is, in the creation of the universe. As to life on earth, well, I think we have to believe in evolution - species come into being, thrive, and die off, being replaced by others - the evidence for that is pretty clear - life on earth is clearly not, and never has been, in a 'fixed' state.
Genesis I treat mostly, as I've said earlier, as a figurative, allegorical, story of man's relationship to God, how it went wrong, and the beginnings of God's plan to put it right again, which culminated in the death of Jesus on the cross and his subsequent resurrection. The details of the creation story are relatively unimportant to that, more important, 'back-story'.
That is the only way, at the moment, that I can form a narrative in my mind which satisfies both my scientific mind and my belief in God. Obviously, as I learn more about the bible, and as new scientific discoveries are made, I have to do more thinking, so as to keep these two, slightly uncomfortable, bed-fellows co-existing without either abandoning reason or losing my faith. It's a bit like walking a tight-rope, or trying to cross a minefield on a pogo-stick!
Currently I'm gently pondering the 'problem' of 'earth-like' planets orbiting other stars - which undoubtedly exist, probably in untold millions across the universe - whether they are 'home' to intelligent life, and their relationship to 'our' story. If I believe that God is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient, He has to be God of those worlds too.