By Cortland P Hill, MME PE

Raised in a strong Christian home in the 50’s, I thought I believed in the Bible, but had seldom read it. I knew all the famous stories, including, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

But I had a Mechanical Engineer’s inquiring mind that needed to know HOW God did it. In college and later I kept aware of some of the advances in “scientific” thinking that led me to believe that because some distant stars were billions of light years away (due to the red shift of their light now reaching earth), it seemed to me that additional time was needed for them to get there in the first place. Why didn’t the astronomers talk about that additional time when they calculated the age of the universe? Of course, billions of years from the Big-bang to the present gave all the time necessary for life to start and evolve into the wondrous variety and balance we enjoy now!

Busy with a career, I never did resolve that lengthy time conundrum. I figured God did it, probably using the Big-bang, and some physics I did not yet understand. It never really bothered me – until the day, now some 13 years ago that I encountered Him and his Son, Jesus, in an unforgettable conversion experience. It wasn’t long until I began to understand that all along I had been asking the wrong question: it wasn’t HOW God did it; it should have been WHY did he do it? I had been BLINDSIDED by what had been presented as “science” all those years, by not asking the right questions:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. How did I get here?
4. Where am I going?

Come to find out, philosophers had been asking these questions for millennia. Theologians of my cultural persuasion had answers for some of these, scientists had answers for others, but as yet I had not found a coherent set of answers to them all. The biggest problem for me from the “science of evolution” was that there was no answer to the Why question; there was no PURPOSE in a universe filled by chance and time. I then began to understand that science cannot answer questions of purpose. Science deals with cause and effect; or effect and cause. Science does not admit to an Ultimate Cause, perhaps because science will not admit to the existence of God.

The Bible starts out “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, ten of the most profound words ever written. The point I had missed for 65 years was that Creation was a SUPERNATURAL event; it was not a NATURAL event or series of events as science attempts to describe. I had become so wrapped up in NATURAL propositions as to how God did it (or might have done it) that I completely forgot about how the Bible speaks of Creation. It was accomplished SUPERNATURALLY, in six literal days, recently!

So, if you are like I was, searching for NATURAL explanations for the above four questions (or even only one of them), try spending some time understanding SUPERNATURAL and the power of God. Perhaps God is bigger than you have yet imagined!