13. Beginner Bible Course: How did the universe happen?

EPISODE 13  The simple Bible overview of…HOW DID THE UNIVERSE HAPPEN?

For economic reasons...

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...my six siblings learned to play with very simple toys. One of our favorites was dominoes. I'm guessing you've seen the little slats with the dots on them that you line up. That's not how we normally play dominoes. The Nelson boys use the dominoes for construction. We'd build domino towers. It goes like this to Domino's stood on their ends, upright one domino across that's the first floor to more dominoes up another across that's the second floor. Our goal was to see how many stories we could get in our domino tower. My hands weren't the steady asked and I was the littlest brother.

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So I usually could only get up five or six stories. And it leaned like the tower of PISA. My brother, Tom had the steady hands of a brain surgeon. If my memory serves me correctly, he built one 18 stories, tall, his secret spending a lot of time on the bottom. If you didn't get those first few floors, square and true, you are not going to build a Tommy style skyscraper in these next few podcasts. We're opening up to Genesis chapters. One through three. I need to tell you we're going to take it slow. They're foundational chapters in so many things. So let's crack open the book and take a look.

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Genesis one, one starts out very simple, but profoundly in the beginning, God made the heavens in the earth. I draw two boxes on the Blackboard for my students. I label them the universe. Then I ask them to imagine babysitting a group of preschoolers and walking them through the door of a room. When they opened the door inside as a perfect replica of the Eiffel tower built out of 10,000 plus Legos, I asked them, what do you think those preschoolers would say? Standing there at the door. Sometimes my students will say, well, the boys would run in and kick it over. We're going to talk about boys and girls in Genesis chapter two.

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So hold on. But most of them say, they'd stand there, their eyes bugging out and ask something like, wow, who Pell Pat? I draw pointing in to one of the boxes and arrow. And then we have this discussion. There's basically two views of how the universe, all of that. There is God here. One is by accident. The other is on purpose. I label one box chance. I label the box with the arrow, pointing into it by design Christians and other world religions and many philosophers. And even scientists say it had to be by design others, looking at it, say it had to be by chance because there's no one or nothing outside of the box.

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Carl Sagan was one of those. He said, the universe or cosmos is all there is Was or ever will be. It's a closed box. Nothing's on the outside or no one whichever side you happen to be on. I encourage you to have respect for both sides. There are those standing at the door, staring into creation, saying, wow, who made all this? Seeing the incredible intricacies and complexities and the delicate balance in the universe, far more than 10,000 Legos in an Eiffel tower, they conclude someone or something made this, those standing inside the box, the room, seeing the death disease disasters and other things wrong.

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Pushed back hard on a benevolent designer who made it all many have concluded. There is no such designer, if no force or person his outside the box, designing what's in the box, their needs to be an answer for how all of this came to be. Their investigation. Using scientific principles is impressive. And some of their theories are quite profound. Their task of explaining what's around us is a bit like explaining to those toddlers at the door of the room that nobody built that Eiffel tower. It happened by chance. How did the universe get here?

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There's really only two possibilities. It was by accident or on purpose. It was by chance or intelligent design. Both answers require faith. The Bible starts by taking aside in the beginning. God created the heavens in the earth. God is the one who assembled the Eiffel tower in the room in all its complexity and beauty. And the Bible will answer how the death disease in disasters came into play. We'll see the mechanism in the order. Genesis claims God created all of the beauty in that box, as well as when God did that in our next wordpicture.