My essay, CREATION: A SCIENCE FANTASY, is essentially the Biblical account of creation brought up to date with a little science. The Biblical account of Creation was that of a highly gifted people long ago, which was reduced to writing by the scribes in about 700BC in the book of Genesis.
In the face of the stupendous fact of Creation, science is speechless. The equations of science describe with considerable accuracy how various facets of Creation behave. Science does not actually prove that one event causes another; it only notes that one event follows another, and it is an interpretation of the human mind that causation played a part in this. Science only describes. And as Prof. Hawking said in his more modest days, “Who put life into the equations?” Hence the title of my essay. To imagine that science offers an explanation of the stupendous fact of Creation is sheer and utter fantasy. And when scientists discuss whether there is only one creation or an infinite number of them, their views verge on the bizare. If scientists ever manage to create something out of nothing, we should perhaps start listening to them with respect; but until then, it is probably best to reflect on the ability of even intelligent men to fantasize.
However we should ask the question: is this vision of Creation the true and only one? How did thought begin? Were the unspoken and unconscious assumptions of those first thinkers, which moulded the attitude of their minds, and their whole approach to life, the correct ones? Might they have been different, if they had not had to struggle so fiercely to survive at all? Would it have been better, and nearer the truth, if those assumptions had been different?
Goethe’s view was that theology was the understanding by intelligent men of spiritual truths, for the benefit of their contemporaries; had it been the work of God, it could not have been understood by men; but being the work of men, it did not reveal the inscrutable. Is this true about the Creation too?