A great pleasure to be here to talk about the idea of creation.

What do you, just take for a moment and just think,

when you think of the idea of creation, what comes to mind,

just what visualization, what comes to mind.

For me, it's probably something a little bit like this.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. So, um, so the idea of

this like weird amalgam of, you know, in my mind, uh, scripture is, is read by Jamesville

Jones, deep, very, very profound voice. And yet some amalgamation of that scriptural idea of God's creative power,

and yet in something with the kind of, you know, scientific Nova documentary style visualization

of what we think is happening in that aspect of creation. There's this mix of religious and

scientific, which is, in reality, not a horrible place to start, but it can at times put us in points of tension.

And sometimes that tension can feel somewhat unbearable.

If we think about the scriptural side, the reading, or how we think about creation in the Bible, the thing we usually turn to is the beginning

of Genesis. Genesis chapter 1, seven days of creation, nice and neat. God created this, then this,

then this, then this. Clearly God's power is active in each of those, each of those days, very clear

what God is doing, and it even says, you know,

God enjoyed, what he created was good. It saw how God reacted to what he created.

We have the story of Adam and Eve where there's this interaction between God and the first human

beings that is very beautiful and amazing. And there's a way in which God's role seems obvious in the picture that we get from

Scripture of what he is doing and how active he is in the very possibility of creation.

From the scientific side, though, we get a slightly different picture.

We get something along the lines of this, something along the lines of this, uh, starting with the idea of the big bang.

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