“God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1

The Bible tells us that everything we can see is the result of God’s act of creation.  It also tells us of things beyond what we can see which we must accept by faith. (See my post, Who’s There?)

As those who affirm the truth of Scripture, we should be encouraged by the clear distinction between faith and what science can measure.  But that doesn’t prevent science from pressing into the unknown.

Science continues to refine the natural laws that are part of creation, but it cannot replace them.  These natural laws remain constant everywhere we look in the universe.

Science cannot know beyond the limits of natural laws.

Scientists can imagine what might be before “the beginning.”  And they can speculate about a time when the laws of physics might have been different.

We could point to that as a place where science oversteps, but believers also press from where we are confident into what we don’t know.

One of those places is found in Genesis 1:2 which says “The earth was without form and void.”  This is part of God’s creation, and his Spirit is hovering over the waters, but we don’t know exactly what this void was like, or how long it lasted.

Some have suggested this may describe a “gap” in the creation timeline that includes the billions of years required for evolution.  That might solve some problems between the Bible and science, but it raises more questions with the rest of Genesis 1.

Others suggest that this corresponds to the time when Satan fell.  The “chaos” (Gen. 1:2) is the result of the battle between angels and demons (Isa. 14:12-15, Lk 10:18).  This is an intriguing thought, but lacks any meaningful evidence in the Bible.

Still other’s have suggested that God could have used some process that does not now exist, some history that is not recorded for us.  That also could be, but now we are speculating with those who do the same with science.

The Bible says that nothing was created apart from God (John 1:3), but tells us no more about the nature of this dark and empty void.

While we can extrapolate from the rest of scripture, we cannot be sure.  And while science can look back as far as the natural laws allow, it cannot look beyond what God created.

Both science and faith must live with questions they cannot answer.