With Easter Sunday a week away and the latest remarkable revelations about the origins of the universe under active discussion worldwide, it seemed appropriate to share my recent movie experience in a packed Fayetteville theater.

I grabbed a bag of refillable popcorn and settled into one of the few remaining seats to watch the Christian-oriented film God’s Not Dead.

It’s basically the story of a Christian college student challenged by his arrogant, atheistic professor to use three class sessions to provide scientific evidence to the class that God is in fact alive and active in our lives rather than dead. The academician regularly smirks and belittles the student before his peers at every opportunity.

At the end of his presentations, the class votes on whether the student succeeded in convincing them God isn’t dead. If not, he fails the class. I’ll leave it at that for those who’ve yet to experience the popular and thoughtful film.

I mention this because I also just finished an article wherein Nathan Aviezer, a prominent Israeli physicist at Bar Ilan University, says the latest scientific discoveries surrounding the big bang theory, sometimes called “cosmology’s missing link,” verify that the known universe was created outside space and time. In other words, as described in the Book of Genesis. “To deny this now is to deny scientific fact,” he says.

The story says a group of scientists, including astronomer John M. Kovac of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announced it had discovered the evidence it had been seeking which supports the theory that the universe definitely had a beginning.

Physicist Alan Guth of MIT, who developed the theory of “inflation” of the known universe, believes the universe was suddenly ripped violently apart within “a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second” after bursting into existence.

Of course, being a dutiful scientist with colleagues understandably parsing his every word and nuance, Aviezer is quick to add that, while he believes this discovery confirms the story of Genesis where an ultimate creator breathed life into nothingness, this revelation won’t necessarily make any skeptic become a believer.

“As a scientist I tell people that faith in God is just that,” Aviezer told the Times of Israel. “We will never empirically ‘prove’ the existence of God. The Torah quotes God as saying ‘let there be light’ and science tells us that this light came into existence, exploding to create the universe as we know it. … At this point I think we can say that creation is a scientific fact.”

Aviezer said Cambridge University professor Stephen Hawking found that “the actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics.”

There was considerable reaction to Kovac’s stunning discoveries made at the South Pole while researching and measuring the effects of gravitational waves and ripples in space-time.

It’s all far too complex for my limited layman’s brain. Yet Kovac and his team obviously understood what they were doing and the enormity of its significance when it comes to displaying an intelligent design to the universe.

If it is further verified, Kovac’s work, the New York Times says, “will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the big bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.”

Professor Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins, an expert on the early universe, writes: “This is huge, as big as it gets. This is a signal from the very earliest universe, sending a telegram encoded in gravitational waves.” Actually, I’ve never had any difficulty realizing that the universe, as with our individual lives, had a created beginning and within the limits of space time. We exist while constantly moving in only one direction until our consciousness departs the physical body. We live out our existences by following a one-way, half a-timeline which, as verified with Kovac’s findings, expands from a beginning toward one direction. We can only move forward one moment at a time, right? What we can’t possibly comprehend is the nature of consciousness beyond space and time from whence everything in this limited realm is created.

By my reckoning, any creator big enough to breathe light and life into a void of sheer nothingness would have no difficulty transforming the atoms and molecules comprising his son’s physical body back into pure light, whether the limitations of our space-time physics can comprehend that or not. That’s sort of like saying the force of gravity definitely exists whether you believe it does or not.

All food for thought as creation again springs to life within the space-time constraints of another Easter week.

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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.

Editorial, Pages 91 on 04/13/2014