The Best Bible Verse For Atheists
My interviewer, a Christian radio talk-show host, asked, “If you were trying to persuade an atheist to believe in the reality of God, and you were restricted to using only one scripture, what would it be?”
A fascinating question that all evangelicals should ponder. My choice would be Genesis 1, verses 3, 4, and 5. The reader is given a poetic description of nothingness. The earth does not yet exist. There is only the One Eternal and Omnipotent God, hovering.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day (NIV).
Even a good number of Christian theologians believe those verses are to some degree metaphorical. They are not. What is being described are two scientifically verified occurrences: the so-called “Big Bang” (Wait! Keep reading, please!) and the first detectible phenomenon to take place after the moment of the Bang, the separation of light (observable, measurable) matter from dark (invisible) matter.
Some folks demur, insisting that after creating a universe of light, God separates the daytime from the nighttime, exactly as we are told. But that is not what we are told. The words “daytime” and “nighttime” are not used, but rather “day” and “night,” and that difference is significant. As we conceive of them, day(time) and night(time) are shadow phenomena that require sun, moon, and earth, which were not created until the third and fourth days.
On the fourth day, the words “night” and “day” and the reference to separating light from darkness do not mean what they meant on day one. They cannot, in fact. The first separation, on day one, corresponds to the separation of dark matter and light matter. That is the only possible meaning for which there is scientific evidence…evidence that was not discovered until the Twentieth Century, some 3500 years after Moses made a record of the event.
It would certainly appear that God included non-scientific descriptions of the Big Bang and the separation of dark from light matter as signs for us, the people of our time.
According to cutting-edge astrophysics, dark matter holds the universe together. It is the Organizing Principle. Without dark matter, creation would have flopped. The universe would have no laws, no consistent structure. It would be nothing, period.
The fact that dark matter holds the universe together should further intrigue Christians because that is precisely what Paul attributes to the Christ, Jesus, Son of God, Second of the Trinity:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15 – 17, NIV).
Paul also attests to the eternal nature of the divine.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Astrophysicists have only recently discovered that dark matter – which is unseen – has not deteriorated one iota since its creation in the first second of the Bang. It appears, in other words, to be eternal, and if that is the case, then perhaps and in some mysterious way, dark matter is evidence of the Divine, evidence of God!
More than three thousand years ago, Moses described the Big Bang and the separation of light and dark matter. There is only one sensible explanation for how a man who lacked scientific instruments and knowledge of the intricate mathematics of the universe could have known these things: God, from Whom the things in question originated, told him!
This article was slightly amended on 15th July