Even more strange is that Jews and Christians have long held that God made space and time along with the universe. We have seen how the church father Augustine, when confronted with the question of why God sat around for such a long time before deciding to create the universe, answered that the question was meaningless. There was no time before the creation, Augustine wrote, because the creation of the universe involved the creation of time itself. Modern physics has confirmed Augustine and the ancient understanding of the Jews and Christians.
The Big Bang resolves one of the apparent contradictions in the book of Genesis. For more than two centuries, critics of the Bible have pointed out that in the beginning—on the first day—God created light. Then on the fourth day God separated the night from the day. The problem is pointed out by philosopher Leo Strauss: “Light is presented as preceding the sun.” Christians have long struggled to explain this anomaly but without much success. The writer of Genesis seemed to have made an obvious mistake.
But it turns out that there is no mistake. The universe was created in a burst of light fifteen billion years ago. Our sun and our planet came into existence billions of years later. So light did indeed precede the sun. The first reference to light in Genesis 1:3 can be seen to refer to the Big Bang itself. The separation of the day and the night described in Genesis 1:4 clearly refers to the formation of the sun and the earth. Day and night— which we experience as a result of the earth’s rotation—were indeed created much later than the universe itself. The Genesis enigma is solved, and its account of the creation is vindicated not as some vague parable but as a strikingly accurate account of how the universe came to be.
