WHEN "I DON'T KNOW" IS THE BEST ANSWER

Creation stories attempt to explain the creation of the Earth (or universe) and the creation of humans (or of life on Earth). There are hundreds of creation stories but let's just imagine there are only two: the Jewish story and the Norse story.

The Norse story says the god Odin battled the ice giant Ymir. After an epic battle, Odin defeated Ymir and used the giant's body parts to create the Earth--his blood formed the rivers and seas, his bones the mountains, his hair formed the trees, and the sky was made from his skull. Humans came from the giant's armpits.

The Jewish story says that Yahweh created the universe by thinking it into existence. He made a man from dust and a woman from the man's rib. He created everything that exists in just six days.

More than a thousand years later, humans invented a new way of explaining things. They looked at facts (evidence) and formulated possible explanations that were consistent with the facts. They called these explanations 'hypotheses'. Then they asked, if this hypothesis is true, what further evidence should we expect to find? And what evidence would prove the hypothesis false? They searched for evidence or carried out experiments and discarded falsified hypotheses. They continued to test, debate and refine surviving hypotheses until they explained the facts extremely well.

This process has proven phenomenally successful. It is now known as the scientific method. We know it works because we create tools from its successful hypotheses and these tools work. My computer is such a tool. So are passenger jets, cars, medicines, televisions, eye glasses and space rockets.

So here we are in the second decade of the 21st century, and we have a choice. What should we believe about how the universe came to be? We can chose the Jewish creation story or the Norse creation story or we can see what science can tell us.

Science has formulated a handful of hypotheses to explain the origin of the universe but they are very difficult to test. Work is proceeding but we cannot yet be confident that any of these hypotheses are correct. Right now, science can only say, "We don't know".

What will you bet on:
The guess made three thousand years ago by the Jews?
The guess made almost two thousand years ago by the Norse people?
Or will you say, I don't know?

Only one of these answers makes sense.

 

By Bill Flavell