My younger brother and I followed closely behind our parents, as we wended our way through The Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. I was seven years old, and can still to this day remember the enormity of the dome, looming large above me, like space itself. We were visiting from Orange County, CA, where I often gazed up at the stars in the night sky, but it was nothing compared to the unobstructed view of the 3-D universe projected onto the planetarium’s huge screen. After the show, I turned to my mother and said, “The Big Bang Theory and Creationism are basically the same thing. Time must be different from the perspective of man than from the perspective of God.” My mother’s jaw dropped open, but before she could comment, my brother chased me down the long corridor towards the meteorites. 

Now, as a rising freshman in high school, who has taken a mix of science classes (Earth Science, Life Science, and Physics) and a few religious studies classes (World Religions and Old Testament as Literature), I am more convinced than ever that Creationism and the Big Bang Theory are one and the same. I see people fighting about it online, so convinced that they are right and the other is wrong, as if science and religion were at war with one another. Being raised as a second-generation Chinese American, who believes in God and celebrates most of the holidays from Water to Christmas to the Chinese New Year (I’m a monkey), I find this chasm in belief hard to accept. So, I looked closely to see where the stories intersected, how they both might be true. 

The Big Bang Theory is the most popular and widely accepted theory of creation in the scientific community, as well as with the general population. It suggests that the universe started out as a very small ball of energy that rapidly expanded, creating space that continually expands and cools down, even to this day. When I first discovered that the Big Bang’s expansion started at a central point, I immediately thought of God line in the Bible: “Let there be light.” God could have sparked existence with this central point, as if breathing the cosmos into being. You might be thinking, well, the Big Bang Theory took billions of years to create human life, and in the Bible, it only took six days. However, since time is relative, billions of years to us could be six days for God. And if you look at it, the six days and the billions of years actually line up. The first day, God created light. The second day, God created Earth. Third day, land, sea, and plants were created. The fourth day, God created the sun and stars, which is clearly out of order; it should have come on the second day, highlighting humans’ inherent narcissism. Of course to them, Earth was the central point of the universe. Then, on the fifth day, birds and sea animals were created. Finally, land animals and humans were created on the sixth day. Except for that fourth day, the days are pretty much in order with the Big Bang Theory.

Since humans came into existence at the end of creation, their frame of reference and historical knowledge simply can’t be accurate. In fact, a lot of the early books in the Bible are considered historically inaccurate, as they were written by four different groups: the Yahwist (960-920 BCE), the Elohist (850 BCE), the Deuteronomist (621 BCE), and the Priestly (550 BCE), who all lived hundreds of years after the central stories had already taken place. And the fact that there are two creation stories in the Bible, and they were written around 900 BCE and 500 BCE, 400 years apart, also speaks to a big game of telephone, where something most definitely got lost in translation. 

The reason that the scientific community rebukes the story of creationism is because of it is more or less an example of flawed human recollection. There is no proof, for example, that Noah’s Ark ever existed, or that Moses received the ten commandments, or that he parted the Red Sea. Whereas, looking through the Hubble Space telescope, we can see that the universe is still expanding and cooling off, which proves that there must have been a force that put everything into motion in the first place. But my thought is just because humans are inaccurate in their storytelling doesn't mean they were entirely wrong about the creation of light and life, and it certainly doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist.

There is still so much we do not know, that we must keep an open mind about, which is why I care so much about aligning these stories of origin. They help me bridge two seemingly disparate parts of myself, the part of me that believes in God, and the part of me that believes in the kind of proof only science can provide. In the end, if we can align these parts of ourselves, we can align as an intellectual community, where we don’t try to diminish one belief in favor for another, but instead find unity in our curiosity and awe. As far as I can tell, we need that right about now.