It has been said that one of the marvels of history was the rapidity and thoroughness with which the English adopted Christianity. The first translations of parts of the Bible into English appeared fifty years after Augustine landed in 597 A.D. The first complete Bible in English did not appear until almost a thousand years later in 1538. By 1604 King James was on the throne of England. He complained that he "could not see a Bible well translated into English". He proposed one uniform translation to be done by both Universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Fifty four of the best scholars and linguists of the day were chosen. The work took two years and nine months to complete and finally appeared in 1611 as the King James I Authorised Version. This version became the standard English Bible for nearly three hundred years. It contained both accurate and inaccurate translations and determined the religious thought and attitudes of all English-speaking people. To millions of people this translation became the "inspired word of god".

All attempts to amend the authorised version failed until 1870, when a new translation was begun. Several further translations have followed. The revised versions, while appealing to scholars, did not change public attitudes. Our language and culture continued to be profoundly influenced by the King James version of the Bible until recent times.

So let us look at the first sentence of this translation. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth". The first translators' error occurs in the fourth word god. The Hebrew text uses the word Elohiem; not El, singular, or Elah, dual, but Elo-hiem, plural. The correct translation should therefore read "In the beginning the GODS created the heaven and the earth." The word Elohiem appears seventy seven times in the first nine chapters of the Bible. But the translators were not consistent, in Gen. 1: 26 the translation correctly reads "let US make man in OUR own image and OUR likeness." Again in chapter 3:20, "man is become one of US." In Gen. 11:7. "Let US go down and confound their language."

Are you confused? You ought to be. Fifty four translators also appeared to be confused. Still, they were working under royal instructions "to follow the Bishop's Bible and as little alter as the truth of the original will permit". Do not forget that England had already been Christian for almost a thousand years. The concept of a single creator was thoroughly established. The story of the Garden of Eden was believed to be literal fact. To change this would have been catastrophic to the emotional life of the people and the clergy.

It is interesting to note that when Moses was instructed to lead the Children of Israel out of Egypt he did not appear to know which god was commissioning him. "And Moses said unto god. Behold when I come unto the Children of Israel and shall say unto them, the god of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say unto me. What is his name? what shall I say unto them?" (Exodus 3:13.)

Going back much further, we can examine the origins of human beings according to the mythology of some ancient societies such as the Aboriginals of Australia. Through their myths they related the advent of humanity to divine origins. The Greeks did the same, with some humour. Even the Bible tells us, "The sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children of them, the same became mighty men" (Gen. 6:4).

According to the creation myth of the Old Testament, people were created innocent and perfect. The story presents a god who is without fault, the antithesis of evil. Human beings were created in the "image and likeness" of the creator. Then a new factor arose in the Garden of Eden, when evil and the devil in the shape of a serpent appeared to Adam and Eve. We may ask, where did evil and the devil come from? Did god also create evil and the devil? You may answer, "well no, there can be no evil in god, the devil was a fallen angel." Logic runs out about here. However, to the ancient Hebrews it would seem to explain the need for religion and give weight to the notion that human beings brought guilt, sin and suffering upon themselves. It provides a platform for the idea of redemption and a sacrificial system to appease an austere and righteous god. Before you can establish a concept of redemption you need to establish a doctrine of sin.

You could be excused for thinking that the gods of the creation myths were having a bit of fun by creating humans to counter their boredom, but you could not conceive of them as kindly beings. They teased their subjects with temptations and then called their natural response, a sin against god. I don't see any love; I see blame, punishment and viciousness. I see a god who claimed to create the world out of nothing, yet could not forgive without demanding the price of blood. The myth is also an attempt to explain the reason for the suffering, disease and death to which all people are subject. It helped to fill up the spaces in primitive human understanding. It formed the basis for the Hebrew concept that an angry god could be appeased by the sacrifice of animals. In contrast, let us consider what science has to say about our universe.

Space and Time

The ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun god Ra. They built huge and elaborate temples in honour of their many gods. Large numbers of priests continuously served them, sacrificing animals in grand ritual ceremonies. The sun rose each morning to bring life and well-being to the earth and its creatures. They believed that each night, servants of Ra rowed the sun through the underworld, ready to reappear next morning.

Three thousand years later, we know that our rather small planet is orbiting an average sized sun. Our sun is a fiery, luminous, gaseous mass nearly 150 million kilometres away, yet its rays bring light, warmth, and life to the earth. At night we look up and see thousands of other distant suns we call stars.

To give an idea of the stupendous distance and vastness of space, I will borrow and reconstitute, in my own words, an idea used by Isaac Asimov. It took our astronauts about three days to travel from planet earth to the moon. Light travels at 299,783 kilometers per second. That equals about 7 3/4 times around the earth in one second. To further gain an idea of the vastness of space, let us suppose that it will become possible for engineers to design new metals which will withstand tremendous tensions and fuel with greatly increased power, and methods to overcome increased inertia. And let us disregard other possibilities of speed and assume a steady traveling rate of one hundredth the speed of light. Astronauts could then reach the moon in less than two minutes instead of three days. At the same speed, a journey to our nearest star. Alpha Centauri, would take astronauts 430 years to get there and another 430 years to return.

But that is not all. Our sun is part of a cluster of many millions of stars which comprise a galaxy. Patrick Moore, in his book "A-Z of Astronomy", tells us that star systems [galaxies] are often made up of many thousands of millions of stars. Stephen Hawking, who holds Newton's chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University, tells us: "we now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes." Can you really grasp the magnitude of such numbers and distances?

So great is the vastness of space that the human mind tends to numb. We can only achieve a minute understanding of the meaning of infinite space. Yet reason tells us that there cannot be a boundary or edge to time or space. There must always be something beyond the limits of our telescopes, and then something beyond that again. We cannot conceive of an enclosure without asking ourselves what is on the other side of the enclosure.

Astronomers tell us that the process of change in outer space goes on continuously. Stars have a life span over millions of years, and finally expend their energy and die. All living matter is like that. When any living thing dies, it decays and provides an energy source for new and totally different and separate expressions. The famous scientist Lord Rutherford who first split the atom suggested to us that atoms have an internal structure. Negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in the nucleus cause the electrons to orbit the nucleus of the atom, just as the earth orbits the sun. The principle operating in the atom is the same as that seen in the vast universe.

The astronomer Edmond Halley in 1705 predicted the return approximately every seventy six years of the comet which bears his name. He also plotted and proved that stars are continually moving in space. There is a great deal of scientific evidence to show that astral bodies are gaining heat and losing heat, expanding, or contracting and even exploding. In other words, over thousands of millions of years, the stars are undergoing continuous change.

Time is a human invention. We have become obsessed with it. Scientists have dated our earth at 4.7 thousand million years old. We ask, what was before that? For how many thousands of millions of years was our solar system part of a vast astral dust cloud or some other accumulated energy before it came together to form its present mass? Time, like outer space, is immeasurable. There ever was and ever will be something preceding and following that which we humans call time.

John Boslough in his book "Stephen Hawking's Universe" tells us that the great physicist Albert Einstein reasoned that as light has energy it therefore has mass: he proved that mass and energy are interchangeable. Alexander Friedman the Russian mathematician suggested that all matter was concentrated in a single point now known as the singularity and that there was a Big Bang which created our universe. Boslough says "According to the most accepted version of the Big Bang [theory] today, all the material in the universe comprised an extremely hot compressed gas in a primordial fireball 10 to 15 billion years ago."

Stephen Hawking is considered by many to be the leading physicist of today. He told Boslough

"The problem with this approach is that general relativity, which was used to predict the singularity at the origin, is a purely classical theory, so there is nothing in general relativity to take into account the quantum behaviour of subatomic particles that were created in the Big Bang." Boslough goes on to say "While general relativity allows for a perfect point-like singularity at the beginning of time, quantum mechanics does not, for it prohibits defining at the same time the precise location, velocity and size of any single particle or singularity. Ultimately, quantum mechanics will have to be brought into play if we are to understand the workings of the infinitesimal universe at its very beginning. Only by reconciling the two seemingly irreconcilable areas of physics can theorists hope to find a unified field theory that will explain the workings of the entire universe."

A more recent theory has been put forward by Richard Gott of Princeton University. He suggests that like bubbles on a head of beer, an infinite number of universes were formed. So astrophysicists have not yet irrefutably determined the manner in which the earth was formed.

Some of the latest scientific thinking is expressed by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, New York. He has the following to say in his introduction to "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen W. Hawking:

"This is also a book about God—or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a creator to do." Let me repeat that "a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a creator to do."

Hawking tells us that "Aristotle did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too mud) of divine intervention."

Stupendous as it may seem, there can be no beginning or end. Whether it is stars or living matter on this earth, the same principle prevails in that the debris of past existence becomes the nucleus or nutriment for uniquely new experiences of existence. There are no boundaries or edges to space, no beginning or end of time.

If you say that a god must have created the countless millions of suns and all living things ("how else could they be there!"), you still have not found the beginning. You must now answer the question, who created the creator? Just pushing the question back one remove does not solve anything. It is impossible to find the first cause of the universe. Professor Hans Reichenbach explains in his book "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy" that,

"It has no meaning to ask what is the cause of the universe. All explanation must start with some matter of fact. Science can only push the matter of fact back to some place where it supplies a maximum of explanation."

The Beginning of Life on this Planet

The problem that concerns most people is the suggestion that life can only come from previous life. If you accept the evolutionary theory (as almost all scientists do), you will understand the diverse development of present life from that which started millions of years ago. But how could the first living thing on earth spontaneously come into being?

Isaac Asimov tells us in his book "Extraterrestrial Civilizations" about Stanley Lloyd Miller's experiment in 1952.

"He tried to duplicate primordial conditions on earth.... He began with a closed and sterile mixture of water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen, which represented a small and simple version of Earth's primordial atmosphere and ocean. He then used an electric discharge as an energy source, and that represented a tiny version of the sun.

He circulated the mixture past the discharge for a week and then analysed it. The originally colourless mixture had turned pink on the first day, and by the end of the week one sixth of the methane with which Miller had started had been converted into more complex molecules. Among those molecules were glycine and ala-nine, the two simplest of the amino acids that occur in proteins.

In the years after that key experiment, other similar experiments were conducted, with variations in starting materials and energy sources. Invariably, more complicated molecules, sometimes identical with those in living tissue, sometimes merely related to them, were found. An amazing variety of key molecules of living tissue were formed 'spontaneously' in this manner,... If this could be done in small volumes over very short periods of time, what could have been done in an entire ocean over a period of many millions of years?

It was also impressive that all the changes produced in the laboratory by the chance collisions of molecules and the chance absorption of energy (guided always by the known laws of nature) seemed to move always in the direction of life as we know it now. There seemed no important changes that pointed definitely in some different chemical direction.

That made it seem as though life were an inevitable product of high-probability varieties of chemical reactions, and that the formation of life on the primordial Earth could not have been avoided."

Change occurs with everything, from the vast universe to the minutest particles. Inorganic matter over a great length of time is worn away and moved around, so that even the sand and minerals of earth are changed and compressed to form solid structures. As long as our sun gives light and warmth to the earth, all organic matter on it will decay to form nourishment for new expressions of life. The only thing which does not change is change itself.

Members of the human race seem to be compelled to search for some higher or greater force outside themselves. Why do we do this? We may assume that our ancient ancestors thought that some unseen power was interfering with the activities and expectations of their tribe. How else could they explain the sudden calamities and illness which seemed, from time to time, to be directed against them? To them it would appear to be the work of the spirit of a dead ancestor, or perhaps, a god was displeased. The human race, from the dawn of history would have found it easy to assume the presence of an unseen spirit. From this ancient superstition rituals would develop to counter those unknown and feared forces. Hence there would arise the practice of magic. First the fear and then the ritual in an attempt to manipulate or appease the object of the fear.

If we say that a god created the universe, we are then indeed resorting to a magical explanation. The Greek philosophers seemed to have no difficulty in accepting the idea of infinity. How much have we been influenced by the Judaeo-Christian religious teaching of a mythical creator who could judge human beings in an after-life and punish disobedience? History suggests that religious leaders have used the notion of a divine super-being to give themselves power over their followers. They do this by claiming the authority of a god and offering a mixture of fatherly comfort and parental discipline. We look at this idea more fully elsewhere.

"And the gods created the heaven and the earth." Sounds like the echo of an acceptable myth of early Mesopotamia altered to Hebrew thinking. In essence this is not much different from the Egyptian or Greek and Roman gods or the dream creation myths of Australian Aborigines. The Greeks made their gods in the image of humans; the Hebrews made humans in the image of the gods. Read as a creation myth, the first nine chapters of the Bible are charming. Read as a literal occurrence and a divine message, the stories become ridiculous in the extreme.

The concept of a god creator is a notion born in the ancient past in an effort by primitive people to explain the unknown. All primitive societies have attempted to explain the unknown by the use of mythological stories. Sickness, plagues and disease were thought to be the result of displeasing a god or dead ancestor and thereby receiving punishment.

Slowly, men and women of science are chipping away at ignorance so that we begin to know the structure of the universe and what causes plagues and how to control them. We no longer need myths to explain the causes of events. Knowledge is making a nonsense of the concept that there are acts of god.