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From Confessions of a Bog-Standard Evangelical:

I am not in the game of bashing evangelicals and evangelicalism – humanly speaking, I owe everything, almost all my theology, and much of my Christian nurture to such people. It wasn’t the confessional Presbyterians who told me the gospel; it wasn’t the confessional Lutherans who took the time to teach me the basics of the faith; it was the evangelicals. They cared enough to reach out to me and engage me. Yet evangelicalism at an institutional level seems to have been hijacked, not by the kind of decent, orthodox people who taught me the faith, but by a group of people who are happy to use the institutions and the market of evangelicalism to give themselves a power base, but who seem to despise precisely the kind of basic evangelicalism which I have loved and to which I owe so much.

I’ve been increasingly coming across sentiments such as the one quoted above. The church I attend falls under the evangelical umbrella (does being a non-denominational church automatically make it evangelical?). Although I’m not sure what “institutional level” means since evangelicalism is such a nebulous group, I do agree that there are some elements that have entered the fold and smuggled in ideas that are far from the heart of the gospel.

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Boing Boing asks, What came before the Big Bang? The article it cites says that the Big Bang theory is widely accepted by physicists as making “a lot of sense. Except for one small thing. That initial (infinitesimally small) point (of origin of the universe), called a singularity by physicists, is a physical impossibility. According to the models we have today, the temperature of the universe at that first moment would have had to be infinite, which mathematically makes no sense. Also, the singularity doesn’t do a good job of explaining where all the matter and energy we see today in the universe came from. So, physicists are increasingly starting to look at other branches of physics, to see what they can do to replace the singularity with a more reasonable proposition.”

What if they look into cosmogony, the study of the origin of the universe, where science and theology meet? What about God as the uncaused first cause? If we are going for the simplest explanation here (Occam’s Razor anyone?), Creatio ex Nihilo would be where I’d bet the farm on, instead of going for string theory concepts that look like physicists’ very own “God of the gaps.”