Sermon Illustrations on big bang

Recently I heard a lecture by an English Methodist who is both a scientist and a Christian theologian. He was talking about the scientific debate over the Big Bang, and he used an image that I found q...

We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally smal...

In 1964 Peter Higgs wrote a paper entitled, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” which proposed the existence of a new fundamental particle of matter based solely upon mathematical dedu...

In 1997, the Hubble telescope took flight to give us a look through its powerful lens into places we had never known or seen before. Through this mammoth telescope, we discovered a staggering number o...

Our family started watching our Christmas movies early this year. We love Christmas Vacation , Charlie Brown’s Christmas, Home Alone (one and two), Rudolph, and Frosty the Snowman ...

Sir Isaac Newton had a perfectly scaled down replica of the then known solar system built for his studies. A large golden ball represented the sun at the center, and the known planets revolved around ...

We have been having  epiphanies like suns, all this year long. And now, at its close  when the planets  are shining through frost, light runs like music in the bones,  and the heart ke...

At 8:17 on the evening of March 3, 1943, bomb-raid sirens bansheed through the air above London, England. Workers and shoppers stopped on sidewalks and boulevards and searched the skies. Buses came to...

Light flies. If you don’t believe me, go outside tonight, crank up the family car, and try to race the beam streaming from the headlights to the end of the driveway. Light is fast—really fast—travelin...

Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...

The current understanding of the physical sciences, which contrasts sharply with the strictly mechanical perspectives prevalent in earlier centuries, aligns closely with the New Testament’s portrayal ...

Robert Ingersoll, the well-known agnostic, once visited Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist and celebrated American preacher of the time. While there, he noticed a stunning globe that displayed the s...

One of the most fascinating features of the Bible is that it tells what is ahead for our world. Both Old and New Testaments contend that history is moving to a climax and that the sovereign God is in ...

In 1997, thirty-nine members of the cult Heaven’s Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite, participated in a mass suicide. They’d been taught that once they exited their earthly bodies, they would land on a ...

Let’s take stock of the challenge once again: the work of spiritual transformation, by which we come to live in God in the midst of our neighborhood, is the most difficult process in the universe. Thi...

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the ...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

In The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien imagines the creation of the world as a divine chorale, with creation appearing out of nothingness like a glorious unfurling tapestry as God sings and the heavenl...

Scientist John Haldane once proposed to the English priest Ronald Knox that, given the vast number of planets in the universe, the emergence of life by sheer chance was inevitable. Knox responded with...

You may feel as if you are sitting still right now, but it’s an illusion of miraculous proportions. Planet Earth is spinning around its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. Every 24 hours, planet ...

The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...

The Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, tells a parable of a theater where a variety show is proceeding. Each show is more fantastic than the last, and is applauded by the audience. Suddenly the manager ...

In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson details the complexity within the human body: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the ...

Albert Einstein, the great physicist, was once traveling from Princeton on a train when the conductor came down the aisle, punching the tickets of every passenger. When he came to the famous professor...

As early as AD 248, Origen suggested that the star of Bethlehem was a comet—and there continue to be astronomers who think that he was right. Comets are icy objects that orbit the sun. When seen fro...

The great temptation of suffering is to let your pain become the whole world and to start believing that all that ever was, is and will be, is your private hell. God’s frontal assault on Job’s egotism...

An important representative of the pluralist position has been the British Protestant theologian John Hick, an unusually prolific and articulate writer. Hick has hit on a very graphic metaphor: He cal...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

In 1989, the advertising world welcomed a new icon into the world. It was pink, it was furry, it wore sunglasses, and sported a drum-set. Can you picture him? It’s the Energizer bunny. Television scre...

Do you remember Geraldo Rivera's most famous fiasco? In 1986 he broadcast a television special entitled The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault. In the publicity leading up to the live opening of Capon...