YouTube: The Intelligence Factor
“And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”
Genesis 1:3-5
It is significant to observe that the ancient Hebrew has God calling forth light as the first step of the creative process. This light is not a reference to the sun, which was created on the fourth day. Rather, it is the underlying light of divine or universal intelligence that the author understands as the foundation of the observable world. According to the account, when God first spoke, the world was “… without form and void.” Following the affirmation of light, things quickly took shape.
All living things express varying levels of intelligence. Mainstream science, assuming intelligence is generated by the brain, emphasizes the importance of brain size. The emerging science that is gaining traction, however, treats the brain more as a receiver than as an originator of intelligence. Think of the brain like the “smart” phone that taps into an “omnipresent” communications network. Because the network is not located inside the phone, the status of the phone – turned off or even broken – has no impact on the network.
When Jesus said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head (Matthew 8:20),” I believe he was referring to the differing capacities of living creatures to access and express intelligence. Plant and animal kingdoms are governed by instinct, while the son of man, the human being, possesses the more expanded abilities of imagination and intellectual reasoning. Having nowhere to lay his head is a way of saying that, unlike animals, the human being has the creative capacity to move beyond mere instinct, to rise above the belief that we are enslaved to circumstance. There are no predetermined outcomes.
The affirmation, let there be light, is a means of stimulating the greater expression of creative intelligence that enables us to work through our challenges and turn negative appearances into exciting opportunities.
J Douglas Bottorff 
When I was growing up in the Methodist Church, we were taught that the sequence of events in the Genesis creation story was not scientifically correct because at the time it was written, the people did not understand–even in Galileo’s time– that the sun had to exist first before the Earth (and other planets) could revolve around it, creating the illusion that the sun rises and sets. I have always accepted that, along with most people I know, and treated the Genesis creation as a legend or myth written by religious people without scientific knowledge to explain how we got here.
There are some very good spiritual insights shared through the creation stories, but we don’t want to take them literally. I feel the same way about the big bang theory, only I don’t see any spiritual insights in it. I see scientists struggling to convince us that the universe came from matter.
In the Big Bang Theory I see many cycles of expansion and contraction into many Black Holes (and re-expansions) on a scale so long and large as to be meaningless to human beings with a lifespan of less than 100 years. By the time we know we are headed towards a Black Hole for re-compaction, it is too late to board our spaceships and head for a more hospitable home. No spiritual meaning in the Big Bang. It is a process, just as evolution is a process. If the soul is eternal and indestructible, it is not made of matter, but perhaps of energy.