“What are you?' was asked of the creature.

'I'm the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it; I had a bellyache.” 

Any Stephen King fans amongst the grown-ups might have recognised this from his novel ‘It’. 

It’s not one of the possibilities that we’ve been looking at in Year 5 and 6 for how the universe began, but it could have been when we were visited by the God and the Big Bang team from Durham University recently.

The question posed for our topic in RE is Creation and Science: Conflicting or complimentary? A sub plot exists - does reading Genesis as a poetic account conflict with scientific accounts?

The God and the Big Bang team spent the whole day in Fishbourne school challenging Year 5 and Year 6 to think about the creation of our world and universe. All thoughts and ideas were encouraged, but then the day narrowed down to whether the description of the creation in Genesis allowed for the concept of the Big Bang? 

First we had to look at the concept of the Big Bang and what that entailed? Could it all have start with an explosion, and if so, what are the chances everything just happened to fall in to place for the right conditions for life to succeed - as Laurence Brown asks in his novel the Eighth Scroll, “you're telling me that if i keep dropping bombs into a junkyard, someday all the pieces will blast together into a perfect Mercedes?” Was it just chance that we all exist today?

Or was there a guiding hand behind it all? And could it be possible that those most famous words from the start of the most famous book in the world, “In the beginning….God created the heaven and the earth” could describe in the most poetic way what happened during the Big Bang?

The scientists from the Big Bang team are all Christians and expertly led us through the different viewpoints that came up during the different workshops they led throughout the day, culminating in a wonderful Question and Answer session at the end of the day, where our children could ask anything they liked about creation - and the children rose to the occasion, taking the opportunity to ask an amazing range of questions. The scientists didn’t let us down in their answers either, taking time to answer every question asked. 

A great day pondering “How did it all begin?”