Some Christians get enthusiastic about Big Bang cosmology or Intelligent Design. They think that both contribute to a notion that life, and even the very universe, has a beginning. A "moment of creation".
But I think that excitement rests on a basic misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of creation. The doctrine of creation is not an attempt to describe the way the universe or life began -- it isn't a quasi-scientific statement about the origins of the universe or life, and it thus has no special interest in questions of life's early history.
Charles Darwin once put it this way: "I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design ... There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their larva feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars".
Darwin highlights an important theological point here. There is much in the world that is beautiful and majestic and good -- but there are also ugly, horrifying and demonic sides of nature. There are hurricanes and floods and famines and cannibalistic insects and parasitic wasps that insert their larvae into the living bodies of caterpillars.
When I recently saw the popular God is Not Dead movie, much weight was put on Intelligent Design, on Big Bang cosmology, to "prove" God's existence. But -- and here's the kicker -- I don't think those arguments succeed in proving anything other than a "life" other than and different too humanity. There's no logical reason to call that "life" God, at least not in the way we Christians identify the God and Father of Jesus Christ.
If there is an Intelligent Designer, then It has to be the Designer of all aspects of the natural world. Might not the Intelligent Designer therefore be a cruel tyrant or an omnipotent demon? Certainly It would not be the God and Father of Jesus Christ. And this means that, strictly speaking, the Intelligent Designer cannot be identified with the Christian doctrine of creation -- for Christians confess that the "Maker of heaven and earth" is "God the Father Almighty", i.e., the Father of Jesus Christ.
The creator is not an intelligent designer, or the silent hand behind the Big Bang. He is the God of the Gospel, the God of grace.
The doctrine of creation is not an attempt to describe the way the universe began -- it is not a quasi-scientific statement about the origins of the universe, and it thus has no special interest in questions of the universe's early history or an explanation of the origin of carbon-based life on earth.
No, all that stuff leads -- as those of us familiar with the history of the Enlightenment know (read Michael Buckley's At the Origins of Modern Atheism) -- to the very foundations of atheism in the modern world. The doctrine of creation isn't about establishing some beginning.
The doctrine of creation is about the Triune God. God is our creator. All that we have has come freely from God; and at each new moment we continue to depend on God for our life and being. In the words of Luther's Small Catechism (1529), the doctrine of creation means "that God created me ... because of his pure, fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, not because I've earned it or deserved it".
So other words, the doctrine of creation is a doctrine about grace -- "creation from nothing" (creatio ex nihilo) means that we exist purely because of the grace of God. And since the grace of God is not an abstract "divine attribute" but a specific event, we might also add that creatio ex nihilo means that we exist because of Jesus Christ.
This, I think, is what Paul was pointing toward in his Romans 8 and Colossians 1.
So did the universe or life have a beginning?
While that question would be interesting, it's not for biblical scholars or theologians to answer. It's better left to biologists and physicists. One thing is certain: If it does turn out (as Stephen Hawking has argued) that the universe has no temporal boundary, or that the universe has always existed in some other way, such discoveries wouldn't have any direct bearing on the doctrine of creation.
Not even in the slightest.
Whether the universe had an absolute beginning some 14 billion years ago, or whether it had no beginning at all. Whether we can call some designer of creation "God". Our confession of faith remains just the same as Luther's: "I believe that God created me because of his goodness and mercy".