Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not one of those people who claim we can prove the existence of God through science.

After all, our primary spiritual challenge is to respond to God and community through the power of love.

Still and all, it’s pretty neat when scientific reasoning proves a story from the Bible.

For instance, take the creation story from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. For 2,300 years – from Aristotle’s observation that “nothing comes from nothing,” until a sea-change article in Scientific American in the 1950s describing the Big Bang – most scientists believed the universe had always existed.

The notion that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” was considered a Hebrew myth. Then, suddenly, the discovery the universe was expanding from what had been an infinitely small point – essentially “no thing” – made the Hebrew myth seem more accurate than 2,300 years of scientific thinking.

And now another consequence of wiser science may confirm another part of the Genesis creation story. One of the most persistent church-state struggles of the last hundred years has been over what to teach our children about how we came to be the brainy creatures we are, living amidst all the living diversity on planet Earth.

Historically, Genesis told us that God created the heavens, the earth and living things in six days. Then Charles Darwin formulated a theory of evolution based on observations he made during his five-year cruise as official naturalist on board the Beagle. In 1859, Darwin published his theories in his book, “Origin of Species,” and from that time until now, the traditional religious have struggled with scientific evolutionists over which book has it right – Darwin’s or the Bible.

Surprisingly, the primary difference between the two explanations of how we came to be remains not so much in the stuff of creation as in the amount of time it took to do the job. Genesis tells us we were made from earth. In this observation, science and the Bible are not far apart.

But what about the time it took? How do we equate Genesis’ six days of creation with the 15 billion years which scientists say is the age of the universe?

Into this controversy steps physicist Gerald Schroeder, Ph.D., with an explanation so profound it makes us gasp at the deeper knowledge contained in Bible “myth.” Schroeder, then a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looked at the Genesis creation story through the insights of Albert Einstein, and realized this simple fact: When you take the physics of the Big Bang into account, six days from one point of view can equal 15 billion years!

How is this possible, you ask? It’s all based on Einstein’s discovery that time is a relative dimension – time’s “speed” depends on how much it’s affected by velocity, gravity and by the point of view of the observer. And long story short, velocity and gravity had a major impact on the speed of time in the six days after the Big Bang.

Schroeder set to calculating (as only a physicist could) the passage of time within the physical turmoil of the creation. And guess what? When he was finished, Schroeder had demonstrated, purely through math and physics, that during the time the equivalent of six 24-hour days passed from the moment of the Big Bang, within the speeding universe, creation was taking place over what to us, looking backward, seems like 15 billion years.

In other words, from our perspective looking back through the geologic record, 15 billion years have passed. But from God’s point of view, from Day One to the creation of Adam, the universe was created in six days – just as Genesis reports. And not to put too fine a point on it, but Schroeder also demonstrated that the acts of creation ascribed in Genesis to Day One, Day Two, etc., actually fit the geologic eras of science.

Those of you who’d like to know more than can be explained here should check out Schroeder’s books, “Genesis and the Big Bang,” and “The Science of God.” You should know that Schroeder himself was so moved by the discovery, he rededicated himself to his Jewish faith and moved to Jerusalem, where he took up teaching at the Weizmann Institute.

On the opening page of “The Science of God,” Schroeder quotes the medieval rabbi and philosopher Moses Maimonides who wrote in 1190 in his “Guide for the Perplexed”: “The only path to knowing God is through the study of science – and for that reason the Bible opens with a description of the creation.”

To which I would say again that love is the primary path to spiritual truth. Yet don’t forget, science and faith both strive to reach truth, even as they take different paths to get there. When we scorn one to elevate the other, we cut ourselves off from a viable path to understanding a deeper reality – and from the possibility of that “Aha!” moment when science and faith converge.

Lee Witting is a chaplain at Eastern Maine Medical Center and pastor of the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor. He may be reached at leewitting@midmaine.com. Voices is a weekly commentary by Maine people who explore issues affecting spirituality and religious life.