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Q: The Bible presents us with a cosmology completely at variance with that accepted by modern science. The Bible tells us that the entire universe was created in six days and that the Earth is the center of the universe with everything in the sky revolving around it. Science tells us that the universe is between 14 and 15 billion years old, and that even if the universe has a center, we are not in it. We are actually revolving around a rather ordinary star in a fairly empty space in a rather ordinary galaxy, which is one of many other galaxies. If the Bible got something so basic so totally wrong, how can we believe anything in it? It seems to me that to give the Bible credence, you must dismiss everything that we think we have learned in the last 400 years about the universe and our place in it. – (From K in Durham, NC)

A: Thank you, dear K, for your cosmic question that has troubled many of my readers about the truth of the Bible. There are only two kinds of questions we can ask about the world and our place in it: problems and mysteries.

The French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel got this distinction right when he wrote in his book, “The Mystery of Being,”“A problem is something that I meet over and against myself. I find it complete before me; and hence I can lay siege to it and solve it. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved and hence the distinction between what is in me and what is over and against me loses its meaning.”

Problems are questions that have answers and mysteries are questions that never go away. How old is the universe? What is the cure for cancer? These are all problems, even if we do not have the answers to them now. What is the meaning of life? Is virtue rewarded and evil punished? These are mysteries. The Bible is a collection of problems solved inaccurately and mysteries encountered brilliantly.

All pre-Copernican speculations about the size and age of the universe are wrong but they are merely wrong answers to problems that ultimately do not affect our lives in any way whatsoever. They are outside of us and as soon as we answered them, they disappeared as problems forever.

Once chemists thought that a substance called phlogiston caused combustion but after Lavoisier proved that oxygen caused combustion nobody ever spoke about phlogiston again, because what causes combustion is just a problem.

The reason the Bible is still compelling to us almost 4,000 years after its inception is not because it got the universe right but because it got us right. In the face of the mystery of what we are really like deep down, the Bible teaches us that all people are made in the image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect. Later philosophers like Hobbes taught that we are wolves preying on each other constantly. Both responses to human nature have evidence in the world but the Bible urges us to embrace our mutual sanctity. That kind of response to mystery will never be disproven or surpassed by some scientific discovery. Science is about what is true in the world. The Bible is about what matters in the world. God gave us curious minds so we could answer problems and God created us with yearning souls so that we could encounter mysteries.

Maybe your faith could be like Einstein’s. He understood problems and mystery. He wrote in 1930,“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

The great rabbi Leo Baeck also taught wise words about mystery,“When a man wants to be certain of his existence, when he therefore listens intently for the meaning of his life and life in general, and when he thus feels the presence of something lasting, of some reality beneath the surface, then he experiences mystery.”

Look to the world of mystery and the Bible will never let you down.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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