As we deal with the topic of sound and hearing, we would first do well to think deeply about God’s creation of our physical sphere and how the physical sphere is interlocked with the spiritual sphere. How is knowledge of the spiritual sphere interlocked? Man is created in God’s image. Our spiritual dimension enables us to contemplate God’s reality, both in sustaining our physical world from day to day and in understanding God’s original creation of the heavens and the earth. As we continue the discussion of topics such as sound and hearing, we become more aware of the Creator’s role in establishing how man accesses information about our world through sound and hearing.
As creationists, we are reminded of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Heavens and earth refers to all that exists. This phrase could also apply to God’s creative acts in the intervening eons of time. God created all physical matter, including hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars. In recent ages the phrase creation of heavens and earth might include periodic creative acts such as the origin of life and the origin of man. There is a quantitative difference between the enormous quantity of non-living matter in our universe and the relatively small amount of living matter to be found on Planet Earth. Certainly there is a qualitative difference between non-living and living matter.
God created all that exists. Genesis 1-2 stresses the creation of humanity in God’s image. The Genesis accounts underline the interaction of man with the physical creation. Humanity is immersed in a physical world.
Humanity created in God’s image perceives two major spheres of reality. One sphere is the physical world of orderly matter governed by predictable physical constants. Another is the spiritual world—a divinely implanted God-consciousness with a deeply ingrained ability to contemplate present and future reality.
The Creator has gifted man with the ability to access information concerning the physical world through the five major physical senses. A study of the stimulus of sound energy and the sensory ability to detect it using our specialized organs of hearing triggers only the beginning of our sense of wonder. Physical sound traveling by compressional waves of air molecules transfers its energy through the canal of the outer ear into the solids of our eardrum and three small bones of the middle ear, and finally into the cochlea, the inner ear’s liquid medium.
In future posts we will extend our discussion of man’s ability to convert sound energy from physical waves of compressed molecules to billions of electrical signals called action potentials rushing to the brain from the cochlea through tens of thousands of neural circuits in the auditory nerve. This information reaches the brain in what is known as the “neural code.”
In the wisdom of God, humanity has been created to experience and enjoy both the physical world and the spiritual world. Before the creation of the heavens and the earth (all that exists), God existed as a spiritual entity. In the days of Christ on earth, he taught, “God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24 NIV). God still exists as a spiritual entity. The infinite Creator brought the physical heavens and earth into existence. Earth’s recently created humanity now enjoys both physical and spiritual dimensions of reality. Our dual existence is a divine gift to man and an expression of God’s love for his created works.
