Regarding this conclusion by Leslie Wickman, which you seem to endorse:
quote:
... it adds scientific support to the idea that the universe was caused — or created — by something or someone outside it and not dependent on it.
I'm not a physicist, and I'm just trying to comprehend the recent findings (folks here have been very helpful in that regard - thank you all), but based on what I've been able to understand so far, it seems to me that the BICEPS2 results
do not provide any support for the assertion that there was "something or someone outside" that caused the inflation. As far as I've been able to tell, the results have nothing at all to say about the cause of the inflation; they only describe its nature, speed and duration.
If I'm wrong about that, and these results (or existing aspects of the scientific theories supported by these results)
do say something about what would have caused the inflation to occur, I suspect that the explanation involves just natural conditions with natural consequences, rather than any kind of deliberate, goal-oriented action on the part of some sort of self-conscious entity whose "image" is somehow related to
homo sapiens.
To be frank, it's egregiously silly to assert that the Book of Genesis "predicts" anything in particular at all. I suppose you could say that by asserting the falsehood of other mythical accounts, it "predicts" that we will not find the earth to be sitting atop an elephant or turtle, will not find a giant serpent encompassing the universe, etc.
You can look for an interpretation of your scripture that isn't flat out incompatible with physical truth, and if you can find one that doesn't involve blatant violations of basic linguistic principles, then you can rest easy that the foundational text for your belief could still be regarded in general as "not necessarily false."
In any case, given that the first two books of Genesis refute each other as to the sequence of events, it seems pointless to talk about either of them having any relevance to physical truth. The first is poetry, and the second is a relatively simple-minded "just-so" story.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.