| by Fred Heeren
A Skeptic’s Questions
How am I supposed to take you Bible believers
seriously when so many of you say that the universe was created
within the last 10,000 years, in obvious contradiction to
the facts of science?
A Believer's Response
The fact that so many Christians believe that
may be more of a cultural phenomenon than any sign of what
the Bible actually teaches. I won’t deny that there’s
a conflict between science and traditional beliefs among many
Christians, but as I can show, there’s no conflict with
the Bible itself.
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Conflict with Recent Creation Tradition
For Jews, Christians, and Muslims who wish
to pay attention to science, science has brought them good
news and bad news. The bad news, for some, is that the universe
appears to have been created billions, not thousands, of years
ago. The good news is that it was created .
For the healthy skeptic, the consensus of
science is open to question and independent examination, since
it is based on the tradition of human beings, who are never
infallible. But if the consensus of scientists is open to
question because of their susceptibility to human error, might
not the tradition of many Christians also be open to error
– particularly when Bible-believing Christians disagree
with one another – and most particularly when their
traditional opinions are not based on the clear teachings
of Scripture, but on a personal interpretation?
I have mentioned scientists who, because of
their theological biases, did not accept the idea of a beginning
for the universe; but to the credit of most, when the evidence
became overwhelming, their desire for truth won them over
to what was for them a new way of thinking. This sums up the
complete turnaround of science in this century from a belief
in an eternal universe to a universe with a creation event.
My own theological biases long included the idea that God
created, not just transcendently, but recently . For many
of us, our unwillingness to even consider a theory that suggests
otherwise is based, not on scientific evidence, and not on
our own diligent study of this matter in Scripture, but on
our faith in an interpretation of certain Christians.
The Source of Recent Creation Tradition
Recent creation tradition stems especially
from James Ussher (1581-1656), Irish Archbishop of Armagh.
Genealogies of Genesis and other portions of the Bible led
him to the conclusion that there were 4,036 years from the
creation of the universe until the birth of Christ. Not satisfied
with this, scholar John Lightfoot (1602-1675) took it upon
himself to refine the calculations, and he decided upon a
creation date of October 18, 4004 B.C. Adam was created on
October 23 at 9:00 a.m.
Creation critic E.T. Brewster wryly comments:
"Closer than this, as a cautious scholar, the Vice-Chancellor
of Cambridge University did not venture to commit himself."
These chronologies were based on the mistaken
notion that the Bible’s genealogies always included
every generation. Neither Ussher nor Lightfoot recognized
the fact that, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew words for
father ( ‘ab ) and son ( ben ) can also mean forefather
and descendent. Bible scholars (including even the staunchest
recent creationists) now recognize that "telescoping"
was a common practice, serving as an aid to memory and as
a means of emphasizing the more important ancestors. The practice
becomes especially obvious to any scholar who examines passages
such as 1 Chronicles 26:24, Ezra 7:2, or Matthew 1:8.
But this date for creation quickly became
a part of Protestant tradition when it was included as a margin
note, and sometimes even as a heading, in the early printings
of the authorized King James Version of the Bible.
Explaining a Young Universe
These dates, or at least the general time
periods, became ingrained into much Christian thinking, but
they posed no real problem until conflicts arose with geological
findings in the early 19th century. Today, the young earth
position is in direct conflict with practically all the sciences.
Recent creation advocates must explain how we can see galaxies
that are billions of light years away (meaning their light
took billions of years to get here). Fossil evidence and radioactive
dating of the rocks themselves have rendered any recent creation
theory increasingly unreasonable.
Philip Gosse, a Christian geologist who found
himself confronted with undeniable evidence for an ancient
earth in the 1850s, resolved his dilemma by proposing that
God had created everything with an appearance of great age.
The actual age of the earth might be eight or ten thousand
years, but the "ideal" age (the age which God simulated
at creation) could be millions of years. Ancient fossils,
according to this view, never existed as plants or animals
but had been created as fossils . In His exhaustive job of
"antiquating" His universe, God had even simulated
the half-digested food found in many animal fossils.
Of course, an omnipotent God has the ability
to do such a thing. But the question arises, Would the God
who encourages us to delight in and study His great works
create false histories (Psalm 111:2)? Are His creative wonders
deceptive, or do we appreciate Him more the more we learn
of His lengthy preparations for humankind?
The "creation-with-apparent-age"
hypothesis is still held by most recent creation advocates
today. According to it, we see starlight, not because the
stars were really there billions of years ago, but because
God created the starlight in situ , as if it had been traveling
for billions of years. Such a situation would mean that events
that we see in distant galaxies, such as supernovas, never
actually happened, but that God is sending us false stellar
reports by light. Alternatively, some propose that the speed
of light has actually changed. Perhaps light used to travel
with much greater velocity, quickly bringing us the light
from billions of light-years away, and then God slowed it
down to its present velocity.
Such reasoning, of course, is based on questionable
presuppositions, not on evidence. Even science writer Paul
Steidl, a recent creationist who prefers this view, admitted,
"To be honest, there is little or no evidence for a change
in the speed of light." There is, however, much contrary
evidence. More than fifty experiments to measure the speed
of light, beginning over three hundred years ago, indicate
that this constant has not changed during that time (at least,
not as far as we can tell, considering the imprecision of
data used in the past). More importantly, astronomers who
measure the spectral lines of hydrogen report no change in
the light waves arriving from even the most distant galaxies.
The spectral line of hydrogen at 21 centimeters should vary
with the speed of light, but this line remains constant, whether
the measurement is made on nearby galaxies or those billions
of light-years distant.
Another early idea of the recent creationist
advocates, called the "tired light" hypothesis,
calls into question the whole concept of determination of
distances by redshifting. According to this idea, redshifting
may be due to the light’s loss of energy rather than
the Doppler effect. But careful measurements show that identical
redshifts are observed even at greatly disparate frequencies;
any loss of energy from distant starlight would show increasing
amounts of blurring across spectral lines. In spite of the
fact that the "tired light" hypothesis was tested
and proved groundless years ago, recent creation advocates
continue to promote this hypothesis today.
Those who question the whole idea of redshifting
and an expanding universe should understand that gravitational
lensing independently confirms that objects with higher redshifts
truly are more distant. Massive objects like galaxies are
known to act as crude lenses, bending the light from objects
that lie behind them so that we can see them. Gravitational
lenses thus distort the images of these objects, magnifying
them or producing multiple images of the same object. In every
case where a gravitational lens has been located, the object
behind the lens always has a higher redshift, confirming that
the redshift does indeed indicate greater distance.
Other factors do contribute to the degree
of an object’s redshift besides the Doppler effect (like
gravitational effects). But even if new evidence suddenly
came along to show that the redshifting now attributed to
recession velocity should be attributed in great degree to
something else, we still know that the farthest observable
galaxies are at least some millions of light-years distant,
and so we know that the universe is at least some millions
of years old.
How can we be so sure? Given the distances
we have determined to our nearest stars by fool-proof parallax
methods, and given a minimum amount of spacing between stars,
we know that our own galaxy’s size must be close to
the 100,000 light-years that we have determined by other methods.
Even if we suppose that there is very little space between
galaxies, we have to account for the space required by the
millions of observable galaxies themselves (to be extremely
conservative, over a million have been observed and plotted
on maps – astronomers say there are actually billions).
Even if we assume that galaxies are spaced apart by only 10
galaxy diameters (though science tells us this is much closer
than typical spacing), and even if we assume there are only
one million galaxies, we find our observable universe must
be at least 62 million light-years across.* To be able to
receive light coming from such a distance obviously requires
that the universe be at least 62 million years old.
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*The computation treats the universe as a
sphere and stacks one million galaxies within spaces that
are cubes with sides that are one million light-years each
(keeping each galaxy about 10 galaxy diameters apart above
and below, and on all sides). The volume for a sphere = 4
r 3 /3, where r = the radius. So the volume of 1 million cubes
= 10 F 24 cubic light-years. And r = 62 million light-years.
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Even recent creationist Paul M. Steidl writes:
"There is no doubt that there really
are objects greater than 10,000 light years away. Ten thousand
light years still leaves us well within the Milky Way Galaxy,
and other galaxies are thousands of times farther away than
this. No arguments or revisions of the distance scale can
change this basic fact."
To accept the idea that God created starlight
"in transit" and rocks with radioactive elements
used up in order to give them the "appearance" of
billions of years of age is to accept the idea that God is
deceptive. At best the appearance-of-age hypothesis presumes
that God has some hidden agenda, some reason to misrepresent
the universe as much older than it is. Even Einstein’s
notion of God was above this; he refused to believe that there
was anything deceptive about the way He created the universe:
"Subtle is the Lord," said Einstein, "but malicious
He is not."
To accept the idea that starlight has slowed
down over the years or that its light has become "tired"
over distance is to ignore laws of physics and observational
tests. To seriously cling to any of these ideas is to put
preconceptions (which are based more on tradition than on
Scripture) above evidence. *
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* Other proposals have been offered in recent years in an
effort to explain how light from stars can travel billions
of light-years to reach us in the short time that has allegedly
passed since creation. One of these ideas, though coming from
a recent creationist, acknowledges the fact that billions
of years have passed "out there" among the galaxies,
but proposes that only thousands of years may have passed
here on Earth. In his book, Starlight and Time, Christian
physicist Russell Humphreys shortens Earth-time through use
of general relativity. He proposes that Earth was surrounded
by an enormous gravitational field, slowing down time here
relative to the rest of the universe. However, observational
evidence clearly contradicts this idea: for example, our observations
of pulsars and Cepheid variable stars whose cycles do not
vary with distance. A more interesting proposal comes from
Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder. In his books, Genesis
and the Big Bang and The Science of God, he proposes that,
indeed, the universe has had a 15-billion-year history as
we look back at it from our spacetime coordinates. But according
to general relativity, an observer at the beginning would
look forward to a future when time, as well as space, would
stretch out. What appears as 15 billion years from our spacetime
would be condensed a million million times from that early
viewpoint – into just six days.
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Christian philosopher of science Bernard Ramm says: "Such
a scheme as Gosse propounds, clever as it is, is a tacit admission
of the correctness of geology. Better sense will state that
the ideal time is the real time."
The Other
Christian Tradition
For those who feel
the need for support from Christian tradition, I should point
out that Augustine said that the creation "days"
were not sun-divided days, but rather, God-divided days. Others
who believed that the creation days were not necessarily solar
days include Irenaeus, second century apologist and martyr;
Origen, third century apologist; Basil, 4rth century bishop
of Caesarea; and Thomas Aquinas, 13th century theologian.
This tradition even goes back to ancient Jewish thinking,
for the position that the days of Genesis were not to be taken
literally was also held by first-century Jewish writers, Philo
and Josephus. Obviously, these early opinions cannot be said
to have been formed in order to comply with the discoveries
of modern science.
More recently, the
ancient universe view was held by conservative theologian
C.I. Scofield, whose Reference Bible helped publicize the
famous "gap" theory (which proposed an age-old earth
before Adam). Scofield wrote: "The first creative act
refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic
ages. . . . The frequent parabolic use of natural phenomena
may warrant the conclusion that each creative ‘day’
was a period of time marked off by a beginning and ending."
An ancient world
is also defended by conservative Bible scholar A.H. Strong
in his Systematic Theology . And in his Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties , Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer points
out that "it would seem to border on sheer irrationality
to insist that all of Adam’s experiences in Genesis
2:15-22 could have been crowded into the last hour or two
of a literal twenty-four-hour day."
This Christian tradition
would demonstrate an open attitude toward the big bang theory
– not putting it before the Bible, and not necessarily
claiming that it is the only theory that could ever fit the
facts – but, for the reasons below, accepting it as
a reasonable theory that accords well with the bits of information
that the Bible gives us about the beginning of the universe.
The Harmony
of Modern Cosmology with the Bible Itself:
The Bible’s Harmony with an Old Universe
The theological theory
of a recent creation rests, in great measure, upon a single
word used in the first chapter of Genesis – the word
"day," the Hebrew word yom, a word whose intended
meaning is open to dispute. Each category of creative acts
is described as taking place in one day. The fact that the
word can refer to a great period of time rather than a solar
day is clear from its nearby use in Genesis 2:4, which speaks
of the "day" that all this creation activity took
place. Here the word yom is intended to mean a general period
of time, since it includes all the "days" of creation.
Most versions do not even translate the word as "day,"
so that it will not be confused with a solar day. The New
International Version simply states "when they were created,"
rather than "in the day that the LORD God made."
But in the original Hebrew text, the word "day"
is there as clearly as it is in each of the "days"
of creation.
Even solar-day proponent
Henry Morris admits, "There is no doubt that yom can
be used to express time in a general sense." He goes
on to mention that the word is translated as "time"
65 times in the King James Version, but as "day"
almost 1,200 times, and draws conclusions from this fact.
However, later he confesses that many of those 1,200 cases
also refer to a more general period of time, even though they
are translated as "day."
Gleason Archer, an
authority on ancient Semitic languages, points out that, in
the Hebrew, Genesis 1 omits the definite article before each
of the creation days. Rather than saying "the first day,"
it literally reads, "day one." Says Archer, "In
Hebrew prose of this genre, the definite article was generally
used where the noun was intended to be definite; only in poetic
style could it be omitted." This would also lead us to
believe that a figurative meaning for the word day is intended.
The author of the
Genesis creation account may have had a 24-hour day in mind,
or he may have used the 24-hour day as a fitting picture to
describe the stages of creation. Scripture is filled with
examples showing use of this word as a figure for longer time
periods, as in "the day of the Lord," "in that
day," etc.
It is also possible
that the author was not thinking so much of ages but of the
literary structure of his narrative. Today a growing number
of conservative Bible scholars hold to this position, since
the writer casts the creation days within a parallel framework.
The order and symmetry of this structure stands in stark contrast
to other ancient creation accounts, where the world is created
during violent conflicts between gods. In the Bible, however,
care and design are stressed even in the literary structure.
Charting the days reveals the symmetrical beauty of days that
correspond to one another both horizontally and vertically.
Days 1—3 correspond
to one another vertically, each speaking of formation, while
days 4—6 also correspond to one another vertically,
each speaking of filling. Moreover, placing these two lists
side by side reveals that each day of formation corresponds
horizontally to a day of filling: day 1 corresponds to day
4 (light), day 2 corresponds to day 5 (sea and sea creatures),
and day 3 corresponds to day 6 (land and land creatures).
It is also possible to accept this overall framework as an
artful use of a real sequence of creative events, since the
geologic record’s agreement with Genesis 1, in my view,
is difficult to explain by coincidence alone. Volume 3 deals
with this subject in great detail.
Whether one accepts
the day-age interpretation or the literary framework hypothesis
(or some combination of both), the inerrancy of Scripture
is not violated. The Scriptures allow for the geologic ages
that science reveals. Some would even say that the Bible’s
most natural interpretation necessitates long periods of time
before the creation of humans.
Notice, for instance,
the use of the word "generations," again in Genesis
2:4 (usually translated "account" in modern versions).
The verse literally translates as "These are the generations
of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the
day of their making." In Hebrew the word "generation"
( toledoth ) means the number of years between the birth of
parents and the birth of their offspring, or a period arbitrarily
longer. The fact that it is used in the plural obviously suggests
a long period of time for the creation of the heavens and
the earth; it is difficult to reconcile these "generations"
with the idea of only six solar days.
The rest of the Bible
certainly gives us the general sense that creation was a time-consuming,
monumental process, involving ages (Proverbs 8:22-31, Psalm
104, Micah 6:3, Habakkuk 3:6). Genesis, the book of beginnings,
only devotes one chapter out of fifty to describe creation,
and the rest of the Bible is far too general to satisfy the
curiosity of a scientist. Why doesn’t the Bible give
us more specifics? Why, after all, doesn’t Genesis tell
us about each phylum and class and give us the specifics of
all the processes God used to bring them about, along with
their exact dates?
Obviously these facts,
interesting as they would be to scientists, are not the reason
for God’s communication. They would not satisfy the
greatest need of the human heart, the need to know not just
when or how the universe was created, but Who created it.
It is not the Bible’s intention to teach science. Like
the teacher/king in Ecclesiastes, we have to work for our
knowledge of God’s natural order. But His gift through
His Word is the revelation of Who He is, which we would know
only imperfectly apart from special, supernatural revelation.
Supernatural revelation tells us Who created and why . Natural
revelation tells us how and when .
God’s purpose
through Genesis 1, for readers today as well as in Moses’
time, is certainly to magnify Himself as sole Creator and
to let it be known that all creation serves Him and His purposes.
Nature is not to be worshipped. Only the Creator is worthy
of that honor. Bible-believing science philosopher Bernard
Ramm writes: "This is more effectively brought out by
an absence of reference to all secondary causes. God speaks
and it comes to pass! Expositors have been mistaken in assuming
that (i) this cannot involve time, and (ii) this cannot involve
process."
The Bible’s
Harmony with Our Findings From Nature
Some people, however,
feel that the Bible must be the only source of revelation
for all truth. This single revelation position leads to the
view that science is of the devil, that everything we need
to know is in God’s Word and to try to gain knowledge
from other sources is sin. Such a position runs contrary to
Scripture itself, since Psalm 19:1-4 and Romans 1:19-20 clearly
tell us that God also speaks to us through creation. Above
the entrance to the old Cavendish Laboratory in London is
engraved Psalm 111:2: "Great are the works of the LORD;
they are studied by all who delight in them."
Even though it is
not the Bible’s purpose to teach science, its brief
account of creation in Genesis 1, sketchy and unsatisfying
as it is from a scientist’s viewpoint, is the only ancient
text that accurately describes certain geologic truths. As
we’ll see in future articles, the theologians who advocate
a young earth view must confront another difficult question:
If Genesis cannot allow for a creation that took place over
billions of years, why does the account fit the general descriptions
of the geologic ages so well?
Both the Bible and
geology testify to a progressive creation: the world was not
created in an instant with everything in its place. Both tell
us that the earth was once "formless and empty,"
and that this condition was followed by a "primitive
universal ocean," which in turn was followed by the appearance
of dry land (or as Eric Lerner puts it, "a gradual retreat
of shallow seas from all the continents") Both agree
that darkness covered the earth in its earliest history (required
by the early opaque debris cloud in all theories of planet
formation). Both agree that animal life first inhabited the
sea. Both agree that plant life preceded land animals, and
that birds preceded mammals. And now (after 150 years of studying
the fossil record), both are even beginning to agree that
each life form appeared abruptly, often with no transitional
forms between them. Both testify that mammals, and finally
humans, were the last to appear.
Other ancient creation
accounts, filled with accounts of battles and sexual encounters
between mythical gods of sea, sky, and earth, explain creation
in very different terms. These match neither the order nor
the substance of events, according to science.
In other articles,
we already discussed how the Bible harmonizes with the theory
of relativity ("With the Lord a day is like a thousand
years, and a thousand years are like a day") and with
the laws of thermodynamics ("the heavens will all wear
out like a garment"). Like the Bible, both of these fundamentals
of science clearly point to a creation event. The current
scientific view that this beginning must have taken place
between ten and twenty billion years ago is a bigger embarrassment
for science than for theology, since this simply does not
give the processes of random selection anywhere near the amount
of time natural selection and mutation requires to produce
the purposeful complexity that is life. We will look further
into this in other articles.
Die-hard recent creationists
find themselves on the same side as the atheists who continue
to reject the big bang’s evidence for philosophical
reasons. To some dissenting scientists and science writers,
the big bang is especially unattractive because of its close
correlation with biblical creation. Science writer John Boslough
criticizes big bang cosmology, calling it "the scientific
model of Genesis." He denounces it for its inability
to account for the lack of ripples in the microwave background
radiation (since he was writing in 1992, just before their
discovery); but notice how he phrases his concluding criticism:
For the time being,
the big bang remains a scientific paradigm wrapped inside
a metaphor for biblical genesis , a compelling although simplistic
pseudoscientific creation myth embodying a Judeo-Christian
tradition of linear time that led to Western ideas about cultural
and scientific progress and which ordained an absolute beginning"
(emphasis added).
Unlike other ancient
religious texts, the Bible teaches that God is transcendent
and that the universe is not eternal. In this century science
has come to agree. The very existence of certain atoms shows
that the elements themselves cannot be infinite in age. Science
historian Owen Gingerich explains: "If the atoms were
infinitely old, then radioactive uranium and thorium would
have turned to lead. Their very existence tells us that they
were formed at a finite time past."
Even recent creationists
accept the fact that the universe is expanding, but they say
that God created an already-expanding universe, rather than
a big bang, for the sake of the universe’s stability.
If the galaxies were simply created without this outward motion,
gravity would bring all the galaxies crashing together into
a "big crunch." Either way (big bang or creation
in an already-expanding mode), God’s care and wisdom
are shown in this expansion that establishes a stable universe.
Does the Bible even
hint at an expanding universe? At least one astronomer has
recognized a possible correlation. In Steven Beyer’s
The Star Guide , Beyer notes an interesting fact about the
word used in the Hebrew Bible to describe the heavens in the
context of creation (e.g., Genesis 1 and Psalm 19). Long before
scientists had proposed any theory of an expanding universe,
Hebrew lexicographers (in 1762) described this word, raquia,
as expressing "motion of different parts of the same
thing, at the same time, one part the one way and the other,
the other way, with force." In 1821, John Reid translated
the word as "expansion, the heavens, from their being
stretched forth." Young’s concordance defines the
Hebrew noun raquia as "expanse" and the verb raqa
as "to spread out or over." Strong’s concordance
defines raquia as "an expanse, i.e. the firmament"
and raqa as "to pound" or "to expand."
To describe God’s
activity in stretching out the heavens, the Hebrews used both
the verbs raqa and nata , as in the many cases in which the
Bible says that God "stretched out" or "spread
out the heavens" (e.g., see Job 26:7, Isaiah 40:22, 42:5,
45:12, Jeremiah 12:12, Zechariah 12:1). Of course, we have
no way of knowing whether these words were purposely used
to describe the expansion of the created heavens. But once
again, unlike any other ancient creation account, this one
certainly does not contradict the lessons science has recently
taught us about the origin of our universe.
The Big Bang’s Harmony with Your Witness
For Christians, talking about the stability produced by an
expanding universe and the tremendous time and care God took
to prepare the world for us can be a natural way to bring
God into a conversation. However, advancing the young earth
view poses a serious stumbling block to many who fear they
must subscribe to it in order to believe the Bible. Reasonable
people who have some knowledge of science will tend to dismiss
your gospel along with your geology. How much better it is
to present facts that witness rather than private interpretations
that scare unbelievers away.
Conclusion:
The Story from Science: "In the Beginning . . ."
The conclusions drawn
from classical thermodynamics, from general relativity, and
from the observations of astronomy all unite to tell the same
story. This century has seen the convergence of these three
fields, resulting in what is probably the greatest discovery
of modern science: the finding that the universe must have
had a beginning – a beginning that was highly ordered
and purposeful.
British theorist
Edward Milne concluded his mathematical treatise on relativity
with the statement: "As to the cause of the Universe,
in the context of expansion, that is left for the reader to
insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him."
* * *
Shocking
Summary Statements and
Stimulating
Conversation Starters
• There is
a solution to the young earth/old earth controversy: tag team
wrestling. A fair match would be to let Duane Gish, Ken Ham,
and Henry and John Morris champion the young earth side –
and to pit them against Hugh Ross, the champion for old earth
creationists, who is tough enough to take on all four by himself.
• There is
a conflict between modern science and some traditional beliefs
among Christians, but there’s no conflict with the Bible
itself.
• Recent creationists
need to think about what they are seeing when they look up
into a star-filled night. If the light from many of these
stars and galaxies is coming to us from millions of light-years
away (as recent creationists admit), and if God created the
heavens and the earth just ten thousand years ago, then how
do we see this light that took millions of years to get here?
When we see a supernova in a distant galaxy, is this an event
that never really happened? Is God sending us false stellar
reports by light?
• Is the ancient
universe view only held by liberal Christians who wish to
accommodate the discoveries of modern science? Actually, pre-modern
Bible believers such as Josephus, Philo, Augustine, Irenaeus,
Origen, Basil, and Thomas Aquinas all held that the creation
"days" were not necessarily meant to be taken as
literal, solar days. In this century, the ancient universe
position has been held by such conservative Bible scholars
as C.I. Scofield, A.H. Strong, and Gleason Archer.
• The writer
of the Genesis creation account may have had a solar day in
mind, or he may have used the solar day as a fitting picture
to describe the stages of creation. Either interpretation
is legitimate; so don’t let anybody bully you into thinking
it’s his way or no way. Anybody who feels he has to
bully you in order to convince you shouldn’t be taken
too seriously anyway.
• Old and young
earth creationists generally agree that the universe is expanding
– they just differ about how far back we can follow
the process in reverse until we come to the moment of creation.
Leaders in both groups agree that this outward motion provides
stability; without it gravity would act to pull all the galaxies
together. Thus, whether God created the universe in a big
bang or in an already-expanding mode, God’s wisdom and
care are displayed by astronomical observations.
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For end note documentation, see the chapter titled "The
Bible and the Big Bang," in the book, Show Me God.
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Science journalist
Fred Heeren writes for The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal,
The Chicago Tribune, Insight magazine of The Washington Times,
The American Spectator, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, New Man
magazine , Weekly World News, and any other publication that
will give him a platform to make the latest discoveries in
science understandable and relevant to the general public.
He has an agenda, he says: and it is to encourage people to
stop their trivial pursuits long enough to think about life’s
big questions. He is the author of the book, Show Me God (subtitled
What the Message from Space Is Telling Us About God), Editor
of Cosmic Pursuit magazine, and president of The Day Star
Network.
To read more interesting
articles like this one, log onto http://www.ScienceDiscussion.com
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