NUmarcus
Active Member
Continuing on. It took a while to look up the references quoted in the sermon...so if I got one wrong or if the scripture is out of place please let me know.
Genesis Part 2: The Beginning of the Universe
There is no one alive today who has not at some point in their life sat back and asked "How did the life, plants, etc....the things of the world get here?" In Genesis Chapter 1, the issue of creation is brought up and addressed directly. However, there are many who were brought up in a period of American history where the "evolutionary" model of creation/development was/is taught and subsequently it presents an obstacle to their coming to faith in Jesus Christ.
Now as followers of Jesus Christ who have placed our faith in Him and the finished work on the cross, it becomes important for us to understand and subsequently be able to explain to non-believers why/how Genesis is at least plausible. The reality is that as knowledge increases and we learn more and more about the world, the Bible's account of creation in Genesis 1-3 becomes increasingly evident as truth.
What does the Bible Say about the Creation of the Universe?
Notice that says "God created". It does not say:
It is saying that there was nothing (no matter, quarks, electrons, and on and on), but there was God and He created the heavens and the earth. There is a key term used here that comes from Hebrew. The Hebrew word 'created' is bara. This is interesting because it is never used in the Bible with another subject except God himself. God can bara, but people can never bara. What is the point?
The Hebrew word 'bara' it means to create something out of nothing. So God took nothing and made it into everything we see in the world.Further, God did it in 6 literal 24 hour days. If you look at Genesis Chapter 1:
Notice the same phraseology is present throughout. The Lord creates and works between twilight and dawn and a day is completed. The word that is used in Genesis 1 for day is 'yom' and it does mean a literal 24-hour period or day. It is not refering to an epoch, an eon, or some other multi-year period. Further, in each passage the Lord is VERY explicit...there is one morning and then one evening and a day is completed. Therefore, the declaration of Genesis 1 is that God made the universe out of nothing and he did it in 6, 24-hour days.
Time Magazine, article titled "Unraveling the Universe"
Considering how little they know, would it not be logical for scientists to at least be open to the idea of creation....to give it a chance? Sadly, they are not open to this. The reason for this is pretty simple. If a person admits the world was created, then they have to admit that there is a creator, and if there is a creator of all that we see, He is obviously more powerful and obviously more awesome than we are. If he is that awesome and that powerful, it is logical that we should be humble before him and seek his will and his path to heaven and so on. Because people are prideful and arrogant they cannot make this a fact for themselves because they cannot allow for....deal with a Divine creator in their personal life that has direct, current, AND eternal implications.
Now, having discussed this offline with friends and family, I can understand and see how a renowned physicist...someone who has spent countless hours in libraries and classrooms and laboratories calculating the speed, size, end point, and start point of the universe could fail to see the truth because in their "trained" brain there is no zero sum calculation that says:
"Since the combined probabilities of this examination are approaching 1, which is to say it is nearing a statistical certainty, we can conclude that the data supports a failure to reject the null hypothesis of creation by a Creator that manipulated these thousands of independent variables," and hence they approach it from a "We scientifically DO NOT KNOW."
However, there are also a lot of "What abouts?" that populate the discussion of the creation of the Universe. What follows is a brief examination of some of them.
What about the fact that almost no scientist in the world think that the Bible's account of creation can be right?
There are a lot of scientists that reject the evolutionary model in toto or who at least will publicly state their serious reservations with it. Consider the following quotes:
What about the age of the universe...the age of the Earth? The Bible presents a picture of a very young Earth and scientists present a picture of an Earth that is very old (billions of years)
The reason why scientists are committed to an Earth that is billions and billions of years old is because the odds, the mathematical probability of human life developing on Earth through evolution are so infinitesimally small, that the only way to make this even remotely possible is to give it billions and billions of years to happen in. With any shorter time frame this becomes mathematically impossible. This is why evolutionists must argue so vehemently for an Old Earth scenario.
The two most common methods for dating the age of the Universe and the Earth are (1) Radioactive dating and (2) Expanding Universe Model
What about Radioactive Dating?
You measure the decay rates of carbon and uranium and other isotopes and then use that data to calculate the age of the Earth.
Physicist Dr. Frederick Jueneman:
Most of the water came as the result of cracks in the Earth's crust, and if this is accurate, and the Earth's crust was broken up and radioactive material accompanied the upwelling of water from the "deep" and the entire planet then soaked in it for a year...radioactive decay data is then logically invalid because we do not have a uniform, "closed" system that goes all the way back to the origin of the Earth. In short...the data is polluted.
What about Expanding Universe Model?
Dr. John Baumgardner (Los Alamos Laboratory Geophysicist) 1994:
Interesting fact about the man who developed the radioactive dating concept:
The bottom line with all of this is that the Earth's age is not set in stone at 4.5 billion years old. There is not a indisputable scientific evidence that the Earth is 4 billion years + old. In reality it may very well be young as Genesis says. If it is very young, as Genesis says, then the evolutionary model of the Earth and the Universe becomes impossible.
What about the Big Bang Theory? It appears to account pretty well for how the Earth came into existence.
What about the fact that Earth is so perfectly suited for life that only a few tiny changes would result in life NOT being able to exist on Earth?
Time Magazine: "One intriguing observation that has bubbled up from physics is that the universe seems calibrated for life's' very existence. For example, if the force of gravity were forced upward just a tiny bit, stars would burn out faster and leave little for life to evolve on planets circling them. If the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by just a hair, stars would never be born since the hydrogen they eat would never exist. If, at the Big Bang, some basic numbers in the initial conditions had been jiggled just a tiny bit, the matter and energy never would have coagulated into stars, planets and other platforms stable for life as we know it."
What Time is saying here is that our planet and the rest of the universe has been precisely tweaked to support life here on Earth.
Article from physicist Dr. Hugh Ross (Article)
Dartmouth University Astronomer, Dr. Robert Jastrow: For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 1978), p. 116.
Conclusion:
The implication is that for Christians the truth is evident that the universe and the Earth are created by, managed, cared for, looked over and held in control by an all wise, majestic, righteous, holy, and loving God that lets no detail or event go by the wayside or unaccounted for. For Christians this is comforting! If you have never considered any of this or are questionning of creation, Christ and so on but still stop in here to read consider that in many ways each day you are being called by Christ to salvation and fellowship.
I apologize for the length of this, but I wanted to be thorough. I pray that I have not added to nor taken away from the Lord's word. I am going to hold off on the next part until the end of the week so folks can get caught up/post thoughts/kick the mental ball around on the board. God Bless you and have a great week!
Genesis Part 2: The Beginning of the Universe
There is no one alive today who has not at some point in their life sat back and asked "How did the life, plants, etc....the things of the world get here?" In Genesis Chapter 1, the issue of creation is brought up and addressed directly. However, there are many who were brought up in a period of American history where the "evolutionary" model of creation/development was/is taught and subsequently it presents an obstacle to their coming to faith in Jesus Christ.
Now as followers of Jesus Christ who have placed our faith in Him and the finished work on the cross, it becomes important for us to understand and subsequently be able to explain to non-believers why/how Genesis is at least plausible. The reality is that as knowledge increases and we learn more and more about the world, the Bible's account of creation in Genesis 1-3 becomes increasingly evident as truth.
What does the Bible Say about the Creation of the Universe?
Notice that says "God created". It does not say:
- In the beginning man
- In the beginning amoebas
- In the beginning nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and a lucky bolt of lightning
It is saying that there was nothing (no matter, quarks, electrons, and on and on), but there was God and He created the heavens and the earth. There is a key term used here that comes from Hebrew. The Hebrew word 'created' is bara. This is interesting because it is never used in the Bible with another subject except God himself. God can bara, but people can never bara. What is the point?
The Hebrew word 'bara' it means to create something out of nothing. So God took nothing and made it into everything we see in the world.Further, God did it in 6 literal 24 hour days. If you look at Genesis Chapter 1:
Notice the same phraseology is present throughout. The Lord creates and works between twilight and dawn and a day is completed. The word that is used in Genesis 1 for day is 'yom' and it does mean a literal 24-hour period or day. It is not refering to an epoch, an eon, or some other multi-year period. Further, in each passage the Lord is VERY explicit...there is one morning and then one evening and a day is completed. Therefore, the declaration of Genesis 1 is that God made the universe out of nothing and he did it in 6, 24-hour days.
Time Magazine, article titled "Unraveling the Universe"
Considering how little they know, would it not be logical for scientists to at least be open to the idea of creation....to give it a chance? Sadly, they are not open to this. The reason for this is pretty simple. If a person admits the world was created, then they have to admit that there is a creator, and if there is a creator of all that we see, He is obviously more powerful and obviously more awesome than we are. If he is that awesome and that powerful, it is logical that we should be humble before him and seek his will and his path to heaven and so on. Because people are prideful and arrogant they cannot make this a fact for themselves because they cannot allow for....deal with a Divine creator in their personal life that has direct, current, AND eternal implications.
Now, having discussed this offline with friends and family, I can understand and see how a renowned physicist...someone who has spent countless hours in libraries and classrooms and laboratories calculating the speed, size, end point, and start point of the universe could fail to see the truth because in their "trained" brain there is no zero sum calculation that says:
"Since the combined probabilities of this examination are approaching 1, which is to say it is nearing a statistical certainty, we can conclude that the data supports a failure to reject the null hypothesis of creation by a Creator that manipulated these thousands of independent variables," and hence they approach it from a "We scientifically DO NOT KNOW."
However, there are also a lot of "What abouts?" that populate the discussion of the creation of the Universe. What follows is a brief examination of some of them.
What about the fact that almost no scientist in the world think that the Bible's account of creation can be right?
There are a lot of scientists that reject the evolutionary model in toto or who at least will publicly state their serious reservations with it. Consider the following quotes:
- "Scientists who utterly reject evolution may be one of our fastest growing minorities in the scientific community. Many of these scientists hold impressive credentials in science." (From Science Digest)
- Dr. William D. Hamilton, Professor of Biology, Oxford University: "The theological possibility that explains the origin of the universe is still certainly alive."
- In 1991, 60 scientists (including 24 Nobel winners) came together and published a book titled "Cosmos, Bios, and Theos" One of the authors, Yale Physicist Dr. Henry Morgenau stated, "There is only one convincing answer for the intricate laws that exist in the natural world, and that is creation by an omnipotent, all wise God."
- Dr. Paul Davies, Physicist at Arizona State: "The very fact that the universe is creative and that it has permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness, in other words the very fact that the universe has organized its own self awareness is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming."
- Dr. Ronald Numbers, Historian at University of Wisconsin. He studies the whole debate between evolutionists and creationists. He states: "Published scientists with creationist beliefs are NOT uncommon."
What about the age of the universe...the age of the Earth? The Bible presents a picture of a very young Earth and scientists present a picture of an Earth that is very old (billions of years)
The reason why scientists are committed to an Earth that is billions and billions of years old is because the odds, the mathematical probability of human life developing on Earth through evolution are so infinitesimally small, that the only way to make this even remotely possible is to give it billions and billions of years to happen in. With any shorter time frame this becomes mathematically impossible. This is why evolutionists must argue so vehemently for an Old Earth scenario.
The two most common methods for dating the age of the Universe and the Earth are (1) Radioactive dating and (2) Expanding Universe Model
What about Radioactive Dating?
You measure the decay rates of carbon and uranium and other isotopes and then use that data to calculate the age of the Earth.
Physicist Dr. Frederick Jueneman:
- "The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such 'confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." Frederic B. Jueneman, “Secular Catastrophism,” Industrial Research and Development, Vol. 24 (June 1982), p. 21.
- Meaning? He is saying, if there was some kind of global disaster that changed the way the environment works, the radioactive decay rates are invalid. Now is there some event that is global in nature and is a disaster? The answer is the flood from Noah's time. The Bible states that the water that covered the Earth did not come from rain. If we look in Genesis 7:11
Most of the water came as the result of cracks in the Earth's crust, and if this is accurate, and the Earth's crust was broken up and radioactive material accompanied the upwelling of water from the "deep" and the entire planet then soaked in it for a year...radioactive decay data is then logically invalid because we do not have a uniform, "closed" system that goes all the way back to the origin of the Earth. In short...the data is polluted.
What about Expanding Universe Model?
- Scientists present the impression that this is a highly fined tuned exercise and the subsequent results are air tight
- Time Magazine, article titled "Unraveling the Universe": "Astronomers since Hubble's' hay day in the 1920s that you only need two pieces of information to deduce the age of the universe. You need to know how fast the galaxies are flying apart and far away they are. The ratio of these two numbers tells you how fast the cosmos is expanding and a simple calculation tells you how long it has been since the expansion started."
- University of Oklahoma Astrophysicist, Dr. David Branch: "There are these two loopholes though. What is the right distance and what is the right speed?" Time magazine notes that these loopholes are large enough to drive the star-ship Enterprise through.
- The point? This is far from an exact calculation that yields a precise dating of the universe. In fact there is science beginning to suggest the opposite of an "old" universe etc. LIKE WHO Mark?
Dr. John Baumgardner (Los Alamos Laboratory Geophysicist) 1994:
- "The slip sliding of the Earth's plates might once have happened at 1000s of times faster speeds than it happens today, and if that is true then the Earth is actually quite young."
Interesting fact about the man who developed the radioactive dating concept:
- Walter Libby devised the method in 1946 and used it to calculate the age of the Earth. He came up with a number of 30,000 years old.
- Point? He was smart enough to develop the method, but he was not smart enough to use it and get the results correct?
The bottom line with all of this is that the Earth's age is not set in stone at 4.5 billion years old. There is not a indisputable scientific evidence that the Earth is 4 billion years + old. In reality it may very well be young as Genesis says. If it is very young, as Genesis says, then the evolutionary model of the Earth and the Universe becomes impossible.
What about the Big Bang Theory? It appears to account pretty well for how the Earth came into existence.
- Dartmouth University Astronomer, Dr. Robert Jastrow: "Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. The scientists pursuit of the past ends a moment of creation. This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by everybody accept for the theologian. What we see is that the evidence from astronomy leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The essential elements of the astronomical model and the biblical account in Genesis are the same." (Robert Jastrow, “A Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths,” Christianity Today, August 6, 1982.)
What about the fact that Earth is so perfectly suited for life that only a few tiny changes would result in life NOT being able to exist on Earth?
Time Magazine: "One intriguing observation that has bubbled up from physics is that the universe seems calibrated for life's' very existence. For example, if the force of gravity were forced upward just a tiny bit, stars would burn out faster and leave little for life to evolve on planets circling them. If the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by just a hair, stars would never be born since the hydrogen they eat would never exist. If, at the Big Bang, some basic numbers in the initial conditions had been jiggled just a tiny bit, the matter and energy never would have coagulated into stars, planets and other platforms stable for life as we know it."
What Time is saying here is that our planet and the rest of the universe has been precisely tweaked to support life here on Earth.
Article from physicist Dr. Hugh Ross (Article)
- Found/listed 72 characteristics of the universe and solar system that are so perfectly fine tuned that if any one of them were just slightly off life on Earth would be impossible. The probability of all 72 of these occurring on one single planet like Earth is 1 in 10 million trillion trillion trillion or 1 chance in 10 to 65th power).
Dartmouth University Astronomer, Dr. Robert Jastrow: For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 1978), p. 116.
Conclusion:
- Reality: it takes Faith to believe in Genesis' account of creation, but it also takes A LOT of faith to be an aethist and believe in the evolutionary account of how we got here.
- Have we proved that Genesis 1 is right? No
- Can we prove that Genesis 1 is right? No. Remember that all of the evolutionary scientists cannot prove that their model/theories/calculations are right either.
- We have made a very logical/plausible argument for the fact that Genesis 1's account may be the most intelligent of all the theories
The implication is that for Christians the truth is evident that the universe and the Earth are created by, managed, cared for, looked over and held in control by an all wise, majestic, righteous, holy, and loving God that lets no detail or event go by the wayside or unaccounted for. For Christians this is comforting! If you have never considered any of this or are questionning of creation, Christ and so on but still stop in here to read consider that in many ways each day you are being called by Christ to salvation and fellowship.
I apologize for the length of this, but I wanted to be thorough. I pray that I have not added to nor taken away from the Lord's word. I am going to hold off on the next part until the end of the week so folks can get caught up/post thoughts/kick the mental ball around on the board. God Bless you and have a great week!
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