“The scientist has scaled the mountain of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; and when he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Robert Jastrow, NASA scientist
Lawrence M. Krauss at Scientific American, admits that he is continually perplexed that in the secular community, U.S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than other nations. But even more disturbing to Krauss was a 2009 Pew Survey that found that 31% of U.S. adults [white evangelical protestants] believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” because to him it means that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth. Christianity being the myth, of course.
Knowledge, as defined by Webster’s, is the “understanding gained by actual experience; a clear perception of truth.” Scientists, who have never observed either the big bang or evolution in progress, only have a perception of the truth and everyone knows that in science, truth is not set in stone.
Take for example the Theory of Gravitation discovered in 1666 by Isaac Newton. Newton’s theory “explained all the observed facts and made predictions later tested and found to be correct within the accuracy of the instruments used. As far as anyone could see, Newton’s theory was “the Truth.” However, during the 19th century, with more accurate instruments, observations uncovered some discrepancies. Einstein proposed his theories of Relativity explaining the newly observed facts and made more predictions which were tested and found to be correct within the accuracy of the instruments being used. As far as anyone could see, Einstein’s theory was “the truth.” When science says a theory or educated guess is “true” they mean that it only agrees with known experimental evidence which are proven time and time again to be incomplete or totally inaccurate.
The very first line in the Bible tells us that God “created the heaven and the earth.” God did not impart to man how or when He created them, just that He did create them. The “Bang” theory offered by science as the truth of creation is just an educated guess of how the early universe expanded and cooled and how matter congealed, from a primordial soup into stars, planets and galaxies. What scientists are actually describing is the aftermath. The “Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged,” according to Alan Guth, a MIT physicist.
Few are aware that the Big Bang theory was the brain child of a Catholic priest, Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre, a Belgian Jesuit, astronomer and professor of physics at Catholic University of Leuven. Lemaitre worked on what became known as the “hypothesis of primeval atom” or the “Cosmic Egg.” Guth’s work and that of others exploring the first microsecond of what people of biblical faith know as the Creation builds on Lemaitre’s insights.
Alan Guth came up with a revolutionary prequel to the Big Bang, building on Lematre’s insights, and the work of Einstein and others. He pointed out that at extremely high energies, there are forms of matter that upend everything we learned about gravity in high school. Gravity is an incredibly potent force of repulsion and that replusive gravity was the fuel that powered the Big Bang. “The universe, being roughly 13.8 billions years old, began from a patch of material packed with repulsive gravity. . . like a magic wand, doubling the patch in size every tenth of a trillionth or a trillionth of a second . . . until it got to the size of a marble . . .The ingredients of what would become our entire observable universe. . .”
Even if Alan Guth’s work is empirically verified, a far larger question will still remain. Where did that “patch of material packed with repulsive gravity” that contained “the ingredients of what would become our entire observable universe” come from?
The more we delve into the mysteries of physics and cosmology, the more the universe appears to be intricate and incredibly complex. Science alone can never reveal to us why the universe came into existence. Biological evolution has not the slightest understanding of how the first living organisms emerged from inanimate matter or how eukaryotic cells, the highly structured building blocks of advanced life forms ever emerged from simpler organisms.
Why did everything we need in order to exist come into being? How was all of this possible without a power to orchestrate the precise dance of elementary particles required for the creation of all the essentials of life? The incredible fine-tuning of the universe presents the most powerful argument for the existence of God.
The great British mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated, based on only one of the hundreds of parameters of the physical universe, that the probability of the emergence of a life-giving cosmos was 1 dived by 10, raised to the power 10, and again raised to the power of 123. This is a number as close to ZERO as anyone has ever imagined. The probability is much smaller than that of winning the Mega Millions jackpot for more days than the universe has been in existence.
“To the Christian, science is merely that branch of discovery that categorizes, and utilizes the knowledge woven into the fabric of the universe by a Sovereign, All Powerful, and Omniscient, Creator. Science is not the end of all things, but merely one of the means by which man may glorify God. This is because God is the creator of all that is. He has hidden the treasures of his ominous glory in the very universe in which we exist. The power in the atom, momentum, energy, mass, time, etc. are all creations of God and, therefore, under his authority. The more the Christian learns of these things, the more he can glorify God. Science is the creation of God and God is the sovereign of all.” Matt Slick
