In an earlier interview, in a conversation about the beginning of the universe, one scientist made the claim that science has “made it clear that there is a plausible case that a universe like the universe we live in could result literally from nothing…”
When Krauss said that “all of the energy that we see was created from basically empty space,” what does he mean?
Probably this: “Multiple lines of evidence, including the detection of the CMB exactly 50 years ago, have bolstered the consensus model of modern cosmology, which shows that the universe was initially infinitely hot and dense, literally dimensionless. There was no space, no time.” (Achenbach)
In the first tiniest fraction of a second – 1/1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th (some say 32 zeroes) of a second, the universe increased in size by 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times!
It had been thought for quite a while that a lot of stuff happened in the first moments of the universe’s existence (I once heard someone say that much of the growth of the universe happened in the first 30 minutes of after the Big Bang… or of the Big Bang)
I do not remember who that was (probably from some kind of NOVA show or something)… but whoever they were, they apparently weren’t even close.
In Millionths of Trillionths of a part of a second, it seems, the universe expanded from nothing to a significant something, millions of trillions of times in size.
Dare I say it?
As if it were spoken into existence.
Now, I do not want to claim something as “ours” without looking at the whole picture. There are many other implications of this discovery that some Theists might not be so happy with (it turns out that the universe is probably 14 billion years ago or more. My personal views does not struggle with this, but I know that many people’s do.
It also means that probably only about 5% of the matter of the universe is “normal” matter – most of the rest is the mysterious stuff that modern scientists call “dark.” (Peplow) We will have to keep waiting to figure out what the implications of that means too, because right now, no one has any idea.
The reason that I wanted to write on this, is to encourage those who are theists, but who feel stupid, marginalized and written off by those in the scientific community. It is ok to be a theist and a scientist.
Be encouraged that in this case, and at this point, what even the secular scientists have uncovered about the beginning of the universe matches what Christian (and Muslim and Jewish) theologians would have predicted. Enjoy.
More to follow…
Thank you for this Chris.
I am convinced that God made everything and holds everything together. I believe He spoke our universe into existence, or maybe He sang it into existence, like Aslan did.
I believe that we will all discover in heaven that our universe is very old, some 14+ billion years old.
A clock placed on each of the planets in our solar system will all keep different time. Our satellites have relativity baked into them. Which clock is God using? We know he doesn’t keep earth time; is he really bound to a 24 hour earth day? The time estimated on an earth clock, if it had been placed on the lead edge of the big bang, is an interesting thing to talk about….
I think it is essential that teachers who instruct teenagers and young adults make sure that their conviction about the age of the earth includes the fact that their belief is not an essential part of the Christian faith. More than one young adult has struggled with their faith when they have been told to accept all of the Bible literally, or none of it, and later come to believe in an old earth when they study science.
this is well spoken. I remember years ago sitting with a group of Christian men, all leaders, who were almost whispering about their opinions about an old Earth because of the judgment they feared if it got out they like old Earth theories – and we were alone on a canoe trip! I am glad the division between faith and science is being mended… at least in the church.
No comment yet Chris from me. I need to ponder for awhile. Cheryl B.
It is very true that scientific learning is a process. Out with the old and in with the new. It is also fascinating that while scientists claim that this is a strength (to change their minds based on new data) they rarely do so for the overarching models. Cosmology, origins, evolution etc are peppered with observations that utterly falsify them. Yet their commitment to the philosophy causes them to “hold out hope” that another scientist will find the answer. That we can never know enough, or that we have barely scratched the surface, is accepted by all scientists, or they would not pursue scientific knowledge at all.
If I draw a circle and say, for a thought experiment, that all available knowledge exists inside it, and then draw another cirlce inside the first and say, for a thought experiment, that all mankind currently knows exists inside this smaller circle, I then ask – is there any way to know the difference in content between these two circles? The answer is clearly no. But the atheist is certain, in all that unknown, that God doesn’t exist there. This has to be a very tense cognitive existence.
The young earth is easily provable by observing some basic processes, and accepting that the methods for “old earth” dating are significantly flawed. They are statements of faith and nothing more.
If we look at today’s population doubling, the human population doubles every 70 years. Just 70 years ago the earth had half the humans we have today. If I were to take a spreadsheet and put today’s population on it, then reduce this by one-half for each 70 years going back in time, how soon do you think I would reach zero? It actually happens pretty fast.
Now let’s account for wars, famine, pestilence and mayhem, and we can double this “70” to 140, and we still get to zero pretty quickly. The only number we can put into this equation that come close to fitting the evolutionary narrative, are so outrageous that they defy a reasonable person’s credulity. And keep in mind, we are supposed to use “present processes” to extrapolate into deep-time.
This is simply a case where the evolutionary thinker will say “how can we be sure that this process has been consistent all this time?” But this is the same objection a creaionist offers concerning all of the specious methods and processes that the evolutionary communtiy brings forth. Nuclide decay has been shown that it can decay more rapidly under arbitrary conditions – scientists are even using these methods to assist with nuclear waste disposal. This is both a form of hypocrisy and arbitrary inconsistency.
The Sun’s magnetic field is decreasing at a measurable rate. While its polarity has been recorded as reversing, its magnetic strength has always declined. If we go back in time, increasing the Sun’s magnetic strength at this same rate, in a very short time the Sun would have the strength of a neutron star. This level of strengfth has never been recorded in the Earth’s crust, which is a good place to look for such things.
The Moon recedes from the Earth at a rate of 1/2 inch per year. So 1000 years ago the Moon was 500 inches closer to the Earth. We can only reverse this process for about a billion years before the Moon would be creating mile-high tides and lots of crustal upheavel – but such conditions have never been noted in the earth’s crust. If the Moon gets too close, it would breach the Roche Limit and disrupt.
The level of sediment on the sea floors accumulates at a known rate. If the seas have been in place for billions of years, the sedimentary level should be in the miles of depth,not the few hundred feet that is actually there. Perhaps the seas have not been here as long as the evolutionary narrative has asserted?
Finally,the “standard Geologic Column” doesn’t exist in one place anywhere on the planet. It exists as a few-layers-here, and a few-layers-there. They are then stacked, on paper, in the presumed order of evolution and the presumeed dates are assigned accordingly. Fossils are dated largely by using this as a refernence point, and as a point to calibrate radiometric dating instruments. But there are lots of places where “younger rock” is dated much older than “older rock” – the volcanic sediments in the Grand Canyon are noted for this. There are hundreds of dating methods – none of them agree with each other. The scientist is free to pick-and-choose the method that agrees with what they already believe. Lyell was the first to do this with the Niagra Falls, where the scientists told him that it retreated about 1-foot per year, but Lyell reported (abitrraily) that it retreated many feet per year. Even today, a measured observation places the Falls at several thousand years old, but Lyell reported that it was many tens of thousands of years old.
The bottom line – evolution requires time to be remotely believable. If God created Time, then the whole world makes sense. If through evolutonary processes, mankind came about and later manufactured religion and the notion of God, then Time created God.
Progressive Creation is an appeal to stretch the created timeline to account for the atheistic musings of humans. Why bother?
For those who are a part of the scientific community… secular or not, I think Josh seems to be offering the most common arguments that I have seen in other settings making the claim that a young universe & young Earth have scientific basis… or at least that old Earth and universe do not. I could not have made the cases with this much stamina.
Isa 40:22 “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in”
That word “circle” literally means “circuit” or “circular path” – there is only one circular path “of the earth” and that’s its revolution around the Sun. Heliocentrism in Isaiah?
Now that science largely accepts the postulate that space is a fabric, it is no surprise that God stretched the heavens like a curtain.
But let’s be honest – scientists like Eric Lerner have proven via observation that the Big Bang didn’t happen. Every time Hubble et al gets a closer look at a galaxy, something appears that defies the ‘standard model of cosmology” – to the point that it is now in tatters. The primary reason that the Big Bang cannot work is that it appeals to a “proto-physics” a form of physics that was only in place for nano-seconds. In other words, we cannot see it, hear it or measure it. It is non-repeatable. But as we will see, it is something else as well. The Big Bang couldn’t have happened with known physics – so they have to contrive another kind of physics to support the big bang.
The Sun rotates at a phenomenal rate if we look at the movement of the surface, yet it is near perfectly spherical – shouldn’t it be bulging at the equator? This anomaly has puzzled science for decades..
The Milky Way is zooming through space, and its galactic arms are rotating at a phenomenal, even unimaginable speed. The Sun, sitting in one of those arms, is also moving at immeasurable speeds. So here’s the question, if the Sun were to blink-out, we would not know it for about 8 minutes, but if the Sun’s mass were to disappear, we would start to drift immediately. The Sun is nowhere physically near the same place it was 8 minutes ago, so is the Earth revolving around an imaginary point-in-space where the Sun was physically present when light departed the Sun. Or is the Sun standing still? Or is the force of gravity instantaneous? If we wanted to film a moving car by circling it to give the appearance that it’s standing still. We would have to speed up on one side, dash across its path, slow down on the other side — does the Earth experience any of these things? Shouldn’t we experience some kind of torque effect? No, the Earth quietly revolves as though the Sun is standing still. So is gravity faster than light?
One anomaly after another, and we get to the reality that there isn’t enough matter in a galaxy to hold all of the stars in place, especially the ones on the outer periphery moving at unimaginable speeds. So they appeal to “dark matter” and “dark energy” – things they cannot see.
It all started with black holes. A dumping ground for every cosmological anomaly until now there are whole, chugging discipllines around a concept – something that has never been observed yet scientists claim are pervasive. When we give black holes a really hard look, they are mathematically and physically impossible. That the mainstream community has based cosmology upon them is in a word – embarrassing.
Einstein is also on-the-ropes for a lot of reasons associated with relativity, which he admittedly never fully developed. His missing piece was that he knew something was larger than gravity but he could not nail it down. His other missing piece was the inabilty to reconcile relative motion, as exemplified by the many (non-Einstenian) defenses of the Twins Paradox. If the Twins Paradox is to be resolved, it has to be resolved inside Einstein, or it has no value. Even his equations on the perturbation of planets can be explained without relativity. One of those dirty-little secrets they don’t put in textbooks.
Anomalies like the “horizon problem” where two galaxies appear equal in strength yet are too far apart for energy to have traveled to even-them out.
And then we have the discovery of a deep-space quasar sitting in front of an opaque galaxy. “Gravitational lensing” was first proposed, until more were found, and they are now recognized as objects being formed by the plasma ejecta at the galaxy’s axis. They are intrinscially red-shifted, making them appear to be deep-space objects.
More recently the comet 67P has shaken the foundation of the cosmological model. If comets are not “dirty snowballs” – and clearly 67P is not, then what are they? If they have no water or water ice (and it was recently reported that this comet has no detectable amounts of either) this defies the existence of the Oort Cloud, which is a supposed gas-and-ice cloud way-way out in space that serves as a “comet factory”. Why do comets need a factory? Because they don’t last very long and yet we still have them – so there must be something making them. Like black holes and dark matter, the Oort Cloud has never been seen nor measured. Yet it qualifies (or at least it did) as science.
Last but not least, the faint-young-sun problem, in that cosmological theory says that the sun had to slowly ramp-up its strength, so would not have been full-strength for almost three-fourths of its existence. This means that the earth would have been a frozen ball of ice just 1 billion years ago, which is not enough time for evolution to kick off and get us where we are today in such a short time-span. The secular answer to this is that Earth cloud formations trapped greenhouse gases and jump-started Earth’s warmth. They “tested” this with a computer model (and models only reflect the mind of the modeler – they cannot be objective). Now what they are saying is that the clouds and gases spontaneously responded to the Sun, and self-balanced their warmth over time as the Sun grew in strength. Of course they had to “model” this because greenhouse gases cannot be affected by anything humans do, and their behavior has never been tied to the Sun’s brilliance.
On the earth front, biological evolutionists separate “evolution” from “abiogenesis”. That is, the origin-of-life matters not. They claim to begin the evolutonary chain of events with an “imperfect replicator”. This little jewel has the ability to self-describe its own DNA and behavior, and whenever there is somehting strange going on, they trot-out the imperfect replicator.
There is a common theme in the “big bang”, imperfect replicator”, “dark-matter”, “Oort Cloud”, “black holes” etc they all have characteristics that allow their nature and behavior to be enhanced to fit the data.
In short, they are rescue devices.
I even asked one scientist about the imperfect replicasor and he said that such a thing exists in the deep-time past. In short, we cannot see it, measure it or handle it. I suggested to this person that the imperfect replicator was just a thought-experiment – no basis in factual evidence. He said “congratulations – you just turned evolution into a thought experiment”
I say, call it what it is. Evolution is merely a thought experiment, an alternative narrative about the history of the world. It has no basis in fact or evidence, the hand-waving and shoe-horning of modern scientists notwithstanding.
Many of the readers are unable to see or understand how any Christians hold fast to a young Earth or even young Universe understanding. Across some of the articles, Josh has written responses more or less disagreeing with the ideas I have put forth… but I wanted to approve all and comment on some of them so that those who were unaware of the perspectives of the more hard-line thinkers opposed to or at least very mistrustful of scientific insights and theories.
Josh, I think it is an unjust expectation for scientific theories to come into existence with all the numbers painted in… many of the topics you list above are theories less than 100 years old… some not more than 25.
I would love to get any citations for some of the studies and models that you reference, by the way. They sound fascinating.
“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”
-Nobel Prize Winner Arno Penzias
“For the scientist who has lived by 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.”
– Astronomer Robert Jastrow
One thing that I would love to hear you speak on someday is the double slit experiment. To me, this is the clincher when it comes to the existence of god.