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Feedback 2011
Chronological order in Genesis 1
Big bang beginnings and days before the sun
Published: 8 September 2011(GMT+10)
Dr Carl Wieland answers some questions
raised by Russell Grigg’s article
Discovery Channel program: How the Universe Works.
wikipedia.org
Big bang chronology doesn’t fit with the Genesis account of creation.
Larry G. from the United States wrote in response to our article
Discovery Channel program: How the Universe Works.
Dr Carl Wieland’s comments are interspersed throughout.
This isn’t so much a comment as a question. I am not a scientist only an interested
person as it were. Doesn’t the big bang or whatever term is used, imply that at
some point in time everything began to exist?
Big Bang cosmology (BBc) seeks to extrapolate what is believed to be the current
expansion of this space-matter-time universe backwards in time, using one solution
of Einstein’s field equations. That would mean, if you keep going backwards, that
there was a point where things began. But there is no reason to believe that one
can legitimately make such an extrapolation. As you indicate below, the initiation
of such an event is a mystery. But for Christians, there is a temptation to say
“aha, let’s put God in there as the lighter of the fuse, and make the Big Bang His
method of creation”. But in so doing, it ignores the huge biblical contradictions
that arise. For example, the Bible teaches that the earth came 3 days before the
sun, BBc has to have the sun existing millions of years before the earth—and it
doesn’t end there. The book
Dismantling the Big Bang is by John Hartnett, a creationist
who is a research physics professor at the University of Western Australia, and
the co-author is a popular science writer to help make it accessible to laypeople
If believers get excited about marrying their theology to today’s science, they
are in danger of being widowed tomorrow.
Now it would appear to me that nobody knows for certain how that came about, since
nobody was there; that is, none of us. But the mere idea or fact that something
caused all of this to begin to exist is pretty huge.
The other problem is that in the thinking of many educated believers, God has been
increasingly relegated to only initiating the alleged big bang, then sitting on
His hands for millions of years. Jesus Christ said people were there “from the beginning
of creation”, but BB thinking has them only appearing right at the end of an interminably
long creation process.
I have to admit that a lot of what is proposed sounds like the result of someone
smoking left-handed cigarettes. Saying that the jump from nothing to everything
was caused by nothing is well … past dumb.
Yes it is, and many BB proponents are now saying that the cosmos overall is eternal,
and that what we are able to observe as universal expansion is only in one corner
of a much larger ‘multiverse’. This is impossible to either prove or disprove, but
it shows that if believers get excited about marrying their theology to today’s
science, they are in danger of being widowed tomorrow.
Kind regards,
Carl W.
A.S. from Egypt wrote in response to
Discovery Channel program: How the Universe Works:
Please explain how can we accept that earth was created before the sun? Are we to
just shut our eyes to the logical impossibility of lower rank to exist before higher
rank in one system? It is same as light to exist without its source!
Thanks
A.S.
Dr Carl Wieland responds:
Dear Mr S.
If one accepts the existence of an all-powerful miracle-working Creator God, able
to call matter, space, time and the physical laws themselves into existence from
nothing, I fail to see the logical difficulty in accepting His account of an earth
created first, and then the other objects of the solar system and universe three
days later. Or indeed light (electromagnetic radiation) without a source. For light
to come into existence without a sufficient cause would indeed give logical
difficulties, but since God is the sufficient cause, there is no such logical difficulty.
For light to come into existence without a sufficient cause would indeed give logical
difficulties, but since God is the sufficient cause, there is no such logical difficulty.
We are told that light was created on Day 1. That does not mean that it had no [physical]
source, but it may not have had. We do know that whatever that initial source of
light was (if there was one) it was supplanted by the sun on Day 4. But we know
that the earth was rotating from the first, in order to give us a day-night cycle.
It also means that the light on Day 1 was directional. [See
How could the days of Genesis 1 be literal if the Sun wasn’t created until
the fourth day?]
Finally, the ‘ranking’ of objects in the solar system is surely a subjective determination,
not some objective truth. How are we to rank solar system objects; by their mass?
Their rotation velocity? Spin velocity? The complexity of their contents? Temperature?
The pull of gravity between the earth and the sun keeps the earth in its orbit.
But this does not only require the mass of the sun, the earth also must have mass,
providing a mutual gravitational attraction. It would have been a light matter indeed
for the creator of the solar system to have set the earth’s solar orbit in place
at the time of the sun’s creation on Day 4.
Sincerely,
Carl W.
References
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