Ken Smith wrote:

This is the second part of my third major posting in response to Don’s initial post. I may well make further major postings about cosmology, depending on the responses to this one.

Don replied:

I only mentioned cosmology in passing in my post of May 2, but since you have in interest in it and you seem to be keen to avoid engaging the major biblical issues, I can understand why you are keen to get off the Bible and onto cosmology. There are many important biblical issues in my original post that you have not even touched upon.

K:

There have been a number of responses complaining that the discussion had concentrated on religion, and that very little about scientific issues had appeared.

D:

Well, the topic is “How are we meant to understand Genesis?” I am involved with a Christian ministry called Answers in Genesis; not ‘answers in science’. No one should be here under the false pretence that I am here to ‘prove the Bible using science’. I see the Bible as the authority when it comes to history, not science. I explained this in my first post.

K:

Since the BB is, at present, the only cosmological theory (that is, theory about the development of the universe) which has survived the rigorous scrutiny of generations of scientists – might I start with a plug for a conference on cosmology. [snip]

D:

Even if this were an accurate reflection of reality, it would not prove that it is true. This is the fallacy of argumentum ad numerum. Not long ago, ‘generations of scientists’ believed that the continents were fixed in place too.

There is a growing movement of astronomers, cosmologists and physicists who recognize huge problems with BB cosmology. Indeed, Colin Keay, one of your colleagues in the Skeptics, is a sceptic of the BB, isn’t he?

Scientists who have found strong evidence against the BB have been frozen out of positions at universities and starved of funds (e.g., Halton Arp, who studies anomalous red shifts in quasars). In fact, the BB paradigm holds such a privileged and protected position that a number of significant players placed an advertisement in New Scientist (May 22, 2004) to get a hearing. The censorship held up for Nature, which refused to publish their open letter. See http://www.cosmologystatement.org/ for the letter and the signatories. It makes for interesting reading as to how a model of history can become so locked in that no criticism will be entertained, no matter what. Chapter 10 of Halton Arp’s book, ‘Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science’ is particularly illuminating about how such science works. It is not characterized by the na ¯ve objectivity that several have claimed for science on this forum. Thomas Kuhn wrote about this; how wrong paradigms can get locked in and can be almost impossible to budge. It reminds me of another historical theory, biological evolution, which is also protected from any criticism, lest the masses might begin to doubt it.

Here is a part of the cosmology statement:

‘The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.’

If Ken is true to form he will accuse me of misquoting scientists. Go for it, Ken!

K:

Two paragraphs from Don’s preamble read:

D:

I take the Bible as authoritative, so I take seriously the example of the apostle Paul who said, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). For the last 200 years or so, perhaps the greatest source of arguments against the knowledge of God has been naturalism; the dogma that nature is all there is. Its corollary, historical naturalism, claims that origins and history can be explained by purely natural processes.

There are elements of the sciences of astronomy, geology and biology that have been developed based on and in turn used to bolster the claims of naturalism: big bang cosmology, historical geology and biological evolution (the origin of the huge spectrum of living organisms). All three, not just the third, stand in opposition to the traditional understanding of the biblical big-picture view of history, which is founded in Genesis 1-11 (not just Genesis 1).

K:

Let me start with a quotation which might seem to give some support for Don’s words. On page 70 of Simon Singh’s recent (2004) book “Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know All About it” (Fourth Estate, 2004) one sentence reads:

Scientists were particularly proud that they had developed a theory of the universe that no longer relied on invoking God.

Now I am well aware that in quoting this I am providing creationists with ammunition, given their propensity for quoting the writings of scientists out of context.

D:

‘Civility’ again, Ken? Once again we have the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem.

K:

Let me immediately try to ensure that this doesn’t happen in this case, by quoting the whole paragraph in which it appears. Singh has been talking about developments, mainly in geology, in the 19th century, and how all the measurements and calculations, including those by Kelvin, who is frequently cited as a “creationist”, had resulted in ages in the millions and hundreds of millions of years.

D:

Kelvin actually argued *against* the hundreds of millions of years. He put an *upper limit* on the age of the earth, based on its supposed cooling from a hot blob (the prevailing idea). Kelvin’s calculations did not contribute to the acceptance of deep time at all; he opposed the billion-year timescale being floated at the time. And Darwin called him an ‘odious spectre’, and Darwin’s ‘bulldog’ Huxley likewise hated Kelvin but could not refute his arguments. But they kept the faith in evolution. Yet evolutionists demand that creationists surrender at the slightest difficulty.

It was not until the discovery of radioactivity that Kelvin’s constraint on the age of the earth was lifted (see Burchfield, J. D. 1975. ‘Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth’, Science History Publications, New York). However, modern measurements and estimates of the heat from radioactive decay do not actually account for Kelvin’s objection. See Lord Kelvin revisited on the young age of the earth (http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v13/i1/kelvin.asp#f1 ). Kelvin believed in an older earth than I would accept based on biblical evidence, but he opposed the long ages wanted by evolutionists. AiG lists Kelvin as a scientist who believed in the Creator, but accurately states his position on the age of the earth, contrary to Ken’s insinuation. See http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/bios/default.asp

K:

He then writes:

The growing uniformitarian movement came to the consensus that the earth is more than a billion years old, and that the universe must therefore be even older, perhaps even infinitely old. An eternal universe seemed to strike a chord with the scientific community, because the theory had a certain elegance, simplicity and completeness. If the universe had existed for eternity, then there was no need to explain how it was created, when it was created, why it was created or Who created it. Scientists were particularly proud that they had developed a theory of the universe that no longer relied on invoking God.

This assumption (that the universe was eternal) was so pervasive that Einstein, in his first paper on cosmology (see below for details) modified the field equations of general relativity by adding the famous “cosmological constant”. This was perfectly reasonable at the time. In 1917 there was no solid evidence that the universe extended beyond the Milky Way. The various nebulae which astronomers had observed were only shown to consist of vast numbers of individual stars, and to be separate galaxies in their own right, after results had been obtained in the early 1920s from the 100 inch telescope at Mount Wilson, and the expansion of the universe was only discovered in the late 1920s – in Einstein’s paper he refers to “the small velocities of the stars” several times. These, and much other historical material, can be found in Singh’s book.

After some further comments about uniformitarian ideas Singh writes, in two paragraphs on pages 79 and 80:

So, by the start of the twentieth century, scientists were content to live in an eternal universe. This theory, however, was based on quite flimsy evidence. Although there was dating evidence that pointed towards a truly ancient universe, at least billions of years old, the idea that the universe was eternal was largely based on a leap of faith. There was simply no scientific justification for extrapolating from an earthly age of at least billions of years to a universe that was eternal. Sure enough, an infinitely old universe constituted a coherent and consistent cosmological view, but this was nothing more than wishful thinking unless somebody could find some scientific evidence to back it up. In fact, the eternal universe model was built upon such fragile foundations that it probably deserved the title of myth rather than scientific theory. The eternal universe model of 1900 was almost as flimsy as the explanation that it was the giant blue god Wulbari who separated the sky from the land.

Eventually, cosmologists would confront this embarrassing state of affairs. Indeed, they would spend the rest of the twentieth century struggling to replace the last great myth with a respectable and rigorous scientific explanation. They strove to develop a detailed theory and sought the concrete evidence to back it up, so that they could confidently address the ultimate question: is the universe eternal or was it created?

D:

Which all goes to show that nothing much has changed: cosmology is driven by philosophy, not the data (but see verification of this below).

K:

The BB is one of the predictions of general relativity. Stephen Hawking and George Ellis write in the Preface of their book “The Large Scale Structure of Space-time” (Cambridge University Press, 1973):

This theory leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first, that the final state of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a `black hole’ which will contain a singularity; and secondly, that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe.

Thus before talking about the BB we need to give some preliminary consideration to general relativity and the remarkable success it has enjoyed.

Simon Singh’s book mentioned above is 534 pages long, but he writes on page 509 “This book has tried to explain a big subject in a relatively small amount of space”, and on page 471 “Each subsection of each chapter of this book would need to be expanded into its own dedicated volume to do justice to everyone who has contributed to the development of the Big Bang model.” He continues at the bottom of this page and on the next page:

In addition to the limitations of space, this account of the Big Bang model has also been constrained by an effort to minimise the number of mathematical equations. Mathematics is the language of science, and in many cases a full and accurate explanation of a scientific concept is possible only by presenting a detailed mathematical exposition.

The limitations of posting using only the 95 printable ASCII characters preclude even an outline of general relativity and its cosmological implications. However there are a number of popular books which manage to make a reasonable fist of presenting enough information about relativity and the BB so that the intelligent layperson can gain at least some inkling of what it is all about.

An invaluable resource book, for those prepared to learn the relevant mathematics, is “The Principle of Relativity” by H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski and H. Weyl, with notes by A. Sommerfeld. This is a collection of translations of some of the most important original papers on relativity. For general relativity and cosmology, the papers “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” on pages 111-164, and “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity” on pages 177-188, both by Einstein, are the significant ones. It is worth pointing out that in the “Foundations” paper 27 pages of the 54 (that is, half the paper) are devoted to the algebra and calculus of tensor fields, the mathematical tools required, since at the time these were not part of the mathematical education of physicists or astronomers.

If anyone wants a full mathematical treatment of general relativity I suggest that the nearest university library would be a good starting place, both for books and papers in periodicals.

Since a number of Christians may be interested in learning something about the relationship between cosmology and Christianity, here are two books. David Wilkinson is a Methodist minister who obtained a PhD in astrophysics before training for the ministry, and Craig and Smith are professional philosophers.

Wilkinson, David: “God, Time and Stephen Hawking”, Monarch Books, 2001. Contains a number of illustrations to assist with explanations of various points.

Craig, William Lane and Smith, Quentin, “Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology”, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993 A somewhat heavy book by two philosophers: Craig argues for theism and Lane for atheism, with separate articles criticising the other’s arguments.

D:

Actually, last time I heard from William Lane Craig, he was still 100% Christian; he was not half atheist. Quentin Smith is the atheist. 🙂

K:

For those without the necessary mathematical background, but who are prepared to read carefully and think over what they have read, some useful and interesting modern books written from a scientific perspective are (in chronological order by date of publication), with brief comments:

Will, Clifford M.: “Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test, Oxford University Press, 1988. Experiments verifying the predictions of general relativity.

Smoot, George and Davidson, Keay, “Wrinkles in Time: The Imprint of Creation”, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1993. The detection of irregularities in the cosmic microwave background.

Aczel, Amir: “God’s Equation: Einstein, Relativity and the Expanding Universe”, Piatkus Books, London, 2000. Lots of interesting background information.

Silk, Joseph: “The Big Bang”, 3rd edition, W. H. Freeman, New York, 2001. Comprehensive, with 40 pages of Mathematical Notes and a 25 page Glossary.

Singh, Simon: “Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know All About it”, Fourth Estate, London, 2004. Takes a historical approach, starting with naked eye estimates of the size and distance of the Moon, and finishing with initial data from the Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

Einstein’s prediction of the bending of light when passing massive objects and it’s confirmation from the 1919 eclipse expeditions brought him fame, and made his name, and the word “relativity”, famous world-wide. Two of the above books present diagrams of these first measurements: Aczel on page 145, and Singh on page 141. Aczel’s diagram is particularly illuminating. The deflection predicted by Newton’s theory of universal gravitation is half that predicted by Einstein, and the diagram shows clearly that Einstein’s is much closer to the truth. Later measurements have provided much more accurate verification of the prediction. Of Einstein’s other two predictions, gravitational redshift is now regarded as so closely related to conservation of energy that any reasonable theory of gravity will make the same prediction, and the precession of the perihelion of Mercury was accurately measured, but could not be explained, in the mid-19th century.

Will’s book goes through the experimental tests which have been applied to the predictions of general relativity, and shows that it has passed all these tests with flying colours. Three additional predictions, light delay in passing massive bodies, the strong equivalence principle, and gravitational radiation have now been verified.

There are still some predictions which have not been checked, mainly because of formidable experimental difficulties. One of these relates to what happens in the neighbourhood of a massive body which is rotating, known as “dragging of inertial frames”. This is mentioned in chapter 11 of Will, but was well known to science fiction fans by 1968. In Larry Niven’s short story “Neutron Star” part of the dialogue goes

“A mass that large can distort space by its rotation,” said the puppeteer. “The Laskin’s projected hyperbola was twisted across itself in such a way that we can deduce the star’s period of rotation to be two minutes twenty-seven seconds.”

Thus anyone who wishes to challenge the BB needs first to find some way of explaining how the universe behaves, without using general relativity, and then show that their ideas agree more closely with the experimental data than relativity does. Since the predictions of relativity agree with experimental data to the limit of accuracy of measurement it is clear that such people face an uphill battle.

D:

I deal with this incredible confusion over GR and BB; GR does not equal BB (see later) — Ken needs to revise the elementary distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions..

K:

I have only read two attempts by creationists to use general relativity. Both of these were attempts to use it in support of their own peculiar ideas, and both made so many elementary errors that even mentioning them here would be a waste of time.

D:

Here we have the informal fallacy known as ‘hurling elephants’. ‘There is so much evidence … I don’t have space to present it.’ Perhaps the evidence is not presented because it could be shot down? And if you only know of two attempts, it once again shows that you are not as well read in creationist stuff as you claim to be. But the fact that creationists use GR in their own cosmological models shows that you have just wasted everyone’s time with all this waffle about GR, because we accept GR. GR is established by good operational science; experimental physics. The BB, being a model of history, is not open to the same experimental verification.

K:

Don writes in the paragraphs I quoted earlier, and repeat here for convenience

D:

There are elements of the sciences of astronomy, geology and biology that have been developed based on and in turn used to bolster the claims of naturalism: big bang cosmology, historical geology and biological evolution …

K:

Don is probably not aware that my honours thesis in mathematics at the University of Sydney in 1953 was entitled “Relativity and Cosmology”. Answers in Genesis claims that Tas Walker is an expert in geology on the basis of his first class honours degree in geology with a thesis on isotopic dating. So presumably Don will be willing to accept that I am an expert in general relativity and cosmology on the basis of my first class honours degree in mathematics.

D:

A 50-year-old textbook from a leading cosmologist would have little relevance today, let alone an honours thesis that old. But Dr Walker worked on the latest radiometric dating techniques and found that so-called isochron plots (which are often claimed to be an infallible dating method) could be generated from non-radioactive nuclides, so they had nothing to do with age. Frankly, I don’t care what qualifications someone has or does not have. What I am interested in is the quality of their arguments, and in the case of public figures who claim to follow Christ, how consistent their beliefs are with the Bible. Just because someone has even a PhD, or even a DSc, does not give their pronouncements infallibility.

K:

However rather than pursue that line I will just content myself with commenting on Don’s claim that the BB “[has] been been developed based on and in turn used to bolster the claims of naturalism”.

I’m not sure where Don got the information about the alleged basis of the BB. Digging my honours thesis out of the family archives and looking through it, I cited 19 books and 31 papers. Since then I have read over a hundred books and numerous papers on various aspects of relativity and cosmology, and have listened to many scientific lectures. Mention of God, or even allusions to religion, are quite rare.

D:

That’s the point – the big bang presupposes naturalism (nature is all there is; there is no need for God).

K:

I have not come across any mention of religion in any of the technical works I have read.

D:

Well, perhaps I can quote from George Ellis, since you seem to respect him:

“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations,” Ellis argues. “For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.” Ellis has published a paper on this. “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.” (Gibbs, W. Wayt, 1995. Profile: George F. R. Ellis; Thinking Globally, Acting Universally, Scientific American 273(4):28,29).

It seems that Ken Smith, widely-read in the BB, is not aware of this: ‘…we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models.’

I guess it would be even better to quote the book by Hawking and Ellis that Ken quoted above, because he seems to have missed this bit:

‘However we are not able to make cosmological models without some admixture of ideology. In the earliest cosmologies, man placed himself in a commanding position at the centre of the universe. Since the time of Copernicus we have been steadily demoted to a medium sized planet going round a medium sized star on the outer edge of a fairly average galaxy, which is itself simply one of a local group of galaxies. Indeed we are now so democratic that we would not claim that our position in space is specially distinguished in any way. We shall, following Bondi (1960), call this assumption the Copernican principle.’ (Hawking, S.W. and Ellis, G.F.R., The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 134, 1973. Their reference is 1960).

Geoffrey Burbidge (Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego) put it this way:

‘Big bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and [in] many cases, untestable assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth.’ (Scientific American, p. 96, February 1992.)

Hubble himself admitted the philosophical (i.e., religious) assumptions behind the BB. Hubble had discovered a relationship between distance and redshift for a number of galaxies he had observed. This suggested that they were all moving away from a centre near the earth (Ockham’s razor). However, see what Hubble says:

“Such a condition would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe . . . . The hypothesis cannot be disproved, but it is unwelcome, . . . But the unwelcome supposition of a favored location must be avoided at all costs” (pp. 50-51). Later he added, “Such a favored position . . . is intolerable; moreover, it represents a discrepancy with the theory because the theory postulates homogeneity” (p.58-59). (E. P. Hubble, The Observational Approach to Cosmology, The Clarendon Press, 1937).

What ‘theory’ is he talking about? The Cosmological Principle, that earth has no particular favoured place in the Universe. This has also been called the Copernican Principle. Of course, reading my Bible, I would say earth certainly has a favoured place, central to the Creator’s purposes, and I would not expect that earth would look like a cosmic accident with no special place in God’s creation.

Hubble admitted that the Cosmological Principle is:

“. . . a sheer assumption. It seems plausible and it appeals strongly to our sense of proportion. Nevertheless, it leads to a rather remarkable consequence, for it demands that, if we see the nebulae all receding from our position in space, then every other observer, no matter where he may be located, will see the nebulae all receding from his position. However, the assumption is adopted. There must be no favoured location in the universe, no centre, no boundary; all must see the universe alike.” (p.54)

Why must all ‘see the universe alike’? Because an earth-centric universe is not acceptable for religious reasons. No materialist can stomach a universe where the earth has a special position near its centre. Anathema! How could we be near the centre by accident in such a vast universe?! The probability of such a thing would be so small as to demand intelligent design. Anathema!

Hawking put it this way: “. . . it might seem that if we observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe. There is, however, an alternate explanation: the universe might look the same in every direction as seen from any other galaxy, too. This, as we have seen, was Friedmann’s second assumption. We have no scientific evidence for, or against this assumption. We believe it only on grounds of modesty: it would be most remarkable if the universe looked the same in every direction around us, but not around other points in the universe . . . .” (S. W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, New York, 1988, p. 42).

Now this ‘model’ universe based on the Cosmological Principle has no centre and is bounded (has not edge). Our universe is imagined to be a three-dimensional surface which is expanding in an unseen fourth physical dimension. Putting it in a layman’s way, if I travelled in a ‘straight’ line from the earth, I would never reach the ‘edge’ of this universe, because no edge exists; I would end up back where I started! There are different ways of putting this; positively curved space is a more technical term. No one can conceive of such a thing physically; it is quite contrary to our normal three-dimensional experience. And as the cosmologists admit, there is no evidence for it. But it is a necessary assumption to avoid the implications of the observations that suggest that we are at the centre of things and also to get the BB to work. Many laymen have wondered why, if the universe started with so much stuff in such a tiny space, why it was not a black hole and so how could it ‘explode’, since black holes suck everything in? Hubble’s assumption is essential to avoid the black hole problem (and other problems). It also makes the maths simpler. But the reason for it is philosophical / religious.

In other words, the BB does not just pop out of GR, like bubbles up your nose when you open a can of fizzy drink. No, it depends on some fundamental philosophical (religious) assumptions. And the Cosmological Principle is a decidedly anti-biblical philosophical assumption. From all this I can only conclude that Ken is not as well read in cosmology as he pretends to be, or he had blinkers (blinders)

on while reading it. Another possibility might be that Ken has so absorbed and accommodated the anti-Christian mindset into his own thinking that he does not even see it when he encounters it.

Interestingly, much of the secular opposition to the BB also arises because of philosophical considerations – because the BB has a beginning. Hoyle, Bondi and Gold dreamed up a steady state model to get away from a beginning. There is only one thing that an atheist / materialist dislikes more than an earth-centred universe and that is one that has a beginning. Science works on the principle of causation: all things that have a beginning have a cause. The BB had a beginning, so what caused it? Davies’ ‘quantum fluctuation’ is mere sleight of hand (if there is nothing there, there are no quanta to fluctuate!).

Of course God, being eternal, had no beginning, so the question “What caused God?” is illogical.

Many Christians have taken comfort in the BB because it has a beginning. Some apologists have used it for that purpose, without necessarily agreeing with the details (such as the time-scale or ancillary hypotheses re the formation of the earth, etc). However, the BB rests on the religious assumption that the earth is nothing special, contrary to Genesis and the whole sweep of the Bible.

Interestingly, observations showing quantization of redshifts, by William Tifft, seem to refute the Cosmological Principle and are consistent with a universe that has a centre and is unbounded (that is, there is an edge, like common sense would suggest. And the universe is approximately earth-centric. See Our galaxy is the centre of the universe, ‘quantized’ red shifts show. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v16/i2/galaxy.asp This paper also shows further how the BB is based on atheistic presuppositions that fly in the face of observations.

Burbidge recently co-authored a paper with Halton Arp detailing a devastating observation that contradicts a fundamental assumption behind the BB (red-shift is a measure of distance traveled since the hypothetical BB). See Quasar with enormous redshift found embedded in nearby spiral galaxy with far lower redshift: unsolvable riddle for big bang astronomy (http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0112quasar.asp#r8 ). Oh, yes the original paper is referenced, Ken, so that you can check for any misquotations.

K:

Maybe Don has some source material where some scientists working in the area have denied the existence of God. If so I would be pleased to be enlightened about the books or articles where I can read these statements for myself.

D:

I think I have supplied ample above, from some of the biggest names in cosmology.

BTW, you don’t have to explicitly deny the existence of God to very effectively do away with Him. You just leave God out of the picture all the time and you will usher in atheism. If with my own children my wife and I had never mentioned God, salvation in Christ, the Bible and we never went to church or had them taught things in youth programs at church, etc., would they grow up to become committed Christians? No, they would grow up pagans, by default.

Indeed, the humanists have been mostly cunning enough not to attack God directly in any case. One strategy they have pushed is the philosophically bankrupt fact-value distinction, corralling Christianity into the realm of ‘values’, so that it is not even important enough to be true or false like something in the real world.

Another strategy was to devise a model of history that contradicts the Bible (without actually mentioning the Bible) and get it generally accepted. That’s what the deist James Hutton and is disciple Charles Lyell did with their doctrine of uniformitarianism in the first half of the 17th century. Lyell did not openly oppose the Bible and he advised Darwin not to do so either. Deist Lyell knew that if he destroyed the history of Genesis, the rest of the Bible would collapse like a house of cards. Every atheist worth his salt knows that.

K:

Things are slightly different in books written in a popular style for the average person who has little or no scientific training. Paul Davies has mentioned God in a number of his writings – one book is even entitled “The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning” (Penguin 1992). And there is the comment at the end of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” that discovering a comprehensive theory would enable us to “know the mind of God”. And there is Einstein’s remark “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

D:

All of these mentions of ‘God’ have nothing to do with the creator-God who reveals himself in the Bible. Careful study underlines the non- or anti-Christian philosophies of these cosmologists / physicists. Hawking uses ‘God’ as a metaphor for ultimate knowledge (a theory of everything; TOE). Davies could be some sort of deist, but not a Christian. He abandoned Christian beliefs as a teenager when the local vicar could not answer his questions about creation and the universe (The Australian, March 9, 1995, p. 1). Einstein explicitly shared the pantheism of Spinoza, of whose views ‘The Hutchinson Softback Encyclopedia’, 1996, says: ‘Mind and matter are two modes of an infinite substance that [Spinoza] called God or Nature, good and evil being relative.’ Like New Age and Eastern thought, this is a ‘monistic’ belief, which explicitly denies a Creator in the normal meaning of the word, i.e. one who pre-existed (and is thus independent of, or ‘outside’) that which was created. (see http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v23/i1/einstein.asp ). So Einstein’s religion ‘sighted’ by science is pantheism. This web article finishes with: ‘Christians who inappropriately invoke Einstein in their preaching, writing or witnessing do so to the detriment of their cause.’ See also my article on ‘Physicists’ God Talk’: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i3/god_talk.asp which also mentions that a lot of the ‘God’ talk of physicists is in fact blasphemous – such as calling the Higgs boson the ‘God Particle’ (Lederman). It is ridiculously na ¯ve to think that any of this has any relevance to supporting biblical Christianity. I have to say that Ken’s use of these quotes from Einstein and co. in this way amounts to serious quoting out of context.

K:

But here again, with one exception, I have not come across anything in books on cosmology which could, even by enormouse stretching of the imagination, be interpreted as denying the existence of God. The exception is Fred Hoyle in his “The Nature of the Universe” (Blackwell, 1950). In the final chapter Hoyle makes some unflattering remarks about religion, and these could be interpreted, by someone strongly opposed to Hoyle’s “continuous creation” ideas, as denying the existence of God. And since Hoyle, in this book, was responsible for the origin of the phrase “big-bang”, which he ridiculed, his words should not be taken to heart by others who wish to treat the BB in a similar fashion. And for the sake of peace on a.r.c I’ll pass over the attempt by Duane Gish, in a debate in Brisbane in 1988, to describe Hoyle as a “creationist”.

D:

You did not pass over it at all! (Yet another attempt at ‘guilt by association’ fallacy.) But once again it is next to impossible for anyone to check the accuracy of your accusation. Unfortunately for you, Ken, we actually have the tape of this debate in our library. Here is a transcript of what Gish said, in context, so that readers can be disabused of your slander:

“Here is a newspaper article that appeared in a London newspaper, The Daily Express, of August 14, 1981.

“Two sceptical scientists put their heads together and reached an amazing conclusion, “There must be a God!” One of these scientists was Sir Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, the other one was Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy, University College, Cardiff, Wales. Now, these two scientists became interested in the problem of the origin of life.

“At that time they were both atheists, with no inclination to accept the creationist viewpoint. They calculated a probability of life evolving on this planet in five billion years. The probability? One chance out of the number one followed by forty thousand zeros. They said ‘Obviously, that’s zero.’ But they said, ‘Let us assume that every star in the universe has a planet like the earth; let us assume that the universe is twenty billion years old. Now let’s calculate the probability of life evolving somewhere in the universe in that twenty billion years.’ The answer came back, ‘Just forget about it.’ The probability was so low, it was essentially zero, or nil.

“Sir Fred Hoyle said, ‘The probability of evolution is equal to the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard would assemble a Boeing 747’! Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve always said, ‘If people want to believe that, that’s OK, but just don’t call it science.'”

“Now, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have concluded (now they are not Christians, they don’t believe the Book of Genesis or anything like that) but they have concluded that wherever life exists in the universe it had to be created. Therefore there must be a God. Did they become creationists because of their religion? Obviously not. They became creationists in spite of their religion, you see, because when they began their studies they were atheists.”

“Now this notion that life evolved on this planet, ladies and gentlemen, is a myth, not science. It is pseudo-science.”

So Gish was perfectly correct (in context!). So please retract this slander (and while you’re at it, please repudiate the vile gutter slander by your buddy Plimer saying that Gish was travelling in Australia ‘with an entourage of young boys who were continually touching him’).

K:

Barry Parker is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Idaho State University. He concludes his book “Creation: The Story of the Origin and Evolution of the Universe” (Plenum Press, 1988) with the paragraph:

Before I end the book I feel I should address a question that some of you will no doubt be wondering about: Why does a book on the creation of the universe have no mention of God? Scientists do, indeed, rarely mention God when they talk about creation. Furthermore, they are sometimes accused of trying to do away with the need for God by attempting to explain creation in scientific terms. And it is true: scientists would prefer a purely scientific explanation of the beginning of the universe. That is not to say, though, that all scientists are atheists (few are). Furthermore, there is no fear that scientists will ever eliminate the need for a God. If we look back at the early universe we see that regardless of how far things are pushed — even if we were someday able to explain creation itself in an entirely satisfactory scientific way — there is still something that is unexplained. Creation depends on the basic laws of nature — without them it would not be possible. Who created these laws? There is no question but that a God will always be needed.

D:

Is that all God did, Ken? He set the laws of the universe (and He certainly did that) that allowed cosmic, geological and biological evolution to create everything we see today? This is Deism, not Christianity – you’d make a good Freemason with beliefs like that. It’s no wonder that you are so reluctant to engage the biblical issues that I raised in my first post.

That is hardly the testimony of the Bible, which says that God’s attributes are clearly seen in the things that He has made (Romans 1:20). It also says that God actually ‘hands on’ made Adam and Eve, in His image. Is it just an accident that evolution produced people ‘in the image of God’? In fact it must just be an accident that our world is here at all, if it was produced by the big bang. If God only designed the laws of physics, then the chance nature of the BB could never ensure the production of a planet suitable for life and the chance nature of biological evolution could certainly not ensure the production of humans either. Such a view completely destroys the Bible’s message that begins with the Eternal One willing the heavens and earth into existence and forming and filling them as He purposed, preparing a dwelling place for the special creature ‘made in God’s image’ with an eternal purpose in the plan of God.

Blessings,

Don

K:

Ken Smith — Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `It is now clear how large a price had to be paid for a misunderstanding of both science and religion: to base religious beliefs on an estimate of what science cannot do is as foolhardy as it is blasphemous.’ Gerald Holton

D:

If, by posting this quote, Ken, you suppose that we are on about a ‘god of the gaps’, it once again shows how poorly you have researched what we believe. It is not because of lack of knowledge that we can see that there must be a Creator, but because we do understand. We understand it from the testimony of God’s Word and study of God’s creation backs this up. For example, a fairly full understanding of the complexity of the bacterial flagellum, the ATPase enzyme motor, the blood clotting cascade or the vertebrate immune system drives one to realize that such systems could not have developed by Darwinian/Dawkinsian small step-wise lucky accidents (mutations), because natural selection can only work on traits that have at least some function. If you remove just one of the 40 components of a flagellum it does no work at all, so there is no stepwise process to evolve it from no components. Period. And the more we learn about the flagellum, for example, the more it underlines the need for a Creator. Creationists do not believe in a ‘God of the gaps’ (‘we don’t understand it so God must have done it’). But evolutionists are quite happy to believe in ‘mutation plus natural selection of the gaps’, even against the evidence. Google AiG’s site for ‘god of the gaps’ and you will find quite a number of articles refuting this misconception.

Don