On Wed, 4 Sep 1996 08:20:12 -0700 (PDT), Randy Landrum wrote:
[...]
RL>To settle for evolution or "the big bang" theory without God begs
>a thousand scientific questions. Where did the original energy and
>matter come from? What caused the explosion? How could impersonal
>forces acting randomly construct a universe whose planets rotate
>with such precision that we set our clocks by them? It is
>preposterous to believe that "nothing times nobody equals
>everything!" -Myths that could destroy America by Erwin Lutzer
I do not necessarily rule out "the big bang" if it is just the
a scientific description of Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth."
However, the absurdity of believing that the whole cosmos can just
pop out of nothing, every now and then dawns on some non-theists.
Here is an article from the recent New Scientist:
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"NEW SCIENTIST FORUM
On creating something from nothing David Darling ponders the origin
of the Universe
----
IT'S the simple questions that usually tax science the most. For
instance, why should there be something instead of nothing? The
Universe is so outrageously enormous and elaborate. Why did it-or
God, if you prefer-go to all the bother?
Yes, I know that if the Universe was not more or less the way it is
then there would be no one to reflect on such problems. But that is a
comment, not an explanation . The fact is, nothing could be simpler
than nothing-so why is there something instead?
Science has started delving into the minutiae of genesis. No one bats
an eyelid these days when cosmologists talk about what conditions
might have been like around one ten million trillionth of a second
after the moment of creation And once we have got the tricky
business of linking gravitation with quantum mechanics sorted out,
then maybe we can push things right back to the very first instant of
all.
Well, I've read the party manifesto on this and I didn't buy it. I can go
along with the quantum foam stuff, the good news (for once) about
inflation, the quark soup and so on. That's fine. I may not be able to
imagine it-who can? But, as far as I am concerned, the fact that the
Universe was an incredibly weird place 10^-43 seconds after "time
zero" is no big deal. What is a big deal-the biggest deal of all-is how
you get something out of nothing.
Don't let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not
got a clue either-despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job
of convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem.
"In the beginning," they will say, "there was nothing-no time, space,
matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from
which..." Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean? First there is
nothing then there is something. And the cosmologists try to bridge
the two with a quantum flutter, a tremor of uncertainty that sparks it
all off. Then they are away and before you know it, they have pulled a
hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats.
----
I may not have been born in Yorkshire but I'm a firm believer that
you cannot get owt for nowt
----
I don't have a problem with this scenario from the quantum
fluctuation onward. Why shouldn't human beings build a theory of
how the Universe evolved from a simple to a complex state. But there
is a very real problem in explaining how it got started in the first
place. You cannot fudge this by appealing to quantum mechanics.
Either there is nothing to begin with, in which case there is no
quantum vacuum, no pre-geometric dust, no time in which anything
can happen, no physical laws that can effect a change from
nothingness into somethingness; or there is something, in which case
that needs explaining.
One of the most specious analogies that cosmologists have come up
with is between the origin of the Universe and the North Pole. Just as
there is nothing north of the North Pole, so there was nothing before
the Big Bang. Voila! We are supposed to be convinced by that,
especially since it was Stephen Hawking who dreamt it up. But it will
not do. The Earth did not grow from its North Pole. There was not
ever a disembodied point from which the material of the planet
sprang. The North Pole only exists because the Earth exists-not the
other way around.
It's the same with neurologists who are peering into the brain to see
how consciousness comes about. I do not have a problem with being
told how memory works, how we parse sentences, how the visual
cortex handles images. I can believe that we might come to
understand the ins and outs of our grey matter almost as well as we
can follow the operations of a sophisticated computer. But I draw the
line at believing that this knowledge will advance our understanding
of why we are conscious one jot. Why shouldn't the brain do
everything it does and still be completely unaware? Why shouldn't it
just process information and trigger survival responses without going
to the trouble of generating consciousness? You only have to read the
musings of Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick and others
to appreciate that we are discovering everything about the brain-
except why it is conscious.
No, I'm sorry, I may not have been born in Yorkshire but I'm a firm
believer that you cannot get owt for nowt. Not a Universe from a
nothing-verse, nor consciousness from a thinking brain. I suspect that
mainstream science may go on for a few more years before it bumps
so hard against these problems that it is forced to recognise that
something is wrong. And then? Let me guess: if you cannot get
something for nothing then that must mean there has always been
something. Hmmm. And if the brain doesn't produce
consciousness...well, no, that is just too crazy isn't it?
David Darling is an astronomer and author of After Life (Fourth
Estate) and Zen Physics (HarperCollins)."
(Darling D., "On creating something from nothing?", New Scientist,
Vol 151, No. 2047, 14 September 1996, p49)
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The point is that if God can indeed "call things that are not as
though they were" (Rom 4:17), in creating a cosmos, then he can
surely intervene in creating new living desigs, whether de novo or
by modifying existing genetic code.
As Phil Johnson observes, the Darwinists must rule this possibility
of an intervening Creator out apriori because:
"If creation is admitted as a serious possibility, Darwinism cannot
win, and if it is excluded a priori Darwinism cannot lose." (Johnson
P.E. "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism",
Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 1990, p8)
God bless.
Steve
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