Posted on 02/23/2015 8:37:27 AM PST by fishtank
Secular Study: No Big Bang?
by Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Christians who believe the universe began billions of years ago often point to the Big Bang model to try and verify a creation-like beginning.1 But a new origin of the universe model offers an "everlasting universe" and dismisses the whole idea of a Big Bang.2
Genesis does not describe a Big Bang. Instead of a hot explosion, it presents a rather cold, watery origin. Instead of stars first, followed by Earth's emergence billions of years later, God made Earth first, then stars four days later. If the Big Bang really happened, then nobody told God about it. And if Scripture's history falls this far off base, then what other errors might it contain?
Despite the dangers that the Big Bang presents for the Bible—to say nothing of the baffling scientific quandaries it generates—some Christians continue to believe it and even use it to argue for creation. But this noble intention can have bad results.3 Lured by the prospect of illustrating how secular science incorporates a kind of beginning point for the universe that could merge with the concept of God, this particular argument pays the price of accepting a model with almost no resemblance to Genesis.
It had to all start somewhere and from something, and science alone has no answer for that. If people actually thought about that for a minute or 2, we would all be in a much better place.
Actually, Hawking devised a theory of universal origin that renders the notion of a “beginning” moot; time back then just flowed in ways you’d need advanced cosmology training to grasp.
“or if God created it one afternoon 6000 years ago, complete with light positioned enroute to earth in the proper timing”
If someone accepts that as a viable theory, they’ll be hard-pressed to prove exactly that occurred about 20 minutes ago.
“Genesis does not say “in the beginning, God created the Universe”; it says in the beginning, God Created the heavens and the earth.”
heavens + earth = everything = universe
He who penned Genesis likely did not have a transliteral word for “universe”, only the combination equating to “everything up there, and everything down here”.
The author, Dr. Humphreys, is not formally trained in general relativity or cosmology theory, and his initial article and book acknowledged the tentative character and possible falsity of the new proposal. He also solicited, publicly and privately, feedback from Christian physicists who did have formal training in these disciplines. Starting even before the appearance of Starlight and Time and continuing to the present, such feedback has been forthcoming, and, to our knowledge, it has been uniformly critical of the theory. In fact, Starlight and Time and related writings by Humphreys exhibit profound misunderstandings of relativity theory and cosmology. Humphreys’ theory is irremediably flawed. It is very unfortunate that these writings have been so widely distributed in the young-earth community and have misled so many Christians. . .Go read the articles on Reasons to Believe to get the citations and the rest of the argument. If even Humphreys has ceded the core elements of his original hypothesis, then it really is dead in the water and we need to acknowledge it as such.To our knowledge, not one person competent in general relativity and cosmology theory who has examined Starlight and Time has given a "pass" to this theory. Despite the lack of expert corroboration of his work, Humphreys continues to insist on the validity of his demonstrably false theory. . .
In his latest attempt to defend Starlight and Time, Humphreys actually quietly abandons it. The three central arguments of the original Starlight and Time proposal were:
1.The alleged physical significance of the Schwarzschild time coordinate of the Klein metric. This is so important in the original Starlight and Time argument that Humphreys called it "the essence" of his new cosmological model.
2.The gravitational time dilation effects of differences of gravitational potential in a bounded universe which, it was alleged, do not occur in an unbounded universe. Again, this is essential to the original argument.
3.The alleged profound effects of event horizons in a bounded universe. In Starlight and Time, Humphreys attributed most of the effects of 1 and 2 above to the action of an event horizon, which he claimed would cause Earth clocks to be static while billions of years of time elapsed on clocks in the distant universe.
It has been shown in a number of articles that all three of these claims are manifestly false. In particular, 1) the Schwarzschild time coordinate has no physical significance at all for the behavior of physical clocks in a bounded universe, 2) the pattern of gravitational field and potential differences is manifestly identical for bounded and unbounded universes (this is sufficiently important and sufficiently simple that we will revisit it below) and physical clock behaviors are manifestly identical for both cases, and 3) the event horizon of a bounded universe has absolutely no effect on the passage of time on physical clocks in such a universe.
In his most recent defense of this theory, "New Vistas of Spacetime Rebut the Critics", Humphreys gives up so much ground on each of these three central arguments that one can fairly say that he has abandoned the original formulation of his hypothesis.
And yes, I did read the book back in the day. I got initially excited by it, but even in the layperson section there were flaws that the careful reader could discern.
Shalom
It's been translated directly from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into English, not from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to French to English, or from Greek to English to Greek again.
It'd be nice if the critics of the Bible weren't relying on grade-school misunderstandings of what it is and how it's been passed down to us.
Shalom
“He who penned Genesis” didn’t have a working understanding of anything other than there were lights in the sky at night. He knew nothing of telescopes, nothing of the moons of Jupiter, nothing of light and radio waves. In short, Moses was a scientific illiterate. To claim any scientific understanding of the universe based on such illiteracy is forced ignorance, devolving back to the time when the sun and stars were simply the cast of characters in legends and myths.
The necessary equations are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
I’m curious about running the “Earth orbiting a black hole for 4 local days while the universe ages relativistically 13 billion years” numbers out of sheer morbid curiosity. Will take me a little while to get around to it.
That’s how we ended up with phrases like “wheels within wheels” and “let the reader understand”, among many others, in scripture: the writer & audience simply lacked both language and cognitive framework to describe future understandings. Imagine Moses trying to describe, technically, FreeRepublic!
Which is exactly why science triumphs over stories.
Moses didn't have to completely understand science to write what he wrote...
II Peter 1:20-21
"...no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, 21 for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."
I would not be surprised if all our scientific observations were also consistent with the model of an "eternally oscillating" universe.
If you attribute it to God and think God meant Universe, you might well think He would have had the vocabulary to have said so.
However there is abundant authority from other written historic sources that the Heavens meant everything inside of the Asteroid Belt only. Outside was "Water" whatever that meant or might have meant.
For me, I choose to believe that the real meaning is that in the beginning, God created all of everything. I have no idea how he did that.
That God has the language for “universe” doesn’t mean Moses, nor Moses’ readers, did.
How do you conclude “Heavens meant everything inside of the Asteroid Belt only”? What contemporary & prior historic sources could possibly have grasped the reality of asteroids vs planets vs stars vs etc? You claim “abundant authority”, start citing.
Interesting that you authoritatively criticize attempts to grasp what can be grasped, yet end with “God created all of everything. I have no idea how he did that.” Nobody here is disputing God creating everything. It is, however, quite sensible to look at what’s around us, think a little, and conclude the obvious (within reasonable room for error). To say “no idea” is to allow that God made it all, and the way it appears to be, some 20 minutes ago.
Overstating an opposing view is unhelpful.
Of course Moses didn’t have to completely understand science to write what he wrote. He DID find need to express the concept of “universe”, which in ancient Hebrew and/or within literary conventions was plainly expressed by “heavens and the earth”. For the point of the writing, he also DIDN’T have to “completely” express the science involved: suffice to say, God created it all, in phases that looked like, to lesser beings of limited knowledge & perception, what’s described.
And it’s pretty obvious that physical earthly geography is rather more understandable to early cultures than advanced cosmological origin theories. (BTW: a random quote claiming great things means little. I’m unconvinced that Psalms was intended as an abstract ocean liner map between an arbitrary foreign country and a then-nonexistent city.)
Genesis does not say “in the beginning, God created the Universe”; it says in the beginning, God Created the heavens and the earth.
I happen to believe God in fact created the Universe. I don’t think He tells us or thought we needed to know how, when, and under what circumstances He did so—if we did, He would have told us.
Check out article and comments.
Thanks, David.
Also see Hilton Ratcliffe's book The Static Universe and Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened, for arguments against an expanding universe.
Cosmology is not as cut and dried as its proponents would like us to think.
To be fair, almost no actual cosmologists speak with the certitude of Discover or New York Times on the subject.
Moreover, we can directly observe that galaxies were closer together in the distant past thanks to a finite speed of light.
Besides which, a static universe still couldn't be eternal, because there's a limit to the amount of usable hydrogen in the universe. If the universe were infinitely old, it would also be infinitely entropic, having suffered its "heat death" long ago.
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