Tag Archives: Big Bang

The Institute for Creation Research

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Thursday I was privileged to spend a few fantastic hours at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). I visited with staff and scientists at their Dallas campus, and previewed the Discovery Center. When finished, hopefully next year, it will feature a state-of-the-art planetarium, animatronic dinosaurs (imagine a flying pterosaur swooping down!), fossils, a model of Noah’s Ark, geological evidence of the Flood, and so much more.

I met many of their distinguished scientists, dedicated and humble people who spurned more lucrative positions to confirm God’s word. Their powerful intellect was matched only by their passion. We shared the wonder of some of my favorite subjects, like the DNA evidence of recent creation and a real Adam and Eve, the mind-blowing technology of life, multiple discoveries disproving the Big Bang theory (spiral galaxies, absence of anti-matter, blue stars, double stars, comets, and heavy elements, to name just a few), and the evidence for a single ice age.

If want to know the literal truth of Genesis, read their publications, and, when it is finished, get yourself to Dallas and the Discovery Center. ICR offers a fire hose of evidence. An easy way to start is by signing up for their free monthly magazine, Acts and Facts, which is available here.

One of their favorite subjects, one we came back to again and again, is dinosaurs. They noted the term “dinosaur” is relatively new; before that they were called dragons. I saw an enormous fossil head of a 35-foot-long sea monster that was instantly buried during the Flood. I saw fossils with authentic, preserved dinosaur proteins, tested by a secular lab to be just thousands of years old. The worldwide discoveries of dinosaur “soft tissue,” original blood in some cases, shatter the secular myth of an old Earth.

ICR needs funds to complete their Discovery Center. I invite you to join the cause and be part of this exciting project. You can donate here.

Let us thank God for the Institute for Creation Research. They are a beacon of hope in our confused world.

Thanks for reading.

Doug

Rethinking the Big Bang

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I used to think the Big Bang theory was supported by multiple lines of scientific evidence, and impossible to challenge. When you watch anything related to astronomy on TV, it will probably be based on the Big Bang theory. In Counting To God I argued that the creation of all time, space, and matter from nothing was evidence of God.

The evidence of God is still there, stronger than ever, but the support for gradual cosmic evolution disappears when you look behind the curtain. The latest evidence does not agree with the Big Bang theory, and the theory is now rejected by many scientists, including many Atheists. In this post I’ll describe the Big Bang theory, and then the science. To me, science now points to an even more miraculous creation, the creation described in Genesis. As usual, you decide.

According to the Big Bang theory, a one-time, supernatural event took place 13.8 billion years ago. That event was the instantaneous creation of space, time, and all of the matter and energy that ever has existed and ever will exist. The theory is that an ultra-hot and ultra-dense fireball gradually expanded and cooled, and gravity slowly pulled the matter together over billions of years to form stars, planets, and galaxies. As generations of stars burned and exploded, the extreme heat and pressure created heavy elements – elements heavier than helium in the periodic table (oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and so on) – that are critical for life.

That’s the theory. Let’s look at facts (sorry the list is so long, but the subject fascinates me):

Mature Distant Galaxies. This shocked me. Galaxies far away are receding from us, and the speed with which they are receding is generally proportional to their distance from us. (Hubble’s Law). According to secular Big Bang models, this means that when we look at distant galaxies we are looking back in time. According to the Big Bang theory, the galaxies farthest away were formed shortly after the Big Bang. The models generally predict that it takes billions of years to form a mature galaxy with billions of stars, and that the heavy elements gradually increase as stars explode.

We have found distant galaxies that are fully mature. One team of astronomers found 15 distant galaxies that (according to their models) are 12 billion light years away on average. In other words, they believed they were looking back in time 12 billion years, to less than two billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies are fully mature in shape; they are massive, with a hundred billion stars or more each; and they are filled with heavy elements. Another team discovered a galaxy supposedly 560 million years old with ratios of heavy elements similar to nearby galaxies.

Mature distant galaxies contradict the Big Bang model. They fit the biblical model, where God “stretches out the heavens like a curtain…” Isaiah 40:22. The Bible states in 10 places that God stretched out the heavens.

Blue Stars. Blue stars are the most massive stars. Stars with more mass are hotter and burn much quicker. Rigel (the star in Orion that is the “foot” on the right) is estimated by secular astronomers to be around 8 million years old and at the end of its life. A star like our sun, which itself is bigger than 95% of all stars, will burn for a thousand times longer than a typical blue star. If the universe is billions of years old, blue stars should be long gone, and any new ones formed should be fantastically rare. Yet blue stars are all over our galaxy. I love to look at magnificent bands of blue stars in other spiral galaxies. (It’s easy to do, just google “spiral galaxies” and click on “images”). The abundance of blue stars, both in our galaxy and in other galaxies, contradicts the Big Bang model.

Arms in Spiral Galaxies. While you’re admiring those spiral galaxies, notice the “arms” of tens of billions of stars stretching out from the center. Our Earth is in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. According to secular astronomers, our galaxy has made about 20 complete rotations in its roughly 12 billion year life.

Nice theory. But, if it were true, the stars wouldn’t still be in the spiral arms. Over time the stars would have wandered and filled in the disks of the galaxies. Those sharply defined arms disprove the Big Bang theory.

Double Stars. Stars like our Sun are typically found in groups of two or three. Double stars, also called binary stars, are very common. New research shows that most double star systems will spiral into collapse – the stars will run into each other – in less than one hundred thousand years. This contradicts the Big Bang model of double star systems existing for billions of years.

No Exotic Particles. The ultra-hot and ultra-dense fireball of the Big Bang should have produced exotic particles. We don’t find any. When energy “condenses” into matter, it creates equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. We don’t find anti-matter in the universe. Under the Big Bang theory, one of the most common particles in the universe should be a magnetic monopole, a particle with a single net magnetic charge. Magnetic monopoles have been created in the laboratory. They have never been observed in space.

The Horizon Problem. When we look deep into space, all areas are almost exactly the same temperature. The Big Bang theory predicts cold spots and hot spots. Since light could not have traveled between regions on opposite sides of the universe, they should not have the same temperature; they haven’t been able to exchange energy. To get around this, many secular astronomers believe the universe went through a brief period of massive “inflation.” Inflation is really a philosophical belief, and not science, since it can never be reproduced or observed. Some mathematical models of inflation did make predictions, and all of those predictions have been proven false.

Stars and Planets from Clumps? According to computer simulations, gravity won’t hold grains of dust together until the ball is at least a kilometer in diameter. In other words, you need planets to get planets, and stars to get stars. Secular scientists brush over this problem, but have yet to show how planets and stars can be formed by gravity.

Magnetic Fields. Planets that are billions or even millions of years old shouldn’t have magnetic fields. The total electric energy “stored” in the Earth’s magnetic field has decreased by 14% since its first careful measurement in 1829. This decay fits creation models, which attribute the decay to electrical resistance in the core of the Earth.

Dr. Russell Humphreys has done incredible work in this area. In 1984 he proposed an alternative magnetic model involving God aligning water molecules during the creation week. It accurately predicted the magnetic field strengths of Uranus, and Neptune, as well as the decay rate of Mercury’s magnetic field. Even more impressive, a number of his predictions were made in advance, and then confirmed by satellite measurements.

Comets. Comets have finite life spans; they gradually burn up or collide with the Sun or a planet. They can’t have existed for billions of years, and in most cases not for millions. Secular astronomers imagine an “Oort Cloud” containing a trillion or so potential comets, at the far outer reaches of our Solar System, to replenish the supply. However, as even Atheist Carl Sagan admitted, there is not one shred of scientific evidence for the existence of the Oort Cloud.

* * *

I am not an expert in all of these areas, and it is certainly possibly that I have gotten some things wrong, or that later research will change the statements above. Nevertheless, I think the verdict is in. I am now convinced the Big Bang theory, the prevailing model of gradual cosmological evolution, has fatal flaws. It’s not as ridiculous as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution (how could any sane person believe the human brain “evolved” by chance?) but it has huge problems that most people don’t know about. In Counting To God I noted the 1965 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, faint radiation coming from everywhere, and suggested it was overwhelming evidence of the validity of the Big Bang theory. I didn’t know about these problems (and many problems not listed here), and I didn’t know the background radiation can also be explained as the limiting temperature of space, as starlight being reflected off space dust.

The universe can’t have existed forever. (Second law of thermodynamics, look it up.) Like models of gradual biological evolution, models of gradual cosmological evolution don’t fit the facts. We are left with a magnificent creation, a universe of enormous complexity, beauty, and size. The facts suggest it was all created just thousands of years ago, exactly as described in the Bible:

“I made the earth and created man on it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host…” Isaiah 45:12.

The Bible is true, right from the first page. In a later post I’ll show how important that is for Christianity.

Thanks for reading. Please share the good news of true science. Together we can change the world.

Creation

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Why does the universe exist? Have time and space and matter/energy always existed, back to an infinite past, or were they created by some process or being? In the last century science has begun to shed light on these age-old questions.

For thousands of years most people thought the universe had always existed. That was the view of Aristotle, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton. It was also the initial view of Albert Einstein. When it was pointed out that his theory of General Relativity required a universe in motion, either expanding or contracting, he added a fudge factor, a “cosmological constant,” to keep the universe in balance.

In 1914 it was discovered that light from certain fuzzy spots in the sky was “red-shifted,” which meant they were moving away from us at hundreds of miles per second. In the 1920’s Edwin Hubble, using the then-new 100-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar, discovered those fuzzy spots were entire galaxies. Using a variety of techniques, Hubble began to estimate their distance. In 1929 he announced that the distance away from us was generally proportional to the redshift, the speed away from us. In other words, galaxies twice as far away as others are moving away from us about twice as fast, galaxies four times further away are moving away about four times as fast, and so on. This astonishing relationship between distance and receding velocity is generally true throughout the entire universe. It is now called Hubble’s Law.

Hubble’s law begs a beginning. If you play the movie of time backwards so the galaxies are all coming together, it suggests a moment of creation. The religious implications of a beginning were violently opposed by hundreds of scientists, who cobbled together a competing theory, called the “steady state theory,” that required the constant creation of new matter in the voids of space (a violation of the first law of thermodynamics), to continually build new galaxies. The steady state theory died suddenly in 1965, when two physicists accidently discovered proof of creation – faint background radiation from the birth of the universe. Today the evidence of a beginning – called the “Big Bang” by some – is overwhelming, from the details of the faint background radiation to the relative amounts of the atomic elements. The Big Bang created the entire universe in one miraculous event. It created space, time, and all matter/energy. It did not occur in a specific part of the universe, it occurred simultaneously everywhere in the universe.

What caused the Big Bang? The cause has to be outside of space and time. One theory is that the universe arose as a fluctuation in the quantum field. But the quantum field is a high energy field within our universe. Prior to the Big Bang, space and time did not exist, and there was no quantum field. Also, if you try to imagine an eternal quantum field outside our universe then our universe would have “popped out” an infinitely long time ago. And, what caused that quantum field to exist?

A second theory is that the universe expands and contracts in an infinite series of big bangs. But that violates the second law of thermodynamics – the universe would run out of usable energy.

A third theory is that our universe popped out of another universe, and so on and so, in an infinite regress of turtles all the way down. But infinity is a monstrous mathematical concept that has never been tamed in the real world. If you imagine an infinite regress, then you have to start with an entire infinity of causes, because, no matter how far back you go, you are no closer to the beginning. Another problem is that this theory of infinite regress does not agree with modern science. In 2003 three scientists proved the universe cannot have an infinite past. As one said – “all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

Could that beginning be evidence of God? Skeptics are quick to counter – what caused God? But that question reveals a problem of definition. The Bible describes God as the uncaused cause of existence, the “I am who I am” who created the heavens and the Earth. It makes no sense to ask what created something that exists without cause.

Many find it hard to believe that anything could exist without cause. Yet that is the conclusion of modern science. Something has to just be, has to exist without cause. That something has to be outside of space and time, and immensely powerful. That something fits the Biblical description of God.

Thanks for reading.

New Clues from Astronomy

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This week I offer some incredible new clues from astronomy. I find each fascinating. None proves the existence of God. To prove the existence of God you need the overwhelming evidence from biology of radical new technology and new coding, “orphan genes,” in each species. In astronomy, since we can only measure our universe, there will always be those who claim (with absolutely no scientific evidence to back it up) that there are other universes and we “just got lucky,” so to speak. But let’s look at these amazing new clues.

The first made recent headlines. Scientists claim to have detected “gravity waves.” We know, from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, that matter bends space, and apparently the massive collision of two black holes over 1 billion light years away rattled space so much that it was detected. The point is that, if this is true, and most scientists seem to think that it is (although some suspect error or even fraud), it is a major confirmation of Einstein’s theory. Since the equations of General Relativity require a singular beginning, a “big bang,” then this confirmation of General Relativity is further evidence that our universe had a beginning, exactly as claimed by the Book of Genesis perhaps 4,000 years ago.

The second item is a scientific paper on the number of “terrestrial planets” in the universe. Using a very broad definition of terrestrial planet (basically any planet at least one-half of the diameter of Earth and not more than 10 times as massive, and not taking into account many factors required for a planet to be potentially habitable), the study estimates there are 700 quintillion of them – that is 7 followed by 20 zeros. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that the study found that these Earth-like planets should mostly be in much larger, spheroid galaxies, and not in a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. They call this a “mild violation” of the mediocrity principle, also sometimes called the “Copernican Principle,” even though Copernicus never claimed the Earth was ordinary. The bottom line is that this is one more quality of Earth that seems special, to add to the long list I go through in Chapter 13 of Counting To God (right distance from the star, right distance from the galactic center, right type of star, right ingredients, the right moon, right solar system, and on and on).

Before giving you the last item, I can’t help but note that the paper above actually claims “the case for Extragalactic SETI remains strong.” (Meaning they think there is a strong case that there is intelligent life in some other galaxy.) They claim this simply by citing other papers, and they totally ignore the abysmal failure of every scientist in the world to come up with even a “mildly plausible” way that life could have arisen by chance. When I went to school, to find out the probably of something occurring, you would multiply the number of chances (here at most the number of terrestrial planets) by the likelihood that any of those chances would succeed. For the latter number, the chance of life forming anywhere in the universe at any time by accident, the best number I have seen, from Yale Physicist Harold Morowitz in the 1960’s, is one in a number with one hundred billion zeros. So that number overwhelms a number of Earth-like candidates with that has a mere 20 or so zeros. In other words, life couldn’t have formed by chance, there is no explanation for life without God, yet the strong Atheist beliefs of these scientists prevent them from recognizing that, and cause them to make frankly idiotic statements about life on other galaxies and pass that nonsense off to us as “science.”

The third item also relates to the so-called mediocrity or (falsely named) Copernican Principle. There is a movie, now available on DVD, called “The Principle.” It’s a little confusing, and perhaps deliberately a little hard to follow, and it has a few things in it that are wrong, and a few crazy statements by Atheist scientists, but I did find two of its key points stunning. First, some astronomers believe galaxies are not distributed randomly in space, but statistically are much more likely to be found in various shells around the Earth, each separated by 250 million light years. That is mind-blowing; if true then the entire universe is symmetric around the Earth, and this phony mediocrity principle is destroyed. The second claim is that the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, what is called the cosmic microwave background radiation, is aligned with the plane of the Earth and the other planets around the Sun. If true, that precise alignment would not appear to be by chance. This second claim is made by distinguished MIT physicist Max Tegmark and others. I intend to try to learn more about these amazing claims that Earth may actually be – yes, believe it or not, as they used to say – the center of the universe!

Thanks for reading! And please, please, spread the good news of science.

Something From Nothing – Revisited

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I am saddened by the confusion over the scientific evidence for God, and particularly saddened that many Atheists deliberately create confusion. This week let’s return to a question I asked about a year and a half ago: Why does anything exist?

I think it’s obvious that if you start with absolutely nothing – no time, no space, no energy, no matter, no laws of physics – you can’t create anything. So, to me, there is clearly no nontheistic reason – no explanation without God – for why anything exists. It just does. By itself, this doesn’t prove that God exists, it just proves that existence is an unshakable mystery.

Yet one Atheist has published a book claiming that you can get something from nothing. Believe it or not, A Universe From Nothing is actually the title of his book. But what he does is disingenuous, and that is sad. He doesn’t start from nothing, he assumes the existence of the quantum field.

What scientists call the “quantum field” is the foundation of our reality. It is a high energy field, and, as I explain in Chapter 14 of Counting To God, described by fantastically complex mathematics. It appears to consist of pure thought – ideas in the mind of God. Clearly the creation of the universe is connected to events at the quantum level – the subatomic level – of reality. But what caused the quantum field to exist? You can’t seriously just assume the existence of the quantum field. How does energy described only by fantastically complex mathematical patterns and equations pop out of absolute nothingness?

There are other problems with his pseudo-science theory, beyond falsely claiming that the quantum field is “nothing.” First, while “virtual particles” – particles that exist for fantastically small periods of time, less time than it takes light to cross a hydrogen atom, and then disappear – do exist, there is no scientific evidence that stable particles can pop out of a quantum field. So that’s another blatant, unacknowledged leap of faith. Second, even if you could get a stable particle from the quantum field, how could an entire universe, with the mass to create hundreds of billions of galaxies, suddenly pop out? Third, even if that event happened, how could it all be so finely tuned as to create the beautifully complex universe we now observe?

The truly sad part is that many people seem to think this quantum field nonsense makes sense. I have met many people who will tell you they think the universe popped out of a quantum field, and that therefore God is unnecessary. Where exactly did the quantum field come from? It makes no sense to say that the quantum field always existed, and then the universe suddenly popped out, sort of like a cosmic egg that finally hatched. If time and space have no beginning, so that the quantum field existed in the infinite past, then, even assuming that there is some small possibility that at some point a universe will pop out, our universe would have “popped out” an infinitely long time ago. Any probability, no matter how small, becomes a certainty when multiplied by an infinite period of time.

The truth is that ALL of these pseudo-science theories that attempt to avoid creation don’t work. The “steady state” theory collapsed in 1965 when Arno and Penzias discovered the radiation from the Big Bang. The “infinite multiverse” theory was disproven in 2003 by the Borde-Guth-Villekin singularity theorem – the past can’t be infinite. The perpetually oscillating universe theory – a universe that somehow contracts and expands forever, creating an infinite number of “Big Bangs” – would run out of energy (second law of thermodynamics).

We are left with the truly astonishing scientific conclusion that our universe was created. What caused that – what was the first cause? This doesn’t automatically get you to God, but it does prove, in my view at least, that something just exists, that there is something outside space and time that is uncaused, that caused our universe to exist. To me, that’s sort of like the first punch in the face of Atheism.

The second punch, a knockout punch, is that our universe is astonishingly fine-tuned. In so many ways, from the precise settings of the constants of physics, to the number of dimensions of space, to the mind-boggling ordering of the universe at the Big Bang, to the laws of physics, to the nuclear resonance levels within atoms, and on and on, the universe at least unquestionably looks like it was perfectly designed for life. This is commonly accepted among Atheists.

So our universe was somehow created, there can’t be an infinite number of past universes, and our universe is perfectly designed. To me, those are knockout punches.

And yet the public reads the titles of these nonsense books and thinks there’s a “scientific” explanation without God for existence.

I’ve been a little behind on my blogging, but hope to get back into it this year. If you have questions, or suggestions for blog posts, please comment on my Facebook author page.

Thanks for reading.

A New Dawn

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How do you explain the miracle of dawn? With heavenly clockwork, an immense fireball rises over one horizon and marches inexorably toward the other, bringing light and heat, making all life possible, and astonishing the sentient beings who stand witness. My best dawns were after sailing through the night, and seeing the darkness slowly conquered by the rising Sun. If you’ve ever watched a dawn, from first rays to final glory, you know it is a miracle.

In the ancient world, dawn, like every other mysterious thing, happened at the will of the gods. Over thousands of years, and most impressively in the last few hundred years, we’ve come up with different stories. We now say the Sun is a ball of burning stuff, of hydrogen atoms in a controlled ten-billion-year thermonuclear explosion. We now say the predictable march across the sky, and all other clockwork of the heavens, are the result of gravity, a fundamental force of nature where objects interact over great distances. Many extend this progress story – this “grand progress narrative” of “natural” causes replacing divine causes – to the origin of humans, we sentient creatures who observe the dawn. Many will tell you we are here because life arose by accident, and that, through blind, unguided evolution, the continual process of natural selection preserving the best mutations, those first cells eventually transformed into human beings.

This “grand progress narrative” supports a philosophy called Scientism. Scientism is the belief that everything can be explained by so-called “natural” causes, without God. Scientism is clearly not science, but it masquerades as science, and many can’t tell the difference. The grand progress narrative is scientism’s main theme. Scientism says there will always be a natural, materialistic explanation, and that if we just wait long enough we will figure it out. Scientism claims that natural causes alone can and will explain the dawn, and even how we came to be here.

Most people aren’t aware that in the last few decades this grand progress narrative has been proven false. Scientific progress has not slowed; fortunately for us new discoveries continue. But this thousand year old story of “natural” causes replacing divine causes has been reversed. To see why, let’s look at the dawn piece by piece.

We know the Sun is made of “stuff,” mostly burning hydrogen. We now also know that, without God, there is no explanation why stuff, or anything else, exists. All of true science – observation, experimentation, and reasoning – now leads us to a unique event – a universe created out of nothing, all matter and energy, even time and space itself, created in a single “big bang” instant. This “big bang” theory forced Atheists to retreat and claim, with absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever, that our universe somehow popped out of an infinite, eternal, and perpetually inflating “multiverse.” This infinite multiverse theory was disproven by the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin singularity theorem of 2003, what I have previously called the “God Theorem.” As one scientist put it, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”

We know that the clockwork of the heavens results from gravity. We have learned that gravity, along with dozens of other constants and features of our universe, is “impossibly fine-tuned,” set just perfect for life. If the force of gravity were stronger or weaker by one part in a number with 60 zeros life would not exist. That’s a greater precision than throwing a dart randomly and hitting a bulls-eye on the other side of the universe. Other features of our universe are even more precisely set. Without God, we have absolutely no explanation for this fine-tuning, and the amazingly perfect design of our universe.

Some say the first life arose by accident. Science now tells us that’s a fantasy. Harvard’s “Origin of Life Initiative” crashed and burned, its scientists crushed by the enormity of the problem. We now know that even the most “simple” life is a fantastically designed collection of micro-miniaturized factories and roads and storage facilities. Without God, we cannot explain the origin of life.

Some say, most of our popular culture will insist, that human beings arose solely through blind, unguided evolution. Yet we have found massive amounts of original information in every species on Earth. Throughout all of science, all of human history, all of our human experience, we have never found meaningful information that did not arise from a mind. This information – unique DNA coding in each species – proves the existence of a transcendent intelligence.

At this time in human history, we are witnessing a new dawn. Scientism’s grand progress narrative has been exposed. Without God, there is no explanation why anything exists. Without God, there is no explanation for the incredible design and fine-tuning for our universe. Without God, there is no explanation for the origin of life. Without God, there is no explanation of the creation of new species, including and especially human beings. It is a new dawn for belief, and if we as a culture can grasp the wonder, and work together as God wants, there may be hope for us yet.

Thanks for reading.

The God Theorem

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Can a mathematical theorem point to the existence of God?

Consider whether our universe had a beginning, as claimed by the Bible. Until about a hundred years ago, there was no scientific evidence it did. Then, in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered the universe is expanding in a way that implies a beginning, or “Big Bang.” Stunning confirmation of this theory came with the accidental discovery in 1965 of radiation, “relic photons” from the Big Bang (actually, to 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had cooled down enough to allow light to travel freely). Today the Big Bang theory is commonly accepted.

By itself, the Big Bang theory claims the universe had a beginning, and suggests the existence of God. So today most Atheists have retreated to belief in a “multiverse.” They believe our universe is an insignificant part of a much larger scheme, a collection of universes typically called the multiverse. To avoid the need for a beginning, Atheists typically believe the multiverse contains an infinite number of universes. One popular theory has universes exploding out of other universes, in “eternal inflation.”

Which bring us to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, what I call the God theorem. (For videos on this theorem, click here.) In 2003 these scientists proved that, if you assume an expanding universe, you can’t have an infinite past. Every universe that expands must have a space-time boundary in the past. What’s so powerful about this theorem is that it covers all cosmological models and theories of expanding universes. According to Professor Vilenkin:

All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.

With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe.

The multiverse has other problems, not the least of which is that it’s impossible to prove or disprove, and therefore many people think should not be considered “science.” The multiverse theory may be losing favor, even among Atheists. An opinion piece in the current issue of New Scientist magazine, by physicist Lee Smolin, is titled: “You think there’s a multiverse? Get real.”

Here’s how one blog sums it up:

If the universe came into being out of nothing, which seems to be the case from science, then the universe has a cause. Things do not pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing. The cause of the universe must be transcendent and supernatural. It must be uncaused, because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be eternal, because it created time. It must be non-physical, because it created space. There are only two possibilities for such a cause. It could be an abstract object or an agent. Abstract objects cannot cause effects. Therefore, the cause is an agent.

Sounds like God to me. Thanks for reading.

Pope Francis

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As you may have read, Pope Francis recently made some interesting remarks on evolution and the Big Bang. The media coverage of those remarks has been pretty confused, to say the least, and often hostile.

Here’s what I believe the Pope actually said (translations may differ):

“When we read in Genesis the account of Creation, we risk imagining that God was a magician, with such a magic wand as to be able to do everything. However, it was not like that… And thus creation went forward for centuries, millennia and millennia until it became what we know today, in fact because God is not a demiurge [demigod] or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities.”
“The Big Bang, which is today posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creation; rather, it requires it. Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.”

Now the Pope is not a scientist, but I think he got it pretty right. The Big Bang is a theory of creation. It stuns me how often people don’t get that. I was on a syndicated radio program, and the host said to me something like – “Religious people believe in creation, but scientists have the Big Bang Theory.” The Big Bang is all about creation – all of time and space and matter and energy created in a single instance from absolute nothingness. It is scientific verification of the first words of the Book of Genesis. Until the 1965 discovery of relic photons from the Big Bang, many scientists objected to the Big Bang Theory because they said it was too religious. Now that it is mainstream, accepted science, atheists somehow want to pretend that it is contrary to God.

As for evolution, the key point to keep in mind is that the Pope is using that word in its normal sense – as a process of change. He certainly isn’t referring to Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. What the Pope is saying is that life evolved over billions of years into what we see today, that all of life was not teleported onto this planet, that God worked over billions of years to create each species. That is absolutely consistent with the scientific evidence. As I’ve noted before, Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution has been emphatically disproved in recent years, although you won’t find much evidence of that in the popular media. But mainstream evidence, such as the findings of 450 scientists working on the ENCODE project to map the human genome, that our DNA is mostly or entirely functional and has more than one level of information buried in it, clearly disproves unguided evolution.

So the Pope got it right. I’m not a Roman Catholic, but I’m finding a lot about Pope Francis to like.

Thanks for reading.