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Those who contest the creation scenario as outlined in the Bible
occasionally cite that the book of Genesis claims that God created
the earth in six days (10). A day on the earth is approximately 23 hrs
and 56 minutes. Planets in our solar system obtained their axis spin from
off-center meteor impacts in the distant past (11).
Venus rotates backwards, due to a large moon
sized impactor that reversed its direction of rotation (12).
Valles Marineris is an enormous trench across the Marian hemisphere
that resembles the Grand Canyon, however it is 19,000 miles long.
Planetary Scientist believe it is a giant gash resulting from a Martian
moon that fell out of orbit causing Mars to spin in the direction of
the strike (13).
Uranus rotates backwards and on its side from an impact of a body
the size of Earth (14).
NASA orbital
computer simulations verified that our moon is not a captured rogue
satellite. No matter what angle, distance, speed or trajectory
is considered, the Earth does not capture the moon, it passes by. These simulations also show
that our moon (25% of the Earth in size) is too large to have formed around the
Earth. The Earth’s spin was initiated from a cataclysmic impact 4.5 billion
years ago. It is the general consensus of planetary scientists that
Orpheus, (a Mars sized planet that orbited between Earth and Mars)
impacted the Earth billions of year ago forming our moon (15,
16). Impact Scientist Dr. Jay
Melosh confirmed the mathematical model, but also demonstrated that
most of the computer simulated mathematical test models resulted in
two moons that fell out of orbit after 2 billion years, crashing
into the earth. We are exceptionally lucky that the impact resulted in
one very large moon (17).
Food for thought: Throughout the Bible, the moon is referred to as
female and companion to the Earth (Gen 37:09, Solomon 6:10).
The Bible also recounts the creation of woman by being taken out of
man (Genesis 2:21). Likewise, the moon (female) was created by
being taken out of the Earth.
Previous to the impact, proto
Earth’s spin was negligible. Scientist believe the Earth
always had the same side facing the sun, just like the moon always
has the same side facing the Earth. We never knew what the
dark side of the moon looked like until it was photographed it with
orbiting satellite spacecraft. After the impact the length of
a day instantaneously became four hours. The earth’s spin has been
steadily decreasing ever since. If we attributed God’s day to the
Earth’s spin, shouldn’t it be at the beginning of the Earth’s
creation? Proto Earth's day at that time frame was negligible and
may have been many millions of
years. How long is God’s day? Why would we attribute it to the
Earth’s spin now, billions of years later? It is clear in the Bible
that God already had an established day before he began creating.
Psalm 90 attributes God's day to being much longer, "A thousand
years is as a day", the "thousand
years" is likely to be symbolic of periods incomprehensible in
earlier times (18,
19). As the Universe is God’s
realm, could God’s day be a complete rotation of the Universe?
Four hundred years ago the Catholic Church burned people at the
stake for believing the world was round and orbited the sun. As
science progressed, Church officials were eventually forced to
accept reality, particularly when their standpoints became more
and more untenable. As we discover other planets, suns, solar
systems and galaxies, it starts to become apparent that setting
God's day at 23hrs and 56 minutes is as absurd as when the Catholic
Church held that
the stars and planets are carried around by being embedded in
rotating crystal spheres moving around the Earth. Those who
continue to adhere to nonsensical standpoints eroded Church credibility.
Ideas that have nothing to do with the Bible, Faith and Morals
should never be elevated over the Bible, Faith and Morals. In
debates, atheists will endeavor to concentrate on the untenable
topics, recline and watch Creationist Christians bury themselves by arguing that Adam and
Eve had pet Tyrannosaurus Rexes (20).
In holding such ludicrous ideologies, credibility becomes
tantamount to that of the Branch Davidians, Jim Jones or those who thought they were
going to flying away on the
Hale-Bopp comet. In arguments, atheists have typically
retorted; "Sure, and a few years ago Christians would have us
believe that the Earth is flat and the moon is made out of cheese".
One of our contributing
editors is an Orthodox Rabbi who explains that the Jewish people do
not adhere to a literal six day creation. "Since the Hebrew word for
'day', "YOM", as used in the Hebrew Bible, can represent anything
from the daylight 'day' (or even part of it), to a 24-hour day, and
up to many years. It all depends on the context of the passage where
the word is used. This is not so much different from the use of
'day' even in English - e.g., 'today', 'nowadays', 'days are
coming', etc. The earliest scrolls used similar wording to reflect
not a 'day', but a period of time or a time frame. Those caught up
in the six day creation premise fall victim to myopic thinking,
basing their hypothesizes on rudimentary English translations. In
his book "The Science of God", Orthodox Jewish physicist Dr. Gerald
Schroeder, using proven science, actually "maps" the six "days" of
Creation into the six epochs of the development of the universe, and
comes up with a number for the age of the earth that is almost
identical to the consensus among geoscientists. Even if you don't
accept this point-of-view, the main thesis of the book is that this
universe did not get created by "accident"; rather, that there is a
Creator who designed it. Christians who adhere to a six day creation
should invest in a copy of Prof. Schroeder's "The Science of God" -
it is available in paperback for less than $10".
Scientists know the length of
a day throughout time owing to several different methods that yield
analogous results. One method is examining
paper-thin rock layers called tidal rhythmites which reveal the
frequency of prehistoric tides (21).
These slender petrified sediment layers reveal that primitive tides
were more frequent and the days shorter. Dr. Marjorie A. Chan
verified how tidal records a billion years old reveal that a day at
that point was 18 hrs long. The results are supported by
Continental Drift back calculations, which are at a known rate of
slightly less than 3 inches per year. Tidal rhythmite data has also
been accurately verified by studying ancient coral skeleton's
fossilized calcium carbonate growth rings. All coral on earth grows
one micro layer per day and has annual growth rings. Ancient
fossilized coral contain more micro rings that correspond to age, as
there were more days in a year as we go back in time, since there
were less hours in the day. Moreover, as we are losing our moon by
one and a half inches each year, it becomes mathematically
verifiable to establish tidal frequency and corroborate sample
dating by working backwards, accounting for the moons gravitational
effect. Supported by four very different independent scientific studies
(Tidal Rhythmites, Continental Drift, Coral Fossils and Moon
Distance) which all yield identical
results, the
science becomes rock solid.
The Average
Earth - Moon Distance = 238,857 Miles (the moon is moving away at
1.5 inches per year)
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1.5 inches = .00002367424 miles
1 Billion = one thousand million |
Miles moon moved away in 1
billion years 1,000,000,000
years x .00002367424 miles = 23,000 miles |
Earth - Moon Distance 1 billion
years ago 238,857 miles - 23,000 miles = 215,857
miles |
Creationists have attempted to use the recession of the moon to
prove the Earth is only 6,000 years old, but their math is
completely erroneous
(22). There are still some
Pastors who preach that the earth is only six thousand years old,
notwithstanding that according to Biblical chronology and
archeological findings, these dates would be impossible, for it
would leave only 66 years between Noah and Abraham
(23).
Moreover, these calculations refuse to even consider how the Bible
recorded people in Adam's period living to almost a thousand years
of age (Adam died at 950 years), which could easily push the
Biblical time of the creation of man to as far back as fifty
thousand years. These Creationist allege that the Bible must
have meant months not years, which is hypocritical. Why hold
to six days and then claim that the Bible was wrong on Adam's age? Such wild assertions of a very
young Earth could only be possible if God made an atom by atom
snapshot of a previously existing Earth-moon system (as radio
isotopes of lunar samples confirmed that they originated in the Earth's
mantle) from another solar system, and
materialized a precise duplicate in our solar system.
Obviously such a
proposal would have to come with an explanation as to why. One
possible elucidation could be the 500 million years required to
accumulate enough organic matter to sustain advanced human
civilization. Another could be the rarity of the impactor scenario that resulted in our
necessary moon, a one in a
trillion collision. Yet, there are a hundred
trillion stars in our Galaxy alone. If we can
imagine such incredible scenarios in science fiction episodes like
Star Trek, it may not be too far fetched to suppose God done
something of the sorts. However, it would be a tough argument to float.
The Bible also describes the amazing
story of Noah's Ark, which is now gaining some scientific support.
The Bible states that "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on
the seventeenth day of the second month, on that day all the
springs of the great deep burst forth,
and the floodgates of the heavens were opened (Genesis 7:11) (24,
25). Atheists contested that such
springs are nonsense, but now a June 12, 2014 science article claims
that seismologists discovered otherwise, that these "springs
of the great deep" are called transition zones "and could
potentially have the same amount of water as all the world's oceans"
(26,
27). The missing water has now been
discovered.
Passages in the Bible
Describing the Creation of the Universe
Most scientists employ the example of superimposed dots stretching
out on the surface of an expanding balloon to illustrate the
redshift of the galaxies moving away from each other in the "Big
Bang" model. There are 14 mentions of God creating the Heavens in
the Bible, 13 of which utilize the words "stretch, stretched,
stretches, stretcheth, stretching, stretched-forth spanned,
spreadeth and spread-out. This is a significant confirmation of the
"Big Bang" creation theory in the Bible.
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Genesis 01:01 In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth.
Job 09:08 Who alone stretches
out the heavens
Isaiah 40:22
[It is] he that sitteth upon the sphere of the earth, and the
inhabitants thereof [are] as grasshoppers; that
stretcheth out the heavens as a
curtain, and spreadeth them out
as a tent to dwell in. 42:05 Thus saith God the LORD, he that
created the heavens, and stretched
them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which
cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon
it, and spirit to them that walk therein. 44:24 Thus saith the
LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I
[am] the LORD that maketh all [things]; that
stretcheth forth the heavens
alone; that spreadeth abroad the
earth by myself; 45:12 I stretched
out the heavens with My hands. 48:13 Mine hand also hath laid
the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath
spanned the heavens: [when] I
call unto them, they stand up together. 51:13 And forgettest
the LORD thy maker, that hath stretched
forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth; and
hast feared continually every day because of the fury of the
oppressor, as if he were ready to destroy? and where [is] the
fury of the oppressor?
Jeremiah 10:12
And by His understanding He has
stretched out the heavens. 51:15 He hath made the earth
by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and
hath stretched out the heaven by his understanding.
Job 09:08
Which alone spreadeth out the
heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea. He
stretcheth out the north over the
empty place, [and] hangeth the earth upon nothing. 37:18 Hast
thou with him spread out the sky,
[which is] strong, [and] as a molten looking glass?
Psalms 104:02
Who coverest [thyself] with light as [with] a garment: who
stretchest out the heavens like a
curtain.
Zechariah
12:01 The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the
LORD, which stretcheth forth the
heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth
the spirit of man within him. |
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Is the Big Bang in the
Bible?
By Karl W. Giberson
March 23, 2014 12:00 AM
News.Yahoo.com/Big-Bang-Bible-040000314--Politics.html
The “Big Bang” theory of
the origin of the universe got a big boost this week when
scientists reported the discovery of 14-billion-year-old
echoes of the universe’s first moments—the first proof of an
expanding universe, and the last piece of Einstein’s general
theory of relativity. Creationists and other conservative
religious believers have a curiously ambivalent relationship
with the Big Bang—unlike evolution, which is universally
condemned. Young-earth creationists mock the Big Bang as a
wild guess, an anti-biblical fantasy that only atheists
determined to ignore evidence of God’s creation could have
invented. In contrast, creationists who accept that the earth
is old—by making the “days” of creation in Genesis into long
epochs—actually claim that the Big Bang is in the Bible. Some
of them are rejoicing in the recent discovery. The leading
evangelical anti-science organization is Answers in Genesis (AIG),
headed by Ken Ham, the guy who recentlydebated Bill Nye. AIG’s
dismissive response to the discovery is breathtaking in its
hubris and lack of insight into how science works. They call
for Christians to reject the discovery because the
“announcement may be improperly understood and reported.” This
all-purpose response would also allow one to deny that there
is a missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777. Secondly, Answers
in Genesis complains that the predictions being confirmed in
the discovery are “model-dependent.” They fail to note that
every scientific prediction ever confirmed, from the discovery
of Neptune, to DNA, to the Ambulecetus transitional fossil is
“model-dependent.” The whole point of deriving predictions in
science is to test models, hypotheses, theories. Finally, AIG
suggests that “other mechanisms could mimic the signal,”
implying that, although the startling prediction was derived
from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the
inflationary model of the Big Bang, it could have come from
“some other physical mechanism.” No alternative mechanism is
suggested. The AIG response declares instead that “Biblical
creationists know from Scripture that the universe did not
begin in a big bang … we know from Genesis 1 that God made the
earth before He made the stars, but the big bang requires that
many stars existed for billions of years before the earth
did.”
Not all biblical
literalists take such a hard-line stance. Like Ham, the
popular Christian apologist Hugh Ross is a biblical literalist
who rejects all forms of evolution: Ross believes that the
“days” of creation in Genesis are vast epochs and thus the
universe can be billions of years old. Ross heads the
organization Reasons to Believe, which is often ++attacked by
AIG++ and other young earth creationist groups for having a
“liberal” view of the Bible. (http://creation.com/the-dubious-apologetics-of-hugh-ross)
Ross, an astronomer by training, was delighted by the
discovery of the gravitational waves and told the Christian
Post that “The Bible was the first to predict big bang
cosmology.” Ross, in fact, is convinced that many ideas in
modern science—including the inflationary model for the Big
Bang confirmed by the recent discovery—were actually predicted
by the Bible. He argues—to the dismay of Hebrew scholars—that
the word “bara,” translated “create” in Genesis 1:1, means “to
bring into existence that which did not exist before.” Ross
has ingeniously located much of modern physics in the Bible,
including the laws of thermodynamics and the Big Bang. The
initial response from the Discovery Institute, the
headquarters of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, maligned
the motivations of the cosmologists searching for the gravity
wave, claiming they found more theologically friendly models
of the Big Bang “disturbing,” and wanted to refute them. The
recent discovery of the gravity waves—after years of
searching—is being trumpeted by the scientific community
because it “saves the jobs of a thousand people at two
national labs who are having to justify their expensive
failure. Despite his organization’s snarky cynicism, the
Discovery Institute’s director, bestselling ID author Stephen
Meyer, was in the this-new-discovery-proves-the-Bible camp.
Meyer went on the John Ankerberg show to extol the theological
virtues of the Big Bang. Using the same arguments as Hugh
Ross, Meyer finds both the Big Bang and even the inflation
model in the Bible: “We find repeated in the Old Testament,
both in the prophets and the Psalms,” he told the Christian
Post, “that God is stretching or has stretched out the
heavens.” Meyer says this “stretching” means that “Space
expanded very rapidly,” and the recent discovery provided
“additional evidence supporting that inflation.”
Meyer and Ross are right
that English translations of the Bible do speak of the heavens
being “stretched out.” But to suggest that this is what has
been confirmed by the recent discovery is simply not possible.
A typical biblical passage supporting this claim is found in
Isaiah 40:22 where we read that God “stretches out the heavens
like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.”
Does this really sound like an event at the beginning of time
when the universe experienced a momentary burst of expansion?
And what do we make of the apocalyptic vision described in
Revelation 6:14 that, at the end of time, “the sky rolled back
like a scroll”? The biblical authors, and most ancients,
understood the sky over their heads to be a solid dome, an
inverted bowl resting on a flat earth for the authors of
Genesis, a crystalline sphere surrounding a round earth for
Aristotle and most Christians until the scientific revolution.
The Hebrew word used in Genesis for the sky is “raqia” which
means “bowl” or “dome.” It does not mean “space-time
continuum” and it is not something that could be “inflated.”
It could, however, be “stretched out like a tent” or “rolled
back like a scroll.” These divergent responses are full of
hubris in both directions, making extravagant claims for or
against scientific discovery, embracing or rejecting science
on the basis of existing religious commitments. But these
extremes aren’t the only ways for religious believers to
respond to major scientific breakthroughs. Not every
scientific idea has to have a theological interpretation,
although the tendency to fit new science into ancient
religious frameworks is often irresistible. And the Big Bang
is certainly no exception.
The Big Bang theory, in fact, was developed in the 1920s by a
Catholic priest who was also an acclaimed physicist, the
Monsignor Georges Lemaître. It was ridiculed and rejected by
Lemaître’s atheist colleague, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle applied the
derisive term “Big Bang” to Lemaître’s theory in a 1949 BBC
interview, a nasty label that stuck. Hoyle, who labored
heroically to produce an alternative theory, didn’t like the
theological implications of the universe beginning suddenly in
a moment of “creation.” It sounded too much like the first
verse in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens
and the earth.” And, as Hoyle and others noted,
Lemaître was a priest who might reasonably be suspected of
trying to smuggle Catholic theology into science. Hoyle’s
concern was amply illustrated in 1951 when Pope Pius XII
declared that, in discovering the Big Bang, science had indeed
established the Christian doctrine of the “contingency of the
universe” and identified the “epoch when the world came forth
from the hands of the Creator.” “Creation took place,” the
pope said. “Therefore, there is a creator. Therefore, God
exists!” The Vatican’s science advisor was horrified by the
Pope’s confident assertion that physics had proven God. He
warned him privately that he was shaky ground: the Big Bang
should not be enlisted in support of the Christian belief in a
Creator. The Pope never mentioned it again. The Catholic Church learned in
the Galileo affair, scientific theories should not be opposed
on theological or biblical grounds. These lessons have been
learned by Catholics, for the most part, as evidenced by the
relative scarcity of prominent Catholic science-deniers.
Unfortunately, we cannot say the same things for many
evangelical Protestants, many of whom belong to truncated
religious traditions that began after Galileo, or even after
John F. Kennedy. They lack the accumulated wisdom that
restrains the Pope from inspecting every new scientific
discovery and either rejecting it because it counters a
particular interpretation of Genesis or enthusiastically
endorsing it because it confirms this or that doctrine. And
when the Pope strays, his advisors quickly get him back on
track. Catholic thinking on science is informed by the
pontifical academy of science, an advisory group with no
counterpart in Protestantism.
Ken Ham and his
colleagues at Answers in Genesis, Hugh Ross and his colleagues
at Reasons to Believe, and Stephen Meyer and his colleagues at
the Discovery Institute are too quick to embrace, reject, or
gloss with theological meaning the latest scientific
discoveries. Rather than rushing to the Bible to see whether
its ancient pages can accommodate the latest science, they
would do well to heed this caution from Lemaître, as he spoke
of the theory that he discovered: “We may speak of this event
as of a beginning. I do not say a creation … Any preexistence
of the universe has a metaphysical character. Physically,
everything happens as if the theoretical zero was really a
beginning. The question if it was really a beginning or rather
a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical
question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical
considerations.”
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Inconsistencies in the Bible
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As previously mentioned on our
home page, some contrived atheists have become very adept at
challenging the Bible, pirating the bulk of their ammunition from
several websites constructed by elite Jewish Professors in effort to
curtail escalating Jewish conversions to Christianity, such as MessiahTruth.com.
Bombarding a novice with this huge bulk of disputations compiled by
some of the most influential Rabbis in the world can quickly have a
believer performing reverse triple summersaults defending their
faith. Some opponents have assembled
a few discrepancies in the Bible, several of which are very far
reaching and quite easy to contend. For example; In the Old
Testament Genesis 1:11-12 & 1:26-27 God created trees before Adam
and Genesis 2:4-9 God created trees after Adam. These are classic
examples of taking passages out of context, the Bible essentially
states that God created trees on earth before Adam in Genesis
1:11-12 & 1:26-27. Genesis 2:4-9 does not describe the creation of
the earth's first trees, but the construction of the Garden of Eden.
The
first Official Bible was compiled by Catholics During the Council of
Trent in 1545. It was assembled from text dating back to
approximately 40 - 80 AD, which were exclusively Catholic, as it was
the only Christian Church in existence then. Ostensibly, the times
of Jesus were quite different; there were no recording devices,
video cameras, nor newspaper reporters taking notes like a
stenographer. Although it is thought there were very early texts, it
is hypothesized by Catholic Scholars that they were likely
destroyed during the persecutions of the early Christians (when the
Romans were feeding the first Christian martyrs to the lions).
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Considering that the four main Gospels were written separately
about 40 - 80 years after the events, it is remarkable that
they are so analogous, with only a few very minor
discrepancies. And some of these are readily explainable. For
example, the contention that Luke 2:7 records baby Jesus in a
manger immediately after birth, while Matthew has him in a
house during the adoration of the Wise Men. Other writings
that the Council of Trent did not include record that the
Shepherds (the first to visit the new born Jesus), promptly
located a hospitable home for the Holy Family in Bethlehem.
Another example: There are no mentions of Joachim and Anne
(Mary's Parents) in the Bible, but we know of them through the
Gospel of James (not included in the Bible) as well as
mentions in the Quran / Koran. "As
for the figure of Joachim/Imran, he is revered by Muslims for
being the father of Mary and the grandfather of Jesus and also
for being one of the most saintly men present in Jerusalem at
the time, along side the priest Zachariah. By tradition,
Imran's wife was Hannah, the Catholic Saint Anne (28). |
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