I recently
published a two-part essay on the unfathomable origins
of the universe proposed by the Big Bang thesis of
the creative moment. According to this standard model
of the beginning and complex workings of “everything
that is,” the universe did not arise from a
“location” with dimensional parameters
since the Big Bang is understood to have created the
universe with its full complement of laws, forces,
matter, energy, space, and time. It is the source
of everything, even space and time. Nothing can “emerge”
unless there is already a measurable tensor matrix
to emerge into. In other words, Creation cannot occur
or “emerge” outside of space and time.
The Big
Bang appears to create as many problems as it solves,
which is why many laypersons and scientists are skeptical
of its theoretical validity and of its auroral instant.
There is the question of whether the Big Bang is even
a convincing scientific theory. How could the universe
suddenly appear on a virtual background? Bjorn Eckberg
contends in Scientific American that today's
multilayered theoretical edifice of the Big Bang may
turn out to be inherently flawed, a confusing mix
of fictional beasts invented to uphold the model.
Perhaps
we should simply admit defeat and, as the prophet
Micah urged, “humbly walk with thy God.”
Perhaps we should accept the biblical account in Genesis,
though I myself am somewhat skeptical. An act of faith,
however, is not an act of superficial and unexamined
belief.
Nuclear
physicist Russell Humphreys, for example, is a creationist
who upholds the inerrancy of the Biblical account
of Creation. In Starlight & Time, an
unabashed romp in the fields of speculation, he has
attempted to solve the paradox of starlight crossing
millions of light-years in an infant universe. He
has challenged the Big Bang theory with a six-day
creation period by pointing to the time-dilation model
in the General Theory of Relativity. The gravitational
distortion of the early cosmos means that a few of
our calendar days would have been available for light
to travel the enormous distance to Earth. “God
makes the universe in six days in the earth’s
reference frame [but] light has ample time in the
extraterrestrial reference frame” to close the
temporal and physical expanse.
Humphreys
conceives the universe as bounded rather than edgeless,
as it would have to be in order to avoid the zero-energy
theory, the notion that the positive energy of all
mass in the universe is precisely balanced by the
negative potential energy of the gravitational field.
A boundless universe would yield mathematical problems
that are not easily domesticated. Rather, in a bounded
universe, there would be a center of mass, a net gravitational
force, and the “time-distorting effect of gravity
on a massive scale. Distant objects in the universe
could age billions of years in a single day of your
time.”
Humphreys’
conceptual model of the creative process is backed
by some rather formidable metric tensor sequences
in a differential manifold capturing the coordinate
invariance of curved space geometry. This operation
describes the formation of the universe in a “white
hole.” He explains that “the physics is
that of a universe-sized white hole with a shrinking
event horizon and matter expanding out of it,”
which he proposes arrived on Earth during the fourth
day when God created the sun, moon and stars.
As mentioned,
the effects of the General Theory of Relativity permit
for gravitational time dilation. “Billions of
years would elapse in the distant sky, allowing light
from the galaxies to reach the earth within one ordinary
day of earth’s time.” It is an ingenious
theory which, Humphreys admits, “is not yet
well enough developed to make detailed quantitative
predictions. But the bottom line is simple: God used
relativity to make a young universe.”
Astrophysics
professor Antoine Bret shows that Humphreys’A
analysis is wrong. For Humphreys, the earth apparently
sat inside a massive spherical shell, or white hole,
where the gravitation potential slows time down. But
the problems are multiple. Young Earth Creation (YEC)
is neither observable nor repeatable; therefore YEC
cannot be reputably scientific. How did the spherical
shell form? There is no equation for that, apart from
the fact that white holes are theoretical constructs
and have never been observed. Separated points inside
the shell will still be separated precisely as they
were at the start, even billions of years later; the
math regarding the expansion of space inside a white
hole is inapplicable. As C.S. Lewis stated in God
in the Dock, “Science twisted in the interests
of apologetics would be sin and folly.”
The upshot
is that the Biblical account of Creation is a parochial
narrative that semaphores toward a mystery beyond
words and outside the limitations of human thought
but does not rule out a Divine origin for the Creation,
which is no less “absurd” than any other
theory, including the origin point of the Big Bang.
Maybe early Christian theologian Tertullian was on
to something when he allegedly uttered those fateful
words, Credo quia absurdum — I believe because
it is absurd. It’s a test.
Isaac
Newton, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Max Planck, Albert Einstein,
Abdus Salam, Arno Penzias, Charles Townes, Freeman
Dyson, Sir John Polkinhorne, Erwin Schrödinger,
among many, many others, were all God-inspired, finding
their belief compatible with their scientific practice.
As was C.S. Lewis who saw no antagonism between science
and God. I am very fond of astrophysicist Bernard
Haisch, who, in The Purpose-Guided Universe,
remarks, “An integration of scientific and spiritual
concepts will of necessity come about eventually.”
To which I reply: Amen.
