The Jewish New Year and a young earth

At sundown today, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins. Shalom!

Many liberal theists have made the claim that the ancient readers of the Bible never believed Genesis was meant to be literal. When I hear people make this claim, I've often asked them what literary clues are present that identify Genesis (or other relevant passages) as figurative and how can we distinguish them from simple narrative. The usual responses I get are a swift change of the subject (red herring), links to liberal scholars who have made the same claim (appeal to authority), or an avalanche of literary terms that have absolutely no substance (argument by verbosity). I intend to write a more detailed discussion of this criticism in the future but on this occasion of Rosh Hashanah, I wanted to point out a simple fact that might shine some light on the matter.

Our Gregorian calendar was intended to count the years since the birth of Christ. The AD in 2022 AD is an abbreviation of the Latin term, Anno Domini, which literally means, “year of our Lord.” There was a little goof in our math but, for the most part, it's been approximately 2,022 years since the birth of Christ (give or take a few years).

Now the Jews, of course, do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah of Scripture and so their calendar doesn't count the years since His birth. Instead, they have counted the years since creation. So, what year is it on the Jewish calendar? It's 5783.

Hmmm. Is it just a coincidence or is that not too far off from the typical creationist's understanding of the age of the earth? The claim has been made that creationists like myself are simply fanatical fundamentalists who take a hyper-literal view of Genesis that is not intended by the text. It seems to me that the Jewish calendar agrees with me. If they are counting the years since the creation, they are far closer to my estimate of the earth's age than any evolutionist's estimate. I guess that means the ancient Hebrews were also young earth creationists!

Exotic cosmology

Once upon a time, people believed the sun, planets, and stars orbited a stationary earth – an idea called, “geocentricism.” I'm sure it seemed intuitive to everyone then because we certainly can't feel the earth moving and the sun seems to move across the sky. In a real sense, geocentricism seemed to explain the “evidence” well. Some things, however, like the retrograde motion of planets, seemed to not fit the theory well.

In the second century, a Greek philosopher/astronomer named Ptolemy, tried to smooth out the difficulties with geocentricism. He believed the planets moved around the earth in an orbit called a deferent. As the heavenly bodies moved in this large circle, they also moved in a smaller circle called an epicycle around an imaginary point called an equant. These ideas seemed to address the observed problems with geocentricism well and Ptolemy's theories endured until the time of Galileo.

Today, we understand that the Sun is the center of our solar system and the earth, as well as the other planets, orbit it. The apparent retrograde motion of other planets is caused by a difference in the relative speed of planets as they are observed from the earth. Deferents, epicycles, and equants never existed at all! These things were the symptoms of a flawed theory. They seemed to answer some questions about the theory but the real problems laid in the theory itself. So as long as the underlying theory persisted, more and more fanciful sub-theories had to be invented to keep the failed theory afloat. You might call it them “fudge factors.”

So where am I going with all this? Well, when it comes to secular theories of cosmology, I've seen a lot of same behavior among scientists. There are several crazy, er... I mean, “exotic”... explanations that have been invoked in order to hammer down stubborn difficulties with their theories. Actually, I'm only using the term “exotic” to be nice. These theories are so insanely ridiculous that I suspect that deep down even their most staunch proponents don't sincerely believe them. They merely cling to them because without them their entire worldview completely fails.

A UNIVERSE WITHOUT EDGES

Imagine for a moment a very large, flat meadow of grass with a crowd of people standing in it. You are somewhere in the crowd. Through just simple observation, it would not be hard to guess where you are in the crowd. If all the people are on one side of you and no one on the other, you would be on the very edge of the crowd. If there were more people on one side than the other, you would be toward the edge. If there were about the same number of people everywhere you looked, you would be closer to the center. It's not hard, right?

As we look around in the universe, we observe about the same number of stars no matter which direction we look. Just as in my crowd analogy, it would be very reasonable to conclude from this observation that we are somewhere near the center of the universe. Of course, the universe is very, very large and since we cannot see the edge of it in any direction, it makes it hard to be sure that we're in the center. It would be like being in the ocean with no land in sight; you would really have no idea if you're in the middle of the ocean or just outside sight of the shore. To really know we're in the center, we'd have to have more information.

In the mid-19^th century, Dutch physicist, Christian Doppler noticed that sound waves changed frequency relative to the observer when the source was in motion. He dubbed this phenomenon, “the Doppler Effect” and believed it would apply to all waves including light and radiometric waves. In the beginning of the 20^th century, we were able to observe this phenomenon in the light from distant stars. The light from the stars was “redshifted” indicating that the light wave was being stretched and that the star was moving away from us. As we began to survey more and more stars, we realized that the stars uniformly seemed to be moving away from us at a constant speed.

The implications of what was being observed was huge. Obviously it meant the universe was expanding but more than that, the general movement of the stars directly away from us further seemed to confirm our position near the center of the universe. In this enormous universe, the odds of us coincidentally being in the center are mind numbingly small. If God had intended us to be in the center of the universe, then the remote odds of it happening randomly don't matter. However, scientists, because of their bias toward natural explanations will not allow themselves to consider that we're here by design. So what is the solution?

Scientists have put forth a model of the universe where there really is no center – or rather everywhere is the center. Space is a flat surface that is being stretched like the surface of a balloon being blown up. All points on the surface would be moving away from each other yet there is no edge nor center to the universe. They say space is curved, similar to the surface of the earth and if you started in one direction and headed in a straight line, you would eventually end up where you began. No matter where you are in the universe, we would observe exactly the same things in every direction.

This “Balloon Model” of the universe seems to be the epitomy of an “exotic theory.” To me it seems way more far fetched than Ptolemey's equants and epicycles. The mad genius of it is that really is no way to test it. There's no way we could fly to edge of the universe to see if it's there. We can't stand back from the universe and see if it resembles the surface of a balloon. We can only picture the universe based upon we can observe from the earth and that supports the Bible.

THE OORT CLOUD

When I was young, I used to think that comets hurtling through space were similar to meteors entering earth's atmosphere; I pictured it as a fiery ball with a long tail of flames. I know now that comets are made of ice and the long tail we see is actually ice particles being blasted away from the body of the comet as it passes near the sun.

The fact that comets lose some of their mass each time they pass near the sun has a bearing on the age-of-the-earth debate. Obviously, if a comet becomes smaller with each orbit of the sun, eventually it must disappear all together. Also, each time a comet comes near the sun, it also risks collision with a planet or the sun itself which would end its life immediately. Simple reason, then, forces us to acknowledge that comets can only exist so long. Their long tails are a visual testimony of their short livedness. Eventually, they will either exhaust all of their matter or crash into a planet. If our solar system were really billions of years old, they should all be gone by now. End of story.

One very famous comet is Halley's comet which passes by our sun once every 75 years. It is consider a “short period,” one who's orbit takes less than 200 years. Since Halley's orbit is only 75 years, in just one million years it would have passed by the sun more than 13K times! No one believes that is possible and I'm not suggesting that's what secular scientists believe. Actually, secular scientists believe the maximum life span of Halley is about 40,000 years. If the universe is less than 10,000 years old, this isn't a problem at all. However, it doesn't comport well with the idea that the solar system is millions or billions of years old. If the solar system is really billions of years old, why are there still so many short period comets left? In order to rescue their theory, secular science must find a source that can replenish comets as they are exhausted. After all, since there still are comets, and we know that most of them can't have been circling the sun for billions of years, these comets had to come from somewhere more recently.

Secular scientists are claiming a very exotic source of new short term comets known as the Oort Cloud. According to Wikipedia, the Oort cloud, “is a theoretical concept of a cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years)” [bold added]. As we read through the entire Wiki article, we see a lot of other conditional descriptions; words like “conjecture,” “thought to be,” and “hypothesized” abound. The Wiki article is brimming with “facts” about the Oort cloud – things like it's composition, size, origin, location, etc. It's amazing that we can know so much about something that we've never seen and really aren't sure even exists!

In the same article, we can read the following:

“Over the course of the Solar System's existence the orbits of comets are unstable, and eventually dynamics dictate that a comet must either collide with the Sun or a planet or be ejected from the Solar System by planetary perturbations. Moreover, their volatile composition means that as they repeatedly approach the Sun, radiation gradually boils the volatiles off until the comet splits or develops an insulating crust that prevents further outgassing. Thus, Oort reasoned, a comet could not have formed while in its current orbit and must have been held in an outer reservoir for almost all of its existence.”

You can read it for yourselves. The Oort cloud was hypothesized seemingly for no reason other than the need for a source of comets! It about as scientific as saying comets are made by unicorns. Most people agree that science is founded upon observations. Here, we are talking about a hypothetical source of comets that cannot be observed so their belief is the Oort cloud is no more scientific than my belief in God. The existence of the Oort cloud is simply necessitated by a belief in an old universe. It's akin to a faith belief except they see it as more plausible because it's a “natural” explanation rather than a supernatural one.

INFLATION COSMOLOGY

The Big Bang model of the universe is a theory brimming with difficulties – I mean difficulties beyond the obvious, “where did all the matter come from.” The problems I'm talking about are a little less obvious but still very substantial. Please note too that these aren't my objections to the theory. These are objections raised by secular scientists and discussed in this Wiki article.

The Horizon Problem: If we looked toward the eastern sky, we could see galaxies that are estimated to be 10 billion light years away. We could see the same thing in the western sky. So if one galaxy is 10 billion light years away in one direction and another is 10 billion light years in the other, then they would be 20 billion light years apart from each other. Now, secular scientists date the universe to be around 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that is true, the light from the “eastern” most region of space has not had enough time to reach the “western” region. Even though we can see both ends, they should not be able to see each other because their light could not have traveled the 20 billion light years of distance between them in only 13.8 billion years. Are you still with me? OK. Here is the problem: everywhere we look, the universe appears to be homogenous.

If I dropped an ice cube into hot water, the cube would melt and the water would cool a little. Eventually, it all becomes the same temperature. That's homogeneity and it always happens eventually once the two things begin to interact. It seems to have already happened in the cosmos. The cosmic background microwave radiation, for example is the nearly the same everywhere we look. But how could the entire universe have evened out so uniformly if all the regions have not had enough time to interact?

The Flatness Problem: Matter produces gravity. Objects in motion have kinetic energy. When the supposed Big Bang happened, matter began to expand. Once the expansion began, kinetic energy would have carried the matter forward while gravity would have been slowing the expansion. Let me see if I can explain it in lay terms.

If the rate of expansion were too slow, gravity would have quickly pulled everything back into a Big Crunch. If the expansion were too rapid, the matter would have accelerated too quickly for stars to form. From the very beginning there must have been a perfect balance, a “fine tuning,” between the expansion and the slowing or else the universe could not exist as it is now. The precise balance of 1 is represented by the value Ω (omega). The margin is so narrow as to be incredible.

These Horizon problem and Flatness problem just two problems with a Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. While either one alone could be fatal to the theory, scientists cling desparately to the belief there had to be a solution. Enter now Inflation Cosmology! It was suggested in the 1980s that in the very early seconds after the initial expansion, the universe when through short period of hyper-expansion where it figuratively exploded from about the size of a grape to trillions of miles across in just a fraction of a second. They say such an event would solve a few difficulties.

First, they suppose that the homogeneity we observe occurred prior to the hyper-expansion, while all of space was still close together. When inflation occurred, it carried the homogeneity out with it. Concerning the flatness problem, the inflation supposedly forced the value of Ω to that fine-tuned balance of 1. Some have compared it to a how a balloon smooths out as it inflates. I'm not sure how well the analogy describes the solution but most cosmologists seemed satisfied with it.

So what is the evidence for all of this? We'll, it's pretty much like the evidence for the Oort cloud – they simply need it for their theory to be viable. It's a sort of fudge factor to get around some of the serious difficulties they know exist with the Big Bang. Actually, the idea of inflation is even less credible than the Oort cloud. In the case of the Oort cloud, at least we know that icy bodies exist in the universe. We've never seen an event like the inflation epoch and there's nothing in physics that would otherwise suggest such an event could or should occur.

CONCLUSION

When we consider modern cosmology, the Big Bang doesn't sound unreasonable at first hearing. We can see the stars moving away from us. If the universe is continuously expanding, then we need only extrapolate backward to conclude that at some point in the distant past, all matter very close together. It's obvious. Yet no matter how reasonable it sounds, some things just don't add up – things like the flatness problem or the horizon problem. There's also the unsettling coincidence that we appear to be at the very center of the universe. Never mind there are still many other difficulties I don't have time to discuss.

To be certain, scientists have “explanations” for all these things. They invent exotic theories to explain their failed predictions. It's like epicycles all over again. However, unlike epicycles, we can't test these fanciful cosmologies as easily. Scientists say that there really is no center of the universe and it would look basically the same from any vantage point. Really? How do we test that? We can't even fly to the next star, let alone a star millions of light years away, to see how the universe looks from there. We only know what the universe looks like from our vantage point.

The Big Bang theory is simply a modern version of Ptolemy. It might seem reasonable at first but it is completely contrary to reality and can only be kept afloat by continuously invoking very unreasonable sub-theories. These sub-theories, though, lie outside scientific inquiry. They can't really be observed or tested. They aren't as much theories as they are stories. Secular scientists believe them not because the scientific evidence for them is overwhelming but because they refuse to consider the alternative.

Jesus wasn't plan B

Genesis 2:15-17, “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

This passage has been a puzzle to many Christians and the subject of much criticism from unbelievers. The question often asked is why would an all-knowing God put the Tree in the Garden if He knew Adam would disobey and bring the Curse on all of creation? If there were no tree, Adam could not have eaten of it so would not have sinned by disobeying God. No tree means no Fall, no Curse, and no history of death in the world. In other words, if God knows everything, why didn't He just not put the tree in the garden and spare the world generations of misery?

Critics sometimes exaggerate the dilemma, hoping to raise doubt on the omniscience of God or the plausibility of the Bible. Such criticism could have a chilling effect on the gospel. It tries to make it look like God made a mistake and then had to come up with the cross as a way to fix it. Jesus was a sort of “plan B.”

There are a few bad assumptions behind this criticism. First, it's completely non sequitur as an argument for atheism. I'm not sure exactly how it follows that, because people die, there can be no God. You could try to make a case that He's not a loving God or that He's not the God of the Bible but there's no reason we must necessarily conclude that death means there's no God. It goes back to a point I made a few months back: people have a false idea of how God should act and, when they can't find a god that acts they way, they conclude there must be no god at all.

The other flaw in this criticism is the assumption that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the only sin Adam could have committed. Removing the tree does not necessarily mean Adam could no longer sin. Adam still had free will and so could have disobeyed God in other ways. For example, God also commanded Adam and Eve to multiply; Adam could have refused. We have to ask if it is even possible for God to create a creature with free will but not the ability to choose to disobey Him? It's sort of like asking if God could create a square circle.

I certainly can't claim to completely understand God. Indeed, if a finite, simple man like me could completely understand Him, He wouldn't be a very big God. But after having thought about this and looking into His word, I think I have an inkling of why things are they way they are.

We like to say that God can do anything. Of course, there are things even God can't do. God cannot lie, for example. He cannot even be wrong. And here is another very important thing – God cannot stop being God. He will always be the Infinite One, the Eternal One, the Perfect One. Logically speaking, it can be no other way.

Isaiah 46:9-11 says, “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executes my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.”

Like this passages says, there cannot be anyone like God. In logic, there is an interesting paradox called the Irresistible Force Paradox. Essentially it says that irresistible force and an immovable object cannot exist simultaneously. One must yield to the other. The same is true for God. Not only must there be only one supreme power, He must also have supreme authority. You cannot have 2 beings with free will unless the will of one them yields to the other. Think about it – what would happen if one god says, “this will be blue” and the other says, “no, this will not be blue”? One of them must yield to the other.

When God made man, He could have made us like robots who only can do what He programmed us to do. That isn't what God wanted. He wanted someone with whom He could have fellowship - someone who would have emotions and reason similar to His. So, He created in His image. Yet, even though we are like God, we cannot be just like God. God wanted us to have fellowship with Him. He created us with free will and the ability to genuinely love Him. But by giving us free will, it was inevitable that we would disobey him. If we have free will, there will come a point that what a man wants will conflict with what God wants. Obviously, God would have known all this.

God is love (1 John 4:7-8). Because of His perfect love, He desired an object to love. However, His perfect justice would not allow Him to suffer the disobedience of His creation. So when He purposed to create us, He simultaneously would have had a plan to reconcile us to Himself again, once we disobeyed Him. His plan was the cross!

Revelation 13:8 refers to Jesus as, “The Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.” In dutiful obedience to the Father, Jesus created the entire universe and shaped man with His own hands, knowing that the cost would be His own blood. It's overwhelming to think about it. It reminds me of a moving passage from that famous hymn:

And when I think of God, His Son not sparing
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing
He bled and died to take away my sin

God didn't make a mistake. He didn't create us without realizing the cost. Jesus wasn't plan B. He was always the plan!