Mysteries So Bright

I truly respect the efforts of creation scientists, but I think the effort to prove that the bible is true by scientific evidence may not be possible.  This has been a feeling I have had for several years, but just now am starting to understand why I feel that.  These thoughts are unpolished and incomplete for sure, but it is a start.  And I would like the readers to respond with your thoughts, disagreements, questions, my erroneous thinking, and so on.

First of all, I do believe the Bible chronology to be true: the 6 day creation, the flood, the young earth and universe. But I don’t think we can prove it scientifically. I think the Creator, our Lord Jesus and His Father God, and the Holy Spirit did it almost instantaneously – maybe our triune God purposely stretched it out to last for 6 days to set the example of the 7 day week with a day of rest as the climax of the week. (Since I first wrote this, I have found that the church fathers and theologians long ago said this.  A good source of that history is in the book, Coming to grips with Genesis, by Mortenson, et. al.).

And because of the way the creation was done, being spoken out of nothing, I believe, then the flow of what we observe as natural processes could not be normal.

I say this because as far as I understand the “natural” laws, it is physically impossible to put into place all the molecules, atoms, nuclei, and sub-nuclear particles of the universe in the short interval of time if one is working within the restrictions of those laws. So, it seems to me, the whole process of creation had to have been done miraculously, maybe outside of time (except for the 6 days x 24 hours/day = 144 hours of elapsed time)  [Note: I am not rigid about the 144 hours, but I have no reason other than to choose the way the Bible describes it in its literal form.]

So, for example,

• God also created the photons in place (in situ) in their travels from the distant galaxies to the earth so the sights could be enjoyed by man at the time of his “birth;”  otherwise the stars would have to have been made years before the earth, and the 6 days of its creation. [Note: the only method used to measure stellar distances that I trust as “proven” is the parallax method.  And this method has thus far extended out to about 1600 light-years (click here for the link on this method).  All the other methods of measuring distance of stars are based on statistical theories, and the “evidence” that the furthest stars are something like 15 billion light years away, is based on somewhat shaky assumptions ]

• God made the isotope mixtures, for example, just what He wanted to give the balance needed for the limited radiation from nuclear fission;  so why try to explain the percentages, for example, of Uranium 238 and its decay chain of isotopes?  If God created the U238 in the first place, why not create at the same time all of the daughter isotopes?  [Note: by “balance needed” I mean to keep the radiation from being too strong or too weak for His purposes.]

• The properties found by physics, geology, biology are what God wanted and needed in order to pronounce about creation, “It is good,” reasons about which we may be able to partially discover , but certainly not completely.

Therefore, it seems a wasted effort to bend over backwards, for example,  to make the radiological evidence to conform to our theory of the chronology, or to how the living creatures “evolved”. [The creationists have said that maybe the radioactive nuclear decay was speeded up in the past to account for the evidence that seems to point to millions of years of elapsed time. But why is that necessary when God could have more easily set the mixture of isotopes like He wanted to in the first place?]

I don’t mean it is a waste of time to try to understand it all – the research in the fields of the physical and biological sciences is good, I think – and the efforts by most good scientists are motivated by the search for knowledge of how it is put together and the dynamics of it all, not to find or prove how it got started.  The origin of things, how and where they came from, is outside the realm of science, I think, since there is no way to test the theories of those that try to answer the questions.  Outside of experimentation, science is not real science, in my opinion. To believe a non-testable theory is based on faith, not science.

Since it requires faith, I chose to put that faith in the story as related in the bible.  Anyway, those are some of my thoughts about this vast topic.