Is Science Your God?

The stars are so far away, billions of light years they say, so the Earth and its accompanying planets must at least be that old, since we can see the light from those stars. Look also at the rock strata in the Grand Canyon. It must have taken millions of years for that deep canyon to form. Therefore, the Biblical teaching that the Earth and all of creation is just a mere 6000-7000 years old is archaic thinking, right? Maybe the six days of creation described in the Book of Genesis by Moses really refers to long periods of time like some Biblical revisionists claim.

Hold on a moment. In taking a look at the universe, astronomers estimate it is about 12 billion years old (or wide). However, scientists at the Imperial College of London calculate that starlight, travelling at the speed of light couldn't have even made it half way across the universe by now. Researchers conclude that light must have travelled faster than the known speed of light (186,282 miles per second) at some time in the past. How much faster? By a factor of 10 with 69 zeros behind it. Only recently have scientists begun to examine if it's possible for light to travel at anything other than a fixed speed. In the laboratory light has been speeded up 300 times faster and slowed down to a stop. If light travelled at a different speed at some time during the beginning of the universe, then the scientific assumptions used to estimate the age of the universe have to be re-thunk. Do scientists have the integrity to admit they really don't know the age of the universe? Are they willing to reveal the assumptions behind their mystifying calculations on the beginning of time?

How long for canyons and continents to form?

What about that deep canyon in Arizona? Must have taken millions of years to form, just like the continents that scientists say took millions of years to split apart from a solid land mass called pangea. But these estimates too, like the ones for the speed of starlight, were based upon the assumption that magma (hot granite) moves very slowly. Upon re-examination, scientists last year discovered that melted granite moves very quickly, so fast that the continents could have formed in as little as a thousand years!

The guides at the Grand Canyon tell visitors that the rock layers there are millions of years old. The signs at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico once said its dripping limestone formations (called stalactites) were 260 million years old. This figure was based upon the assumption that limestone drippings take millions of years to form. Only later did researchers realize that limestone dripping can advance by quite a few inches in a few short years. The sign at Carlsbad Caverns was later changed to 2 million years, and now the sign is gone.

Recently University of California geologists visited Indonesia and re-dated the well-known Java Man fossil, estimated to be 1.8 million years old. They came up with the figure of 32,000 years. OK, so one fossil was mis-dated decades ago, what's the big deal? The eyebrow raiser is that paleontologists date these fossils by the rock strata they are found in. If that rock strata isn't millions of years old in Indonesia, then how old are parallel rock layers in the Grand Canyon? The recent deep stratified canyon that rapidly formed following the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption in the state of Washington reveals how quickly such canyons can be hollowed out. The guides at the Grand Canyon probably won't be changing their scripts soon, but the whole rock dating scheme appears to be in a state of disarray.

Rate of DNA mutation

Well, maybe starlight and rock layers just aren't good measures of time. But certainly mutational rates in human DNA can be calculated and the age of homo sapiens dated back farther than any Biblical estimates. By calculating one DNA mutation every 300-600 generations (every 6000-12,000 years), based upon the assumption that one generation equals 20 years, scientists have estimated the age of the first humans. Eve, the woman whose DNA was ancestral to all living people, probably lived 100,000-200,000 years ago in Africa, said researchers. But last year scientists admitted they had made a mistake. The rate of DNA mutation may have been 20 times faster than their original calculations. Under the new calculations, Eve would be a mere 6000 years old. That's about what the Bible indicates by backward tracing of its extensive genealogies.

Big Bang fizzles

One of the holy grails of science has been the Big Bang theory, that the universe began a few billion years ago from an explosion of super condensed matter. Some observations that the universe appears to be expaning outward, initially made by Edwin Hubble (Hubble space telescope fame) appeared to fit this model. What you may not read in school science books that often promote this theory as unequivocal fact is that the Big Bang doesn't match the landscape of the cosmos. The universe is flat rather than scattered in all directions, and it has an even background temperature. One would expect matter to be spread in all directions unevenly, like a paint can exploding in your garage.

So scientists can't figure out what's holding the universe together. They theorize some kind of hidden matter holds everything together. String theorists, an elite group of mathematicians and physics professors, are attempting to develop a hypothesis that "strings" everything from gravity to subatomic particles into a single hypothesis. Their theory is that there are "strings," entities smaller than a millionth of a trillionth the size of an atom, that knit everything into place. The problem is, after more than a decade of research, the string theorists have yet to devise a laboratory test for their theory. What's a hypothesis without a test? (Psst, I'll help you out, it's called a religion.) Federal grants, prestigious awards and tenured faculty positions abound for string theorists. Yet, so far, they might as well have been writing comic books. Science isn't even sticking to its own disciplines.

Who first proposed the theory of relativity?

When Albert Einstein offered his theory of relativity, and his famous E = MC2 equation, what became apparent is this. If a rocket ship carrying humans at the speed of light left Earth and returned two decades later (Earth time), the people on the space ship wouldn't have aged as much as those on Earth. What the scientists and the journalists of the day failed to recognize was that Einstein was the second person to make this discovery. The idea that time is relative was penned a few thousand years prior to Einstein in the book of Psalms – "for a thousand years in your (God's) sight are like a day." [Psalms 90:4]

Why aren't we more skeptical of science?

The Book of Ecclesiastes says that "no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." (3:11) The Book of Job says "God thundereth marvelously with His voice; great things doeth He; which we cannot comprehend." (37:5)

Michael Scriven once said: "An extremely healthy dose of skepticism about the reliability of science is an absolutely inevitable consequence of any scientific study of its track record." Schopenhauer once said "All truth passes through three stages; first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."

An unknown author offers this story: "The experimentalist comes running excitedly into the theorist's office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "That's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here's the reason" (long explanation follows). In the middle of it, the experimentalist says: "Wait a minute," studies the chart for a second, and says, "Oops, this is upside down." He fixes it. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "you'd expect to see a dip in exactly that position. Here's the reason….."

The apostle Paul said "If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing." [I Corinthians 8:2] He advised followers in Greece to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which you have been taught." [II Thessalonians 1:15] "Keep that which is committed to thy trust…….. and oppositions of science so called." [I Timothy 6:20]

Isaac Asimov once said: "The young specialist in English literature lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern u2018knowledge' is that it is wrong."

Is science your God?

August 11, 2001

Bill Sardi is a journalist residing in Diamond Bar, California. His new book is Big God vs. Big Science (Here & Now Books, 107 pages, illustrated, $7.00) at www.hereandnowbooks.com.