Home
New Zealand
Canada
Wedding
Guestbook
Music
Links
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
New Zealand |
Canada |
Wedding |
Guestbook |
Music |
Links |
|
Beresheet
bara Elohim. In the beginning... |
|
|
Home-school Welcome
to Existence Bible
Training Resources
|
 A
Word for word portion from Chuck Misslers' You've
all heard about it, many Christians think it's some kind of Ogre, if you
ask 10 poeple what they mean you'll get 10 different answers. The Big
Bang is a colloquialism for creation, it basically emerged in the era
of Einstein and his theories and also by the observation in astronomy
that stars and galaxies are rushing away from us at rather fantastic speeds,
and in fact the speeds are proportional to their distance away from us.
That gave rise to alot of scientific inquiry and papers over the years
about the realisation that the universe is expanding.
The
Special theory of relativity (E=mc2) was published in 1905, and a few
years later confirmed in modest ways. The general theory of relativity
was published in 1915. But Einstein recognised the problem with the expanding
universe, because if the universe is expanding it implies that it had
to have a beginning! Einstein plugged into his equations a 'fudge-factor'
he called the cosmological constant to formulate a static model. Before
he died, he wrote that it was the biggest mistake of his career because
he was totally unwilling to accept a finite universe and by assuming what's
called the static model, that would allow one to deduct the issue of a
beginning and a beginner.
As
the years have gone by and our knowledge of astro-physics and astronomy
continued gets refined, cosmologists (people who study origins) are determined
to bend whatever they find, around in such a way as to aviod the idea
of a creator. There was a hesitation model, there was a steady state model.
In the 1960's they were destroyed by modern scientific discoveries, thermodynamics
etc. those theories were disproven. Then they had a model called the oscillation
model. "Yes it's expanding, but a few billion years from now it
will contract, and then it'll expand again and so on". You see
if it expands and contracts you've got a problem - it had a beginning
and it has an end. "No no we don't want to do that - it's going
to oscillate" And so the oscillation model was popular until
someone said "Wait a minute, doesn't that violate the entropy
laws?"
So
in 1984 that was destroyed. There is a variation of that model called
the inflation model, that's in the papers a little bit because it's 'on-again-off-again'.
Cosmology in my opinion is not a science, it's a field of interest. Why
do I say that? If we're specific with what we mean 'scientific method',
and I don't mean something that's scientific science, that's fine. Scientific
method, means you gather some data, you formulate a hypothesis, then you
construct an experiment in an attempt to refute your hypothesis. Now if
you can't construct an experiment it's not science. It may be interesting,
it may be speculative, it may be very demanding intellectually, but science
involves an impiracle closure of some kind. The design of experiments
is crucial. Chance is always the rival conjecture.
We'll
talk more about that later, we'lll also talk more about entropy. Entropy
is just a fancy word for randomness. There are three laws of thermodynamics.
The first one is that the sum of energy and matter in the universe is
a constant. That seems well established. The second law of thermodynamics
is that as you change from one to the other you always loose a little.
You loose a little to the ambient - the environment. There's a third one
we won't get into here. The
three laws can be remembered easily by the way - The first one says you
can't win, the second one says you can't break even, the third law says
you can't get out of the game.
You
and I have the advantage in science, in that the scientific background
we have allows us to understand the Bible better than anyone ever has
in the past. While science is a moving target, it allows us to better
understand things. Let me emphasise this for you, lets talk about King
David, George Washington, and you and I:
King
David travelled at the speed of horseback, communicated by hand message
and clothed himself with a technology that was agrerian - agricultural.
Move ahead three thousand years to George Washington. He travelled at
the speed of horseback, communicated by hand and clothed himself with
an agrerian technology - right? Now move on just a couple hundred years.
We travel at the speed of sound, communicate at the speed of light and
with a technology that is distance independant, and we clothe ourselves
with a technology in which we design the molecules we want. Another way
of looking at this, is that 90% of all scientists that have ever lived,
are alive today. It's crazy isn't it! Well think about it, if it doubles
every year, that's just the flip-side of it, isn't it.
We
have the opportunity to understand things like few people did in the past.
You and I today, if we are up-to-date in current physics, can have the
following insights: The scientists today simply have to admit that the
universe is finite. It can be measured. By the way that destroys evolution.
Why? Because the universe needs lots of time. How old is the universe?
Current estimates are about 15 billions years. Terrific. If I'm going
to do something like a DNA mollecule by chance, we know the DNA mollecule
consists of a code which is digital. Because of this, switching to imperial
will tell us that the probability of it happening by chance requires 10130
tries. That's 10 with 130 zero's after it. That's a big number. You and
I probably have no capacity to appreciate how big a number that is, but
lets try:
Let's
assume I want to try that randomly, and I need generations of some organism
to try to make these mollecules. The question is, how many generations
of these mollecules can I squeeze in? It depends on how short a life-time
they have. If I have a mollecule that has an average lifetime of one second,
how many of those could have existed throughout the history of the universe?
The universe is 15 billion years, how many seconds are there in 15 billion
years? 1017. That is surprisingly small. If you've got 10130
tries but only 1017 opportunities, your in big trouble. So
lets say I could find an organism way back that lived shorter than one
second. Okay, I will take a second, and divide it into a thousand parts,
that's a millisecond, and take that and divide it into a thousand parts
that's a microsecond, I'll divide that into a thousand parts and get a
billionth of a second, 10-9 that's a nanosecond. In a nanosecond
the speed of light travels a foot. That's why they make computers so small,
so they can keep up with themselves! How many nanoseconds have there been
in the history of the universe? 1026. That's a long way from
10130. IF evolution could work - and it can't, for reason's
we're going to get into in another session, - if it could there wasn't
time!
Part
two - let's talk about the materials you need. If I wanted to try and
get DNA, and I took all the matter in the entire universe and converted
it to get amino acids in order to play this game, how much is that? Ok,
how many atoms are there in the entire universe - you've never counted
them? Well it turns out that scientists agree it's about 1066.
Let's go one step further, lets take all the sub-atomic particles, and
I mean even the virtual particles in particle physics. How many particles
are there in the entire universe - which is finite by the way. 1080.
Oh, so how am I going to randomly get a 10130 try? No Way!
In other words, you've not only got the time problem, you've got the available
matter problem - there's not enough matter to try, anyway we'll get into
that when we start talking about evolution.
Now,
first point is the universe is finite and can be measured, secondly that
the universe has been expanding. That means it came from a point. A limited
time ago. The point is not really a point, the proper term is a 'singularity'.
What that means mathematiclly is that there are no definitions prior to
that. All that we know expires a very small instant before the singularity.
They can measure it up to 10-43. There are all kinds of papers
arguing what actually happened pre 10-43. This is itsy-bitsy
in time. A singularity is not actually a point, it's the whole four-dimentional
space compressed into zero size. This infinately shrunken space represents
a boundary at which space itself ceases to exist. We have no ablilty to
deal with that because we think, 'if that's there then what's just outside
of it, there's gotta be something'. So it's zero size, and infinte density.
At that point the temperature would be about 1066oC
- that's 10 million billion billion times greater than the center of our
sun. So it's itsy-bitsy, very dense and very hot.
That's
what the big bang simply means, that the universe is finite and had a
beginning. The big bang is not your enemy. The singularity is smaller
than any microscope could see and it blew up so big that none of our microscopes
can see the end of it. Here's what I found fascinating: Nocmonides, who
wrote in the 1300's, a cabilistic rabbi who's writings are quite well-known
in the Jewish community, he quoted from another commentator from 700AD
and he mentioned the following things in his commentary. From his study
of the book of Genesis, he concluded that time prior to Genesis 1:1 did
not exist. He did this from subtleties in the text - you see it doesn't
say 'the first day' it says 'day one'. The ordinary numbers are used later.
That communicated to him that as a Hebrew cabilistic rabbi that time did
not exist prior to that. That's amazing, because there's no other writing
to my knowledge in any of the metaphysical literature of other religions
that deal with time having a beginning, time's always been there, in fact
their concept of 'God' is that he's eternal but he's got lot's of 'time'.
The
second insite he had is that prior to that point, space did not exist,
I find it fascinating for a writer six hundred years ago to have those
insights, no physics, just from Genesis! Something else that's interesting
came across, the Hebrew sages that study Genesis believe the universe
has 10 dimensions. They say that because 10 times in the book of Genesis
it says 'and God said' now in the english that has no meaning, but in
the subtleties of the Hebrew they concluded that each one of those represented
dimensions, only four are measureable, six of them collapsed sub-microscopically
('my words') during the six days. That's their view, that's the classical
cabilistic view. Today in particle physics they've come to the same conclusion.
There are particles that require at least 9 dimensions. In fact the 'buzz-word'
in physics is the string theory which says the universe has 10 dimensions.
Boy isn't that an interesting insight.
The
ancient Hebrew sages argued that the first six days are inconsistent with
all the subsequent laws of nature, and that is what the sabbath was all
about. The Sabbath wasn't because God rested, that's a naiive way to express
it, Nocmonides pointed out that the creator caused a repose to encompase
the universe and the laws of nature including the flow of time, were standardised
from the Sabbath day on when Adam was there. Part of this comes out of
Genesis chapter 2 verse 7 where we have the creator breathing into Adam
the breath of life. You and I take tht modestly in a biological sense,
I think we are very miopic as we read Genesis because we think of Adam
as we know him post-curse. When he was created he was clothed with light.
I'm always fascinated with this, we all have our ways of visualising things,
do you remember the Superman movie? Do you remember the opening scenes
where they tried to create his origin, they have this [Crystoline]
kind of thing, that was entertainment I realise, but it's mind-stretching
in the sense that you and I are victims of jungles and vines and fig leaves
images of the garden of Eden. We know fom the Psalms that Adam was clothed
with light - he walked with God. Satan wasn't a serpent, he was the 'shining
one' is what that really means. That whole existence is something we have
little insight into because we see it post-curse, looking back.
In
Genesis 2:7, the living breath of God, according to Nocmonides is when
the created and the creator were inseperably linked. See that's why we
have eternal existence whether we like it or not. Wouldn't we like to
believe in the annihilation of the sinners! in the scripture, sinners
live forever too, unfortunatley they're alienated from God.
Beresheet
Bara Elohim so
we got through three words!
|
|
|
|