God -- The Bible -- Science

PREFACE

What follows are my opinions.  They are not intended to prove anything and certainly not intended to offend anyone.  I view myself as a Christian but many of my Christian friends would disagree due to various doctrinal conflicts.  I don’t think God is exclusive to any specific religion and  is present in all religions.  It is not my intent to prove that God exists but rather to ask the Atheist to prove that He doesn’t.

What follows is my simple comparison of the Bible’s description of the creation to what science currently believes.  The important thing here is that while the Bible requires faith it is the same for science because neither can prove their positions.

God--the Bible – and Science

The atheist doesn’t believe in God but he believes in science and challenges those who believe in God to prove He doesn’t exist.  But when challenged to prove that God doesn’t exist the atheist cannot offer any scientific proof.  In fact Richard Dawkins – the High Priest of Darwinism – when challenged to explain how the complex DNA and RNA molecules came into existence as a random event he admitted he could not explain it.  Instead he said “it must have happened because we are here.”  The idiocy of this statement is lost on the atheist whose faith is in science.  But to believe that some random combination of chemicals could produce these complex molecules would lead to the logical conclusion that they could have just as easily combined into a birthday cake.  So it seems that science requires the same level of faith as faith in God requires.

Allowing for some poetic license it seems that the Bible describes the Big Bang or “First Cause” pretty well.  The Bible says that God created the heavens and the Earth and the Earth was without form and void..  Science tells us that all energy was created with the Big Bang and was a swirling incredibly hot cloud of particles that eventually coalesced into the stars and the earth.  Then God separated the waters from the waters and divided the waters from under the firmament from those above the firmament.   According to what science believes the energies released began to coalesce into mass laden molecules and ultimately into the stars and planets.  Given some latitude for poetic license the Biblical description of the second day seems to track science.

On the third day God gathered together the waters into one place and let the dry land appear and the seas.  This seems to track the scientific belief that the Earth was formed out of the swirling mass of particles into our planet which was  incredibly hot and surrounded by gas.  As the Earth cooled the gases cooled and formed the seas and atmosphere.  The Bible and science seem to agree up to this point but then the sequence of events begins to diverge.  The Bible claims the next step was the creation of grass and trees  but the fossil record shows no plant life of any kind in the Cambrian or Pre-Cambrian beyond something akin to pond scum.  The Cambrian fossil record shows an abundance of sea life but grasses and plant life first appear in the Ordovician period.   In fact the sequence of events between the Bible and the fossil record greatly differ from this point on, but it is the sequence not the actual events.  The Sun and the Moon are created after the Earth but science claims that the Sun was created first and the Moon after the Earth.  The first life appears in the Cambrian Seas and the Bible and science agree on this point but the Bible claims that flying fowl were created at the same time but once again the fossil record doesn’t show any flying animal until much later. 

This brings us to the sixth day which roughly equates to the Devonian period when land animals first appear.  The Bible lumps the rest of creation into this sixth day ranging from the creation of the first land animals to the creation of man.   The fossil record shows the evolutionary history of the Earth in much more detail than the Bible but roughly they parallel the development of life on Earth.    The huge difference comes with the creation of man.  The Bible is very clear that God created man in His image while the scientists point to the fossil record that shows a path from primitive apes to modern man.  This fossil record for mankind has some questionable entries and assumptions but even so the record is very clear that man did not appear fully formed as we know him today.  To accept the Biblical explanation would require God to look somewhat like Michelangelo’s version of God which would mean that God is tangible, Heaven is tangible or at least a physical place, and that Hell exists.  Furthermore, once God is accepted as real then Satan must be real as well.  

Since the Bible was written people have believed that if God created man in his image that when they look into the mirror they see an image similar to God.  But science tells us that everything in the universe is energy and that the Big Bang created all of that energy.  That would lead to the conclusion that God is energy and that when He created man he created man as an energetic image – which we know as our soul.  Our physical bodies are mere shells – containers for our souls while we serve our time on Earth.  Certainly it would be asking too much for science to accept this explanation because it would require accepting God, but viewing man ‘s soul as the image of God then the creation story in Genesis seems to closely parallel the scientific view of the creation.

As I said at the outset these are just my opinions and I have no proof of anything.  I simply looked at the Bible and compared it to various scientific articles and descriptions and found what I saw as parallels.  You may or may not agree.

Faith Based Science

The debate regarding God’s existence has been raging for centuries but recently the Atheists seem to have seized the initiative as their numbers increase.  Of course the challenge the Atheists present to the Theist is to prove that God exists.  That proof must stand the test of the scientific process in order to be proof.  What has been missing is the challenge to the Atheist to prove God doesn’t exist using the scientific method.  Naturally neither side has been able to show convincing proof so the debate rages on.  But recently this debate has become more strident as the Atheists present scientific findings on Evolution, First Cause, and the Origin of Life.  All of these theories – which is what they are – presented as facts even though the “facts” are actually presumptions, assumptions, opinions, and guesses. .  The era of Faith Based Science is upon us.

 The foundation of the debate on God is the Origin of Life.  Exactly how did life begin?  For the Theist the answer is God – in fact for the Theist God created the Heavens and the Earth and the question is answered.  For the Atheist that is no answer at all because it cannot be demonstrated (or duplicated) by science and to accept God as the answer is to avoid answering the question and represents intellectual laziness if not outright stupidity.  But the scientists are faced with this fundamental problem which fails the scientific test of being demonstrable and repeatable.  The challenge is for the scientist is to demonstrate how life evolved from inorganic matter. 

Essentially the scientific position is that life on Earth began as a random event triggered by some unknown process or combination of events resulting in self replicating molecule.  To date experiments using inorganic components have succeeded in creating organic molecules from inorganic materials but have failed to yield a living organism.  Complicating the matter is the materials used in creating the organic molecules are toxic to life or the resultant molecules are toxic to life.  But there is an even more difficult scientific hurdle to overcome and that is the fact that the probability of DNA being randomly generated is so great as to be impossible.  Recognizing that life being created as a random event or even a series of random events is so improbable the “scientists” have postulated a new theory called “Panspermia”.  Essentially this theory states that life on Earth was introduced via a meteorite that carried life to Earth.  Of course this really doesn’t answer the question because we still don’t know how life began.  The obvious conclusion is that scientists really don’t know how life began but they know God wasn’t involved.

If science can’t really offer any scientific proof about the Origin of Life what about the origin of the universe – the “First Cause” or Big Bang.  Science can trace the universe and everything in it back to the first nanosecond.—the instant of creation.  Of course the problem is what was there before the moment of creation?  For those who believe in God, the answer is God but that isn’t acceptable to the scientist because it cannot be proved via science.  The problem lies with space itself since it was the Big Bang that created space meaning there was not place for that bundle of energy to exist prior to the creation of the space in which it could exist. 

To solve this problem scientifically scientists have postulated various possibilities, none involving God.  Several theories have been postulated but none have been accepted as the probable one. Essentially the scientists agree that none of their theories can be tested or proved but they argue that that’s the best they can do.  The best answer they have come up with so far is that the universe emerged spontaneously from a random quantum fluctuation in some sort of primordial quantum vacuum.  Once you have absorbed this description and examine it critically it does raise some questions.  It assumes that this quantum vacuum that the entire world of quantum particles and interactions already exists.  Please not that the particles have mass and thus must have some space in which to exist.  All of these particles are composed of energy and a zero energy quantum state is impossible.  Scientists like Hawkings and other scientists claim that the universe emerged out of quantum nothingness. They are making a claim that does not meet the scientific test much less a logical one.  But those who deny God but believe in science accept this because they have faith in science.  And brings us to the third problem faced by science – Evolution.

Evolution is a much thornier problem because there is so much fossil evidence supporting it.  Scientists can trace life back millions of years and show the march from sea to land to the air.  They have created charts and diagrams showing how one animal or group of animals has descended from a common ancestor.  Unfortunately many of the examples used are actually simply examples of environmental adaptation and not speciation.  Commonly there are gaps of millions of years and the fossil record does not preserve these speciation events so these connections are assumed.  The major assumption is that these ‘assumed” lineages are that these intermediate fossils exist at the proper point and thus the transitions are plausible. 

The speciation events are virtually impossible to document and even within the Cenozoic these are hard to document.  In fact if the specimens are separated by more than 100,000 years the fossil record cannot show anything about how a species arose.  In effect all of the claims and charts showing the relationships between species during the Precambrian, Paleozoic, and Mesozoic eras are assumptions and not demonstrable facts.  The Cenozoic is more recent but even here where the fossil record is more complete the evolutionary changes are incomplete and the transitions between species are estimated but not fully documented in the fossil record.

This almost total lack of evidence regarding speciation leads to the problem of evolution over long periods versus the problem that some species just suddenly appear in the fossil record with no precursors.  This has led to the theory of “Punctuated Equilibrium” which claims that some speciation events occur over very short periods of 20,000 years but no more than 80,000.  The problem is that there is really very little evidence to separate the adaptation of a species to its environment and the separation of one species into a totally new one.

While the scientists claim they have the answers to the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and evolution, the reality is these are just claims largely unsupported by facts.  In fact the scientific answers to these questions are filled with words like, believed to be, estimated, and probably.  The logical conclusion is that science and scientists rely on faith in science but that faith is really no different than religious faith.