universe Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

June 26, 2024June 24, 2024

Astrolabe Shows Human Cooperation

The astrolabe, an astronomical instrument of ancient times, is a testament to human ingenuity and cooperation. It is a two-dimensional map of the universe, typically crafted from plates. Astrolabes, with their star charts and analog calculation capabilities, were not just tools but gateways to understanding the cosmos. In mosques, they were used to calculate the time of sunset or sunrise, thus the time of prayer. People also used them to calculate distances, the position of stars, and the location of latitudes and longitudes. With its intricate design and multifaceted functionality, the astrolabe shows human cooperation.

Federica Gigante, a historian at the University of Cambridge, found the plates of an eleventh-century astrolabe in the vaults of the Museum of the Miniscalchi-Erizzo Foundation in Verona, Italy. The astrolabe she discovered was made of brass and had Arabic engravings. It had a second plate, which meant it had been taken to a different latitude than its Spanish place of origin.

What is interesting about this astrolabe is that it also has Hebrew letters engraved on the plates, indicating their use by Jewish owners, and it was in the archives of a Christian museum. This astrolabe shows human cooperation. It means there was an era in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians built upon one another’s intellectual achievements. All cultures had people with incredible minds who contributed to human knowledge of what the cosmos is about and how we can observe it.

In our day of religious wars between these same groups, it is incredible that humans don’t have the sense to realize the importance of understanding each other and working together to discover Truth. Jesus gave a great answer to this conflict in John 14 when He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me… If you love me, keep my commandments… even the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it has not seen Him and does not know Him, for He dwells in you and shall be in you.” Think of the progress the world could make if we could work together and follow the commandments of Jesus given so clearly in Matthew 5:21-25 and 38-48.

Reference: Verona astrolabe on wikipedia.org

July 21, 2022July 12, 2022

Science and Faith are Friends

For the past week, we have explored the idea that science and faith are friends.
Both science and theology deal with the fundamental human desire to know. We are naturally curious because God made us that way. Science began with Christian believers who sought to learn more about God through His creation. A desire to learn about God through the things He has made motivated men like Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others to create what today we call “science.”

Faith in a loving and orderly Creator opened the door to a realization that the universe is orderly and not the chaotic product of the many gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans. As a result, theology and theologians developed many of the methods of modern science. Also, it was theologians who recognized that only natural causation is open to our direct study. They knew by faith that God was the ultimate cause of the universe. But since God is not a physical being, we can only study the secondary causation.

Even though we recognize that God is the only possible cause of the universe, all we can do is discover how He did it and marvel at the precision fine-tuning of the cosmos. If we say that God “zapped” these things into existence without a process, we deny God’s engineering and architectural skills. Science and faith are friends, and we can know there is a God through the things He has made (Romans 1:20).

Today, well-known scientists use books and TV programs to proclaim atheism, materialism, and scientism. At the same time, prominent and often highly-paid religious teachers debunk science and tell people to take off their “science glasses” and put on “Bible glasses.” It’s time to call a truce in the war between science and faith. Although the Bible is scientifically accurate beyond its time, it is not a science book. Although nature can tell us much about God, only the Bible can tell us everything we need to know about the Creator of the universe and how to have a relationship with Him. Good science and good theology go hand-in-hand because science and faith are friends.

We have seen that the scientific understanding of the Cause of the universe matches the biblical description of God. Since God is outside of time, He can hear the prayers of millions of people all over the world at the same time. We can’t imagine what it would be like to be outside of time because being locked into time is all we know. If we could step out of history’s timeline and see it from God’s perspective, we could understand why God allows things to happen. We could understand the things that make us ask, “Why doesn’t God prevent that?” We could see the conclusion of all things. We would know that because of God’s wisdom, justice, and love, the conclusion is good.

July 20, 2022July 12, 2022

Tracing the Process of Creation

As we said in our previous post, scientists have been tracing the process of creation back to almost the beginning. However, they hit a roadblock called Planck density (named for German physicist Max Planck) just before they reach the starting point. So, thus far, science finds it impossible to go back to the precise moment when the universe began.

Since tracing the process of creation back to BEFORE the cosmic creation event will probably never be possible, scientists can only study secondary causation. They can see the processes that lead to the universe we live in, but they can’t study the primary causation. Could God be the primary cause operating behind the secondary causation we can see? Science cannot say. The best science can do is to suspend judgment. Personal beliefs are not science.

Science today has set limitations on itself, confining its study to the physical realm. To go beyond that would be considered metaphysics or theology. However, some scientists don’t hesitate to make theological statements. An example is the late Carl Sagan opening the old Cosmos series on PBS television with the statement, “The cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be.” That is not a scientific statement. It is a materialistic, atheistic theological statement beyond what science can measure and examine.

Biologist Richard Dawkins is also not afraid to venture beyond science into theology when he states in River Out of Eden, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Scientists such as Sagan and Dawkins contribute to the war between science and theology, and specifically science and the Bible. All the while, they fail to acknowledge that they are making faith statements.

If you have followed these discussions for the past week, I hope they help you understand why we say science and faith are friends, not enemies. We will have some final thoughts on that tomorrow.

July 19, 2022July 12, 2022

The Creation Process for the Universe

In the past week, we have looked at the fact that the universe had a beginning. Science can trace the creation process to learn many things about why we are here.

Because the universe was created by a process, scientists can study that process and follow it back in time. They have detected the residual cosmic background microwave radiation left over from the creation event. Astronomers can look back in time to see some of the earliest stars. Chemists can analyze the elements in the stars by examining the radiation spectrum. We can know how the elements originated in the stars as we study atomic reactions.

Life is built around the carbon atom, but for a long time, it was a mystery how carbon atoms could have formed. Finally, atheist Fred Hoyle solved the mystery and was shocked by what he found. He saw the fine-tuning required to create the carbon atom, and he expressed it this way:

“Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” — Fred Hoyle

Studying the process of creation leads to the logical conclusion that there is intelligence behind it. What is the source of that intelligence? Science can trace the creation process back to almost the beginning. However, they hit a roadblock just before they reach the starting point. We will look at more on that next time.

July 18, 2022July 12, 2022

What is the Cause of the Universe?

In the past few days, we have examined this syllogism:
Premise 1- Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
Premise 2- The universe began to exist.
Conclusion- The universe has a cause.
We concluded that premise 1 and premise 2 are both correct. That means the conclusion must be true. So what is the cause of the universe?

The scientific consensus is that the big bang was the beginning of time and space as well as matter and energy. So, what does that tell us about the Cause? It tells us that the Cause has to be non-material and outside of time and space. That fits the biblical description of God! Check it out!

Jeremiah 23:23-24- God is everywhere and sees everything.
Acts 17:28- In God, we live and move and have our being.
Psalms 90:4 and 102:27, 2 Peter 3:8- God is outside of time.
Proverbs 8:22-23, John 1:1-3, Revelation 1:8- God existed before the universe and time began.
John 4:24- God is a spirit.
1 John 4:8 and 16- God is love.

As we said before, the common name for the cosmic creation event is the big bang. However, that derisive term coined by astronomer Fred Hoyle does not accurately describe what happened at the beginning. A big bang indicates some kind of explosion. Explosions are haphazard and chaotic, so I prefer to call it the cosmic creation event. Scientists have determined that the beginning could not have been chaotic but precisely tuned to create a life-supporting universe. The more we learn about the processes of creation, the more we see that if things had been even slightly different, we would not be here.

What is the cause of the universe, and what process was used to create it? Scientists have studied that process and learned many things about it. Next time, we will think about what science has discovered.

July 16, 2022July 12, 2022

Did the Universe BEGIN to Exist?

Look at the syllogism in the picture above. Is it logical? Does it make sense? Yesterday, we examined premise 1 and concluded that it is true. However, looking at the second premise could be more challenging. Did the universe BEGIN to exist?

You could assume that the universe has always existed. If it didn’t BEGIN to exist, it doesn’t need a cause! That was the approach of many “thinkers” from Aristotle to Einstein. When Einstein formulated the theory of special relativity in 1905, he was concerned that his formulas indicated that the universe was not in a steady state. It was either expanding or contracting, meaning it could not have always existed. To correct that “problem,” Einstein added a “cosmological constant” that made it appear that the universe is unchanging. He just made up a number so that his equations would show that the universe was eternal. Other scientists realized that Einstein was cheating, and he later admitted it was the biggest mistake of his life.

Scientific experiments from the 1920s to the 21st century have confirmed the universe is expanding and even accelerating in its expansion. Since the universe is expanding, we can trace that expansion back to a point where the universe began as a “singularity.” So, did the universe begin to exist? The answer is yes, it had a beginning! That was something that many scientists did not want to accept because of its religious implications.

British astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle coined the derisive term “big bang” because his faith would not allow the concept of an ultimate Causer, or God. He used that term to make fun of the idea of a beginning. However, it has now become the popular term for the beginning.

So, if premise 1 and premise 2 are both true, the conclusion must be true. The universe has a cause, and science can’t determine what it is. The scientific consensus is that the big bang was the beginning of time and space as well as matter and energy. So, what does that tell us about the Cause? It tells us that the Cause has to be non-material and outside of time and space. What fits that description? We will examine that next time.

December 28, 2021December 28, 2021

The Big Bang and Creation

We receive many interesting questions from our readers, and recently we received this one about the big bang and creation:

“Dr. John Mather, head of the new telescope project, explains that the ‘Big Bang’ is not correctly understood as the universe having one exact beginning point. Rather that its beginning was everywhere at once as evidenced by galaxies all moving away from each other, and residual heat of the “big bang” being somewhat uniform everywhere we look.”

We could blame this misunderstanding on Dr. Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “big bang,” but as teachers of physics and astronomy, we are probably guilty of contributing to it. When we hear the term “big bang,” we think of an explosion. An explosion assumes some material existed, and it blew up like a bomb. That is a mistaken perspective. The big bang didn’t start with a singularity that already existed. The modern understanding of the big bang is that space and time came into existence in a form we call “spacetime.”

We struggle with the concept of the big bang and creation because we cannot envision a condition where neither space nor time existed. We live in a three-dimensional universe and are familiar with X, Y, and Z on a cartesian graph. We know that we can plot any of these dimensions against time. If we move along the ground in direction X at a certain speed, we can plot the distance moved against the elapsed time. When a rocket goes straight up, you can plot Y against time. There is a third direction at right angles to both X and Y that we call Z, and we can plot it against time. But what is time? It’s a fourth-dimensional quantity that you can’t define. You can say it is “what keeps everything from happening at once,” but that is not a definition but a consequence of time.

The big bang concept agrees with Genesis 1:1 that space and time began, but not as an explosion. If space was created, then everything embedded in space was also created. Only action from dimensions beyond our own (X, Y, Z, and time) could do that. So as we consider the big bang and creation, we must ask what could be the source of creation that existed outside of space and time?

You can argue that it wasn’t God, but that doesn’t hold much water. We must account for the design we see in the cosmos, and chance doesn’t even try to do it. The big bang is an excellent proof of creation by God. The Bible describes God as an intelligence outside of space and time who created space and time. We don’t need to understand everything about creation to have faith in God. However, science strongly reinforces the adage that “the more you know of the creation, the closer you get to God.” As science advances in its understanding of the design of the cosmos, the existence of God becomes more and more evident.

June 24, 2021June 19, 2021

The Complexity of the Cosmos

The complexity of the cosmos is so incredible that it baffles the best scientific minds of our day. Scientists have employed elaborate machines to try to understand more of the nature of the creation.

When I was a high school student, we learned that the cosmos is made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. All of chemistry and physics could be explained by the measurements of these three particles. When I took my first college course in nuclear science, I began to work in the cyclotron, assisting graduate Ph.D. candidates. I realized the creation was not as simple as it appears. As an atheist, this was distressing because I could see that human knowledge of the complexity of the cosmos was, at best, incomplete.

As a graduate student, I was privileged to work with equipment that could smash protons to see what was inside. “Fundamental particles” was a term that began to show up in the scientific literature, and gradually another “simple explanation of everything” began to emerge. It was called “The Standard Model of particle physics.” It consisted of leptons (such as the electron), and quarks which made up protons and neutrons.

This model also required force particles called bosons to hold things together. With larger and more powerful accelerators, scientists discovered still more particles which were the glue holding everything together. These particles were part of the structure of matter called gluons and the Higgs boson. The complexity of the cosmos was becoming more impressive.

Despite all of this work by literally thousands of physicists worldwide, they were still seeing things that didn’t fit all of the models. Galaxies were spinning too fast to hold together unless some unknown and unseen force was counteracting the centrifugal force of the rotation. The latest measurements show that 68.3% of the creation is made up of energy we can’t detect by any existing instrumentation. We can measure the mass of the cosmos, but 26.8% of the mass we know must be there because of gravitational fields is missing. Scientists now refer to the two missing quantities as “dark energy” and “dark matter.”

The complexity of the cosmos causes us to wonder at the intelligence that created all of this. We will examine this topic more tomorrow.

December 8, 2020December 7, 2020

What Is the Shape of Space?

A question that astronomers have been working on for years is, “What is the shape of space?” The latest technical tools have answered this question, and it has significant apologetic value for those of us who believe in God.

Let us try to understand the issue. There are three possible shapes to space. It can be elliptical, hyperbolic, or flat. A mathematician would express this in geometric terms using Euclid’s fifth postulate. You have probably forgotten the postulate, but it merely said that through a point, there could only be one line drawn parallel to a given line. The other choices would be that there could be no lines drawn parallel to a given line or that there could be any number of lines drawn parallel to a given line. The fifth postulate assumes that the universe is flat. This is true for all terrestrial purposes, so no one is throwing away the high school plane geometry textbooks.

So what is the shape of space? In an elliptical universe, all parallel lines would eventually meet. If you go far enough into outer space, you would eventually curve back to where you started. In other words, if you had perfect vision and a perfectly clear sky, you could see the back of your head by looking far enough out into space. Light would curve following the shape of space. We all know that a triangle has internal angles that add up to 180 degrees, but in an elliptical universe, the angles would add up to more than 180 degrees.

In a hyperbolic universe, space would be saddle-shaped. Light going out into space would curve because of the curvature of space. But the curve would never close. It would just keep on curving. The sum of the angles of a triangle would be less than 180 degrees, and parallel lines would never meet no matter how far they go. They just curve away from each other.

New instruments can measure cosmic microwave background radiation with such accuracy that scientists can determine the shape of space. That is because the microwaves follow the shape of space. What is the shape of space? It turns out that space is flat or planar. The implications of this discovery are enormous. Since the universe is expanding, the creation is clearly not oscillating. It will not collapse back on itself and start over again as it would in an elliptical universe. In a planar or flat universe, there are no repeats. Physical reincarnation can never happen.

This also tells us that space is a created thing and not eternal. The universe was created with shape and with laws that apply in a flat universe following Euclid’s fifth postulate. Our studies in quantum mechanics are beginning to give us some indication that dimensions outside of space-time are the source for space and time as well as matter-energy. Genesis 1:1 rings more true than we ever imagined. The closer we get to understanding the creation, the closer we get to understanding the methods of the Creator.

(For a further explanation of this, see Astronomy magazine for January 2021 pages 56-58).

August 24, 2020January 18, 2023

All That Is Or Ever Was Or Ever Will Be

“500 + amazing facts you need to know about galaxies, black holes, Einstein’s Relativity, the Big Bang, Dark Matter, and more!” Those are the words on the cover of Astronomy magazine’s special issue titled “Cosmos – Origin and Fate of the Universe.” The magazine has a great listing of discoveries made in the last decade, and it’s full of photographs, artwork, and a variety of charts. David Eicher, the magazine editor, opens the issue by quoting Carl Sagan’s famous line, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” That is Sagan’s religious view, and Eicher plugs it by ending with, “We pack it all in here, and hope you will enjoy reading, and thinking about all that ever was, or ever will be.”

The magazine’s factual matter is impressive, but the philosophical and religious beliefs raise far more questions than they answer. The size of the cosmos has been a subject of intense study. Research shows that the number of galaxies in the cosmos is at least two-trillion –10 times greater than was previously thought. That amount of mass in the cosmos means that any explanation of how the creation happened is outside of current scientific understanding. It is becoming increasingly clear that only 4.9% of the universe is made of ordinary matter. The rest is mysterious dark matter (26.8%) and dark energy (68.3%).

The magazine presents the current scientific theory of the creation process with a “puffy giant dark star” made of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS). These WIMPS collided, annihilating each other and producing a halo of dark matter and black holes. This inadequate explanation makes it clear that the universe did not come into existence on its own. There was a beginning, and that beginning was caused. The cosmos is not self-existing. Those of us who believe in God would suggest that if these theories are correct, they are just God’s tools for creation. They may explain the methods He used, but it is clear that the cosmos we see is not all that is or ever was or ever will be.

This current scientific explanation of creation has implications for other scientific fields. For example, evolution depends on a religious belief called uniformitarianism, which says that no process has operated in the past that is not going on today. Much of what the magazine discusses is not going on today.

Two things are certain from this issue of Astronomy. We know little about the creation, and we deal poorly with what we do know. It’s evident that the cosmos is not all that is or ever was or ever will be. We suggest that a periodical like this one shouts again, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.” (Psalms 19:1).