An Account of History More Vivid Than a Book

God "stretches out the heavens like a curtain…Lift up your eyes and see who created these.”
(Isaiah 40:22,26)

Two objections are commonly laid against Big Bang cosmology by “young-earth creationists” who claim that the heavens and the earth were created in six 24-hour days about 6 thousand years ago.  They object first of all to the certitude of the “old-earth creationists'” claim that the cosmos is over 13 billion years old, on the grounds that we cannot know what happened back then because we weren’t even there.  And secondly, building on their (correct) assertion that “Almighty God has the power to do anything at all He wants (including making everything in just six days”), they object to our apparent determination to limit God’s power to doing it all the slow way. 

Yet the problem for “young-earth creationists” is likewise two-fold.  Firstly, while it is true that human beings weren’t present at creation, that fact is entirely irrelevant (as we shall see) to the question of what we can know about creation (we are not piecing together an imperfect and incomplete fossil record here).  Second, “old-earth creationists'” aren’t attempting to argue about what God can or cannot do.  Indeed, I for one, declare that God has the power to create the entire universe, fully formed, in an instant if He so wishes.  No, we instead frame a very different question:  What does the testimony of nature itself declare about the how’s and the how long’s (by human counting) of creation?  It is to this question that the strictures of biblical interpretation are most explicit.  Romans 1:18-20 warns readers to not suppress the testimony of nature (which amounts to sinful evasion -v.18), but to the contrary, to study nature for the message it yields with respect to the existence of God.  If nature should not be capable of telling the truth there, then what does this imply about the character of God Himself who breathed His words through the pen of the Apostle Paul (2 Timothy 3:16)?  But we say nature does tell the truth about the past just as the Bible declares.   

Of course I am also aware that “young-earth creationists” believe Big Bang cosmology contradicts the first chapters of Genesis.  Yet in previous blog postings I have repeatedly laid out the case that their interpretation of Genesis 1 is NOT correct.  The Hebrew text (higher in authority than the English) of Genesis 1 yields a host of strong indicators that the days of Genesis 1 are long and indefinite in duration.  Therefore the 24-hour day interpretation has no authority to bind hearts and minds.

So what does the testimony of nature actually tell us about origins?  It tells us first of all that the entire cosmos had an absolute beginning out of nothing in a manner entirely consistent with Genesis 1:1.  It also tells us that the cosmos (remember, that very word means “orderly arrangement”) was exquisitely designed by a super-intelligent Being in a manner consistent with Psalm 19:1f and Hebrews 11:3).  Exactly how, what, and why we can know these realities in a spirit of confidence, will be laid out in part II of this posting.