Too Old and Fat? part I

Our universe breaks the record for the most birthdays:  13.75 billion candles’ worth.  And there’s no cheating on the numbers because scientists have ways of accurately calculating this age.  Since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, then light years (“l.y.”) provide the measurement of both distance and the passage of time.  Distances between stars and galaxies are so vast they must, for practical purposes, be measured by this standard.  And every scientific measurement yields a great age.  Consider that when we look at the light from the nearby star Spika, so close to us that it is visible to the naked eye, we are peering back 270 years into the past because that is how long (at 270 l.y.) it took to reach our eyeballs.  For the same reason our view to the center of our own galaxy amounts to peering 25,000 years back into the past.  Likewise, the “image” which traveled from the surface of neighboring Andromeda Galaxy is 2 ½ million years old (though it isn’t faded!).  By means of the Hubble Satellite, the famous “Deep Field” photograph was taken of an area in the sky about the size of a tennis ball at a football field’s-length, over the span of a million seconds.  That image reveals how its 3,000 galaxies first looked when they formed a little more than 13 billion years ago. 

I think it important to briefly reflect on what is a matter of contention for certain Christians.  Some Christians insist the first chapter of Genesis must be interpreted as teaching that the heavens and the earth are six thousand years old.  I have already challenged that interpretation of the Bible in my blog titled, “My Authority part II.”  I find no such insistence - either from that chapter or the Scriptures as a whole - which would require such an interpretation that cannot be reconciled with the clear measurable calculations of science. 

Other Christians reject the position I espouse, that the universe is “old,” on the grounds that “God can do anything He wants to.”  So they issue the challenge, “Why, Gary, do you choose to limit God?”  My reply to their assertion (but not their challenge) is “Amen!  Of course God can do anything!  Indeed God could have, if He so wished, created everything in a single instant fully-formed.”  But their objection misses the point.  And I am still fully persuaded that Almighty God freely created the universe in a manner consistent with recent discoveries framed by Big Bang cosmology.

What God can do is not the question, but what God in freedom chose to do.  The notion that God should choose to deceive the world, however, through a natural order that doesn’t tell the truth, is not a possibility according to the Bible itself.  Romans 1:18-21 teaches the exact opposite since it commands us to heed the testimony of nature as clear revelation of the power of God.  It also identifies as sin every attempt to suppress that witness.  We Christians have permission from Scripture to scientifically study nature for all it’s worth (in spite of errors by “the Church,” from time to time, to either restrict or criticize such study).  The study of nature certainly doesn’t lay bare the mind of God.  To claim otherwise is silly.  Neither, however, does the Bible itself tell us exactly how God chooses to unfold that cosmos He brought into existence by His Word (Hebrews 11:3).  By every serious reading of the first chapter of Genesis, God appears to use process in order to bring about His final product.  We are free to wonder about these processes.  But we are not free to clobber or “de-Christianize” people whose position on creation lies within the teachings of the Apostles and Nicene Creeds.

Therefore, by means of studying nature it is apparent that our super-intelligent God deliberately chose to create the universe by means of “the Big Bang” 13.75 billion years ago.  With that beginning, His creation inherited a set of physical properties that our Maker has deliberately chosen to honor and maintain. 

Now of course I’m sure you have noticed that so far I have offered no reasons for how a very old universe actually points to God’s providence and power.  But it was vital that I first lay some important ground work.  In my next blog I will continue to expand on the case I first began in recent postings, on how the age of our universe is indeed just right.  It is not excessively old!  Given the physics that Almighty God has decreed, its age is exactly required for the making of our wonderful planet, on which our providential God, in love, has chosen to place us.  Stay tuned!