So You Say “The Big Bang Never Happened!” Part I

(This essay is a revision of a previous (deleted) posting titled “Who Loses if the big Bang is True?”)

“By faith we understand that the whole created order was fashioned by the command of God.”  (Hebrews 11:3)  

 
There has of late been a shift in the strategy of young-earth creationists in their apologetic challenge to atheistic materialism.  Until recently, their attacks focused directly on undermining the foundations of the Darwinian paradigm, including 1) the utter lack of transitional remains in the fossil record of the history of life, 2) the immensity of the challenge of non-living material naturalistically “evolving” to become life of even a most simple kind (technically the Darwinian change-mechanism  can’t even work until there exists life to be changed), 3) the challenge of blind processes (having no foresight or goal) producing, step-by-step, irreducibly complex machines (e.g. the stator rotator on a flagellum), and 4) the reality of enormous amounts of information laden within in the DNA of even the most primitive life forms discovered.  I agree that these four challenges carry enormous weight, even though I do not agree with certain aspects of their conclusions.

Just recently, certain leading young-earth creationists have, as late-comers, significantly expanded their apologetic strategy into the whole new area of astronomy.  For many old-earth creationist Christians, “cosmology” (the scientific study of the cosmos) and “cosmogony” (the scientific study of the beginnings of the same) has, as a branch of knowledge, become a very effective source of scientific evidence supporting the existence of the God of the Bible.  Young-earth creationists, on the other hand, have a far different assessment of the same evidence, particularly with respect both to the status of the evidence for a Big Bang, and also the implications of the Big Bang for the question of God’s existence. 

I took the opportunity a few months ago to carefully study a lecture on you tube titled, “The Big Bang Never Happened,” by scientist Spike Psarris.  He claims to have previously been an atheist, but apart from any Christian influence on his thinking about cosmology, he says came to believe in a young-earth view of creation strictly on the basis of the scientific evidence alone.  The video of his presentation had been recommended to me as her proof that a straight scientific examination of the cosmos, free from “evolutionary” assumptions, points to a cosmos that is between six and eight thousand years old.

To be continued...