We Weren't There. And it Matters Not Part II

Some people judge this delimiting reality (of only being able to see into the past) to be either a hindrance to overcome, or a nuisance that must be explained away.  There are those for example who believe the 13.7 billion year age of the universe that is implied by these light-travel times conflicts with the teaching of Genesis 1.  In order to maintain their conviction that the cosmos is really just a few thousand years old, they believe that God must have created the very beams of light in passage from all the galaxies that are radiating across the cosmos.  This proposal by certain Christians (in contradiction to Romans 1:18-20) suggests that God is deceptive with nature’s testimony as to the actual age of His creation.  Yet in fact such an ad hoc interpretation is utterly unnecessary.  In my essay, “The Biblical Demand to Take Another Look” (found at www.christianityontheoffense.com) I make the case that Genesis makes no such demand on readers to believe that the universe is 6,000 +/- years young.

Yet the point of this posting is to make a very different point from the attempt to reconcile astronomical realities with Genesis 1.  I argue to the contrary that light-travel distances and the history that that reality implies, provide us with a privileged and exciting opportunity for confidently observing the unfolding wonders of God’s creation in a manner that is entirely compatible with a very high view of the opening verse (and chapter) of the Holy Bible.

I love fireworks (except after 11 pm when I’m struggling to sleep)!  I prefer experiencing them live as opposed to looking at still photographs of them.  I enjoy feeling and hearing the booming and, for a few days, the lingering smell of the gunpowder.  But what I enjoy most is the visual experience of the entire process from the initial launch all the way to its ultimate expansive display of light against the dark sky.
 

The implications following from paragraphs 2 and 3, above, are tremendous with respect to the reality of humanity’s non-presence at creation’s beginning.  Precisely because light photons take time to cross distances, radiation from objects much farther away from us (the HEDF above) take much longer to reach the lenses of our telescopes than did nearby objects such as Polaris (the North Star) or Jupiter.  This means that as modern scientific instruments detect the range of celestial objects in between the oldest objects visible (HEDF) and our own moon, we are observing the history of the universe all the way back to its beginning.  “Observing” is the key word to this posting.  Unlike the Darwinian claim alleging to tell the history of the development of life (which demands surmising on the basis of very imperfect evidence), when we look out across the entire universe we are able to document its entire history.  We are like historians who chronicle the development of the cosmos from its birth (a very imperfect term) and infancy all the way to the present moment.  So agrees the Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR) publication of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, The Natural Knowledge of God in Christian Confession and Christian Witness­, (April 2013): “Advances in astronomy during the twentieth century…led to the discovery that the universe is not static, but is expanding.  This and related discoveries thus suggest (by projecting backwards) the now generally accepted conclusion that the universe of space and time had a beginning in the finite past” (p.59, note 215).

God could freely have chosen to create the universe any way He wished.  He has the power to have brought it into being in an instant if He so desired.  Yet even young-earth (6,000 years old) Christians understand Genesis to state that creation involved time (6 days).  But following the Apostle Paul’s injunction that we read nature for what it tells us (Romans 1:18-20) we encounter the kind of data that tells us that following its absolute beginning out of nothing in the Big Bang, it has taken 13.7 +/- billion years to reach its present stage.  By the way, nothing in this data affirms Darwinism and its atheistic agenda.  Christians, in my studied opinion, make a serious mistake by resisting the time frame high-lighted by cosmology.  We ought instead to thank God deeply for such a powerful “visual” demonstration of His creative handiwork that has its analogy in the beauty we observe from the display of a firework.  Though we weren’t present for His “launching,” we can still see the entire unfolding of His artistry from our present vantage point.  Indeed, “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1f).