Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
Today's episode features Dr. Jake Hebert, physicist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Heber. Secular cosmologists claim that the universe originated in an explosion 13.8 billion years ago.
Now, this is not an explosion in the conventional sense where you have matter and energy expanding into a pre-existing space. They're claiming that it was an explosion of space itself. And supposedly, very shortly after this explosion, you had simple chemical elements forming. And then over time, somehow you ended up getting stars and galaxies forming over billions of years.
Now, this is really the most popular story, if you will, about how the universe came to be among secular scientists, but it's been harshly criticized even by other secular scientists.
Now, there are three main arguments that you often hear presented for the Big Bang model for the origin of the universe. The first is the apparent expansion of the universe. When we look at distant galaxies, when we see the light from those galaxies, and there are clues in the light that is usually interpreted to mean that those galaxies are moving away from us. And so it's assumed that the universe is expanding. And of course, you would expect that if you had an explosion, some kind of cosmic explosion.
Another argument is that the Big Bang does a pretty good job of accounting for the relative abundances of the light chemical elements, hydrogen and helium. Another argument for the Big Bang, probably the most important one, is that the Big Bang predicts there should be this afterglow of radiation that was left behind about 400,000 years after the Big Bang itself. And we do see this background radiation coming to us from all directions in space. That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. And they claim, the Big Bang proponents, that this is this leftover radiation from a time after the Big Bang.
Now, there are many Christians out there who tell us that we ought to accept the Big Bang, that this was God's means of creating the universe, but there's some very good reasons that Christians ought to reject the Big Bang. And the reasons I give, they spell out an acrostic starry, S-T-A-R-R-Y. And so we'll go ahead and go through these points. We won't necessarily go through them in order because it makes a little more sense if we go in a different order. But when you put all these together, they do spell out the acrostic starry.
Now, the first reason is the A, and that stands for arbitrary assumptions. The Big Bang is built on this arbitrary assumption, something called the cosmological principle, which assumes that matter and energy on the largest scales are uniformly distributed in space. And it also assumes that there are no special directions in space. That when you look at the large-scale structure of the universe, any direction in the sky should be the same as any other direction in the sky.
Now, they could theoretically construct another version of the Big Bang model that doesn't have this assumption, but they would basically have to completely start over. This is a fundamental assumption. It would not be easy for them to change it, yet there's good reasons to question that assumption. There are structures out there in the universe that really seem to be too large if this assumption is correct, and there are indications that there are special directions in the universe.
Okay, so that's the A, arbitrary assumptions. Why should Christians accept a theory or feel compelled to accept a theory that's based on arbitrary assumptions? The R, one of the R's anyway, stands for reverse engineering. And what I mean by that is that the Big Bang does not have too many successful predictions. Almost all of the successes of the Big Bang are what we would call retrodictions.
The observations were made, and then the Big Bang model was tweaked to agree with the observations. For instance, scientists had inferred that the universe was expanding, and then they invoked the Big Bang to explain that apparent expansion.
So the idea of an expanding universe came first, and then the Big Bang. What about the abundances of the light chemical elements?
Well, there's a part of the Big Bang model called Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which describes and explains, supposedly, how these chemical elements were formed very shortly after the Big Bang. The problem with this is that there is an adjustable number in the model that the evolutionists get to pick. They can pick it to be basically whatever they want.
Now, Lawrence Krauss, you've probably heard of him, he's a very militant anti-theist and he's a Big Bang proponent. But he wrote this book in 2012 called A Universe from Nothing, in which he tried to explain. How you don't need God to explain the universe. And there's one quote in there on pages 24 through 25 where he kind of gives it away.
Now, this is what he says. He says, yet the initial density of protons and neutrons in the universe arising out of the Big Bang, and this is the important part, as determined by fitting to the observed abundance of hydrogen, helium, and lithium, accounts for about twice the amount of material we can see in stars and hot gas.
So, what is Krauss saying there? He's saying that the Big Bang's success at accounting for hydrogen and helium. Is occurring because they have an adjustable parameter and they can pick that parameter to be what they want it to be.
So, those are some problems that we see with the Big Bang, and we'll talk about some more of these problems in our next segment.
Now it's time for a short break. We'll hear more from Dr. Hebert in a moment. Dinosaurs are fascinating creatures. Seeing their fossils inspires a sense of awe and wonder that sparks the imagination.
We're learning more about them all the time, but many questions still remain: Are dinosaurs really millions of years old? Did they live at the same time as humans? How do they fit with the Bible? And why are they extinct today? The Institute for Creation Research addresses these questions and more in their full color and easy-to-read book, Guide to Dinosaurs.
Guide to Dinosaurs delves into the history of dinosaurs, fossil discoveries, dinosaur kinds, and what the Bible has to say about these mysterious creatures. It serves as a helpful resource for parents and kids alike. Order your copy of Guide to Dinosaurs from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. That's 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. Mm.
Welcome back. Here's Dr. Hebert.
So, we're talking about the Big Bang and why Christians ought to reject it. And we've already seen that the Big Bang is based on A, arbitrary assumptions, and there's a lot of reverse engineering where they get the right answer, but the Big Bang didn't actually predict the right answer. We talked about how they reverse-engineered. The result that they get the right amount of hydrogen and helium, that's not terribly impressive. I mean, if you just pick a number so that it gives you the answer you want, well, that's not very impressive.
What if the Big Bang, though, also, in addition to getting the right amount of hydrogen and helium, also got the right amount of atoms in the universe, ordinary atomic matter?
Now, that would be impressive. This nuclear recipe that they use, once they pick that number that they call the baryon-to-photon ratio, once they pick that, then it also tells you how much. Ordinary atomic matter should be in the universe.
Now, the question is: does the Big Bang get that right too?
Now, that would be impressive. If it could get the correct percentage, if you will, of atomic matter in the universe and also get the right abundances of hydrogen and helium, that would be a lot more impressive.
So, is it doing that?
Well, we don't know. The problem is because of something called dark matter. There's a lot of astronomers who think there's a large amount of invisible matter in the universe that we can't see. No one really knows what it is.
Some of it's thought to be these exotic, never-before-seen particles.
Some of it's supposed to be ordinary matter. And some creationists are okay with this idea of dark matter. We're not here to solve this mystery at this point. The point here, though, is that no one really knows what this dark matter is.
So no one can really be sure whether the Big Bang is giving you the right amount of atoms, the right amount of protons and neutrons in the universe. According to the Big Bang model, most of the matter in the universe, around 80 to 85 percent, has got to be this weird exotic form that nobody's ever seen before. Why is that?
Well, it's because the Big Bang, once they pick that number, it can't generate enough normal everyday matter to account for all the matter that's thought to exist, including the dark matter.
So you hear them make this claim all the time. They don't really know that most of the matter in the universe is this weird exotic stuff that nobody's ever seen. The reason they're claiming that is because based on Big Bang predictions, They expect that to be the case. And since they know, quote unquote, that the Big Bang model is correct, they think they know how much normal matter should be out there. And I would predict that if we ever do figure out what dark matter is, it's going to be very bad news for the Big Bang because there's just too many ways that the Big Bang could be getting all this wrong.
And don't forget that, you know, they have this stuff called dark energy, that when you throw that into the mix, about 95% of all the stuff in the universe is supposed to be stuff that we don't know what it is. And yet they claim that they've got it all figured out and they know how the universe came into being.
Well, that's really ridiculous. I mean, if you don't even know what the universe is composed of, how on earth can you explain how it came into existence?
So we're talking about this reverse engineering. The T stands for something called tachons. You know, the Big Bang, one exception to this reverse engineering is that the Big Bang did predict there would be this cosmic microwave background radiation. And so that would be a Successful prediction, but even here, there are things in that radiation that don't match Big Bang expectations. And so they've had to tack on stuff to the original Big Bang model in order to make it work.
And they have this thing called inflation theory that's a very good example of this. They've tacked that onto the model. And that's where you're getting this idea of a multiverse, ideas of other universes out there.
Now, there was allegedly evidence for inflation in 2014, but it was quickly shot down.
So what are some of the other reasons to reject the Big Bang? The other R stands for remaining unresolved problems. Why did the Big Bang happen in the first place? Where's all the antimatter that you would expect from the Big Bang? How do stars and galaxies form?
These are things that Big Bang proponents do not have good answers for. The Y stands for a young universe. As we emphasize here at ICR very often, there is abundant evidence for the idea that the universe is just thousands rather than billions of years old. Yet the Big Bang needs billions of years in order to seem plausible.
So if we do really live in a young universe, then the Big Bang obviously can't be correct. And the S is really the most important reason of all, and that is scripture. If we take the scripture seriously, the historical information in the Bible, as well as the testimony of the Lord Jesus himself, all confirm that the universe is young and that the Big Bang is not how God created the universe. Thank you for joining us on Sunday. Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research.
That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org. For over 45 years, ICR has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible's accuracy and authority by showing how science supports the Genesis creation account. Our scientists research the evidence for creation and communicate their findings through books, articles, DVD series, and conferences. Please visit our website at icr.org for more information about the latest scientific discoveries, to subscribe to our free magazine and devotional, and to locate our next creation conference at a venue near you. All of this and more at icr.org.
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