The Creation Debate-Part 15

By: Dr. John Ankerberg, Dr. Don DeYoung, Dr. Duane Gish and Dr. Kurt Wise; ©2002

What theories have been put forth to explain the origin of the universe? What are some of the problems scientists have encountered with those theories?.

Editor’s note: In June 1990 The John Ankerberg Show taped a series of interviews with men from several branches of the sciences regarding the evidence for creation. For technical reasons we were unable to air these interview. Nevertheless, we have decided to re­lease portions of these interviews in a series of articles so you could read the arguments that were being made at that time—more than a decade ago.

Considerable effort has been made to quote the gentlemen correctly. We have at­tempted to find the correct spelling of the scientific terms used. However, the reader should keep in mind that this is a transcription of oral interviews. Mistakes in spelling and in the technical language should be laid at the feet of the editor.

The Creation Debate- Part 13
The Origin of the Universe-Part 4

Dr. Duane Gish: Don, I’ve read a couple of articles, one by a physicist who claimed that if the universe did eventually contract, that you would just have a final crunch. It wouldn’t keep oscillating at all. And he suggested that it couldn’t bounce back. Then there’s another paper I read, in which these scientists said that with each oscillation the entropy increases so if you go back in time, you eventually come to a beginning, it could not have been doing this indefinitely.

You know, I heard Carl Sagan say, as a matter of fact, he was talking about this possibil­ity of an oscillating universe, and he said, but how many times has it oscillated? Then, where did it come from in the beginning? He said, Well, perhaps it came into being miracu­lously from nowhere. And I thought that was a really strange statement from a man who claims to be an agnostic or an atheist.

Another point, Don, is it not true that the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says if you start with an isolated system, that system can never increase in ordered complexity and organization. It will, with time, inevitably run down and deteriorate. And yet, evolution­ists believe that the universe is an isolated system. It started with this big bang, so it started in a state of chaos and disorder, and the simplicity of hydrogen gas, and then according to evolutionists, it transformed itself into the present universe, which is obviously vastly more complex and organized than a disbursed cloud of hydrogen gas.

Now isn’t that a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? If the cloud of gas, for example, that supposedly originated, had expanded forever, and that’s the only thing that ever happened, obviously we’d have no problem with the second law of thermodynamics, wouldn’t even be here to discuss it. But, of course, after the Big Bang of hydrogen gas, then that hydrogen gas converted itself into everything we have today, which seems to me, vastly more organized and complex than a disbursed cloud of hydrogen gas.

Dr. Don DeYoung: Well, with thermodynamics, again it goes back to how you want to look at it in the Big Bang scenario, this initial concentration of mass energy. Again if it really is a black hole, and energy can’t get out of it, then there’s no energy there, it’s a high en­tropy state, like you’re talking. But if you do allow it to explode, then it is a concentration of energy; it’s like a lump of coal that you’re getting at. And so in that case, with the Big Bang story as they describe it, they would begin with an area of concentration energy.

Gish: Yes, yes, that’s at low entropy then. But then it forms hydrogen gas and expands out into the entire reaches of the universe. Now, from that point, then, to this point, it re­quired a decrease of entropy. But it seems to me that the present universe is vastly more highly organized, than a disbursed cloud of hydrogen gas.

Dr. Kurt Wise: Yes, but I thought the Big Bang represented the whole universe. That kernel that you talk about, wasn’t it the whole universe, all of space, time and matter, every­thing?

DeYoung: Everything, yes.

Wise: So it filled all of space right there. All that happened was that space expanded. Am I misunderstanding?

Gish: No. The opinion on how big that kernel was, varies in something the size of an electron to the size of the solar system, to other sizes.

Dr. John Ankerberg: But regardless of the size, are we still talking that right now the scientists cannot get away from that start? In other words, that time, space, matter and energy, all of that was together and it started at a point?

DeYoung: That’s correct. They tried to get away from that with the steady-state theory, with the oscillating theory, but they came up dry on those.

Ankerberg: And secondly, they have nothing that postulates how that happened. That’s just sheer speculation on everybody’s part, as Jastrow said, we don’t know, we might never know.

DeYoung: Well, there’s lots of speculation there. We are mentioning Steve Hawking who talks about perhaps some kind of a quantum mechanical fluctuation of a vacuum. In other words, somehow you start with nothing and get something and at a future instant, it might go back to a vacuum again, and we’d all be lost. This kind of goes off the deep end, and I think it becomes rather metaphysical, and that’s out of my realm.

Ankerberg: But right now, if we have a start and then we have this complexity and design that comes out of this start. When they talk about the Big Bang, they’re really talking about a start that, for whatever reason, seems to have been smoothly undertaken so that out through the universe, energy is disbursed evenly it seems in terms of the radiation. And we have these laws. We have a stable universe in some places. Now, with that, one of the books that you wrote has to do with the moon. And I think a scientist at M.I.T. a geophysi­cist, Naphe Taksos, said, “It’s far easier to explain why the moon shouldn’t be there, than to explain its existence.” How come?

DeYoung: Well, the moon is a good place to think about for a moment. Of course, that’s our nearest neighbor in the sky, and we’ve spent a lot of money in this country investigating the moon. We’ve been there trying to find out its origin. The main reason is the moon, since it has no air, it’s like a museum up there. It’s thought to hold a good record of what the past might have been.

Well, what is our record over the last few decades of studying the moon and bringing rocks back home? Have we discovered the origin? Again, much time and investigation has gone in on this. And as the quote that you gave turns out, no, we have not been able to figure out where the moon came from. And it’s kind of humorous—we talk about the origin of the universe and faraway galaxies and all these details and we really don’t understand our nearest neighbor in the sky. There’s been no shortage of theories on where the moon could have come from.

Way back in the 1800s they talked about the fission theory—that the moon broke off from the earth, and there are some chemicals similarities that would be in agreement with that, but there are dynamics problems. The earth would have to be spinning too fast. It would still be going around too rapidly and it’s not that way. So fission has been put aside.

Another moon origin theory would be capture—that the moon just drifted close to the earth one day, and we reached out with our gravity and captured it, and its been going around us ever since. Those chemical similarities are a problem in that case. The moon does kind of look too much like the earth to have come from somewhere else. And by the way that’s really not an origin theory again. That’s like the Big Bang, where you start with something and then you bring it in from the outside.

Fission, Capture. A popular one today is the Nebula Theory—that big dust clouds, one for the earth and one for the moon, those clouds just condensed and formed side-by-side and that’s how the early solar system was formed. But that does not hold up to the me­chanics and the dynamics of the situation either. There are dust clouds in space and we can see those and observe them over time, and the dust clouds that we look at are not condensing into new planets and stars and moons, they’re dissipating, they’re spreading out. Now, gravity is a very real force and it keeps the sun stable which is a small concen­trated gas ball, but the big clouds we see in the Nebula theory, they would spread out. And when you run through these theories, that’s again where you get that quote, where they say, it would be easy to explain why there was no moon in the sky, but there it is and that is an embarrassment to them.

The latest view just from the last couple years is maybe called the Collision Theory—that a long time ago, some Mars-sized object crashed into the earth and that knocked off a big piece and made the moon. Well, there are problems with that one as well. And there we go as the time go by, one theory after another is set up, and is knocked down again. And frankly, that makes some of us want to speak up after awhile and say “Well, why not cre­ation? If the best that computers and thought can come up with in our day can’t explain the moon, maybe there’s a little message for us there, that the moon is a testimony to the creation?”

Ankerberg: All right summarize all of this in terms of the case for creation. What’s the positive evidence then, as you see it, that stands out?

DeYoung: I began talking about the Big Bang Theory and giving some negatives, I guess, that we don’t know where the original kernel of mass energy came from, or why would it explode, and Duane’s idea was correct. How can you get beautiful planets and galaxies to form from that kind of explosion? So there are fundamental problems with these kind of secular origin theories.

But I think we can go on then in positive sense. We mentioned the Anthropic Principle, that there is an intriguing design on all sides. We mentioned gravity, the mass of micro­scopic particles, we mentioned the earth’s position. And there are hundreds of other design arguments like that that you can come up with. I think that each is a testimony to an intelli­gent planning and we find more of those every day.

I don’t think that I can explain to you the details of the creation and just how it happened. I believe that the creation was supernatural and it’s beyond explanation. I think that it hap­pened quickly, in six days. In fact, Genesis tells us that the sun, moon and stars were all made on the fourth day. I believe that the creation was planned. I believe that it was made for us as Scripture indicates.

Ankerberg: You know, Don, in listening to what you’ve been saying, I can kind of under­stand what Robert Jastrow meant in his famous quote, “Astronomers now find that they have painted themselves into a corner, because they have proven by their own methods that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos, and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover.”

DeYoung: Yes. In summary, I think the best evolutionary model up to today, it does postulate a singularity at the beginning of space, time and matter, everything, but with an unknown cause. And it produces the current complexity in design that we can see along unknown pathways. In contrast, the creation model postulates again, a beginning point, a singularity, but with a known cause. The creation view also predicts the kind of man-cen­tered design we see every place we look.

Credentials

Dr. Don DeYoung received his Ph.D. in physics from Iowa State University.

Dr. Duane Gish is a biochemist who received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Kurt Wise received his Ph.D in paleontology at Harvard.

Read Part 16