Seven reason why we should accept millions of years - Part 7 - radiometric dating is not unreliable

Does Jesus have omnipotent and unlimited power?

Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent.

The breath of life

The discovery of pristine Oxygen on a comet, has puzzled scientists. The problem that the ESA probe, Rosetta, has now posed, is how oxygen can exist in a virgin state when it is so renowned for combining or oxidizing just about every possible element in the periodic table.

Originally the earth acquired its oxygen via photosynthesis, hence plants had to precede animal life, just as Genesis 1 confirms. Plants could feed on the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere and reproduce oxygen, but it evidently took a long time for the earth to acquire enough oxygen to support life.

Is there life out there?

NASA’s Kepler Mission has detected a near-earth rocky planet in a solar system that is quite proportional to our earth-sun relationship and similar to our home planet, except that it is orbiting its sun in 8.5 hours - so is hardly viable for life.

What do we make of that? Well, I guess it means that exoplanets in the expanse of space are possible. Potentially the bible confirms it is so as it points to a new heaven and a new earth, and we know that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us – these things can take time – millennia in fact.

Footprints

How do you know I am writing this right now? I could be a robot or ghost-writer, or this could even be plagiarized material. However, over time enough of the persona of the writer does start to emerge for us to be convinced of their presence and authenticity.

That line of thinking was prompted by something Doctor House said last night when faced with a patient who had a mystery illness. In counseling his colleagues he said, “If we cannot find the root cause we must be guided by effect.” What he meant was that they had to deduce, in this case that there was a small tumor, without the benefit of evidence.

Grand design

The great man has spoken. Stephen Hawking, the world’s leading intellectual, unilaterally proclaimed in his latest book, the Grand Design, that “the universe was not made by God, but is a consequence of all known physics”. So there we have it. Why did we make it so difficult for ourselves. The master has spoken and he must be right.

One can’t help feeling a little sorry for a man so trapped in his own frailty, condemned to a lifetime of immobility, but does he have to vent his bitterness against God by discounting the same?

I am not ready to stoop to his level. Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest of the big three, affirmed that the universe could not have evolved out of chaos. He held a remarkably theistic view of creation, despite his secret alliance to Arianism.

Isn't it wonderful

Intelligent Design is a legitimate initiative aimed as bringing the concept of an original universe into the classroom. Its advocates are at pains to distance themselves from a theological posture, arguing, for the sake of scientific rigor and to ensure wide acceptance, that the concept of a personal God is by the way.

Most, if not all, ID proponents have a personal witness of God, but they need to legitimize their opposition to evolution, which is widely taught in most western schools. The fact that evolution in its purest form is more theoretical than empirical, is for most educators, as by the way.

So random

In 1735 a group of scientists from the French Royal Academy of Sciences ventured off to Peru, to reach a stretch of earth, measuring about 300 kilometers, that ran from Yarouqui to Quito. Their idea was to use the line, part of a meridian, as a basis for triangulating earth distances, in order to derive the circumference of the earth.

Well the entire expedition was a nightmare. People went missing, some died and others ran away, whilst sceptics sat back in places like Paris and London to ponder why its was all so necessary when any meridian would do.

Awesome power

My firstborn son is an amateur scientist. Having blown up all he could find, whilst burning house and home and shaking foundations or launching surface to surface missiles against neighbours, he also found time for the academic side of science. As far as he is concerned, if he spent all day at shool just doing science, he couldn't be happier. Isn't there a specialist science school out there? I suppose not. Sadly a not so good mathematics teacher has caused him to lose confidence in that vital link to a future engineering qualification, but its all coming back - a little bit of encouragement and support is doing wonders. 

In the process of helping him I took him out for some coffee. On the way, he pointed towards a red indicator light and said, "Dad there is enough energy in that small red dot to light a city". The point he was making related to Einstein's groundbreaking energy formula. 

The span of His hand

It is now given that the universe was originally of infinite density, meaning it had infinite mass embraced within a very small volume, analogous to a grain of sand.

The bible says that God spans the universe with His right hand. Whilst I have no doubt that at one dimension God’s spirit does embrace the entire universe, for we were made by Him and for Him. However, there are other recorded manifestations of God that reveal Him in the form of men and here I specifically refer to an incident where Moses was caught in the cleft of a rock on Mount Sinai, as God walked by. Moses only saw the back of God, but what he saw was a man, for we are indeed created in His image.

We could deduce from many other scriptures that God has eyes, ears, a mind, nostrils, hands, feet and a heart. So we are a realistic depiction of the composition, certainly not the size or complexity, of the Great God who made the earth His footstool.

As such it is not improbable that when the creation was initiated, that the Father stooped, picked up a grain of sand and placed it in the right hand of His son, saying, “I hereby reserve you, from before the creation, to be savior of all” (Hebrews 13:8). Thus the creator (Jesus is specifically identified as the agent of creation in John 1), also became the guarantor of that creation, entrusted by God to use the created world to restore divine order and redeem the souls of all who fear Him.

Jesus, the light of the world then breathed over that grain and His glory filled the void to bring about the immense, immeasurable energy that resulted in our created universe. He is not only its guarantor, but is also the unseen force that holds it all together (Colossians 1:17).

By implication then, He also holds the power to remove the sustaining force of the universe and to then fold it all up as one would fold up a garment. 1 Corinthians 15 clearly declares that He will prevail until He has restored all things (a term also used by Newton to describe how all things return to a state of rest). When He has restored all things, “God will be all in all” and the season that described the 14-18billion years of this universe will be concluded, for God would have concluded His works.

A small aside here is that Romans 8 suggests that the power of the King, the same power that raised Him from the dead, already indwells us. Thus, He who fills the heavens and holds all things together, also dwells in us and when the angel sounds the trumpet, Jesus will merely call us and so shall we ever be with our God.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net

And then there was light

Einstein shed some light on physics, but divine light transformed a void, into a wondrous universe.

When Einstein first proposed the mass-energy equivalence, defined in the formula E=MC2, he had what was called an Annus Mirabilis, a great year, releasing a string of hugely significant papers, one of which earned him a Nobel prize. Unfortunately, he was so ahead of his time, that some of his thinking has only been fully validated in recent years, notably through the development of the Hubble telescope and radio astronomy.

Although there was a prevailing consensus about the relationship between energy and matter, there were too many gaps in prevailing theories to quantify the relationship. It was only when Einstein determined light to be a universal constant that he was able to unlock the mysteries of mass-energy equivalence. That resulted in two of the greatest strides in science and it revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Yet Genesis 1:1 had it all. Light was the first phenomenon of creation. The brightness of the Big Bang radiated across the dark void that we know as space. It exploded with life, introducing the four forces of the universe within the first second of that cataclysmic event. Light was the multiplier (C2 or 186,000 mi/s2) that converted the infinite mass of the universe into the vast energy that now defines our universe. Unfortunately, there is a concept of dark matter that makes up 70% of our universe, but it is only dark in the sense of being un-quantified, so we cannot make anything of that at this stage.

Light was used by John to describe Jesus, when he paralleled the words of Genesis 1 with “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. This speaks of revelation light or truth and is actually more fundamental to the creation than physical light, for as we see from events in the first second of creation, the big bang was bound by the laws of the universe, laws that were defined before it all began. The laws were necessary to ensure an ordered universe rather than an uncontrolled, perpetual explosion of energy that would never have produced the viable conditions of a self-sustaining universe. It is that simple fact that defined the difference between intelligent design and random coincidence.

The light of God’s truth is the also what turns the void of our hearts into something wonderful and life-giving. When we allow His light into our lives, it transforms empty vessels into instruments of righteousness. No longer are we coincidence of the random events and selection of life, but we are now purpose-made, a people whom God has separated unto Himself for His own glory.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net

Simple truth

Einstein pondered scientific truth and changed the world. Abraham pondered God and changed eternity.

Few appreciate that Einstein’s now famous energy equation, E=MC2, was originally expressed in a three page thesis, published in 1905. He spent ten years reflecting on the relationship between mass and energy, before he was sure enough to propose the now famous formula. However, the implications of his initial step of faith took the rest of the century to distil and validate.

Men like Abraham spent their life-energy seeking to know God, but even when they reached a zenith, the experience was reduced to a sentence or paragraph, far less than Einstein’s original theorem. Yet as definitive as E=MC2 has been to the modern world, so the few words that passed between God and people on lonely hills, like Moriah, conveyed a weight and substance of meaning that became a watershed in human understanding of the divine heart of God.

Entire faiths and nations were built on such simple moments of divine revelation. Those same outcomes became stepping stones to the climactic revelation of God’s heart and the ultimate conclusion of all revealed truth: the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made and though whom all things consist.

So don’t fret then when God does not make sense, follow what you do know and build on that until you come to your own epiphany. The wonder of it all is that when you get there things will be so obvious you will be left wondering why you could not have seen it earlier.

For me, the simple understanding of His love for us and currency of love in the life and thought of His kingdom is so obvious that we can but wonder how theologians can so persistently contrive to complicate what is so characteristic of the Great I Am.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net

Relatively speaking

The theory of relativity was ground breaking, providing us with a new way to look at space and time.

Einstein not only defined light as the universal constant, he also defined relativity around that same law. His thinking repudiated centuries of thinking that presumed the earth or sun to be the reference point for all universal observations.

His thinking shook the world, because it made all observations of space-time, “relative” to the position of the observer, regardless of the observer’s position.

That is a useful line of argument, but it breaks down instantly if the observer steps out of the universe, for then all time and space events inside the system must be uniquely relative to the absolute position of the external observer. This does not refute relativism, it confirms it. God is the external observer who defines all time and all existence, relative to His absolute constancy and as such all space-time is ultimately relative to Him.

Jesus confirmed this, saying that “the times and seasons knows no man, but His Father only”. So even Jesus is subject to the ultimate absolute and as such His Father was His only reference point throughout His lifetime ministry.

This brings up an interesting idea. We have always concluded that there is no time in heaven, for eternity is timeless. Whilst that has merits, I must conclude that relativism is still constant in heaven, for Jesus abided by that law in His life and will continue to do so until he rolls up the heavens like a garment and time is no more.

Eternity has no finite beginning or end, but within eternity are discrete seasons that do start and end – in fact “Project Earth” is one such example of a season with a defined beginning and end. To that end we can empirically confirm the beginning and we also know that there will be an end, for the sun is slowly burning out.

Seasons are event horizons. They are also time-based, because they have a beginning and an end. So we can safely conclude that time does exist in heaven. This agrees with relativism, in terms of which eternity is only true for the absolute, external point of reference, namely The Father. Thus all sub-sets of His domain are also sub-sets of eternity and thus subject to time: that includes heaven, which having been made by Him does have a defined beginning and an implied end.

I will explore this further in my next article.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net