Let us posit, just for discussion, that God, the Creator of the Universe, is eternal and unlimited and is therefore beyond human comprehension. We can only see Him/Her/It partially and imperfectly. But we can see His effects, that is, His creation; the Universe. The universe, then must be a reflection of its creator and by the study of the universe we can come to know something of the creator, however shallow our understanding must be. I hope theists and agnostics can both agree on this. Atheists, hang around for a few and I think you'll see where this goes.
In America today there are two competing theories on the creation of the universe, the scientific and Creationism. Science is based on our direct observations of God’s actual creation, the Universe as we see it around us. Creationism, on the other hand is based on stories created by man, oh, so imperfect man, who claimed to be inspired by God and wrote, an imperfect and self-contradictory story in Genesis. We have God's word in his own creation and we have Man's word in Creationism. Which of these do you think will be more reliable?
Let us take a look of what we know about our universe, what we have discovered with our senses and our minds, minds by the way, that are gifts from God.
We look into the sky and we see a sky full of stars. Using the mind that God granted us, astronomers have worked to understand that sky. And we find that the center of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, is 10,000 light years away. That is, the light we are seeing started its journey 10,000 years ago. We also can see the nearest galaxy to ours is 30,000 light years away. Further, we have found things like quasars that are 2.3 billion light years away. Astronomers use four methods to measure distance and therefore age and all four produce consistent results so I think that we can rely on these measurements.
I'd like to stop for a moment and discuss one of the methods scientists use to measure how old the light is from distant stars. All of these methods can be complex and therefore can be difficult to understand for the layman. I think this one is fascinating, maybe because I can understand it. All stars produce light that can be broken down and measured through a prism. The light from stars measured this way show a consistent pattern, a pattern that has gaps in the spectrum where certain narrow bands of light are absorbed by the elements in the stars themselves. As stars move away from our position the stretching effect of the Universe expanding causes the light to 'stretch' and shift towards the red end of the spectrum, sort of like a sound moving away seems to get lower. The amount of stretching can be measured using Hubble's Constant, 160km/second per million light years. Scientists can measure this shift of the gaps and determine how long that light has been traveling to get to Earth.
You can see from the chart that the spectrum hasn't changed. What has moved is the breaks in the spectrum from absorption of specific wave lengths by certain elements in the stars. They have moved to the right, the red shift. And by comparing this shift with other methods we can tell how long that amount of shift would take. In this case it is 1 billion years, give or take a Saturday.
Physicists have calculated using the cosmic microwave background radiation levels that the Universe has to be at least 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 0.037 billion years.
Physicists have also been able to calculate the age of the Universe using the Hubble Constant. Hubble's Constant is a measure of how much the Universe is expanding. By simplification in the equation, what is leftover is how old the Universe is, and it comes up to the same 13.7 billion years. This is common sense. If the constant measures the rate of expansion, by calculating backward you can tell how long the constant has been running. The Universe itself teaches us it came into being some 13.7 billion years ago. The Universe itself tells us how old it is, just like the rings in a tree tell us how old it is.
Let's look at what another of the Sciences tell us about the world, Geology. Geologists have found that the continents are not stable, that is they are moving over time. Using lasers and satellites, they have measured the movement of the continents. This isn't a theory, or a guess. They have observed the movement as slow as it is. Once you know the rate of movement and the direction, it is very simple math, just with big numbers to run the clock back and see where the continents used to be and how long it would take them to get where they are now. 130 million years ago, North and South America broke away from Europe and Africa. You can actually see where they used to fit together, and there are fossils from both coasts that show they were together at one time.
And another of the sciences, chemistry has developed methods based on the decay of radioactive particles to date items found back from thousands of years to billions of years. All these methods produce consistent dates. An example is carbon dating, which most people have at least heard of. This is the way it works. Nature creates a very small amount of an isotope, carbon 14. Like all isotopes carbon 14 breaks down over time into carbon 12, the stable form of carbon. Once an organism dies, it no longer absorbs carbon 14 and the isotope begins to decay at a known rate. By measuring the amount we can know when the organism died. Scientists have dated items like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Shroud of Turin, and Otzi, the man frozen in a Swiss glacier with good accuracy up to 60,000 years before present. By then, the carbon 14 is too rare to measure accurately.
Chemists have found many other methods of dating, Potassium- argon, obsidian hydration, oxygen isotope to name a few. The important thing is that all of these methods serve to validate the other methods, that is, they find similar results and support the validity of all the methods.
Biologists have used their understanding of the rate of change in DNA to track human populations around the world and found that we came from a common ancestor 70 thousand years ago in Africa. They have also traced the changes in DNA between humans and bonobos, we share 99% of the same genome, to a common ancestor about 7 million years ago. We did not evolve from Bonobos, but they are our closest relative. We share a common ancestor which has since gone extinct.
Biology gives us another date that cannot be reconciled with Genesis, the Old Tjikko tree in Norway which is 9,550 years old. It was growing thousands of years before Genesis says the world started. Which do I believe, the man created story, or the actual tree that God created. I know man didn't create a nine thousand year old tree to fool us.
One of the biggest changes to biology is the DNA analysis now going on which allows biologists to classify animals based on their genome rather than how they look. This data is rewriting our understanding of how and where various species arose, and no, it wasn't the flood a few thousand years ago.
I can't myself do any of these measures. I'm not trained. But I do know if I got trained I could and more importantly, everyone who is trained gets the same results. The methods work.
Now, you may be able to say, well, that one method, I don't trust the results for some reason. Okay, fine. But what a rational person cannot do is look at the fact that all of these methods in so many disciplines, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology all have tests of dates for the world and for people and all of them point to the same time line. They make a coherent whole that agrees and is supported by observed facts.
What we have is a completely consistent picture from all the sciences of a universe 14 billion years old, an Earth a 4.5 billion years old, life existing over 760 million years ago, our ancestors splitting off from the other apes 7 million years ago and 'modern' humans existing 70,000 years ago.
What is important to remember is the method of science is experimentation; the checking of theory against reality. The other day I was watching a YouTube film of physicists from Nottingham University. The interviewer was asking them some off the wall questions, like what would happen if the universal constants were different? One fellow commented, that is philosophy, not science. The first thing I want to do as a scientists is set up an experiment to test the theory and we can't set up universes to see what happens if we change the strength of gravity.
And I thought, ‘Yes, that is the point isn't it!’ Scientists don't just come up with theories. Richard Feynman described the process like this: Guess the law; compute the consequences; test it against reality. Scientists have to test their ideas against reality, then other scientists have to test them and make sure they come up with the same answer. And when scientists in every discipline over hundreds of years come up with the same answer, it isn't a theory any more. It is rock solid fact.
On the other hand, we have the Creationist theory which says the world is only 7,000 years old, and believers go absolutely bonkers because they think God told them something different than the plain facts. So here is the second part of my thought experiment. For it to be true that the world is 7,000 years old, then God must have created a Universe full of deception to trick the best minds among us. 7,000 years ago, God started light traveling towards the Earth. Some had to be created just above the Earth, then gradually the source of the creation of light must be getting further and further away. Now the light we are seeing was created 7,000 years ago and it was created 7,000 light years away. But God also made some of this light that appears to be coming from greater distances and did this all at once knowing he would be tricking us 7,000 years later once we became knowledgeable enough to calculate these distances. So He created light that was 2,000 lights years away that appeared to be 8,000 years old, then light 5,000 light years away that appeared to be 5,000 years old, etc., for everything in the sky, all of the billions of stars we have seen. He couldn't have created the whole thing at once because that light from those other galaxies wouldn't get here for another billion years.
He started the continents moving 7,000 years ago but made it look like they had been connected in exactly the right way to have separated a hundred million years ago. The same is true of all of the sciences: physics, geology, chemistry, biology; God created them all to give us a completely consistent picture of the Universe that is dead wrong. He wanted us to think the Universe is much older than it really is. I'm not saying God couldn't do it. An unlimited being by definition could do anything. But why? Would God really be the biggest liar of all time? The biggest trickster of all time? Does this sound like something God would do?
Opposed to the consistent and intrinsic picture of reality provided by all the sciences is the literal interpretation of the human written Genesis of the Creationists. Creationism is based on the first book of the Bible, Genesis. But Genesis is actually two different stories that contradict each other in fundamental facts. In the first myth, the stages of creation are separated into six days. The earth is covered in water. God commands the waters covering the earth to separate, forming land and sea. God creates man and woman (both unnamed) together from the dust, then tells them to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. God gives the man and woman dominion over the earth. There is no Garden of Eden where the man and woman must remain or a snake to tempt them or original sin. There are no geographical references. The animals of the sea and air are created on Thursday, while the animals of the land, including man, are created on Friday.
In contrast, the second myth does not mention any separation of time periods. The earth is bone dry, not a drop of water anywhere. The Lord, coming from a different source the story uses a different name, has not caused it to rain yet. He then causes water to spring up from beneath the dry Earth. The Lord creates Adam, then later creates Eve from Adam's rib. Adam and Eve are not told to be fruitful and multiply. The Lord does not give man dominion. The Garden of Eden appears here along with that snake, tree of knowledge and sin. Names of the rivers and lands near the Garden of Eden are included. Man is created before any plants are even created, let alone any animals to eat them. So much for God dictating one perfect and true story. For most people these two contradictory tales are smushed together to 'create' the story we all know. Man is given dominion from one tale and the Garden and Eve's temptation from the other. Just pick and choose the parts you like and ignore the parts that are nonsensical or contradictory and can't both be true. The problem is, you can't do that really and call this a perfect story. It is two myths you have to combine and change and ignore the impossible contradictions to make it seem real. The earth was covered with water, nope, it was bone dry.
What do the Creationists have to support their date of 7,000 years? How did they come up with that date? In two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, there is a lineage of Jesus, one back to Abraham and one all the way back to Adam. So when they count all of the ages of each generation they come close to 7,000 years. There is a problem with this method though. The problem is the two genealogies don’t agree. They only have about 17 names in common, after that they are completely different. Matthew has 40 generations between Abraham and Jesus while Luke has 55 generations to Abraham and another 20 generations back to Adam. Which is right? There is no way to tell. What we can be sure of is one list must be absolutely wrong and that doesn’t give us a lot of confidence in the other list. How can we rely of a method that is completely contradictory? We can’t. Worse, of course, is the Creationists claim this book to be perfect. Perfect? Perfect when the two lists they are using to get their beginning date are only 30% in agreement? Logic says not.
What amazes me about the literalists is that Christians have known from the beginning the Bible can't be read literally. They could see these contradictions. St Augustine in his work De Ordine said we know the world wasn't created in six days. And further he later went on to clarify "We must be on our guard against giving interpretations which are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers (De Genesi ad litteram, I, 19, 21, 39). The Father of all Christian theologians is telling Christians right at the beginning, if your interpretation of the Bible is opposed to science, your reading of the Bible is wrong! Why? The correct interpretation of the Bible won't contradict science because science is the study of God's actual creation and God is not self-contradictory. No one reads the Bible anymore where it mentions the four corners of the World and believes that means the world must be a flat square! Yet, there are people who read the contradictions of Genesis and believe them rather than God's testament which surrounds them, his actual creation.
Science and Religion deal with two different spheres of human knowledge. Science deals with things about which we are certain. The Sun is one of a billion stars. Gravity causes things to attract, like us to the Earth; God is not holding us down. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Religion deals with things about which we can never be certain. What happens after we die, Was there a Creator, etc.? What is amazing is that science which is certain takes a skeptical attitude towards its own certainty while religion, which by its nature asks questions of which we can never be certain, assumes a certainty to which it has no right.
So you have a choice. You can accept a complete and integrated body of knowledge in which each part supports all the other parts and is internally consistent and is how we know God actually built the Universe or you can rely on two lists of names in a myth written thousands of years ago that is self-contradictory and does not agree with what we can see with our own eyes, in which case you must accept that God is the greatest deceiver of all time, that His creation was built as a massive deception. Your choice.
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