Christianity & Science; The age of the universe

EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - SCIENCE

THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

The age of the universe

By far the most important cause of the conflict that has taken place over dating the age of the universe has arisen because of the insistence of some Christians that the word "day" in Genesis, chapter 1, must refer to a day of 24 hours. It is instructive to trace the history of this interpretation.

A history of the debate

The early Church Fathers had differing views on this subject and they don't seem to have regarded it as a matter of prime importance. For instance, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century used Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 to support their view that the creation days were each a thousand years. Clement of Alexandria a little later claimed that these days communicated the order and priority of created things, but not the time. Origen in the third century taught that we should seek a spiritual meaning, not a literal one, in a difficult passage such as this. For him, time as we mark it did not exist until the fourth day, so the earlier days could not possibly have been 24 hours. Augustine, who wrote more on this subject than any other early writer, said:

As for these "days," it is difficult, perhaps impossible to think - let alone explain in words -what they mean.

In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, he adds:

But at least we know that it [the Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar.

Ambrose, bishop of Milan in the fourth century, is the early church leader quoted most frequently as supporting the interpretation of the six Genesis creation days as a 144-hour period, but even he made statements that are ambiguous and refer to an era or epoch as the word's possible definition.

Through the Dark and Middle Ages, church scholars maintained this tolerant attitude of their forefathers. However, in 1642 things began to change. In that year, thirty-one years after the completion of the King James translation of the Bible, Cambridge University Vice-Chancellor, John Lightfoot, published his calculation of the exact day for the creation of the Universe - September 17, 3928 BC. He drew this conclusion by analysing the genealogies in Genesis, Exodus, 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Chronicles, taking the years cited as precisely 365 days. Eight years later, James Ussher, an Anglican Bishop of Ireland, also with copious calculations, published his date, making it October 3, 4004 BC. In a final round of academic sparring, Lightfoot made a final adjustment to Ussher's date. All creation took place during the week of October 18-24, 4004 BC, with the creation of Adam occurring on October 23 at 9.00 am, forty-fifth meridian time!

Remarkably, the date of 4004 BC became firmly fixed in the minds of millions and was taken seriously, with little or no question, for more than a century. From the turn of the eighteenth century onward, editions of the King James Bible included Ussher's chronology as margin notes, or even as headings, in the text. Further, this Bible quickly became the translation of the English-speaking world, when English Protestantism was spreading throughout the world. Sadly, this proved an unnecessary barrier to the spread of the gospel in Asia because Chinese historical records gave an earlier date for the origin and spread of human civilisation.

The impact of geology

It was the geologists who eventually undermined this view in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. William Smith, the "father of English geology", constructed the first geologic column of fossil-bearing rocks in 1799. Lyell, d'Orbigny and Hall, building on the earlier work of Werner, Hutton, Smith, Cuvier and Lamarck, concluded from their calculations of geological deposition rates that life must have existed on earth for at least a quarter of a billion years, with significant progressive changes over that time. Also, the evidence was growing that the fossiliferous rocks could not have been deposited by one particular flood such as that described in Noah's day, however extensive that might have been. This was before any theory of evolution had surfaced. The view was still widespread that God had responded to various catastrophes with separate, successive creations.

"By the middle of the century almost all educated protestants were content to reconcile Genisis with geology"

In the first half of the nineteenth century there were some fierce skirmishes between the geologists and those who clung to Ussher's chronology. However, the increasing evidence produced by the geologists eventually won the day. Hitchcock, in the US, could write in 1840 of a small minority who were still dragging their feet. By the middle of the century almost all educated Protestants were content to reconcile Genesis with geology.

This situation was generally true for the next hundred years. Even members of the Evolution Protest Movement, launched in London in 1932 with physicist Sir Ambrose Fleming the "father of modern radio" as president, fully accepted the findings of the geologists. Their protest was with evolution, not the age of the earth. A minority in America believed otherwise, but it is doubtful if any of them were professional geologists. Alternative views, whether sensible or otherwise, have tended to be more common in America. (The Creation/Evolution magazine, Winter 1981, reported that the International Flat Earth Research Society had 1,500 members, many of whom were doctors, lawyers and other professional and educated people!)

However, in 1963 recent-creationism took off again as an organised movement with the foundation of the Creation Research Society in America, two years after Whitcomb and Morris published their famous book, The Genesis Flood. This book took a substantial part of the evangelical world by storm. In a surge of enthusiasm several new creationist societies were formed in the USA in the 1960s and a couple in Britain in the 1970s. The majority were formed to promote recent-creationism which was seen as the only reasonable alternative to Darwinism. The influence of this movement has been enormous. Ancient-creationists in America have found themselves becoming a less fashionable minority, with the trend in Britain following not very far behind.

The evidence from geology for the ancient age of the earth, and the impossibility of the observed phenomena being created by a single Genesis Flood, is literally massive. This evidence comes from many sources: the strata in the sedimentary rocks; the billions of fossils and their distribution; the quantity of coal in the earth's crust; the Yellowstone petrified forests where 44 successive forest layers have been discovered in one huge stack; the Haymond sedimentary column in the USA which contains more than 30,000 alternating layers of shale and sandstone, etc. However, over the last generation new evidence has arisen which overshadows that produced by geology. This evidence is concerned not primarily with the age of the earth, but the age of the universe.

The impact of astronomy

The nineteenth century astronomers were not far behind the geologists in concluding that the universe was far older than people had thought. England's greatest astronomer of the age was the German-born Sir William Herschel. By 1800 he had calculated the distances of many remote stars in our galaxy. He realised that the light from these galaxies must have taken very much more time than 6,000 years to reach our planet. In the 1830s Friedrich Bessel, using improved instruments, confirmed his basic findings, and other astronomers followed fast. In 1850 the Christian writer, John Pye Smith, concluded in his book On the Relation Between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science that:

These views of the antiquity of that vast portion of the Creator's works which Astronomy discloses, may well abate our reluctance to admit the deductions of Geology, concerning the past ages of our planet's existence.

The theory of relativity

At the beginning of this century Einstein formulated the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1916). For most of us ordinary mortals, understanding of this theory hardly goes beyond the famous limerick of Arthur Buller that appeared in Punch on December 19, 1923:

There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned home the previous night.

However mysterious, this theory was shown to be accurate to one part in a hundred million by Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor in 1993. They received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in this area.

The big bang

The Theory of Relativity concerns the relationship of energy, matter and time in the universe. American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, discovered in 1924 that ours was not the only galaxy in the universe, and in 1929 that the universe was expanding. Einstein's work between 1917 and 1930 pointed to the fact that the universe is not only expanding, but that its rate of expansion is slowing down. What physical phenomenon would produce simultaneous expansion and deceleration? An explosion. In other words the universe had a beginning.

"The fitting together of various pieces of research in this regard, both theoretical and observational, is the kind of thing scientists dream about"

In 1970, three British astrophysicists, George Ellis, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose took this a step further. Working on the space-time theorems of general relativity, their work showed that if general relativity truly describes the physical dynamics of the universe, not only did matter and energy have a finite beginning, but so did space and time. This beginning has become known as the "big bang". A Belgian priest/scientist, George Lemaitre, had first called it the "big noise". Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle insultingly referred to it as the "big bang" and the name stuck. It is now the accepted picture in university science faculties of the way things began.

Over the past decades astronomers have amassed a tremendous amount of information about the universe. They have developed well-proven techniques for determining the temperature, the mass, the composition and the energy output of stars. This knowledge has been advanced significantly by the Hubble Space Telescope, placed in orbit in 1990. Since the remarkable correction to a flaw in this telescope, done by space walkers from the shuttle Endeavor in 1993, it has continued to send back breathtaking pictures in colour of our universe that are ten times sharper than those produced by earthbound telescopes. This telescope is expected to have a useful life of another ten years and who knows what amazing discoveries it will reveal in that time, or even before this booklet gets into print?

Since April 1992, probes done by the Hubble Telescope, together with the Roentgen Satellite and several land-based telescopes, have made a significant discovery. For some time cosmologists have been puzzled by the fact that radiation left over from the big bang (discovered in 1965) appears to be smoothly distributed throughout the universe. This would lead us to expect that matter, too, would be smoothly distributed. But this is not so. This was one of the remaining puzzles about the big bang theory. However, the presence of what is called "exotic" matter in the universe, that only acts weakly with radiation, and the "cosmic ripples" in the background radiation, which were confirmed by these probes, provides the explanation. And the ratio of exotic to ordinary matter fits the picture exactly. The fitting together of various pieces of research in this regard, both theoretical and observational, is the kind of thing scientists dream about.

As reported by Dr Hugh Ross in Christianity Today, Carlos Frenk, of Britain's Durham University, exclaimed to reporters, "[It's] the most exciting thing that's happened in my life as a cosmologist." Cambridge University's Stephen Hawking, a master of theoretical physics and of understatement, described just one of the several breakthroughs as "the discovery of the century, if not of all time." Michael Turner, University of Chicago and Fermilab astrophysicist, said researchers have found "the Holy Grail of cosmology." George Smoot, University of California at Berkeley and leader of one of the breakthrough projects, said: "What we have found is evidence of the birth of the universe...It's like looking at God." Science historian, Frederic Burnham, adds that many scientists have suddenly come to consider God's creation of the universe, "a more respectable hypothesis today than any time in the last 100 years."

Scientists now tell us they can describe many events right back to the first fraction of a second (t=10 -10) of our universe's existence when it existed as a source incomparably compact and incomparably hot (1014 K). Eminent historian of science, Owen Gingerich, describes events at that point of time in these words:

At that point, at a second split so fine than no clock could measure it, the entire observable universe is compressed within the wavelike blur described by the uncertainty principle, so tiny and compact that it could pass through the eye of a needle. Not just this room, or the earth, or the solar system, but the entire universe squeezed into a dense dot of pure energy. And then comes the explosion.

"There is no way to express that explosion," writes Robinson Jeffers,

"...All that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from
each other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer
nebulae like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness."

It's an amazing picture, of pure incredible energetic light being transformed into matter, and leaving its vestiges behind. It's even more astonishing when we realise that the final fate of the universe, whether it will expand forever or fall back on itself to a future Big Crunch, was determined in that opening moment.

"What we have found is evidence of the birth of the universe... It's like looking at God"
G. Smoot

This remarkable event, with everything in existence springing forth from that blinding flash, bears a striking resemblance to the picture given in Genesis 1:3, "And God said, Let there be light." Who could have guessed even a hundred years ago - not to mention two or three thousand years ago - that the scientific picture would emerge with energy in its various forms, including electromagnetic radiation, as the starting point of creation! It is interesting also that there are more than seventy-five verses in the Bible affirming that the universe had a beginning and that God created it.

Further back from this first millisecond, the present known laws of physics do not allow our scientists to go. If this is indeed the beginning of space and time, then the God who achieved it exists beyond the confines of both, a picture that fits perfectly with that which we find in the Bible. And if any state existed prior to the Big Bang, then Christians physicists such as Polkinghorne would maintain that this is still the work of our Creator God. Even a "quantum vacuum" is a created entity.

And if it is true, as seems the case, that neither time nor matter existed before the big bang, however scientists of an atheistic bent may try to explain it, it at least raises the question as to whether it had any cause or not. If it had a cause, then at least God looks to be a very probable possibility. If it had no cause, then the words of Professor Dallas Willard of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California are very relevant: "We must at least point out that an eternally self-subsistent being is no more improbable than a self-subsistent event emerging from no cause." As C. S. Lewis pointed out in God in the Dock, "An egg which came from no bird is no more natural than a bird which had existed from all eternity."

"How long ago did this event occur? Various methods for measuring the age of the universe, such as expansion of the universe, colour-luminosity fitting, deuterium abundance and mass density, anthropic principles and nucleochronology, yield reasonably consistent figures, give or take a billion or two years. However, scientists now believe they can date this event more accurately. About 300,000 years after the initial Big Bang, electrons combined with protons to form atoms, leaving the universe like a big microwave oven. Today the microwave temperature is 2.725ºK (minus 270ºC). The microwaves have been travelling for more than ten billion years. The discovery of this microwave background, first observed by the Horn Antenna at Holmdel, New Jersey, and more recently, the discovery of certain fluctuations in that background, have enabled scientists to extrapolate the expansion of the universe back in time to when the galaxies were all together. After years of uncertainty due to the difficulty of measuring over such astronomical distances, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe in 2003 narrowed the universe's age to 13.7 billion years, with an error margin of less than two percent.

For those who would explore further the scientific evidence for this amazing event that marked the beginning of space, time, energy and matter, I would commend Rob Yule's excellent booklet The Discovery of the Beginning: How the greatest scientific discovery of our time points to the Creator [1].

In 1860, Thomas Huxley, reviewing Darwin's Origin of the Species in Westminster Review, wrote with glee:

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated. But orthodoxy is the bourbon of the world of thought, it learns not, neither can it forget.

It is instructive to compare this with the often quoted statement of Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This was written in 1978, well before the recent discoveries described above. He wrote in God and the Astronomers:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Having explored the debate concerning the age of the universe, we now turn to the second area of conflict, the theory of evolution.