The Universe in a Nutshell

That used to be about the size of the universe, if you ask most scientists. For the tiniest fragment of a second, all of the matter and energy we see today was supposedly small enough to be skewered by a pin. I personally find the Big Bang Theory ridiculous for several reasons:

1. There's no explanation for where that matter and energy came from in the first place. The best explanation is that it came from a collapsing universe before it, but that doesn't explain where it came from originally; it just pushes the question back another 30 billion years.

2. The nucleus of an atom is extremely small, something akin to a marble on the pitcher's mound inside a major league stadium, with the electrons running laps around the seats in the upper deck. Even if you were to scale this up (WARNING: This is where I pull out math), it doesn't work. If the nucleus is a basketball, the electrons are about 20 miles away. How many basketballs could fit in a sphere with a 20 mile radius? A lot: about 19.66 quadrillion (assuming all space was filled; actual capacity would be less). Seems like it might work if you had no space in the individual atoms, doesn't it?

Not so fast. Astronomers have discovered a star called VY Canis Majoris, which is about 1.7 billion, yes, billion, miles across. If you were to use the same ratio to condense it, it would still be nearly 6,300 miles across. Not exactly pea-sized. And that's just one star, not the countless stars and planets and nebulae and everything else we see.

3. The Big Bang Theory doesn't explain the red shift we see. Red shift is a phenomenon where stars traveling away from earth appear redder based on how quickly they're moving away relative to us. The universe is actually accelerating, causing an increase in red shifts. Scientists don't know why and have posited that there must be "dark matter" and "dark energy" out there. The dark matter is supposed to explain why light behaves in unexpected ways and the dark energy explains how the universe is speeding up, but both of these are supposedly being created at a fantastic rate, particularly the dark energy, which violates the law conservation of matter and energy.

There is a new theory out there (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25492/) that suggests the universe has no beginning and no end and just expands and contracts. It accurately predicts what happens with the red shift, and wiggles out of 2, but still doesn't explain where everything came from in the first place. It also doesn't explain how the universe knows when to shift from expansion to contraction, how that happens, or how it overcomes gravity at the point of maximum contraction (or conversely, how gravity or another attractive force somehow increase at maximum expansion). Also, if the universe were infinitely old, we'd have practically no radioactive minerals anywhere because of half-lives.

Ok, now that we've gone over some of the basic science of it, it's time to ask an important question or two. First, why is it that people in science continue to laugh at the Bible when all the answers are in it? The Bible is actually one of the most scientifically accurate books out there, insofar as it mentions science. It told us that worker ants were female (most versions of Proverbs 6:6 say "learn her ways". Both when the Bible was written and when it was translated were male-dominated societies that would have tended to call animals as hes or its if the gender was unknown.

It says the stars are innumerable in Genesis 15:5. Before the telescope, though, many men tried and the counts usually came up at about 1,000, which is easily countable. It has only been since the invention of the telescope that we've seen the Bible proven right.

Isaiah states that the earth is round in Isaiah 40:22, referring to the "circle of the earth", over 200 years before Pythagoras first theorized that the earth was round and over 400 years before Aristotle accepted it on empirical grounds.

Job 26:7 says God hung the earth on nothing. Other cultures believed it rested on the back of some great beast or Titan. It wasn't until Copernicus in about 1500 that we have a scientist realizing the earth has nothing under it.

Acts 17:26 says we are all of one blood. Until recently, scientists thought there were vast differences between races. We know the opposite to be true now.

Job 38:16 talks of springs in the sea. Scientists have now found hot springs at the bottom of the ocean.

Can these all be lucky guesses? Blind rhetoric that turned out true? It's quite possible that the writers themselves did not understand what was being said, particularly not in its entirety, but the odds of all of these being true are remarkably small if you assume blind guesses, particularly when other surrounding cultures held directly opposing beliefs or were completely ignorant.

No, it's that man wants to be separate from God. We want to live our lives apart from His rules and believe somehow that if we can reason Him out of our lives, He doesn't exist. Psalm 19:1 reads, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands." As scientists run out of answers and start breaking their own accepted laws to wedge their theories in, maybe a few of them will realize that the answers have been in the church and not the observatory or the lab. Maybe they will finally realize that their telescopes are not the real windows to the beginning of Creation. But if they are true scientists and consider all the evidence, don't they have to at least allow for the possibility of a Creator?