Clough Evolution Lesson 12

Problems of the Evolutionary Hypothesis (4) Schemes & Problems of Theories

We’ve discussed the role of Chance and shown the great difficulty in using Chance as a mechanism or explanation for evolution. Men have realized this and therefore in this section I would like to deal with two categories of proposals to mend the fence after the assault upon Chance. In other words, Chance by itself, randomly operating in purely non-intelligent base, is incapable of accounting for evolution in any straightforward fashion. Therefore men, because they have felt this pressure that Chance is an insufficient explanation have tried to come up with some answers to replace Chance. These answers generally fall in two categories.

The first category I’d like to call the cataclysmic or catastrophic evolutionary scheme. And the second category I would like to call the schemes of mystical evolution, sometimes called theistic evolution but I prefer the term mystical evolution.

Let’s deal first with the category of cataclysmic or catastrophic evolution. Probably the most famous spokesman for this position is a man by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky created quite a stir, particularly in the 1950s with three books that he wrote in that time. In 1950 he wrote a book called Worlds in Collision; in 1953 he wrote a book detailing the history of the ancient world called Ages in Chaos; and in 1955 he came out with another book detailing what he felt was the geological history of paralleling his earlier history of civilizations, early civilizations. This book he called Earth in Upheaval. To give you a flavor for Velikovsky’s hypothesis I quote from page 247 of the paperback version of Earth in Upheaval. And he says this: (quote) “On evolution as a geological fact all are agreed.” We are not, but nevertheless Velikovsky said “all are agreed. But on the mechanism of evolution the disagreement has been fundamental. Natural selection cannot account for the wholesale destruction of many genre and species at one time. It may occasionally be the agent exterminating single species but can natural selection create new species?” And of course it cannot. “Despite all our efforts breeders have not been able to cross the true frontier of a species. Then how could a new species originate in Chance variation and through cross-breeding in wildlife. Spontaneous mutations are far too few and insufficient in magnitude to bring about the appearance of new species and to explain how the world of animals came into existence. Despite all spontaneous variations, no new species of mammals are known to have been created since the close of the Ice Age.”

Now to understand Velikovsky’s position you have to understand that he is accepting the basic framework for earth history time wise. In other words, he looks upon the fossil record and accepts the fact that the fossil record is a record that is chronologically in sequence, namely that you have a progression in the fossil record from earlier, immature more simple forms, to later more sophisticated, more developed forms. Thus, Velikovsky says that it’s obvious that there’s no real mechanism operating today that can account for this and therefore one has to posit some other mechanism to do this. Well, Velikovsky is hypothesizing catastrophism. In other words, he believes that sudden catastrophes brought in barrages of cosmic rays to set off great numbers of sudden mutations. He also suggests in his writings, perhaps life, or at least some forms, came fro outer space by comets and so on. In other words, what Velikovsky is doing is accepting the basic fossil framework of earth history and saying yes, the earth is very, very old, and it’s rock strata that we are observing basically is a rock strata formed by the gradual change of species but there were steps. In other words, instead of a smooth upward curve, such as on a piece of graph paper, you have a step function like you going up stairs; suddenly you go up then it levels for a while, then suddenly you go up and then it levels for a while. And Velikovsky basically is catastrophist in the sense that he believes there is a sequence of catastrophes in past history that is sufficient to generate enough mutation so that some of these mutations will result in new offspring.

So at this point we find an admission, at least by Velikovsky that classical orthodox Darwinianism and Neo-Darwinianism has failed. It has failed to account for some of the data on which it is based. So therefore Velikovsky has come up with a cataclysmic form of evolution. Now I would like to make three criticism of Velikovsky’s position.

First, it is sheer speculation. In other words, Velikovsky is operating in the dark. You can’t take a time machine and go back in time and see if such catastrophes really happened. It all has to be built up from circumstantial evidence. And this is precisely why most orthodox scientists do not wish to go the route of catastrophism because it lends itself to uncontrolled speculation. When you get in the area of catastrophism anybody can speculate about anything. So there’s naturally a reticence on the part of the scientific community, that’s a mild word but nevertheless, a reticence on the part of the scientific community to go along with Velikovsky because of this. It’s sheer speculation.

My second criticism of Velikovsky would be that he still has to encounter the problems of the destructiveness of mutations. Granted you have mutations, perhaps a thousand fold increase, but nevertheless you also have your destructiveness a thousand fold increase, and of course, Velikovsky’s immediate reply would be that yes, and this is why it’s true that many species died out; freak forms couldn’t fertilize one another and you didn’t have any more reproduction. But nevertheless, one does face a problem of mutation and in such a speculative atmosphere you still have this problem of destructiveness. It’s true that the entire previous category of beings could have been wiped out by sudden series of mutation rates; mutation rates increase a thousand fold by a sudden series of catastrophes but the point still remains that how many would really survive? How many would really survive a massive bombardment like this. It seems to me it would eliminate everything. And it is a matter of fact in the fossil record that there have been many, many species that have survived unchanged from their earliest appearance in the fossil record on up to the present day. How do you explain the fact that certain species have survived unchanged? You would think these massive bombardments of cosmic rays would have affected them; what was their secret of survival.

And then my third criticism of Velikovsky is that basically it postpones the ultimate questions of the origin of life. Now if you say that life is brought to the earth from meteorites or somewhere else you’re right back, well how did life start somewhere else? So it’s basically just postponing the ultimate question.

This is one form of the first category of ultimate explanations to chance, catastrophic evolution. The second one I have just recently run across; it’s put out by Max Flindt. I would call this astral colonization. Max Flindt is an outstanding laboratory research worker at Berkley and Stanford. His book is entitled On Tiptoe Beyond Darwin, printed in 1961, reprinted in 1965 by the Redwood Trade Bindery, 1526 Stafford St., Redwood, California, 94063. In this book Max Flindt posits that man has a unique set of characteristics, so unique that they cannot be accounted for by evolution from humanoid forms. And therefore Max Flindt basically hypothesizes, and I quote him at this point, that “mankind is a hybrid, and further that he and much of life on earth may be a colony, an intentional colony put here, nurtured here, by persons unknown from outer space.” What he is saying is that the barrier between man and ape is so great or between man and his earlier anthropoid ancestors is so great that it cannot be bridged by any conceivable theory of evolution, and so therefore Flindt hypothesizes that the jump from the earlier forms to the later forms is somebody that came from outside the system, somebody that came from outside the planet, indeed a higher intelligence from outer space came and interbred with these earlier ape-like forms on this planet and gave rise to man.

Now this is again, like Velikovsky, is sheer explanation, but nevertheless it is an evidence that quite a few people of rather high intelligence are driven to hypothesize this because Chance is failing today; more and more as men study, more and more are more and more people coming to be aware that the traditional forms of evolution just are not working; they are not sufficient to explain what they have to explain, the origin of life through macro evolution.

Now we come to the second category of evolutionary schemes and these are probably wider known than the first two. I call these mystical evolutionary schemes. And basically what this says is that evolution occurred and that there was a guiding force behind evolution so that you hypothesize god, with a little “g” and I’m convinced, by the way, that the god that’s being hypothesized to account for this is not the God of the Bible, it’s a god of man’s own mind and he should not be dignified with a capital “G”, it should be a little “g”. But this god who is apotheosized to take care of evolution overcomes Chance and thereby neutralizes the impact of the anti-Chance arguments given above.

Now this is introduced by many writers. Henri Bergson called his scheme creative evolution. DeNouy called it telefinalism. I would say the most popular man today representing this viewpoint is Teilhard DeChardin. Teilhard was a Catholic Jesuit anthropologist who died in 1955; his work was felt to be heretical by the Catholic Church until after his death and his work was suppressed by church action until the time of his death when some of his friends published it, and of course now he’s become a big hero within the Catholic Church. Teilhard basically, although it is denied, has strong pantheistic tendencies. As a boy it is told that he used to worship rocks and I think in his later life he still worshiped rocks, frankly. But according to Teilhard God made matter with a psychic urge. It was kind of a sort of built-in mentality which would grow up into higher and higher states. In other words, the whole universe is one big organism. In other words you have the first state of the universe in its very primitive form and it actually grows in itself. Inorganic matter has some sort of a psychic urge that drives it to develop into living material. It seems to me there’s very little difference in saying that there was one complex primitive beginning atom that has grown into the whole universe much like an egg growing into a chicken, and so we have the whole universe alive. Man has biologically evolved up to the present time, Teilhard claims, but now man is in addition to biologically evolving is now beginning, because he is self-aware of himself, self-consciousness and so on, man has reached this point, now not only is man biologically evolving but he’s psycho-socially evolving. Man has become conscious of himself and so now he is evolving in ideology, in philosophical intellectual achievement. So here we have a kind of mystical evolution where the whole universe is somehow alive.

Now I would like to make two criticisms against this. First of all it cannot be made to jibe with the text of Genesis 1-11 and this is why I spent so much time to explain the limitations that you encounter in interpreting Genesis 1-11. It’s not just some sort of book that you can read anything into there you want to. There are certain very definite limitations and in no way can this view of Teilhard DeChardin be ever harmonized with Genesis 1-11. But more basic than this, not only does it not jibe with the history presented to us in the Bible but it destroys the Biblical picture of God’s character and the Biblical picture of suffering. The god, for example, who is seen, and this is the same old god with a little “g”, the god who is manufactured by Teilhard DeChardin to account for all this is a god that’s somehow half creator and half creation. It’s the same kind of thinking that those of you who are acquainted with modern theology will encounter in something known as process theology; you have kind of a split god who is half-creature and half-creator, and basically all this is is a philosophic projection of these men’s own minds.

So therefore they’ve distorted the Biblical concept of god making him half-creator and half-creation and also they have the creation as a result of the fall and not the fall occurring after creation. You see, the Bible puts creation first, finished, and then into this normal good creation is introduced abnormality, disorder and sin, and death, as a result of the fall a historic fall in space and time. The Bible’s order is first creation, then the fall. But if god has really brought into existence our present universe in the way that these men would say, by evolving itself, then we have the fall logically preceding creation because creation hasn’t been finished yet and the fall, suffering, death, disease, disorder is all part of the process god is using to bring about a final creation. And this is directly antithetical to Scripture. There is a new creation in Scripture but this is entirely different…entirely different!

The Biblical position is that the universe existed in a normal state into which a sickness or abnormality was introduced by the fall of man in that order. With this order of mystical evolution you must say that suffering is inherent to the whole thing, and once you do this you implicate God very seriously; His character of love comes to be questioned very seriously at this point.

These are two ways that modern man has of skirting around the arguments from Chance and as the Chance arguments are stripped and laid bare for what they really are, very impoverished imaginative explanation for things, then men will more and more try to go to these other things to explain how evolution came about Now up to this point we have dealt in generalities, we have dealt generally with the principle of evolution, we have dealt with some of the men’s response to the attacks against Chance, but now we would like to go, in our outline, to specifics, passing from the general and move now to the specifics and we’d like to take up some specific problems of both cosmic and macro evolution.

We would first like to deal with specific problems of cosmic evolution and then move to some specific problems of macro evolution. Remember that cosmic evolution we defined at the beginning of this series to be the evolution that accounts for all of reality, not only the planet earth and the biological kingdom on it but the planet itself, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. So cosmic evolution is evolution taken to its logical limits. And we’d like first to deal with this. Now in dealing with cosmic evolution we want to recall the fact that there are only three options available to explain the origin of the universe.

First you have creation; creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing; for all eternity God existed and then at a point in time God created, rather, He created time and space at the same moment. The second option would be Chance, that the universe sprung into existence from Chance, out of nothing by Chance. Of course, if this is true, then that makes Chance ultimate and there’s no guarantee that the universe won’t spring back from its present condition back into void of Chance tomorrow and therefore cutting back the rational base of all scientific structure. The third option is to have an eternal universe always existing but passing through different phases and stages. The only trouble with this third option is that you have the problem of very improbable fluctuations in past time. You have the problem of the second law that it would seem that the universe, if it’s running down and had been eternal would have already run down and died. So therefore the universe could not be eternal, or if it is eternal then at one time in the past the universe made a very improbably fluctuation and these were discussed before.

Now there are specific forms of theories explaining the origin of the universe and I would say that most of them fall into the third alternative, that is that the eternal universe, undergoing the very improbable fluctuation in time past into its present form. The most popular cosmogony at the present day is George Gamow’s Big Bang Theory. Gamow is a very skillful writer, very brilliant man and has put forward the idea that the universe is explosively expanding from some time billions of years ago when everything was condensed down into one small space. When asked how the universe condensed down into this small space Gamow says that it had been preceding on a collapsing trend for billions of years before that point so that you have the universe collapsing over billions and billions of years down to a point and then expanding from that point outward for billions and billions of years on this side. Gamow’s theory has four basic problems with it and our criticism is once again to show that the alternate theories of the origin of the universe are at least as troubled, if not more so than the simple straightforward literal biblical creation.

For example, Gamow’s theory encounters four problems. First, he must explain all existing elements as having evolved from simple hydrogen and so you have a progression up the atomic scale from hydrogen, and at the atomic weight of five we find a gap in the scale, and one wonders then how the elements bridged this gap because today we have no element of atomic weight five so that if you went from one, two, three, four, how did you go from four to six, how did you break that gap? Gamow claims that many of the main elements of our physical universe today came into existence some thirty minutes after the explosion occurred.

A second criticism is how the universe’s matter got condensed down in the first place into such a conglomerate mass, such a highly compressed mass. One physicist likens this to a group of people in a room in a circle firing at the center of the circle with rifles all at the same time and having the bullets hit the point exactly at the same time and coalescence into one cannonball. Now the probability of this fluctuation is very, very small.

A third criticism is that the Andromeda Galaxy M31 is reported to have a blue shift. Now the importance of this is that if the universe is expanding, then all galaxies are expanding away from each other and therefore viewed from our point in the universe all galaxies should have a shift in the light spectrum toward the red end of the spectrum. This is a Doppler effect. For example, you can see this operate if you stand next to a railroad track and if a train is approaching you the sound waves, of course, are moving at the speed of sound but they also have added to it the velocity of the train. And so therefore when they hit you they come to you faster than you are normally used to and so therefore they tend to increase, the frequency of the sound so you have a high pitched sound when the train is coming toward you. However, when the train is going away from you the sound waves, traveling at the speed of sound under that particular atmospheric condition are traveling at the speed of sound toward you minus the velocity of the railroad train, and so here the sound waves impact your ear drums at a slower rate than normal and therefore give you the illusion that the sound if of lower frequency, and here we have a shift to the lower frequency.

Now if the universe, similarly, light waves are coming to us from the most distant parts of the universe and these parts of the universe are running away from us at fantastic speed, one would expect that the light waves would shift toward the red end or the low frequency end of the spectrum because they’re coming to us at the speed of light minus the velocity of expansion at that particular point of the universe. And so therefore you have a red shift or a shift in the light spectrum toward the low frequency end of the spectrum, which is the red. But if the theory is true, then you would expect all points in the universe to be expanding away from us. However, Andromeda Galaxy M31 has a blue shift and if we are to interpret all of these shifts as truly Doppler Effect, then how come we have one exception. There can’t be one exception if the universe is expanding at all points. Much like, for example, if you took a balloon and blew it up and painted dots on the balloon, as you blew the balloon up each dot would move away from each other dot and you could not find one dot on the balloon that would come closer to another dot on the surface of the balloon.

A fourth criticism of the Big Bang theory is that there are apparently two colliding galaxies in Cygnus A and the man who pointed this out, Professor Mulfinger of Bob Jones University notes that this again is an exception to the rule which, if the universe is expanding why these should be occurring.

Now physicists for many years have tried to give alternatives to the Big Bang theory and some of them have the idea of a tired life theory, such as Gerald Hawkins, a British astronomer. And he would interpret the red shift, not due to the fact that the stars are moving away from us but simply that they are so far away that the light has lost its energy and manifested energy loss as they shift to the red end of the spectrum. Of course if this theory is right, both it and the previous theory, the Big Bang theory, do not explain how the universe God here in the first place. They merely postpone and in that way are very insufficient.

George Mulfinger of Bob Jones University, writing in Creation Research Society Journal of September, 1967 under the article, Examining the Cosmogonies, a Historical Review, made an interesting point. He said, “It’s most significant fact that every attempt thus far to bypass the book of Genesis, sooner or later, has run counter to some well established scientific principle or principles.” I think this is something to recall or remember when you hear these theories of the origin of the universe, that basically somewhere on down the line every one of them has violated at least one scientific law. They are desperate attempts on the part of man to imaginatively and creatively explain the origin of the universe and yet every time he does so apart from the help offered to him by God in Genesis, he finds himself in collision with other known scientific material.

Mulfinger makes another point on page 67 of his article and I think this is most intriguing because not only does it show you the problem of erecting some explanation for the origin of the universe that will not be in conflict with scientific law but it goes beyond that and shows you that not only do you have to explain the origin of the universe and the matter/energy in it, and the elements in it, you have to explain the physical laws themselves, were the physical laws somehow in existence in some sort of a vacuum, into which was created matter, and so that when matter appeared it already found…[tape turns]…

…from the same physical laws. Mulfinger says, (quote), “Where did the laws of physics come from? Is there a naturalistic explanation? This question is probably just as vital as the less sophisticated problem of accounting for the material in the world that is so apparent to our senses. Did the laws of physics evolve from simpler laws? Did the Stefan Boltzmann law, which is a fourth power relationship, evolve its way up the evolutionary ladder by gradual changes from the first power law? Did Coulomb’s law and Newton’s law of gravitation, reasoning from their similarity descend from a common ancestor?” Now to a certain degree this is sarcastic but nevertheless, I think the point is true that when you examine these theories of cosmic evolution, remember that you have to not only explain the origin of matter and the origin of energy but you also have to explain the origin of the physical laws themselves. And this is a tremendous problem… a tremendous problem. So we see here that it’s not all sweetness and light when you consider the modern very popular scientific cosmogony.

Furthermore, as we descend from the level of the universe on down through the level of our solar system we discover that one of the explanations most popular today for the origin of our solar system, the sun and its planets, are is the so-called Nebular Hypothesis and the idea is the planets and the sun both evolved out of a nebular cloud of cosmic dust, and you have in the center of this cloud the sun forming and then you have the planets gradually condensing and forming around it. And there are very many variants to this major theory but we’re not concerned with all the fine points, simply to say that still, whichever alternative one would take you have certain problems. First of all you have the problem of inclined orbits, such as Pluto, the comets and the meteors. All planets except Pluto revolve in counterclockwise in circular orbits in the same plain. How come comets and meteors in Pluto do not? If they all condensed out of a cloud one would expect them to have similar orbits.

A second problem with the Nebular Hypothesis is the retrograde motion in the moon of the various planets in our solar system. Of the thirty-two moons that are known to exist in our solar system eleven are revolving about their planets in the wrong way. It’s very interesting that some of the moons revolve one way, some revolve the other. And it’s hard to see how this happened if the Nebular Hypothesis is really true. For example, take Jupiter, Jupiter has twelve moons, four are revolving in one direction about Jupiter and eight are revolving in the other direction. This is very interesting when you have parts of the same family, on the same planet, revolving in opposite directions. For example, Jupiter has two moons, one’s going one way, one’s going the other. Are these just accidents; if these are just accidents and exceptions to theory one wonders about the validity of the theory, for any theory that has eleven out of thirty-two elements to be explained by accidents doesn’t appear to be much of a comprehensive theory.

A third problem would be the retrograde rotation of Uranus and Venus and here we have two planets rotating in the opposite direction from the earth. I think this is rather interesting. If they evolved from the same material somehow you’d expect them to be revolving the same way, yet they’re not.

And the fourth one is the origin of the moon, where did the earth’s moon come from? And I think this is a very interesting point. George Darwin, Charles’ son, in the last of the 19^th century, suggested the moon came from the Pacific Ocean, but a physicist by the name of Jeffries in 1931 proved that this was impossible.

So these are just some of the problems and they’re not presented as a logical refutation but simply to show you that the other side does not have a trouble free situation but is deeply involved with some serious problems, and therefore a Bible-believing Christian should be one who is not ashamed, not afraid to stand up for a literal Biblical cosmogony knowing full well that his explanation is just as good or better than any unbeliever. In fact, if the Word of God is really true, then of course his explanation is the best of all possible explanations.

I’d like to conclude this section of our specific critique against cosmic evolution by relating a statement found in Scientific American, reprint Number 210 entitled The Origin of the Elements, published in September 1956 and the man who said this is a noted physicist by the name of Bondi. And Bondi in referring to these different views of cosmic evolution says that they aren’t really meant to be true, they are only meant to be thought provoking devices to stimulate more new ideas for research. I think this is very interesting because the general impression you would get through the public press, the popular press, is that these really are seriously intended to be true explanations; the public at large, the man in the street, certainly gets the impression from the popular press that when Dr. So and So announces his new theory of the origin of the universe that he’s really serious. But if Bondi’s statement is true, the man isn’t really serious, what the man is doing is creating an explanation for the origin of the universe that he hopes will be fruitful and as a jumping off place for further, more sophisticated, scientific development. In other words they have built in them a very tentative nature.

And I think this is something that a Christian, a Bible-believing Christians really has to understand about all this; this is sort of an academic game that’s being played and men suggest these theories as part of a sort of gamesmanship, and you have to understand this or you get snowed by the false impressions created by the popular press and TV that these men are really serious about creating an absolute explanation for reality and they’re not…they’re not, so Christians should not be misguided by listening to these people.

Now to summarize I would like to give what I feel are several Biblical elements that must be accounted for if the Christian, in opposition to these cosmogonies, is to come out with a Biblical cosmogony. It seems to me any Biblical cosmogony must include all of the following elements:

First, you must include the creation of spiritual dimensions, primarily, personal spirits, the angels, you must have these as the first in a sequence of creative acts of God and you have to say that God created spiritual reality, patterned closely after Himself, in that He created personal spirits which we call angels, before any matter was created. Then God created this planet; we get this as we have covered previously from Job 38 and Ezekiel 28, that we have the creation of this planet. And then somewhere after the creation of this planet you have the third element and that is you have the spiritual fall of Satan. After that you have the fourth element which would be the creation of the seas on the earth. And then you have the fifth element, the creation of light.

And at this point we want to point out something about Scripture, and that is that the earth comes first, not the galaxies that you see on a clear night. The planet earth comes first, then the earth, the planet, is covered with water, then after this God creates life. Now it’s interesting that the light, as created in Genesis 1, was not light emanating from any light-bearing body, such as the sun or star, it was light per se. It was not light bearers, that’s explained later on in Genesis, on the fourth day, but on the first day God created just light, and I think this is very significant because it suggests that God created an energy that was evenly distributed throughout the entire universe, originally, and some of my Christian colleagues, some who are in the Christian Research Society pointed out, it’s interesting that radio astronomers have recently reported background noise that comes uniformly throughout the universe. In other words, if you go to any point in the universe it seems this radio noise is the same quantity; it comes to you equally in all directions. And one man has suggested perhaps this is a residue from the creation of light on the first day of Genesis 1.

I would also suggest that on the first day of creation that God also had a separation between the light and the darkness. What was this separation, the nature of this separation? And here I get into a speculation on my part, but one which I feel is important in understanding the literalness of the seven days of Genesis 1, and that is that you cannot have a sequence of light and darkness in the present universe without planetary rotation, the earth as a planet rotating, exposing first one side and then the other to light. However, if the light was uniformly distributed on the first day of Genesis 1 then there could be no sequence of light and darkness from the planet earth, and therefore how was the sequence of light and darkness if it was not produced by the earth’s rotation in Genesis 1, for as I have said, if it was produced by the earth’s rotation in Genesis 1 it would suggest that light was coming from some sort of separate direction in the universe, it was not evenly distributed throughout the universe, but it was coming from some point source. And yet if it was coming from some point source, it would render the account of the fourth day creative work meaningless because it’s on the fourth day and not until the fourth day that the light is reduced to point sources.

So therefore if the light is of uniform nature, then it would follow that the light and dark sequence of the first, second and third days was produced by an oscillation in the universe; namely the sequence of light and darkness on the first day was produced by an inherent oscillation in the universe of this light energy. One, for example, would see twelve hours of the energy appearing and then for twelve hours the energy does not appear as light; some sort of a mysterious 24 hour pulsation or oscillation. And I think this is interesting because it would then make the 24 literal day not a measure of just the rotation of the earth but it would make the 24 hour day far more significant; it would make the 24 hour day part of a genuine basic oscillation in the basic nature of the universe itself, and therefore you see the days that from this point on are marked off to us by the rotation of our planet, at least on the fourth day of Genesis 1, are marked off by the rotation of the planet. These days aren’t days just because our planet happens to rotate in that period of time but they are days that are far more profoundly related to the inner workings of the entire universe, namely that the period of rotation of our planet is exactly equal to the period of pulsation of this original energy. Now this is just a suggestion but it seems to me that one has to deal with the facts of the first day and one has to explain the sequence of light and darkness on the first day in absence of point sources of light.

And then one comes to the fourth day and here is where we have the uniformly distributed light poured into point sources and from this point on light emanates from point sources, namely stars and suns and so on in the universe. And it’s indicated quite clearly in the Hebrew because in the fourth day you have ma’owr of light bearers indicated; God creates these, by the way, He doesn’t make them appear as I have previously mentioned. So on the fourth day you would have the creation of the light bodies of the universe. The first day you’d have the creation of the energy, perhaps in a 24 hour pulsation and then on the fourth day you have this energy reduced to point sources and the earth’s rotation then is tuned, or maybe it already had been, but it picks up the 24 hour oscillation.

And then the final element in the Biblical cosmogony would be the curse of Genesis 3 as amplified by Romans 5, Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 22. And this would say that the entire universe is wearing down and it’s wearing down not because it was inherently built that way but because later man’s historic fall in space time caused it to wear down this way.

Now these elements are, in summary, these seven elements, I feel, are necessary to a thinking Bible-believing Christian to erect his own cosmogony of the universe. And this is rather exciting I think, really a believer who is trained in theoretical physics and math should take it upon himself to explore these things and not be so embarrassed about the text; not be so convinced that this text is just a naïve product of a primitive Hebrew mind, but look more carefully to what Genesis is saying; looking there for some hints, not that Genesis is going to give the explanation, we’re not looking to Genesis to give us the theory; we’re looking to Genesis only to give us some observations of data which can suggest to us theory.

And so we conclude this section now in discussing the specific problems of cosmic evolution, getting involved in just a few of the finer points and showing that basically cosmic evolutionary schemes are plagued with an ever-recurrent feature of either clashing with known scientific law or just being unable to explain the ultimate questions of life—where did the universe come from, and so on, to explain the origin of physical and chemical laws, etc.

Our next section will deal with the specific problems of macro evolution and here we are going to move from the universe wide domain of cosmic revolution down to our own planet, the biosphere of our planet, the planet/animal kingdom and examine the problem and questions of macro evolution on a specific basis.