Clough Genesis Lesson 7

The fourth day – Genesis 1:14-19

 

So far in our series on roots we have sought to show the biblical view of origins, and since we’ve already got into several of what we will call the scientific evidences, we want to be careful at this point and review a vital principle.  To do this we ought to turn to Hebrews 11:3, where we find that the New Testament author cautions us about the basis of our confidence.  He say, “Through faith we understand that the ages,” the word translated “world” here is a Greek word which means “ages” or “eons,” have been,” perfect tense, “have been framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen have not ever been made of things which do appear.”  The emphasis of this author is that whether one takes the creation view or the evolutionary view you are taking a “by faith” position. 

 

It simply is not true that one view is scientific and the other is religious.  If the universe is the way the Bible says it is, and if God is the Creator, then doesn’t it follow that if He has told us how, in fact, He has created, then we don’t have any neutrality available to us.  We have to either say all right, I buy what God is telling me or I reject it; there are not very many other positions that you can take in that situation.  Either we accept the fact that God is a trustworthy observer to His own events or we don’t.  And this is the basic heart discussion that has to be made in all discussion between creation and evolution.  It’s an issue between worshiping the Creator and worshiping the creature.  All evolutionary positions in the cosmic sense are idolatrous.  They worship and serve the nature more than the God over nature and Genesis 1, we’ve seen, gives us certain steps in the creative process, “God says.” 

 

Now God is the observer to His own events and we’ve noticed several.  We’ve noticed, we started out with bare existence.  That is, in Genesis 1:2 we find the watery chaos.  That watery chaos is what bare naked existence would look like unbeautified by any later creative act of God.  Then the next thing that the days give us is the fact that God introduced light energy into the universe.  “Let there by light and there was light.”  And this tells us that the universe in and of itself does not have light energy.  It is an addition to the universe by God’s beautification works.  And then we have the expanse of faith.  We said that last week, where we have the separation of the waters above from the waters below.  There’s where we have an expanse of the universe, done very quickly, not over millions of years, done very quickly.  And there you have the house, or the tent, or the tabernacle for man and all life.  Then we had the origin of plant life. 

 

So it is that God at each step here is beautifying bare naked existence and He’s giving us an archetype or an original view of what all creative work looks like.  If a man builds a house he has a pile of lumber on the site and he gradually builds the house.  The same is the picture in Genesis 1. 

 

Now at this point we want to answer certain criticism directed toward us.  One of the questions that was handed in was the days, aren’t they ages?  Why can’t a Christian, who is a Bible-believing Christian, who accepts the Word of God, take the position that these ages and with one fell swoop thereby eliminate all the contradiction between Genesis and evolution?  Now that’s attractive, I once believed that myself.  I was a science student, was engaged in science contests in high school, went to one of the best science institutions in the nation, and while there became a Christian and got into this.  And that was the position I took for a long time.  But the more I study Scripture the more I realize that that position doesn’t solve the problems that it was supposed to solve.  It would be great if it would; one simple change in the interpretation, if we could vaporize all the tension between creation and evolution, what a great thing it would be.  The problem is that it just isn’t that simple.  First of all, the day/age idea is an invention of recent years.  No Hebrew scholar of centuries ago ever held to this position; it’s simply an invention made up by embarrassed Christians.  And far more honest would be to simply say the days of Genesis are literal days but the Bible is wrong and just flush it as fantasy; that would be one way of doing it. 

 

But another way of doing it is just to simply say the days are literal because of various reasons.  Here are the reasons. We’ve studied already the hermeneutical reasons why the days are literal: the Hebrew word yom, when used with a cardinal or ordinal prefix is a measuring device, is always a literal measuring device.  Exodus 20:11 substantiates that interpretation.  But then there are six problems that you will get into if you go ahead and say the days are ages.  Let’s suppose you kiss off, write off all the lexical data, write off all the hermeneutics, write off all the evidence in the Hebrew language, just simply excuse it out of existence and say I’m still going to make those days into ages.  Here are six problems you’re going to have. 

 

The first problem you’re going to have is that according to Genesis, on day one the light preexisted the stars, the sun and the moon.  Now I don’t know of any cosmogony and I’m pretty widely read on cosmogonies, and I don’t know of any modern cosmogony that holds that light preexisted the formation of stars.  Usually and obviously it’s a result of various processes working in the stars.  But Genesis insists that day one is light and not until day four, which we’re studying this morning, do we have the stars and the sun formed.  So there’s one problem.

 

The second problem you’re going to have: the second problem is that life starts on land, not in the sea, and all cosmogonies I’ve ever read have the gradual evolution of complex protein molecules in a primordial sea under an atmosphere of an ammonia and with this ammonia type reducing atmosphere you get the right chemical environment and this produces life.  But it’s always in the sea, and there’s reasons for that, as you heard in the tape last week, you’ve got to have some sort of a trapping device to trap these complex molecules and get them in the right density and so forth.  So that’s the second problem with the day/age view.  Even if the days are ages they are not giving us the data in the right sequence. 

 

The third problem; according to Genesis 1:20-25 birds and fishes were created before the animals.  By all evolutionary schemes I’ve ever read you have the birds a result of evolution development of mammals and animals, pterodactyl and so on.

 

The fourth problem that we have is that there is no rain going on until after man is created, Genesis 2:5.  Again, what cosmogony do you know of that didn’t hold to millions of years of rain hitting the earth’s surface, cooling finally until the surface of the earth came back to a position below 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and you had the liquid water existing on the earth’s surface.  All of them have had rain before man. 

 

A fifth problem that we studied before is that woman is supernaturally created out of a man, there’s no way of getting around that because if you flush that part of the Genesis text you’re in trouble immediately with 1 Timothy 2; 1 Corinthians 11.  You’ve got to hold to the supernatural origin of the woman and there’s no evolutionary cosmogony that would dream of having some sort of a half ape man go to sleep for an operation and then comes a she-ape out of his side. 

 

And finally, Genesis reports that man is given the job of naming the animals, taxonomic investigation and this is done after man is created, and I submit to you that if millions and millions of animals had died away in the evolutionary process before man he would be incapable of following God’s command in Genesis 2:19-20. 

 

So this are just six of several more problems that one would face if one took the day/age view.  The day/age view is basically held by people who haven’t thought through too much the details of Genesis. 

 

Now today we come to day four and in day four we begin to discover something about the structure of Genesis 1, a certain symmetry that exists. These six days are lined up in a certain order.  For example, the first three days we have light, we have the expanse of space and sea, and then we have plant life.  Those are the environmental factors for what follows on the rest of creation week.  During the last three days in creation week notice what happens and notice how they correspond to the first three days.  Whereas day one you have light energy, on day four you have the light bearers, or you have the stars, the sun, space is populated; the continuum of light is populated with point forces.  Here we have the expanse of space and sea on the second day, and then on the fifth day, answering to that you have the inhabitants of space and sea, the birds and fish.  And then on the third day you have plant life and then you have man that feeds on the plant life, not that that the birds and fishes don’t, I’m just looking at the correspondences.  You have animal and man on day six answering to the third day.

 

So there is a sort of symmetry here and you can summarize those first three days as days in which the environment is created, and then you can summarize the second three days as days in which that environment was populated.  So this, then, represents the structure of Genesis 1. 

 

Now we want to go to Genesis 1:10 for a little note that we neglected last time, but one that’s kind of important to show us how our God works with us.  In verse 10 the last time God names anything is given.  You notice when God makes light, He divides the light from the darkness, He calls the light day, He calls the darkness night and He names things.  He names the dry stuff earth and He names the gathering together of the water seas, He names the expanse heaven, and in the Bible when one names something one is studying the essence of that thing.  Some of you, again, are familiar through Handel’s Messiah, of that passage that goes, “He shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, and this is a very majestic portion of Handel’s piece. 

 

But how many of you have ever asked yourself that why, if those are the names of Christ, is He not called that in the pages of the New Testament.  Do you ever find Jesus, in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace?  No, you don’t really.  Well, then what are those names doing in the Old Testament?  Because those names depict His character and Christ does show up in the four Gospels as the Wonderful Counselor, doesn’t He give counsel to the woman at the well?  Doesn’t He give counsel to the disheartened disciples?  He is the Wonderful Counselor.  The Mighty God, isn’t Christ the One who says “I AM” in the Garden of Gethsemane and the temple police fall backwards.  Yes, He is the Mighty God.  He is the Father of Eternity, in other words, those titles depict His essence or His character that does shine forth in the pages of the New Testament. 

 

So when we find the naming process going on we find God revealing the essence of things.  And so God teaches man man’s first vocabulary.  And so during these days, up to and stopping with the third day, the environment, God names; He gives working vocabulary, and then it’s up to man to name those things which populate the environment.  That’s his job, that’s our job, that’s the job of the botanist, that’s the job of the zoologist, the job of the chemist, the job of the physicist, the job of the geologist; it’s the job of all the sciences of all the studies to name these contents.  But we can only get started naming them if we know the overall framework which God has given. 

 

Now in Genesis 1:14-19 we have the work of the fourth day, a very important day and we’re going to spend all this Sunday morning on the fourth day because it’s that fourth day that is so important to understand what Genesis is saying and to prevent naïve interpretations of the book.

 

In Genesis 1:14 notice it says, “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament” or the expanse, be careful of the word “firmament” for reasons we explained last week, “Let there be lights in the expanse of heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.  [15] And let them be for lights in the firmament” or “expanse of heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.”  Notice the same motif here, God, all He has to do is say “Let there be,” there’s no argument, there’s no buts; but, but, but, but, but God we can’t do that, all the molecules are in rebellion. There’s nothing like that, there’s an instantaneous harmonious response on the part of the creature.  God says “Let there be” and there is.  He doesn’t have to ask twice, or four times, to have this done. 

 

Genesis 1:16, “And God made two lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: And He made stars also.”  Notice how the word is “made” in verse 16, I emphasize that only because there are some people that would love to say well, you see up to this point the earth was shrouded in a great cloud, and it was only on the fourth day that this cloud finally thinned out and became tenuous so the region of outer space became visible and the discs of the sun, the moon and the stars became then visible, they were there before but they only became visible on the fourth day.  Sorry!  That ain’t what the text is saying!  The text says God made them on the fourth day.  Now if Moses or whoever was the original author of this wanted to say God made them to appear, already in verse 9 you’ve got the verb to appear, “and let the dry land appear: and it was so.”  So had he indicated the stars would appear he would have used the word “appear,” but the word “appear” isn’t used here, it’s the word “make,” asah, and that means we’ve got a big, big problem with the idea of stars being made after plants.  And that’s exactly the way God says, you weren’t there and I wasn’t there so there’s not too much of an argument we can raise against it. 

 

All right, why the stars?  Well here we get into another aspect of nature that some people who are involved in science education always like to knock and that is the problem of teleology in nature.   Teleology, what is teleology?  Teleology means that there’s a purpose in nature, an intelligent purpose in nature.  The atoms and molecules and systems haven’t just been put together for the sake of a chance process but they have been put together for a reason, a rational reason, a reason that is directed toward man and toward God.  It is a reason that the universe is this way and not another way; it’s not just random.  I have seen experimental texts in science that were written to try to avoid teleological statements.  For example in describing a plant one would say here you have the vascular bundles and it’s the job of this, the xylem and the phloem to carry stuff up to the plant and the purpose for this is that… oh no-no-no-no-no, can’t have those words in the text, we’ve got to through and purge the text of all words that speak or hint of purpose, we just have to describe it, there the xylem and the phloem are, this is what the xylem and the phloem do, period.  But don’t ever use the word “purpose,” you might give a science student the wrong impression.  I submit to you if you don’t put teleology you give the science student a wrong impression.

Let’s look at what God says stars are for; stars have a purpose.  They may have other purposes but God says they’re at least for this, in Genesis 1:14, “let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years.”  Notice “seasons, days and years,” we’ll come back to “signs” in a moment.  But “seasons, days and years,” what’s that tell us?  It tells us that God gave us the celestial dome to act as a reference point time wise.  There’s nothing wrong or unbiblical about measuring time by celestial motion and therefore we are on sound ground; this is why God made it, as a chronometric reference point. 

 

But then he says they were also given for “signs.”  Now, a miracle can’t be recognized unless 98% of the time you live with non-miracles, because by definition a miracle is a rare event, and if you had a constant stream of miracles then you wouldn’t have a miracle, would you, because by definition if you had miracles all the time, since miracles are going on all the time, you’d get used to them and then you couldn’t recognize a miracle any more.  So the only way we can recognize miracles is to have a steady state, or a steady static existence that goes on for a time, and then we have perturbations in that or exceptions to rules.  And so this is the word “signs” here.  “Let them be for signs, and for seasons, for days and years,” the seasons, days and years gives you the steady state backdrop and then periodically there will be catastrophic interruptions in that steady state. 

 

And this is what the Bible insists. When Jesus Christ was born there was some sort of astronomical something or other, the star of Bethlehem wasn’t a helicopter that was floating over the Middle East and it wasn’t a spy satellite either. What was it?  It was something.  And the Bible says that there were signs that predicted Christ’s birth.  Then there are signs that David saw; one of them is written up in two places, in 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18, it’s not clear what he’s looking at there but something happened in the heavens. And Judges 5:[20] in the battle in the northern area of Israel around Hazor, and the Canaanite enclave there, it says eventually the stars fought with Sisera, and it describes the flood in the valley of Kishon.  Well, it’s catastrophic something or other happening there and it’s ascribed to these things, these events.  You have the Hezekiah sundial incident [2 Kings 20:11], where the light is refracted in some way or the earth is actually deflected in some form, where the sundial no longer measures the day.  The shadow goes backwards on the clock.  Well God, then, can interfere with the chronometric processes.  If you are in doubt, just stay around until the return of Christ and you will have proof that this is so. 

 

So the signs, the seasons, the days and the nights, these are the functions of the teleology of the celestial dome for man.  Notice in Genesis 1:15, it says another purpose of the stars, including the sun and the moon “is to give light” to man on earth.  Now we make that bold statement as creationists; we don’t shy away from it.  The universe is basically created for the earth.  You say, oh, what an egocentric thing to say; how, knowing the immensity of the universe as you do, how could you ever possibly say a statement like that?  I didn’t originate it, God did, and I submit that He knows more about the universe than you do and I do.  So He says that the stars are made for the earth.  So the earth is a result of this sort of thing.  Somebody once said that the universe was made for the earth; the earth was made for man, and man was made for the incarnation of God.  There you have an absolute teleology, that ranges from one end of the universe to the other and I insist that the Bible says that’s the case and not to admit this is to be an apostate; not to say this is to be a humanist.  Not to say this is to overturn the Word of God for the word of man.  Those who think they can study science without teleology are idolaters.

 

So verse 15 then says that the earth was here, the stars were made to give this light and we can apply a point of doctrine that was very important in the ancient world, maybe less so today, and that is from this we know that the highest powers that be, the cosmic powers, the stars, are ultimately friendly to man.  The universe is not a hostile backdrop against which man ekes out a precarious survival. Rather, it is that the universe is ultimately made for man and we can rejoice and give thanks to our God for it.  We don’t have to be like the novelists are; they’re all contemplating the end of the world and some horrible existence where man is doomed to spend the last years of his life on some forbidden planet out in the middle of deep space.  That’s not the destiny of the human race.  We know better than that.  Man is doomed in Christ to spend eternity in the New Jerusalem; he’s not doomed in that way.  Men who write those kinds of novels are basically nice men but they’re pagans in their view of nature.

 

All right, so we find that God makes two lights in Genesis 1:16 and these two are distinguished from the stars.  Notice even a casual reading of verse 16 distinguishes between the moon and the sun, and the stars.  The moon and the sun are given much more attention than the stars.  Now this is one of the things where familiarity with the text breeds contempt.  I wonder if you, as you’ve read this, you’ve ever noticed anything about the stars, particularly about the moon and the sun. We want to look at this for a minute, and just look at a peculiar thing.  All of you know this but how many of you have thought about it.  Here is the picture of the sun down at a low point of the horizon, taken through filters, so that you can get an idea of what we call the solar diameter, that is the angle subtended by the disc of the sun.  Here is a picture of the moon, taken at the same degree, I doubt this one was taken with a filter but there it is, the full moon, and you can see that the moon’s discs subtends the same angle of arc that the sun’s discs subtends.  And that’s interesting because that’s not true on the planets, other planets in the solar system; their moons appear much larger than the sun, or if you were closer to the sun, theoretically, your moon if it were the same size would appear smaller than the sun in the sky. 

 

But isn’t it interesting that on earth the two great lights, the brighter and the less bright, but they both are the same size and because they are we have another phenomena you are all familiar with, the total eclipse of the sun. Such an eclipse would be impossible unless both discs were of the same diameter.  And this is some of the things that show the beauty of our God.  We don’t ascribe this to chance, this just didn’t happen.  There are reasons why this happened and the Genesis text that we are now studying gives us those reasons.  The reasons: because God set them in the expanse of heaven to give light upon the earth, it’s His handiwork and that’s why at the end of Genesis 1:18 it says And God looked upon them and He said it’s beautiful.  There you have the generation of the sun, the generation of the moon, and the generation of the stars with an immediate artistic evaluation. 

 

Now there’s something to be said for this that I’ll say again and again in ensuing Sundays.  We, in our studies, in the western world, try to get hyper objective about subject matter.  We try to say oh, let’s be objective about this, and disconnect our study, whether astronomy, geology or something, let’s disconnect this from God.  Wait a minute; if the universe is the handiwork of God, then doesn’t that argue that all scientific study is ultimately an act of worship.  If I view the handiwork of God, and I know it’s the handiwork of God because the Scriptures tell me this, and I know this and then I sit here studying it as though it isn’t the handiwork of God, I’ve committed sin in my heart, and this means that ultimately no Christian science student can ever study any area of science apart from a simultaneous coterminous act of worship.  The study of science is the worship of God; worshiping God through His general revelation. 

 

We’ll show evidence of that later, but this business, “it is good,” means there’s an ascetic joy to this; there’s something beautiful about this.  And that’s what I hope to stimulate some of you to do in your life; part of my reason for showing films and slides during this Genesis text is to develop a respect and a love for the revelation of God and nature and I fear that many people in Christian fundamentalist circles don’t have this.  We think of the Book as the only revelation of God.  Now this is the inerrant verbal revelation of God, yes, but it’s not the only revelation of God.  And theologians a century ago knew the difference; they called this Book “special revelation,” and they called nature “general revelation” and the two together, not just one, the two together gives us a picture of our God. So go out on a dark night and look at the stars and worship God; go out and look at the plants and the details and worship God; spend some time just appreciating your God’s handiwork and see if it doesn’t do something for your soul.  Just do it as an exercise, whether it’s a flower garden during the daytime or whether it’s under the open skies at night; commune with Him and tell Him what He’s done and what you think about His acts.

 

All right, God said in Genesis 1:18 something else about the purpose of the teleology of the stars, the sun and the moon.  He said that they were “to rule over the day and over the night.”  That leads us to make three topical studies to apply the work of the fourth day.  The first topical study we want to do is the interpretation of the verb to “rule.”  Now when men lose their respect for God-consciousness, when they repress that thing in their soul, every man knows God is there, they’re just playing games when they say He’s not; when men repress this God-consciousness they go into and open their souls up to human viewpoint which is a religious position. 

 

There’s no neutrality in the way people think; you either think subordinate to the Word of God or you judge the Word of God.  Human viewpoint has interpreted the stars and the cosmic forces of the universe in one of two ways, always done this, it did this back in the times of ancient Egypt, it did this back in the times of the Canaanites, it is doing it today.  One group of people will become fatalists out of this; these are the people who go check the Sunday morning paper before they have their first cup of coffee to see if it’s their day or not, and if it’s not their day they stay in bed.  This only happens on Sunday, and the idea there being that if they got out of bed the cosmic forces somehow would ruin their day.  Now I can under­stand experientially how people might have that idea, after all, you and I have had bad days; some days when you can’t breathe and walk at the same time without tripping over something.  And you all know that kind of a day, everything goes wrong. And then some clown comes up to you and says, do you know what your horoscope said for yesterday when you had all that bad stuff, look at this; and he goes on and describes this horrifying analysis from the horoscope.  Well, now just a minute.  This means that I, if I take that approach toward nature, I am bowing my knee to a nature that is sovereign over me.  I’ve ascribed sovereignty to nature; I am now an idolater.  I am like the ancient Baalists that Elijah killed on Mount Carmel.

 

But on the other hand there are those who take the other approach.  There are those who say well, all right, there are the cosmic forces in nature so here’s what we’ll do.  We’ll learn t find the bottle that has the genie in it; we’ll learn to try to see how we can manipulate the cosmic forces for our good.  Now this was true of ancient mythology but to show you how true it is today I went down to the newsstand and bought this magazine: Official UFO special on ancient astronauts; you are an ancient astronaut hybrid; did you know the Garden of Eden was a space ship; ancient astronaut earth base discovered.  Now this is common newsstand type stuff but interestingly the theology of ancient Baalism is found here.  Here’s an ad, I’ll read you some sections of these ads; listen to the theology of the ad and see if you don’t recognize where it comes from.  Now these guys that write the ads don’t know where it comes from but you ought to: You and the universe are one; there is no division of supernatural and natural, you share the harmony that governs worlds and space and the tiny atom; the consciousness that directs the physical universe also pulsates in the cells of your being, behind your thinking mind lies this reservoir of cosmic consciousness; it is your link with infinity.  And then, very significantly: your link with infinity to be drawn upon at your will.  And if we thumb through the magazine a little bit, we see another ad, same kind of thing: Now you can harness the hidden strength of the great pyramid for your personal use and profit. 

 

Now funny though this may be, do you notice the theology of it.  It is man who is going to make his destiny by manipulation of cosmic forces.  That is exactly…exactly ancient Baalism.  But it goes back before Baalism, turn to Isaiah 14 for a moment; we’ll see where it all came from.  In Isaiah 14:13 we have the sayings of Satan.  Now there’s a little argument over how much this reflects satanic thought, how much it’s the king of Babylon and so on, but generally the spirit of the whole thing is satanic.  “For thou hast said in thine heart,” notice what Satan’s saying, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God;” see, I’ll manipulate cosmic forces, all those cosmic forces are in a great battle and I’m going to rub the genie out of it, “I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north, [14] I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.”  Now that is the most satanic sin of all of Scripture.  Notice there’s nothing immoral here, the things that people often cite as sin.  No-no-no-no, we’re talking about fatheaded pride and this is the ultimate.  Satan wants to manipulate the cosmos; that’s the same idea that’s behind these magazines, same idea behind ancient mythology.

 

So that’s one response men can take toward the stars.  They can react in their human viewpoint either by submitting to them as fatalists or by going with the standpoint of manipulating them. 

 

But there’s a second topical study we want to do applying this fourth day material to our lives.  Besides unmasking this apostate mythology we have another little more urgent task at hand. What, people ask, What do you do as a thinking Christian about the modern scientific theories of the origin of the solar system?  What do you do with these, you just don’t ignore them and they’ll go away. You have to have something to say back to this.  What do you say?  Sure, they’ll say you know about light, you know it travels 186,000 miles a second, you know, for example that there may be stars out here, point B, light from those stars coming to the earth at point A and star B may be separate from the earth by one hundred million light years, really that’s not too far, it’s as far as some of the measurements go.  Now surely, as a thinking Christian, don’t expect me to buy this stuff about the earth is young, the creation was just a short time ago, when we’ve got light traveling for one hundred million years between the star and the earth, surely you don’t expect me to buy that.  I don’t, but God does.  So we’ve got to respond to this in some way.

 

The best response was given by one of the greatest Old Testament exegetes in the history of the Church, a man who was responsible, he and his partner, for a very famous set of Old Testament commentaries, Keil and Delitzsch.  And when they dealt with Genesis Keil put this footnote on his discussion.  Remember Professor Keil wrote this commentary in the 19th century in Germany; he had been exposed to Kant, he knew of the philosophic arguments, and here’s what Keil wrote, (quote): “Most of the objections to the historical character of our account, which have been founded upon the work of the fourth day, rest upon a misconception of the proper point of view from which it should be studied.  And in addition to that, the conjectures of astronomers as to the immeasurable distance of most of the fixed stars, and the time a ray of light would require to reach the earth, are accepted as indisputable mathematical proof;” for the antiquity of the universe, “whereas these approximate estimates of distances rest upon unsubstantiated assumptions, that everything that has been ascertained with regard to the nature and motion of light in our solar system, must equally be true of the light of the fixed stars.” 

 

Now developing Keil’s logic a little bit further, here are some considerations that one must have before one flips over this argument.  First, there are ways of geometrically measuring distances of stars but these methods of geometric measurement are only good out to 330 light years.  Any star that has light becoming beyond that point has to be estimated in distance with a whole series of extremely hairy mathematical assumptions.  It is not a simple thing.  Ask yourself, all during your science education in school, did anyone ever tell you how they measured the distances of stars.  Now isn’t that remarkable.  I believe I’ve had as reasonably a good science education as anyone and I’m here to say that no major assumption western science has ever taught to me at any point in my development in science.  I was never told the proof of why the earth rotated around the sun; oh yeah, we’d get into it a little bit on the side with Kepler’s laws etc, but the history of the debate was never given in science class, the great debate, lots of these things, the great debate of the size of the universe, that’s just simply not covered in science class and it’s tragic because we come into these things naïve, forgetting that wait a minute, let’s not be so quick and easy with our answers. 

 

In the first place, we don’t have a means of measuring star distances out to those distances without a series of complicated assumptions.  A second thing that we have to take into consideration can be illustrated by this: here’s A, here’s B; God made both A and B at the same time, did He not; that is, He made the earth receiving light and the star giving light at the same point.  That means He must have made light in transit.  Now some of you can see a very interesting illustration of this any time you turn on the water in your garden hose.  You may have a 50 foot hose tied on to your outside facet, and you may have somebody out there you want to blast with the hose at the end.  All you have to do is go up to your facet and you turn the water on and immediately you get water at the end of the hose.  Why?  It certainly takes time for the water to flow from the facet to the end of the hose, yet the water comes out of the end of the hose faster than it does from the facet to the hose.  Why is that?  Because there was water in the hose; when you turned on the facet you set the whole thing in motion; there was already water in transit so to speak. 

 

So another way in creation is that light from distant stars was created in transit.  What’s so odd about that; it’s no more odd than asking the question, did Adam have a naval, was he created with a functioning system?  How many rings were on the trees in the Garden of Eden?”  That’s not stupid because in the day in the New Testament when Jesus makes wine out of water He’s making vintage wine and vintage wine means that the wine was around for a long time but we know from the narrative, the eyewitness observation was only around for about two minutes and yet it has the taste of a five year, six year wine.  How come?  Because you can’t have fiat direct creation without appearance of age, I don’t care how you put it.  True, it can’t be used as a panacea but I defy you to think of how you could create anything without an apparent age. 

 

The third thing that people overlook is something that Morris and Whitcomb put in their book back in 1961; there was a footnote, at that time when they wrote it in 61, and on the plane the other week when I was talking to Dr. Morris he reconfirmed that he and Dr. Gish have contacted the people who cranked this particular idea out and it’s not yet been refuted and it’s still floating in the far out speculative areas of physics.  And that is does light travel through Euclidean space?  Euclidean space is viewing the space like we view Euclidean geometry, you know, the kind of thing you learned in sophomore year in high school and so on, this kind of thing, 180 degrees in an angle, a parallel line, the point above the parallel line, one and only one parallel line pierces that point, these are all theorems developed in Euclidean geometry.  But that’s not the only kind of geometry that exists.  There’s Riemannian geometry and there’s other kinds of geometries that have been developed because of various aspects of nature, one of which is your eye.  We do not view, through the lenses of our eyes, in a Euclidean way.  Our eyeballs are built on a non-Euclidean geometric system.  So we don’t even view the universe as Euclidean.  Well now if you take a non-Euclidean way of viewing the universe, as one man did, you get the fact that light could travel from the most distant point in space to the earth in equal or less than 15.7 years.  So now what happens to all the billions of light years?  It goes right down the drain by simply shifting the mathematics of the geometry.

 

I only point this out, not that that’s the answer; I point this out to warn you, when we are dealing with these big questions there are thousands of unstated assumptions that have been brought in and when you begin to tamper mathematically with these assumptions, holy cow, look what comes out at the end of the equation.  You see, you can’t get much more variable than 15.7 years to a couple of billion.  One would say that is kind of a latitude of error.  So with that kind of system you’ve got to be careful about people that make flip judgments about the Scriptures.  So that’s the second topic of the fourth day.

 

We want to go to a third topic of the fourth day, one that will surely interest most that have ever discussed in this area and that is what are we going to do about the age of the universe just looking at the evidences.  Here are nine evidences for a youthful earth, developed out of the field of astronomical data.  You say what, the earth is seen to be young and short on the basis of astronomical data?   Yes, God’s Word is God’s Word, why wouldn’t He leave some evidences around?  All right, so there have been men who have been Christian people, Bible-believing Christians who also have some scientific training and they say listen, I know the brainwashing we’ve got since fourth grade; we’ve always been told this and told this, very cleverly never told any of the other side of the story, but we’ve had this one-sided brainwash and like myself, when we got into advanced science and graduate school we said hey, wait a minute, let’s look at the other side of the question, I don’t care what the professor’s been telling me, he’s not God, let’s see if there is some extra data somewhere else that someone hasn’t looked at.  

 

And sure enough, when you being to dig around, you begin to discover yes there are data.  Take the first one for example.  The solar system is filled with dust, cosmic dust.  If you want to see this for yourself, here in Lubbock we’re treated to an advantage in this area because you can go out here in the morning, particularly once you get outside the lights you can do this, you get outside in the morning before the sun disc appears over the horizon, preferably even before the first light.  Or in the evening after the sun has set and dropped below the horizon and if conditions are right you’ll see kind of a glow above the sun about 20-30 degrees on the horizon.  And this glow is simply the reflection of the sun’s light off this dust that’s in outer space, and it’s simply a graphic testimony of the fact that it’s dusty out there.  So see, ladies, your house isn’t the only place.  And the dust is moving and it’s being attracted to various bodies.  Various computations have found that the sun is consuming this dust at the rate of 80,000 tons a day.  Now one would have to say, then, that the sun would absorb this dust very rapidly and calculations have shown that it would have cleaned out, vacuum cleaned so to speak, all the nearby space out to the range of the earth’s orbit in 2000 years, and would have vacuum cleaned everything out of the solar system out to the orbit of Pluto in 2.5 million years.  Now obviously the solar system is full of dust, so now we raise the question, why is the dust there?  If the universe is billions of years old it should have been vacuumed out; how come it hasn’t been?  Well obviously either the dust must have been introduced through some catastrophe or the universe is simply young.

 

A second evidence is the earth’s magnetic field.  Dr. Barnes, University of Texas, physics department, has found that the earth’s magnetic field is collapsing at the rate of a half life of 1400 years.  The earth’s field was three times as powerful as it is now at the time of Christ.  And if you work the curve backwards, by 10,000 BC the earth’s magnetic field would have been so strong that the earth, to sustain that sort of energy, would had to have been an incandescent star.  Well, obviously it wasn’t an incandescent star, and so therefore this would tend to give an upper bound in the earth’s age at 10,000 years.

 

Items three and four on the list: decay of short period comets and decay of long period comets.  These comets have friction in them and finally they are going to be dissipated, their orbits are not going to stay forever.  And so we have short period comets that argue for an age less than 10,000 years, dissipation of long period comets which argue for an age of less than one million years.

 

Influx of smaller particles to the sun, similar to the first argument gives the calculation of 83,000 years.

 

Item six, some of you ought to remember item six, the accumulation of lunar dust; don’t you remember listening to Walter Cronkite down at Cape Canaveral when they first launched the moon probe and the first lunar landing and there was all this worry and concern over when the lunar thing hit the lunar surface whether it was going to sink into 35 feet of lunar dust and they had these big wide diameter feet put on the bottom of the lunar module to prevent the sinking, and they worried that the guy, when he hops out he don’t hop out, put out your foot gingerly because you might go down.  And the thinking was that the moon had been there for two billion years, it must have 35 feet of dust on it. What happened when the lunar module impacted the lunar surface and what happened when the astronaut got out?  He walked around and you see the footprints, his foot barely sunk an inch and a half into the lunar surface.  Question: where was the dust that supposedly accumulated for two to three billion years?  It wasn’t there.  Did someone come along with a vacuum cleaner a million years ago and clean it all up?  Or in fact has the moon really been young, and hasn’t had time yet to accumulate all this lunar dust?

 

Item seven, the tides on the surface of the earth have friction, exercise friction against this, against the rotation of the earth, and so you have a dissipation of energy in the earth’s rotation field dissipating as heat; calculations that this would run down in five hundred million years.  Why is the earth still rotating if it’s been around for two or three billion?

 

Eight; this is evidence brought forward in the 19th century and there is no excuse why science textbooks don’t put this one, it figured very prominently in the Darwinian discussions at the end of the 19th century when Darwin had to say there had to be long ages because of the earth’s need for evolutionary processes and Lord Kelvin, a Christian man of science said Darwin, let’s subject this to a little quantitative work.  And he calculated the rate of heat loss on the planet earth and worked it back that the earth would have lost all its heat after 24 million years.  So, how do you explain the conservation in the earth’s substance?  Kelvin brought that up; no one ever answered Lord Kelvin in the 19th century and no one has ever yet answered him.  But because his argument isn’t answered, because evolution becomes the philosophical panacea for everyone we just simply dismiss Lord Kelvin’s argument and go on to the next chapter.

 

The ninth one, recently promoted by a Christian astronomer, the rotation of the galaxies.  This was very intriguing.  Certain galaxies are shaped like this with a lot of stars, millions of stars in the center with these arms on them.  Now some way, I’m not sure how but some way the rotation of the core of these galaxies has been measured.  The rotation of the arms has been measured and they’re not the same.  Now it doesn’t require a genius in math to see that if the center of that particular diagram is rotating faster than the edge of the diagram, what is going to happen after four or five revolutions?  These arms are going to wrap up and you’re going to have the galaxy tied up in knots, like this.  Question: why is it if the galaxies have been sitting there for five billion years they haven’t wrapped up, when their rate of rotation would give this as an answer?

 

Well, these are some questions before one jumps on the bandwagon against the Bible, let’s be a little honest to consider the other side of the data? 

 

Now to justify an earlier claim that I said, that a lot of this human viewpoint that’s spewed out against the Bible does not come from science; it comes from an apostate religious worldview that is influencing science.  I view the process as simply the Christian student of science is there to reform science, to purify science of this crud, this philosophic crud that it’s picked up over the centuries.  Now let me give an example of this.  Always we hear about these views of the universe, the nebular hypothesis and we hear some other discussions about the origin of the solar system.  Well, let’s take a little look at how these ideas get started.  The father, it just so happens, the father of modern cosmogony, that is the science or the study of the origin of the universe, the origin of the solar system, is none other than Renée Descartes; now if you happen to be a reader of philosophy at all you will remember Descartes’ name from somewhere else.  You will remember that Renée Descartes is also the father of modern rationalism.  Now isn’t that an intriguing connection.  Also intriguing, if you take a biography of Descartes is that he got most of his philosophic ideas from a dream on November 10, 1619.  Now that’s interesting also.  Here we have the claim being made that the Bible is wrong because it deals with revelatory data.  And yet Descartes, who is the father of modern cosmogony, ultimately grounds his whole system in revelatory data. 

 

Descartes also goes on to form an idea of the universe that views the origin of the solar system as made up of vortices, and the universe had these in it and gradually as these things rotated around they accumulated into planets and the sun.  This is the end result of Descartes’ model.  Well now Descartes developed that model, he was a Catholic, he read the Bible, he knew exactly what Genesis 1 said but he ignored it; he chose to avoid the Genesis text and replace it with his own idea, but his own idea is just a human viewpoint extension of himself. 

 

Later on a more famous model came out by Kant, the nebular hypothesis.  Now again, those of you who have looked a little bit at philosophy, don’t you remember where Kant came from?  Don’t you know what Kant is responsible for?  Of course; Kant is responsible for certain philosophic movements that have utterly destroyed theology, extremely hostile; not on the basis of any scientific data, on the basis simply of philosophic assumptions, the noumenal phenomena and so on.  But even more intriguing, just as Descartes obtained his idea in a dream, it’s interesting where Kant got his idea of a nebula hypothesis from.  He got it from a man by the name of Emanuel Swedenborg.  Swedenborg was an occultist; he had founded the cult of the Church of the New Jerusalem and he claimed to have gotten his ideas of the nebula hypothesis from spiritualistic communications from inhabitants of the moon and distant planets.  Now the next time someone gripes at you about your belief in the Bible, tell them it’s a lot better than getting it hot poop from Mars, because Swedenborg basically started this, he had this weird religion, and then Kant got hold of the nebula hypothesis.  This is not to say that maybe the idea can’t be defended another way, but I just think it’s kind of interesting since we Christians are always accused of our starting point is in revelation; historically the other side’s starting point is in revelation.  So what’s good for the goose is good for the gander in that argument.  Kant then later on said this amazing statement: Give me matter and I will construct a world out of it… all due modesty.  And then this thing rotated, gradually you have accumulations in it and so forth. 

 

Then along came another man who refined this, this man Laplace, most of you who’ve had Calculus remember Laplace and he devised the same sort of thing; notice the dates on these, by the way, please, nothing new that you’re learning in 1977 in your school textbook, it’s been all the way back to the Renaissance.  Here’s Laplace, his idea, rotating dust cloud again, he refined it a little mathematically and got what they call Laplacian rings out of the thing, but nevertheless, he still went ahead with the idea.  And as late as 1944-45 Von Weitzacher [sp?] basically holds to the same chaotic idea of Descartes; yes, details have changed but the ideas are basically the same. 

 

Now after looking at these, we say how do we judge them.  Does the non-Christian who comes up with this garbage have some system by which he can measure it?  Yes.  And here are the problems; these usually aren’t brought forward in textbooks but I will bring them forward.  The first one is that on the planets, the way they rotate, the sun is rotating too slowly and the planets are rotating too fast to have come in a simply system of condensation. What should have happened is that angular momentum in the sun should be 98% and angular momentum in the planets 2%.  The actually data is actually 180 degrees wrong; the sun has very little angular momentum because it rotates so slowly and the planets have high angular momentum because they’re rotating very rapidly.  This is the opposite of what it should be if those models are true. 

 

A further problem of the models is that gas clouds don’t condense right.  You can run equations on them, turbulent flow and so on, and by all known laws they don’t work.  Another feature is the fact that the planets are all made of different materials and element spectrums.  In other words, if all the planets condensed out of the same cloud in a purely chance fashion, you’d expect a chance distribution of elements that would roughly correspond.  Why, then, does the planet earth have certain proportions and certain elements utterly different from the other planets?  Why is there disparagement between one planet, discrepancy between one planet and another if it all came out of the same cloud?

 

A fourth problem is planets like Uranus and other planets, and their moons are rotating backwards, and so if they all came spinning out of the same nebula hypothesis as Kant or they were involved in some sort of a vortices theory of Descartes we have the interesting problem that of 32 moons in the present solar system 11 are rotating backwards.  How do we explain this retrograde motion if everything came out of a simple circulating dust cloud?

 

These are some things that I say the other side ought to be answering, and stop trying to kiss it off by saying well, your mathematical equations don’t work because then laws were different.  Ah, laws were different back then; that’s exactly what I’m saying as a creationist, things were different back then, you don’t allow me to cop out that way, I’m not going to allow you to cop our that way.  You’re the one that held to the uniformity of natural law and baby, you’re the one whose model has to fit it and it doesn’t! 

 

So these are evidences that we Christians who think and believe the Bible can throw back at our non-Christian counterparts. 

 

We want to conclude by turning to a passage of Scripture that shows us the spirit of worship in all this.  We don’t want to leave you with Swedenborg and his people on another planet; hopefully, however, some of you will be enlightened as to where a lot of these ideas came from.  Notice, they did not come from scientists; I gave you three men, with one possible quibble about Laplace, Descartes and Kant were not… repeat, were not scientists.

 

Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse shows His finger works.  [2] Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night shows knowledge.  [3] There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.  [4] Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.  In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun.”  What’s God saying there?  That any man, anywhere, anytime, under any conditions, can go out under the night sky and look up and he’s going to see the handiwork of God.  That man can be a person, to whom the missionaries have never come, but he has God-consciousness in his heart and by looking at the heavens, the general revelation of God, he knows something of what God is like.  Just look up on a dark night.  And this is why it says in verse 4, “their line is gone out through all the earth,” ALL the earth.  Okay, Psalm 19 gives you the worship response to God’s handiwork. 

 

In ancient history there was a man who came, according to Jewish legend, who came to faith by means of the stars.  His name, Abraham, for Jewish legend says that Abraham was an astronomer in Ur, and he used to study the stars by night and he realized, his God-consciousness told him God is there, and the stars showed him that the God is a lawful God, He’s not the chaotic polytheist system that he was taught in Ur, and therefore Abraham made his decision.  Now we don’t know for sure whether that story is true but I think there’s a hint of it because later on when God promises children to Abraham what does He say? Abraham, come out of your tent, look up Abraham, to the skies, and I challenge you, Abraham, to number the stars of heaven and see if your children will not be equal to that number.   Why?  Perhaps because Abraham responded to this kind of general revelation and as such he became a believer.

 

We will sing in conclusion the hymn, How Great Thou Art.