This has always been a question of interest with me.
I have always believed that Genesis 1:1 is a statement unto itself:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. IMHO, the first day of Creation begins with Verse 2. I guess that I am considered to be an "Old Earth'er."
When I was in junior high school, my father and I really got into astronomy, probably as a result of watching Cosmos. As most (if not all) of you know, Carl Sagan produced this series on PBS, and it dealt with all things astronomical. [Who could forget the way Carl said “billyuns???”] This is the first exposure I really had to the Big Bang Theory. I could never comprehend why anyone professing to be an atheist would extol this postulate. The Big Bang Theory proclaims the existence of the Creator.
Now stay with me:
Remember Sir Isaac Newton? Newton (a Christian, by the way) formulated the Laws of Physics. If you took Physics in high school or college, you will recall that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If the particles collided, giving us the Big Bang, something (or Someone!) had to set this into motion. I believe that the Big Bang occurred in the instant that God spoke our universe into existence.
We would all agree that all knowledge comes from God. It would follow that God wrote the laws of physics and chemistry. Isaac Newton merely observed these, and “discovered” God’s Universal Laws. God promised that if we seek Him that we will find Him.
I seem to recall my college professor in astronomy telling us that Albert Einstein did not believe in the Big Bang Theory. Unfortunately, I cannot confirm the validity of that statement. I had previously done a little reading on a totally unrelated topic involving Alan Guth (a Professor of Physics at MIT) and found this statement on the
New York Academy of Sciences web page (nyas.org):
Recent observations of distant supernovae lend further support to Guth's inflationary model. Astronomers have attempted to measure changes in the expansion rate of the universe over the last five to seven billion years by using supernovae type Ia explosions as "standard candles" - objects whose intrinsic brightness they believe they know. By observing that these supernovae are appearing dimmer - and therefore moving farther away - they've determined that the rate of expansion in the universe today is actually larger than it was five billion years ago, an unexpected result that has shaken up cosmology and astrophysics. It has revived the idea of a "cosmological constant," first proposed (and then rejected) by Albert Einstein, a special force that must be working against gravity to account for such an acceleration. [note: the emphasis placed on the last phrase is mine]
We all know the identity of the
“Cosmological Constant,” don’t we? It’s right there, in front of our faces…..