Some commentators read my general overviews, and they assume that I don’t know the basic cosmological views, such as the cosmological view of the starlight and time problem. However, I have been reading about cosmology for the last 16 years or so, and I am quite acquainted with how the views on cosmology “have evolved.”

Some commentators note different arguments that have been made from cosmology on the starlight and time problem. I’m well aware of these arguments, and they always make reference to things unmeasurable (e.g., dark energy and an initial inflation of the universe at a speed faster than the speed of light). For anyone who has followed cosmology closely, this theory was used to explain things that were completely unpredicted by previous cosmological theories (such as the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe). Completely imaginary concepts as Dark Energy are invoked to explain this problem. Additionally, commentators assert that nobody but traditional scientists have been trying to research this problem. That is a blatantly false assertion, as creation scientists have also been researching the problem and providing possible explanations. For each viewpoint, I must admit, there is nothing more than speculation, but there are possible explanations from each point of view.

This view of creationism rests on a literal interpretation of the Bible. The notion is that the Earth was created 6000-10000 years ago. The dating is based on the genealogy listed in the chapter Numbers in the Bible. This perspective says that uniformitarian interpretations of geology and cosmology are incorrect or misinterpreted. They don’t deny the operation of microevolutionary principles (natural selection) operate in the world and use this to account for the wide ranging variation in the “kinds” of life (look at the variation in dogs for example).

The Fall of Man

The fall of man is given a prominent place in this point of view. Before the fall creation was perfect. There was no death (even among the animals). There was no suffering. There was no disease. And living things (animals and humans) were vegetarian. After Adam and Eve ate from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” God proclaimed that they would die and were banished from the garden.

From this view, all of creation in the world fell. Not just human beings. Death came into the world.

The Great Flood

Genesis Chapter 6 (NASB)

⁵ Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

⁶ The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.

⁷ The LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”

….

16 Behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish.

…. Chapter 7

⁴ For after seven more days, I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights; and I will blot out from the face of the land ⁾every living thing that I have made.”

^{5 )}Noah did according to all that the LORD had commanded him.

….

¹¹ In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.

¹² The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.

….

¹⁹ The water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered.

²⁰ The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.

^{21 )}All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind;

²²of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died.

Evidence for the global flood is taken from hundreds of legends across all continents. (1)  The uniformitarian view, that rock layers were laid down over millions of years is seen as false, and the notion that the rock strata layers were laid down in a cataclysmic event (the flood) are seen as true.  (2)  The fact that different types of animals are seen in different strata layers is interpreted as a natural sorting process.  The more intelligent animals would run away from the flood waters, and would thus end up in the higher layers of the strata.

I’ll write more about potential problems with this viewpoint and possible answers to these problems in Part III.  The notion with this point of view is that through sin, came death.  Death is viewed as a bad thing and is the result of the original sin of Adam and Eve.  This is contrasted with the view of Darwinism, which is through death comes life.  This viewpoint explains a great many things (disease, suffering, death, social ills, and so forth), that are seen as very negative things by people on the Earth currently.

However, there are a number of problems with this viewpoint, which I will discuss in Part III.  But, if you begin with the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator, all you need to provide is one possible explanation for how things could have occurred.  Personally, I lean a bit more towards this viewpoint than OEC, because of it’s explanatory power and consistency with the Bible.  But, for Christians, we need to keep in mind the most important aspect of the theology.  And that is Christ paid the price for our sins and on the day of judgment, the Father will look at us and see Christ.

My own point of view, is that the universe may have been needed to be created in the exact way that it was in order to allow for life to exist on Earth.  As Adam and Eve were created with the appearance of age, the universe was likely created similarly.  When you go to watch a movie, it has a starting point.  The assumption is that things happened before the movie started.  If you were to look at Adam and Eve as fully grown humans, you might infer that they had existed for 20 or 30 years and been born of a woman as we know always happens now.  However, the Bible asserts otherwise.  I think the same thing may apply when we look at the universe and its apparent age.  But again, my faith does not rest on these notions, and there may be superior explanations that are biblically consistent.

(1) http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/flood-legends

(2) http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v14/i1/catastrophe.asp

Dwilli, my co-author has written a series of posts about the book, In Six Days : Why Fifty Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation.

1. “The Alpha and Omega…”

2. “Abundant Life”

3. “Abundant Life” II

The scope of intelligent design is limited. It either assumes that a designer kicked things off in the beginning with the a plan that things would unfold as they did, or that a designer was involved at some point in the design of life forms. Christian creationism differs from this in some ways of looking at things.

As some background you need to understand two different views with Creationism.

Old Earth Creationism

Old Earth Creationism (OEC) asserts that God created the Earth billions of years ago. There are different views on Old Earth Creationism, such as the Gap Creationism notion and Progressive Creationism. Gap Creationism rests on an alternative interpretation of Genesis 1:1.

“In the beginning … [when] the earth became formless and void.” (It is argued that the word ‘was’, hayah, can also be correctly translated as ‘became’.) (1)

The notion is that the Earth had existed for a long time, but went into a state of decay. Things were created anew, including human beings. Genesis 1:28 is also used as evidence for this theory.

Genesis 1:28 (King James Version)

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (2) [emphasis added]

Now one aspect of OEC is Day Age Creationism. This is an attempt to reconcile biblical accounts of creationism with scientific theories. Basically, the notion is that the 24-hour days referenced in Genesis are not actually 24-hour days. This goes with the verse,

“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day…” (2Peter 3:8,10). [emphasis added]

Since God exists out of time, the notion of a day is irrelevant. The issue of creation in Genesis is essentially presented in a form that humans can understand, and the notion of a “day” is not taken to be meant literally.

There is another notion of OEC that goes along with “Adam.”

1) Was there a pre-Adamic race? Yes. God created all the races on the sixth day (Genesis 1:24-31). He rested on the seventh and created the Adam, that He put in the garden of Eden on the eighth day. I base this on the fact that in Genesis 1:26, the word man does not have the definite article so it means mankind as a whole. In Genesis 2:7, the word man has the definite article and particle (eth-ha adham) and means the man Adam. Those of you that use the Companion Bible will see that it tells us that in Genesis 1:27 the word man does have the definite article and particle but I disagree. Also, Genesis 1:27 mankind was created and in Genesis 2:7 Adam was formed. (3)

So, the notion is that mankind was created first, and that a pre-Adam race of people was created before the Adam into whom God, “breathed the breath of life.”

To be continued in Part-II with Young Earth Creationism (YEC) explored in detail.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Earth_creationism

(2) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen+1:28&version=9;

(3) http://www.biblestudygames.com/biblestudies/faq/adamandeve.htm

And then did gravity clump matter together.  Albeit, faster than should have been possible.  With particles flying outward at faster than the speed of light, which today is impossible, but then not so miraculous.  And then, did we notice that every galaxy is moving away from us by the redshift of light.  Originally we had the delusion that we were at the center of the universe, then we realized this was delusion, and now we realize that we’re not far off from the center.  But cosmologists realize you should not talk about the ‘center’ of the universe, because there is no center as you would expect.  Eventually, the universe will end in a ‘big crunch’ going back to a marble, and then beginning again!!  And even though cosmologists know this will probably not happen, they also know that this explains what happened before the big bang.  As in all explosions that we know of, the exploding bits accelerate rapidly and then decelerate.  Not so with the universe, because of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy.’  Those things which can never be directly detected.  We’ll never be able to detect that 90% of the universe that is missing, but that’s okay, it explains away the problems in our theory.  And more to come in Part-III.

Source: http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/IUP/Big_Bang_Primer.html

It often seems to me that scientists lose track of the fact that their research methods and interpretation of results are based on philosophical assumptions.  Now, to be fair, sometimes I have seen this awareness, but oftentimes it is absent.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. —Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995.

The notion of evolution can be seen as a psychological or hypothetical construct.  It’s a mental representation that allows for the description of observed information.  In that sense, it can never ‘exist,’ because it is simply a mental heuristic to explain things.  We have to be careful to separate observation from constructs.  For example, a person who believes solely in naturalistic evolution, has a mental representation of how distinct observations are tied together (i.e., different types of fossils in different strata layers, and certain observations from biology).

So what is the difference in psychological constructs between someone who ascribes to ID theory versus naturalistic evolution.  If you use a purely ID based construct without theological elements, they may differ only in the assumption of design characteristics versus happenstance development of features and characteristics.  An ID construct may say nothing more than, an intelligence was involved somewhere in the process and therefore, the characteristics we see have a designated or designed purpose.  So the assumption of characteristics exhibited by life forms will be seen as serving some purpose (as if they have been created by an engineer).

With purely naturalistic evolution, the psychological construct leads to different conclusions, predictions, and a focus of research.  Purpose may be ascribed to mate selection, or selective advantage, or the purpose may be seen as a non-functional hold-over from a previous stage of the evolutionary process.  A person using an ID construct would not necessarily deny many of these things, but would also not make the assumption that all characteristics confer a survival advantage, increase mating fitness, or are ‘hold-overs.’

I have a construct for evaluating science based on its practical and real-world implications.  So far, in my opinion, the naturalistic evolutionary schema has been applied inappropriately to a number of basic biological phenomena.  Purporting evolution to mere natural selection (i.e., bacterial resistance).  Up until recently, people using naturalistic evolutionary constructs have managed to delay advancement in genetics that may have led to cures of important diseases or improved treatments.  As an example, nearly all organs that were previously viewed as ‘vestigial’ or evolutionary ‘hold-overs,’ have been discovered to have important physiological purposes (e.g., appendix, junk DNA, or tonsils).

In my opinion, the design assumption is superior in its possibility for producing long-term real-world benefits to society.  Start with the assumption of design and purpose and think about biology as discovering that purpose.

Now, each construct has societal and personal implications with regard to theology.  Neither construct would speak directly to that issue, but they may be extended with additional constructs.  A person holding a naturalistic evolutionary construct may also come to the conclusion that God exists.  A person holding an ID construct may not believe in God, only that ’something’ was responsible for the design.  It turns out that on a deep level people will be motivated to fill in those blank spots with faith (either faith in God or faith in the non-existence of God).  It just turns out that most who ascribe to purely naturalistic philosophies also tend to extend their constructs to include a construct for the non-existent of God and the reverse for the ID crowd.  Or sometimes, it can work in the opposite direction, the assumption of God leads to the construct of ID, or the assumption of no God leads to philosophical naturalism.  So, while neither theory speaks directly to theology, it is intimately entwined with both theories at their philosophical bases as an outcropping or the philosophical bases for these views is an outcropping of a more deeply held belief system (God’s existence or non-existence).

I would be interesting in hearing opinions about whether you think it would be more advantageous to use a design construct when conducting research or a naturalistic evolutionary construct.  Naturally, I believe that the design construct is a superior approach in the long term for providing demonstrable benefit to society.