Kreitsauce's Musings

I got the title of this post from my favorite line from Stargate: SG-1. Jack O’neill always says it when he gets frustrated by people who waste time on stupidity, wrong-headed thinking, or inane political mumbo-jumbo. Frankly, I’ve noticed a lot of Christians that deserve a good “Oh, for crying out loud,” from the Colonel himself, followed by my second favorite line. My reason for this is that it seems like so many Christians have their heads firmly planted in the sand.

I say this because I have met so many Christians who naively think that they are not responsible for what happens in the world around them. Their attitudes and words, they think, do not influence those around them. Their choice of entertainment, they suppose, is entirely a matter of personal preference, devoid of any deeper meaning and incapable of creating unintended consequences. Whether or not they vote or are involved in government and law (one hesitates to use the word “politics”) is of little consequence. Worldview, apologetics, and philosophy have no meaning to them, and they would just as soon have everyone avoid this area of reality altogether. And, oh, the excuses they use to justify these ideas. Some of them even use Bible verses to bolster their position.

Lucy, the small australopithecus afarensis, is supposed to be our ancestor. Standing at around three feet tall, she doesn’t look like much. It’s obvious that if we’re supposed to get from a chimp-like creature to our current standing of Homo sapien, there’s going to have to be a lot of changing going on throughout the years. We are supposed to have gone through the Homo habilis stage, followed by Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and finally Homo sapiens sapiens (that’s not a typo.)

It all sounds so tidy, doesn’t it? Well, it seems that way until one realizes that there is no clear-cut definition of any of these categories, at least not one that is universally accepted by the scientific establishment. There is some degree of consensus, but certainly not the degree one would expect. There’s also little consensus on how long it takes a new species to evolve. Some estimates place it at 250,000 years per new species of human. Lucy is dated at 3 million years. Homo habilis is dated from 2 to 1.5 million years. Homo erectus is dated at 1.6 to .4 million years. Homo sapiens and so forth remain in the present. With so many unknown factors, who can tell what one should believe about evolutionary science? Of course, it gets much more convoluted than that.

The Taung Can No Man Tame

In 1924, Professor Raymond Dart acquired a fossilized skull from the lime works at Taung. He knew it was unique, and determined that it was a young primate which he named Australopithecus africanus. You can see pictures of Taung in many school textbooks due to its fame. Until Lucy was discovered in 1974, Taung was considered to be our oldest evolutionary ancestor, dating around to 2 million to 3 million years old. Then, in 1973, geologist T. C. Partridge rocked the evolutionist’s world. He determined that the cave that the Taung skull came from could not be more than 870,000 years old. Since it could take up to a million years, according to evolutionary theory, for a new species to evolve,  going all the way from africanus to modern-day humans in 870,000 years is out of the question. Plus, even evolutionists date true humans back to 750,000 years. There’s no way for africanus to be an ancestor.

So what is an evolutionist to do? They tried to fit the Taung skull into the line of habilis. Of course, some were honest. Phillip Tobias wrote in response: “Although nearly 50 yr have elapsed since its discovery, it is true to say that the Taung skull has never yet been fully analyzed and described.” I guess it stinks for all the people duped by the scientific establishment all those years! Some have seen fit to remove the Taung skull from the line of humans altogether, classifying it as P. robustus.

Monkeying Around with the Family Tree

Fortunately for evolutionists, Lucy was found the year after Patridge dated the cave. The family tree was revised, and A. afarensis (Lucy) replaced africanus (Taung) as our nonhuman ancestor. Africanus was moved to the australopithecine branch of the tree and became the link between Lucy and P. robustus.

In 1985, the famous “Black Skull” was found. Dating back, according to evolutionists, to 2.5 million years ago, it seems to be a blend of P. robustus and Lucy, leaving Taung as the odd man out. So scientists have begun to move Taung back to the line of humans (again), between Lucy (A. afarensis) and H. habilis. The problem, of course, is that Partridge’s dating of the cave makes that impossible. The dating was based on thermoluminescence analysis of calcite and uranium-series dates of 942,000 years ago and 764,000 years ago on limestone. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University writes: “A date for Taung of 2 million years ago or more may seem most unreasonable, but the argument is obviously circular and the true age remains uncertain.”

What is my point in all of this? My point is that there is nothing solid or certain about the supposed family tree. Dating methods aren’t entirely reliable, but even when they are used, they are often ignored or twisted to make the fossil record say what the evolutionists want it to say. Lucy, Taung, and the rest are being moved haphazardly about the family tree just to make one that works. To place your trust in the soft science of paleoanthropology is a mistake. I love Lucy because she is a reminder that there are far more problems than solutions offered up by a Darwinistic interpretation of the fossil record. It needs to be reinterpreted. That’s where the problem lies. The flaws are not with the fakes (like Piltdown Man), the genuine fossils, etc. The flaws are in the way evidence is interpreted and with the scientific establishment’s mad dash to put something believable together.

Aren’t you glad there are much more firm foundations out there?

You’d probably assume that a blog post about biological evolution would deal with biology or some other related study. However, that’s not where I’m taking this discussion today. Today, I’ll be looking at the poetic and artistic aspects of the Darwinism movement. To be honest, it makes sense that a believable, coherent theory would have elements of the Arts, because humans have a way of describing anything that matters in with particular eloquence. It’s true, we often tell someone we care about simply “I love you,” but we all know there are much more creative ways of saying those three words. The music industry has blossomed thanks to that creativity.

Darwin’s Day in Court

Andrew Hill has written: “Compared to other sciences, the mythic element is greatest in paleoanthropology.” (in American Scientist, March-April 1984) Speaking sympathetically of that same phenomena in the same article, Ian Tattersall admits: “Paleoanthropologists are fond of telling each other ‘Just-So’ stories; and once in a while a little needling of this kind does no harm at all.” Milford Wolpoff is much less forgiving: ” When the only people who can comment are the discoverers or friends of the discoverers, there is no sense of independent observer. We’re not practicing science. We’re practicing opera.” His reasons for making that statement can be found here.

Two books, written by law professors, may be instructive at this point. Norman Macbeth, a Harvard-trained lawyer and non-creationist studied evolution for years and wrote a book Darwin Retried in which he demonstrated that evolution was a religion and was not of high enough quality to stand up in a court of law. Philip E Johnson, a law professor of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote Darwin on Trial. In his book, he came to four important conclusions about evolution:

1. Evolution is grounded on naturalism, not scientific fact
2. A belief that a large body of empirical evidence supports evolution is nothing but an illusion
3. Evolution is a religion
4. If evolution had been subjected to a rigorous study of the evidence, it would have been abandoned long ago

In response to Roger Lewin’s description of the Ancestor’s Exhibit in 1984 in which he spoke of the awe and emotion of the experience, Johnson commented:

“Lewin is absolutely correct, and I can’t think of anything more likely to detract from the objectivity of one’s judgment. Descriptions of fossils from people who yearn to cradle their ancestors in their hands ought to be scrutinized as carefully as a letter of recommendation from a job applicant’s mother…. The story of human descent from apes is not merely a scientific hypothesis; it is the secular equivalent of the story of Adam and Eve.”

Raining on Darwin’s Parade

Let’s turn now to Darwinism and graphic media. In the March 1998 edition of Antiquity, David Van Reybrouck, a student of the role of drawings in the propagation of Darwinism has made five observations:

1. Illustrations always go beyond the archaeological data
2. Illustrations always involve speculation on the part of the fossil discoverers, who advise the artists
3. Illustrations involve interpretations that rely heavily on unproven and sometimes doubtful theories
4. Illustrations are always nonobjective, yet they are trusted in a visual society such as ours
5. Illustrations are used extensively because they sell evolution effectively.

The most blatant lie ever told to help promote evolution is the “parade” of stages in supposed human evolution that we are all familiar with. The origin of this parade- or should I say charade?- of characters is an illustration in F. Clark Howell’s book Early Man, originally published in 1965. The parade was originally on a 36-inch foldout page within the book. What most people don’t realize that the parade is pure propaganda. It doesn’t exist. The original book makes it clear that the parade doesn’t tell an accurate story, and the author and publishers knew it. Evolutionists knew that the apes and ape-like creatures they had theorized did not walk on their back feet. The book clearly states in the text, but not on the chart: “Although protoapes and apes were quadrupedal, all are shown here standing for purposes of comparison.” Sizes of each proposed ancestor were not to scale, and they were shown walking, not simply standing as the author states. These small details make a world of difference when it comes to the believability of the theory. It’s clear deception. Yet it was- and still is, in some cases- included in advertisements and eventually became its own poster in classrooms around the world.

Holding Out for a Hero

Finally, I’d like to call your attention to Misia Landau’s book Narratives of Human Evolution. In her book, Miss Landau makes an interesting assertion: paleoanthropology is storytelling. She compare folk-stories and epics to Darwin, Huxley, Keith, and Haeckel’s descriptions of human evolution. Here’s some similarities she’s noticed:

• The Hero’s Origin- The hero is typically leading a safe and untroubled life. He may be smaller or weaker than others. Think “Frodo Baggins.” In the story of evolution, the hero is a nondescript primate, perhaps living in the trees. Like Frodo Baggins heading out from the Shire with the Ring, the primate leaves the safety of the trees to walk on the ground, perhaps because of a larger brain or changes in the availability of food.
• The Hero Tested- In myths, the Hero is tested by predators, opponents, or his environment. In the Darwinistic myth, similar situations occur. “Indeed, the tests are specifically designed for that purpose: to bring out the human in the hero”, Landau writes.
• The Hero Transformed- Myths and even modern fantasy always add a sacred or magical object- a Ring of Power, the Master Sword, and Invisibility Cloak- to help a man become more than he was. In evolutionary theory, natural selection or a “magic twist” of genetic mutations (those are the words of Jared Diamond, who wrote an article about the movement of modern humans out of Africa in the May 1989 edition of Discover magazine) bestow upon the hero the intelligence or abilities necessary to become more than his ancestors.
• The Hero’s Death- The fatal irony of the average hero is that he dies due to pride through success. Most evolution tales include a warning to humans that we could become like our supposed ancestors if we aren’t careful. Richard Leakey devotes an entire book to that subject entitled The Sixth Extinction.

Frankly, I think J. R. R. Tolkien is a much better writer of this sort of material than the Darwinists. Let’s just leave it to the experts, ok, guys?

At the AAAS convention in San Francisco, Carl Sagan once explained in his lecture “Velikovsky’s Challenge to Science” that science works in this way: “The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged.” The hypothesis “must survive confrontation with observation. Appeals to authority are impermissible. Experiments must be reproducible.”

That’s a pretty strange statement when you think about it. Evolution isn’t observable. It can’t be challenged in the scientific establishment without some serious ridicule taking place. Evolutionists appeal to the authority of the scientific establishment. There aren’t any experiments that are able to confirm evolution. It’s ironic to me, then, that Sagan would also make a very profound statement in that same lecture: “Not all scientific statements have equal weight.” How right he is. Direct observations of, say, the laws of physics, are far more weightier because of the tremendous amount of data verifying them. Unfortunately, the scientific establishment does not appear to behave this way, and the general public certainly isn’t aware of this concept. What we have are Darwinists acting as the high priests of our society. People- even highly-educated people- believe in Darwinism because scientists can’t be wrong.

How is Darwinism a sort of lesser science? Consider our interest in chimps. We study chimpanzees- their behavior, genetic makeup, and anatomy- because Darwinists believe that we are very closely related to them. Darwinists then use superficial similarities between humans and chimps to prove their assumptions. That is called begging the question in logic. They assume to be true the very thing they are trying to prove. Bereft of anything that Sagan would call a good basis for scientific study, a philosophical assumption has been foisted upon us as science. In reality, such studies on chimps would only attempt to shed light on humanity if evolution had first proven to be a correct assumption. Unlike Darwinism, intelligent design bases its theories on the evidence around us: information provided for our world through physics and DNA as well as the incredible complexity of the universe.

The logical fallacies don’t stop there, however. There’s a difference between historical and scientific evidence. In spite of the fact that scientists have performed numerous experiments on animals in an attempt to prove evolution through mutation, the obvious must be declared: just because mutations can be made to happen or engineered in a lab does not mean that they did happen in the past. That is a logical fallacy. That genetic engineering is possible in the present does not mean that it certainly did happen in the past. Scientists have proven it is possible; they have not proven that it occurred.

Suppose I gave you a pile of hammers and asked you to arrange them in a potential evolutionary sequence. You could start with small ones and work your way to larger ones, arrange them by claw types, group them into families based on what they are made of, etc. You could argue that you showed a pattern from simple to complex. The whole assignment, of course, would be bogus. There was no actual evolutionary relationship between the different hammers. They were designed with a particular function or purpose in mind. Curved and straight claw hammers, sledge hammers, ball pein, mason’s hammers, upholsterer’s hammers, and mallets are different because they are designed that way. Just because scientists can superimpose an evolutionary order on things does not mean that the evolutionary order is fact.

We should all be very grateful for what science has allowed us to achieve. The medical fields have provided us with the ability to heal many wounds and diseases previously thought to be untreatable. Technology has allowed us to communicate and travel efficiently. Yes, because of scientific principles and dedicated men and women willing to spend years of their lives researching, writing, and peer-reviewing what has already been written, you and I are able to enjoy very different lives from our forbears. We can be confident in scientific discovery because it is based on solid evidence and a desire to “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” as Carl Sagan once famously said. Would it surprise you, then, to learn how little evidence we have of human evolution?

HIDE AND SEEK

Have you ever seen an actual fossil of a human ancestor? Probably not. I haven’t. The vast majority of the authors of textbooks on paleontology haven’t. Curators of the museums of natural history around the world usually haven’t. Only a very, very small handful of people have ever been privileged enough to see such fossils. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy afoot. I’m saying that, because they are so rare, so valuable, and so fragile, human ancestral fossils are very unlikely to be on display or studied. In fact, most of us have never even seen a picture of an actual fossil. According to Marvin L. Lubenow, whose book Bones of Contention provided many of the “diving in” points for this series of blog posts, the total number of people who have access to ancestral fossils is fewer than the heads of state in the entire world.

William King, the man who declared Homo neanderthalensis to be a different species than modern-day humans in 1864, never saw the actual fossils. He did so after reading a description of them. Darwin never saw a single human fossil. Thomas Huxley never saw original fossils either, but he took great pains to describe them in his 1863 work Man’s Place in Nature.

People publish vast amounts of research with unverified data! Germany built a two-story museum to celebrate the discovery of Steinheim Man in 1933. Visitors never saw the actual fossil though. They viewed plastic replicas. The actual fossil was kept in a safe set into a stone wall in an old military outpost several miles away. In their article in the October 1995 edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Braun, Hublin, and Boucher note: “While it was never described in great detail, this fossil played a central role in various evolutionary models.”

Of course, there is a good deal of politics in this field as well. Teuku Jacob, former curator of Gadjah Mada University, was known for his jealousy of the Homo erectus fossils from Java in his possession. Swisher, Curtis, and Lewin write:

“These fossils, the prized objects of Jacob’s collection are rarely seen, even by professionals in the fossil-hunting business. Scholars with serious research programs have to apply to Jacob for permission even to see them, let alone touch them, for scientific study. And even those few who succeed in obtaining official permission have to wait for Jacob’s final OK, for he alone is permitted to remove the fossils from the safes.”

Donald Johanson, the discover of Lucy, agrees that “only those in the inner circle get to see the fossils; only those who agree with the particular interpretation of a particular investigator are allowed to see the fossils.”

CIRCLING THE WAGONS

There’s one exception to this almost xenophobic protection of the fossils. In 1984, the American Museum of Natural History in New York sponsored an exhibit in which more than forty of the original fossils were brought together for the first- and probably last- time ever. There were special guards over the fossils and the curators that traveled with the fossils. The fossils were placed in special cases. Work on the subway line beneath the museum was halted to avoid vibrating- and possibly damaging- the fossils.

What prompted this gathering of the fossils? In his book Ancestors: The Hard Evidence, Eric Delson tells us that there were those in the scientific community who were concerned about the rising popularity of creationism. Delson, who was a scientist at the American Museum, tells us that creationism was a “great and growing concern” at the museum. The primary purpose, then, was to show professionals and lay people the evidence for evolution, and they avoided making any statement concerning creationism at the museum so that they would not “dignify…creation science.” Their words, not mine. What are these guys afraid of?

BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

Paleoanthropology is in a strange position. Unlike most- if not all- other areas of science, workers in this field rarely have access to the material their science is based on. They are usually one step or so away from the actual evidence. Too often, creationists have been guilty of downplaying the importance of human ancestral fossils. In reality, they are unique and valuable, but because of their value, an insufficient number of scientists have been able to study them in depth.

What do they work with then? They work with casts and descriptions others have written of the fossils. Casts may be reliable if the molds used are detailed enough and if the materials maintain their intended shape. However, casts can be far from ideal. They lack the detail of the original. Becky A Sigmon of the University of Toronto says that there is a general consensus among paleoanthropologists  that “casts should not be used as resource material for a scientific paper.” (See her collection of papers on the subject for more information.) She has a good reason for saying this. At the American Museum exhibit in 1984, when the original fossils were to be placed into their mounts (which had been based on the casts available), most of them did not fit. Casts simply aren’t substitutes from the originals. Lubenow further complains that “casts of only a small percentage of the total fossil material and less than half of the most important fossil material are available for study.”

Scientists are then forced to turn to description of fossils in scientific literature, which is the most common form of source material for scientific work. How can a field of science continue to function and inform public opinion if there is so little readily-available information? How can we be expected to believe what few have seen? As John Fleagle of the State University of New York, Stony Brook has said: “The big awkwardness right now is when someone announces they have found a specimen that overturns everything we know, but almost no one has seen it.”

Talk about blind faith! My point is this: if we are to believe that humans evolved in the manner most Darwinists claim, there must be more evidence. Right now, there’s just not enough out there for me to buy into.

Having established that the creation of the universe and subsequent formation of the galaxies are all but impossible to have occurred by chance, we now turn our attention to the formation of the planets themselves. It turns out that getting planets to form naturally isn’t very easy after all. There was a time when planets were supposed to have blasted out of the Sun as the result of another passing star, but anything blasted or sucked off of the Sun would have fallen back into the Sun as soon as the other star passed. That’s gravity again for you; always making a mess of things! So scientists turned to “cold accretion”, postulating that planets could form as dust from a forming solar system began to stick together, form dust bunnies, then “planetesimals”, then eventually establish their own gravity which began pulling more planetesimals together until eventually a whole planet was formed. This is supposedly how the inner planets of our solar system formed.

Oh, but there’s a problem here, and it’s a whopper! How do you get that much dust to stick together? How does that dust turn into the the rock and iron of modern planetesimals? Why don’t cosmic “dust bunnies” form in space today? The answer is that space dust doesn’t turn into dust bunnies, and planetesimals don’t play nice when they meet each other. These meteorites and their kin cruise around the solar system at a cool 100,000 miles per hour, and, when they hit each other, they either bounce off or shatter each other. No planets. No us.

But, one may argue, could not their speed relative to each other be much slower, such as the rubble that makes up the rings of Saturn? That’s a great question, but the rubble around Saturn is not collecting; the chunks of rock and dust around Saturn simply bounce off of each other.

Well, what of the gas giants and ice planets then? Surely we can come up with a way for them to work out? Not a chance. If dust has a hard time sticking together, how do you think gas molecules will handle things? Not very well, as you can most likely imagine, since gasses simply do not “stick” to anything. I know there have been simulations demonstrating the formation of gas giants, but those simulations begin with a “gravitational instability.” The simulation was designed to create planets, something evolutionists don’t believe in. The ice planets are supposed to have formed as ice crystals sticking together, but there’s not as much matter out there and no model can bring about their existence so quickly. Other models assume they formed closer to the sun and then moved further away, but you still run into that pesky problem of getting things to stick together. Back to the drawing board!

So we’ve already talked about the singularity pseudoscience. What happens after that? Well, I’m glad you asked that, because now the story gets even better! By the time we’re through talking about galaxy and star formation, stories about wolves eating grandmothers only to be killed by friendly woodsmen will seem tragically commonplace and dull. Now, where was I….. Oh,yes! The singularity had just finished causing the strangely uniform inflation to expand the universe and produce antimatter-free matter, when it turned to its next task: the creation of galaxies and stars….

The question is, once the gas particles in the universe begin expanding, how do you get them to start collapsing all over the universe without creating a bunch of black holes? In other words, assuming you can get the expansion to stop and the collapsing to start, how do you keep galaxies from collapsing completely? Galaxies won’t form naturally unless the matter begins to collect, and the only thing strong enough to collect the matter is gravity, which shouldn’t be able to work thanks to the supposedly uniform inflation I had mentioned in the last post.  Of course, once galaxies begin to form courtesy of gravity, they ought to just keep collapsing in on themselves. What has to step in to keep the galaxies from just shrinking into really big black holes? The plot thickens……

Steven Hawking, in his book The Universe in a Nutshell postulated that dark matter did it. Not just any dark matter, though. His very special brand of magical dark matter formed on a brane world parallel to our own. And I thought I had a big imagination! So far, brane worlds and dark matter (at least dark matter on the order Hawking is talking about) is purely theoretical. No science here so far!

Maybe that’s why Hawking has put galaxy formation on his list of unexplained mysteries in his books published in 1988, 2001, and 2002. J. Trefil wrote in his The Dark Side of the Universe: “There shouldn’t be galaxies out there at all, and even if there are galaxies, they shouldn’t be grouped together the way they are….It is one of the thorniest problems in cosmology.” Marcus Chown, in his article “Let there Be Light” (February 1998 edition of New Scientist) quoted NASA scientists as saying: “We have no direct evidence of how galaxies were formed or how galaxies evolved, whether they formed from aggregations of smaller units or from subdivisions of large ones.” Their problem is that, at best, the Big Bang theory gives us a mass of expanding gas, and that is all.

Of course, then there’s the formation of stars, where we have the same problem with gravity producing more black holes and homogenous gas not wanting to collapse at all. But wait! There’s more! Stars are supposed to have formed, at least in one theory, in hot gaseous clouds vaguely referred to as “star-forming regions.” The problem? Hot gas clouds are more likely to disperse than collapse, so I have a hard time believing that anything like what we see today is actually capable of producing stars. Sure, there are stars in those regions, but that doesn’t mean the stars formed there. They aren’t necessarily new stars. Who honestly cares if stars currently surrounded by vast gas and dust clouds are sucking those clouds in? Any star would suck gas and dust into itself because of gravity. For all we know the stars are old! Lada and Shu wrote and article for Science in 1990, saying: “We have not yet been able to unambiguously detect the collapse of a molecular cloud core or the infall of circumstellar material onto an embryonic star.” No proof there, guys.

This is the second part in a series on the Big Bang. Millions and billions of years have gone by in this little bedtime story, and yet I don’t see any reason for believing a word of it. There’s not one shred of proof, and the objections are virtually insurmountable. I’d rather believe that the cow jumped over the moon than believe this rot, because my “willful suspension of disbelief” has its limits. Just ask my wife about how I felt about “robot heaven” in Transformers 2.

In the beginning there was a singularity. Fortunately for all of us, it expanded (or exploded, depending on who you ask), and our universe is the result. Well, that’s how things would work if the evolutionists had their way. Oh, I know they prefer to use much more scientific terms, but I sometimes have to question why. The things they try so hard to prove using science actually have some very distinct scientific problems.

First of all, there’s the very existence of a singularity from which everything came from. Professor Steven Hawking writes the following in his work A Brief History of Time: “At the singularity, general relativity and all other physical laws would break down: one couldn’t predict what will come out of the singularity….This means that one might as well cut the big bang, and any events before it, out of the theory, because they can have no effect on what we observe.” Thanks, Doc. I’ll just set my bag o’ tools (the laws of physics) aside now because they won’t work in the Big Bang scenario. So what exactly makes this different from a miracle? Once one throws out physics, one is left with metaphysics, in which God is permitted.

The existence of a singularity isn’t the only miracle, however. There’s another great one that big bang cosmologists keep in their bag o’ tricks (since the bag o’ tools known as the “laws of physics” can’t help much here). There’s also inflation, which appears to have properties as varied and mysterious as pixie dust. You see, if inflation didn’t happen, the universe would have collapsed back into a singularity again thanks to a tool of ours known as gravitation. Fortunately, inflation was around to accelerate the expansion of the universe by a thousand billion billion billion times, all very smoothly of course. The Big Bang scenario also predicts the existence of magnetic monopoles, which have never been found, and a non-uniform cosmic microwave background radiation instead of the observed uniform CMBR we see today. Fortunately, we just sprinkle more of the pixie dust inflation and- presto!- the problem goes away. Well, sort of. Inflation is an ad hoc theory in that there is no evidence for its existence, and the inflation rate itself must have been very uniform and fine tuned in order for it to not have looked a lot like a really big, very destructive explosion. I wish I had that kind of faith, my evolutionary comrades.

Then there’s that pesky thing Einstein came up with, what was it? Oh, yeah. E=mc^{2 (which actually looks squared when I type it even though it just looks like a “2″ when I post)} . That’s mass-energy equivalence, meaning that matter and energy are interchangeable. Enough energy can produce matter, and matter can be converted into energy. When particles are created from energy, they are always created in matter/antimatter pairs. Electrons are created alongside anti-electrons (positrons), protons are created alongside anti-protons, neutrinos are created alongside anti-neutrinos, etc. Of course, when matter meets antimatter, the process is reversed. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other and you get a lot of energy. This means that if the Big Bang occurred, the matter formed from the energy of the Big Bang would have very quickly annihilated itself. No galaxies. No stars. No planets. No us. Fortunately, all observable matter in the universe is ordinary, boring ol’ matter. No antimatter galaxies, stars, planets, or people. Big Bang cosmologists try to get around this by saying that- by chance- a small amount (like the mass of the universe) of matter was still left over after the universe nearly annihilated itself, but that seems impossible based on everything we know. What mechanism was in place that skewed the laws of physics and gave existence a chance? None that we know of. It’s all based on assumptions and guesses.

I’d like to come back to the CMBR again. Predictions of the level of background radiation in the universe were way off. It was nearly uniformly 3 degrees kelvin, thanks to the constancy of starlight. I say it was nearly uniform because in 2003, WMAP discovered real variations in the CMBR. I say “real” here because its predecessor, COBE, discovered some years earlier that just turned out to be “white noise.” The problem is, the variations discovered work very nicely in a creationist cosmology, not a big bang cosmology. The Big Bang model predicts that the universe should be uniform, boundless, with no center. Instead, the variations indicated the existence of a cosmic “north and south pole”, and a cosmic “equator” of sorts. Creationists can easily explain this in a model involving the Milky Way positioned near the center of the universe, but such galactocentrism is unpleasant for evolutionists who assume that mankind is not special. Oops again!

Perhaps the most abused factor in evolutionary theory is chance. It is invoked in nearly every aspect of big bang cosmology and Darwinian evolution, even though the average textbook doesn’t actually use the word. Oh, I know that they like to use phrases like “natural selection” and “genetic drift” when dealing with Darwinism, but there’s nothing else out there for the evolutionists to appeal to except for physics when it comes to Big Bang cosmology. It is necessary, of course, because there is no divine mover behind events, and everything that was, is, and will be is the result of Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker“. In the most extreme cases, evolutionists assert that anything is possible, even if “anything” is highly unlikely and may have had to occur or exist in one of the many universes they assume to exist. Since the universe (or multiverse) is so vast, everything has likely already occurred somewhere along the line. Hence, however unlikely it is that the universe we see came about on its own, it has obviously done so thanks to the wonders of sheer chance. To the minds of many, this is just one universe out of the infinite universes that are out there (wherever “there” is), and this may be just one iteration of an infinite progression of universes. We just happened to exist in a universe capable of supporting life. The scenario, however, is false. Anything and everything is not possible. Chance cannot, for instance, violate the laws of physics. That severely limits the potentialities of the wonderful world of chance. Therefore, evolutionists prefer to blend together chance and necessity. An object or process is determined to be necessary, and chance is used to fill in the gaps. How did life begin? Well, we know it exists, and we think we know how early earth would have looked, so just identify what is necessary for life to exist, throw in some “chance”, and add a dash of scientific jargon, and you’ve got yourself a working theory! Williams and Hartnett analyze this use of chance in their book Dismantling the Big Bang.

Williams and Hartnett point out that, for starters, chance is not a force. At all. Things may appear to happen randomly, but there are actually a complex set of forces at work. Anything above the quantum level moves according to Newtonian laws of motion. In a sense, “chance” and “necessity” are really describing the same thing: Physics. Necessity is limited to the certain results of the laws of physics. Chance refers to the possible results of the laws of physics. In this way, chance adds nothing to the party at all. One might question why anybody even invited it in the first place.

Secondly, Chance is dualistic in nature. Whenever you measure the probability something will occur, you must also measure the probability that it will not occur. I suppose there is technically a chance that the water vapor rising from my stove will concentrate into a point and burn a hole through my chest. However, there is a much, much greater chance that such an event will never occur. The chance it will not occur is so significant, no one is even concerned about this event taking place. So it ought to be when discussing chance and origins, because the numbers are no where near being in favor of evolution.

Thirdly, chance does not mean that every possibility is equally likely. Even if the universe is vast and has been around for billions of years, it is most certainly not truly infinite, else the Big Bang would be not necessary. Therefore, there are limits. All interaction in the real world will use up space and time. All interaction in the real world will use up energy. Actually, long periods of time going by will actually decrease the likelihood that anything will happen at all, thanks to our dear friend Entropy. It’s a gamble evolutionists try to take, but the odds always favor the house. Just as spending more money at a casino makes it more difficult to win, “spending” more energy early on in the game of existence makes it more difficult to bring our universe into the state it is in today. The universe would have to had scored an “early win”, which is again unlikely, even by evolutionist standards. Somehow, everything turned out just right for us, something skewed nature. And chance doesn’t really help us figure out what that something is.

Finally, Williams and Hartnett point out that chance can only be applied to events that can happen. Chance never makes things happen when they are physically impossible. Consider the “rogue gas” scenario above that burned a whole in my chest. It isn’t just unlikely. It’s impossible because gas molecules operate according to the aforementioned laws of motion. The actually probability of the event I described is therefore a whopping Zero. Chance cannot make impossible events possible.

Hartnett assumes that part of the first day of creation included forming the Earth primarily from water, that Genesis 1:1-2 is a literal part of the creation narrative and not just an introductory statement. Frankly, I have no problem with that even though some Christians might. Since water- and a lot of it- is essentially the only thing around, God’s creation of light doesn’t refer to stars or the sun. When God created light, He created gravitational and electromagnetic energy, the potential for light. This caused the Earth “which was without form and void” to form into a sphere under its own gravitation. Therefore, the first day of creation included light through electromagnetic energy as well as time, the laws of nature, and three-dimensional space.

On the fourth day the sun, moon, and stars were created as the Bible states. Then, in Hartnett’s theory, God expanded space itself (“stretched out the heavens”) as Psalms and Isaiah state. The size of the universe was rapidly increased, and galaxies were pulled along for the ride, they receded from earth. This event caused the galaxies to recede and spawn quasars. A particularly interesting view Hartnett holds is that quasars are the direct result of God’s stretching the heavens out. If this is true, when we are viewing quasars, we are watching the immediate result of God’s creative act on the fourth day. So how did the starlight reach earth by the time Adam was created?

When God stretched out space, this caused a time-dilation event on earth. Hartnett states that time would have slowed significantly on earth but remained flowing at the “normal” speed throughout most of the universe. However, Hartnett also states that God accelerated the stretching of the universe only during the creation week (since God’s “stretching” act is referred to only in the past tense). In his view, the universe might not be really expanding anymore or at least the expansion is not accelerating. We are only seeing the after-effects of the universe being stretched. Therefore, we observe redshift in the heavens and not blueshift. We are not still in a dilation field (since it was caused by the acceleration of the expansion) so blueshift is no longer observed, but the light we see that has traveled more than 6,000 light years or so has been redshifted by past expansion.

In summary, Hartnett’s theory dovetails nicely with the Genesis 1 creation account. God creates the universe in literally six earth days (plus one day to “rest”- leave off creating). Though the “evening and the morning” only lasted a day on earth, God stretched out the heavens for roughly 1-3 days, during which time itself moved more slowly on earth than elsewhere in the universe. The result is that billions of years occurred elsewhere while only a total of six days passed on earth. In that time, light traveled from distant galaxies to earth, but it is now redshifted as a result of the initial acceleration of the universe. This theory agrees with the Bible and observable data, and it explains how light could travel so far in such a short time.