Kreitsauce's Musings

I cheated. I recently ordered Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project for small groups in churches and schools. It’s an exciting program, but I didn’t wait for training or go through a small group myself to watch the DVDs. I watched them. All of them. In less than twenty-four hours. Dr. Del Tackett is an amazing teacher, but, far more importantly, he accurately describes and defines faith in a God that is far more amazing. I won’t spoil the series for you, because I think that it is much more powerful in a group setting, but I will use one of the lessons as a jumping-in point for today’s posting.

Ever since President Barack Obama told the world that the United States is not a Christian nation, there’s been a lot of questioning about whether or not he was right in doing so. Perhaps it is better to first ask ourselves what it takes to be a Christian nation. Can you simply slap a label on a country and call it Christian? Can you deny it that label if you so choose? What would a truly Christian nation look like?

A Christian nation would begin with the understanding that God has set up a number of distinct realms in society that are dependent on each other. The Truth Project materials list these realms: Family, Labor, State, Community, Relationships with God, and Church. Each sphere is sovereign in nature. Families operate in a distinct way from churches, and one does not replace the other. One has the duty to create because we are made in God’s image, but work should not encroach upon or replace your relationship with God. Sovereignty, however, does not eliminate an appropriate relationship between spheres. Families ought to go to church. Going to church ought to bolster our relationship with God. A strong relationship with God should provide meaning to work. Work should support and enhance community and government. Government and community should find its principles for functionality from a proper view of Scripture. There is a distinction between Church and State, but the two cannot completely separate themselves from each other. God has ordained the State (Romans 13:1) for a number of reasons. When a nation forgets God, however, horrible things may happen.

In the absence of a belief in God, the State may come to believe that it has the authority to determine what is right and what is wrong. We’ve seen the results of such a government. According to R. J. Rummel’s work Death by Government, Stalin killed 42 million, Mao Zedong killed nearly 38 million, Adolf Hitler killed 21 million, and on and on and on it goes. The State-that-would-be-God is a terrible monstrosity. Unfortunately, there are those who have no problem with this mentality.  G. W. F. Hegel wrote:

“The Universal is to be found in the State. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is harder to grasp the Essence of the State. That State is the march of God through the world.”

What madness is this? The State would absorb family, labor, church, education, and community. And so it has in many Western nations.

In modern-day America, the State gets to determine what marriage is, how a parent may discipline, what should be done to the rich, how the poor must be helped, how a child should be educated, what a church may and may not do in the community, and how a community must function. From the cradle to the grave. What hideous thing mankind has created that now has us slouching toward Gomorrah! What have we done to God’s established order, this wondrous system that should have been a reflection of God’s divine attributes? Where will the West wind up if we continue in this direction? Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire portray the Roman Empire as self-destructing due to the following, among other things:

1. A mounting love of show and luxury
2. An obsession with sex
3. Freakishness in the Arts
4. An increased desire to live off the State

This path will not end any better for us than it did for Rome. It wasn’t always this way, for America at least.

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.

In the previous post, I had explained a little bit about Dr. John Hartnett’s problems with Big Bang cosmology. However, it’s not like Creationists are problem-free in their claims either. For instance, how did starlight that is millions of light years away make it to earth in around 7,000 years? That’s a problem, for sure. Now, Creationists have come up with some interesting solutions to the problem in the past, but I’ve not been thrilled with any of them.

1. Light is slowing down- When God made the world, He made light to travel faster than it is today. As my friend Josh pointed out to me, we’d have a hard time proving that one, and it has some theological implications since God’s emblem in Scripture is light. If light changes in such a fundamental way, then God may change too.
2. God made light “en route” to Earth during the creation week- So then God lies, right? Because light is information, Josh would also remind us, and God would have to “make up” information that wasn’t real or true. In other words, when we see a star go supernova that was millions of light years away, the star never went supernova in the first place. It’s all a lie. That doesn’t sound like God to me.
3. White hole cosmology- Russell Humphreys strikes nearer to the truth with this theory, but it is problematic. For Humphreys, God used a white hole to create the universe. Instead of drawing matter in like a black hole, a white hole would push matter and energy out. Humphreys’ theory states that Earth is at the bottom of a massive gravity well, which results in time passing slower on Earth during the creation week than elsewhere in the universe. The problem with this theory is that the light we see from distant space ought to be blueshifted, not redshifted. As I said, this cosmology is on the right track, but has problems. Humphreys does deserve credit for looking outside the standard Creationist box, though.

The Big Bang cosmology expected that the universe would be unbounded, infinite, and lack a center (homogenous). It would look the same in all directions. However, scientists are discovering that, judging from the Galaxy Redshift Survey, the universe does have a center, and we are strangely near it. It looks the same in all directions (isotropic), but it is far from homogenous. In the aforementioned survey, a pattern emerged, which you can see above.  There are more galaxies closer to earth, and they are in an intricate pattern. Interestingly enough, we’re in the center of it. This makes us question whether or not it is unbounded and infinite as well.

Creationist cosmology such as Hartnett’s would predict a universe that is bounded and finite, that God placed the Earth at the center of it, and that it would look the same in all directions (have a variety of stellar and planetary objects) because of God’s wisdom and creativity. As far as we can tell, that’s exactly what we have. But what about the starlight traveling all those light years?

Dr. Hartnett’s solution in Starlight, Time, and the New Physics is to agree with the Bible that the Earth is less than 7,000 years old. However, Dr. Hartnett invokes Einstein’s theories of relativity and asks the question: “By which clocks?” Genesis obviously states the length of time on Earth for each day of creation as being a literal, twenty-four hour period. The Hebrew “evening and morning” formula leaves only one possible conclusion. The days are literal, yet the starlight has traveled much further than we would think possible. Hartnett turned to Scripture and cosmological relativity, and discovered an interesting answer. In Psalm 104:2, Isaiah 40:22, Isaiah 42:5, and Isaiah 44:24, the Bible specifically states that God stretched out the Heavens. What does that mean, though? Hartnett’s answer coming up next week….

Recently I’ve been reading a book entitled Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, which was published in 2007 by Dr. John Hartnett, a professor from the University of West Australia. He has earned a Ph.D. in Physics, and he has published over 120 papers in scientific journals and holds two patents. Shockingly, Hartnett is also a young-earth creationist. The way Darwinists talk, Christians and physicists could never play nice, especially when it came to cosmology and the origin of the universe. What’s funny is that Hartnett has a scientific problem with the Big Bang Theory. Well, actually he has several.

1. Uniformity of Background Radiation- If the universe began 13.7 billion years ago courtesy of the Big Bang, why is the background radiation (the “temperature” of empty space) virtually the same in all directions? Unless Earth really is the center of the universe, or at least very close to it, the temperature of space in one direction of the universe shouldn’t be the same as in the opposite direction. The radiation from each end of the universe hasn’t had time to “blend” or balance each other out, since it should take twice as long (at least) as the universe has existed according to the Big Bang theory for radiation from one end of the universe to make it to the other.
2. Galactic Recession- No, I’m not talking about the results of Obama’s stimulus package. To the surprise of most scientists, a survey of the galaxies shows that they are all receding (moving away from) our own Milky Way. It shouldn’t be true that all galaxies are receding unless the Milky Way really is very near the center of the universe. Of course, this idea is unpalatable to Darwinists, since it would make our home planet seem too “special.”
3. Dark matter- Galaxies shouldn’t be able to hold themselves together without more mass, so scientists have assumed that unobservable “dark matter” must exist. Therefore, of all the matter and energy in the universe, scientists assume that roughly 21% of the matter in the universe is “dark.” This is compared to the 4% of visible matter that can be observed in the universe. Since dark matter is not visible, its existence has been strictly inferred. Some scientists include brown dwarf stars, which are far too rare to account for all the “missing” matter. Others include theoretical supermassive black holes and axions.
4. Dark energy- In 1998, scientists discovered that, contrary to popularly-held belief, the expansion of the universe was accelerating rather than decelerating. In order to explain why gravity wasn’t slowing the rate of expansion, scientists theorized that a phenomenon known as “dark energy” was acting on the universe to increase the rate of expansion. This dark energy is also inferred.
5. Quasars- Quasars are star-like phenomena thought to exist near the edges of the visible universe. The reason scientists believe that they come from near the edges of the visible universe is because of redshift. According to scientists, redshift occurs when light is “stretched” as it travels through an expanding universe, or due to galactic recession. Quasars are extremely red-shifted, which means that- according to the Darwinistic scientists- they came from very far away. That theory hit a brick wall a few years ago when scientists discovered a quasar in the heart of a galaxy only 300 million light years away. That’s way too close for comfort! How can the redshift be so high if the quasar is so close?

These problems- and others- could potentially have been resolved by Dr. Hartnett’s new creationist cosmology. His theory is based on Dr. Moshe Carmeli’s work on cosmological relativity. This theory is an expansion of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity. The difference between Einstein’s relativity and Carmeli’s relativity is that in Carmeli’s equations, cosmic time (t) replaces velocity (v) as the critical quantity, and observed time (13.7 billion years) replaces the speed of light (c) as a constant. You’ll have to go to the link above on cosmological relativity to see some of the equations, however, here’s the basic idea. Carmeli realized that it is possible that the galaxies aren’t merely moving away from us, but that space itself was moving away from us and the galaxies were essentially along for the ride. Carmeli’s equations treat the velocity of this expansion as another dimension of the cosmos. For him, the three dimensions of space, as well as time and velocity, are all dimensions that have to be taken into account when dealing with cosmological origins- 5D. In his equations, there is no need for dark energy or dark matter; this “stretching” of space would account for galactic mass and motion. His book includes a number of appendices explaining his equations in detail, but I’ve just decided to explain in practical terms what Hartnett and Carmeli are describing. This explanation will take a few posts to cover, but I think the possibility of a Creationist cosmology that resolves the problems with Big Bang cosmology and respects the Biblical Genesis narrative will be well worth the wait!

The New Atheists would have us believe that Religion and Science are at odds with each other. Why? Well, that’s a complicated question. Christopher Hitchen believes that religion is really about power, and the currency of life is knowledge. Richard Dawkins basically agrees, but he seems to think that religion is about reveling in mystery, not power. “Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious,” he writes. (The God Delusion, 126) Hitchens makes his feelings quite clear when he says that medicine only had a chance to advance after “the priests had been elbowed aside.” (God is not Great, 90) Ironically, Hitchens goes on to extol the glories of Louis Pasteur’s medical research with no mention of the fact that Pasteur was a devout Catholic!

Strangely, empirical sciences did not develop in other societies that should have encouraged them. China had a well-developed society, India was a strong philosophical center, and Japan excelled in craftmanship. Why did they not develop an understanding of empirical knowledge? It was in the Christian West that developed empirical science, because the Christian worldview expects that the outside world would be understandable and orderly because it was the handiwork of the Creator. Under Christianity, science flourishes. As the West turns from Christianity, science will cease to flourish. After all, only naturalistic worldviews require scientists to fabricate myths like dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy only need to exist if the Big Bang actually occurred. Creationist cosmologies explain the universe without the need for these virtually unprovable theories.

To the point, though. Christianity supports science; it does not inhibit it. Though I’m not a Catholic, the Vatican has done more to support science (especially astronomy) financially over the past six centuries or so than any other institution. As Christianity has traditionally supported the Arts, so it has also supported the sciences. Hitchens and Dawkins seem willfully ignorant of the scientists who were also Christians throughout history. Newton, Pasteur, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Faraday, Bernard, and Heisenberg were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Apparently they found no conflict between faith and science.

You see, when it comes down to it, faith and science are not opposites nor are they in tension with each other. They are different tools for different jobs. Science does not hold a monopoly on knowledge. Religion merely deals with a completely different form of knowledge. I can know that God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world just as surely as I know empirically that the laws of gravity are still in effect. Philosophy also offers a different sort of knowledge that is neither wholly scientific nor wholly religious. Just as I wouldn’t use a hammer to play a bass drum, science is not able to tell us why we are here or if God exists. It’s the wrong tool for the job. I’m not talking about “non-overlapping magisteria” here. I’m talking about using a tool where it is beneficial. When science is beneficial, use it, and don’t let it be hindered. When religion is beneficial (as it most certainly is when that religion is Christianity), then don’t keep it from the public sphere. Politics, law, education, business, and the home could benefit from Christianity’s influence if anti-religious bigots would simply get out of the way. In this way, the tools will complement each other. After all, how would the bass drum be fashioned if the hammer hadn’t been there first?

As confident as the so-called New Atheists are that God does not exist, you would have thought that science had disproven His existence. In fact, they try to whittle God down to a manageable size by- instead of dealing with Him as a Person- label Him as the “God Hypothesis.” Hypotheses are easy to dismiss. God isn’t.

Richard Dawkins is my favorite of the New Atheists because he is quite reckless at this. Consider his book The God Delusion. Dawkins is a scientist, yet he writes a book on religion and pretends that it is science. In it he writes: “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is univocally a scientific question.” So,  of course, because Dawkins is a materialist, Dawkins rules out all non-material existence or personhood. Therefore, in The Wonderful World of Dawkins, God must obey all laws of physics. You would have thought Dawkins were talking about gravity!

In the end, Dawkins decides that God is not a probable Being. I found this to be a bit odd, since Dawkins’ probability and statistics assumed that God was a contingent Being in a universe that forces Him (HIM!) to conform to its unalterable laws. Christianity, on the other hand, proclaims the existence of a God that is necessary, not contingent. Furthermore, probability deals more with the possibility that an event will occur. It measures the ratio of actual occurences and possible occurences of an event. God doesn’t “happen.” He is (hence the name “I AM.”) Dawkins and Christians still aren’t talking about the same Person!

If Richard Dawkins had his way, that phrase would have a whole new meaning today. In Dawkins’ view (mentioned in The God Delusion as well as on his website, religious education is no different than acts of pedophilia. Such a belief is astounding to me. Hitchens is no different when he writes about children who have “had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory education of faith.” Seriously, guys? Christian education should be illegal? This sort of thing is absolutely outrageous to me.

It’s bad enough that Dawkins and Hitchens want to make it illegal to train a child in the Christian faith. It’s much worse that they are leaving us with only government schools, since parents apparently can’t be trusted. Perhaps they should check out the wonders of the schools in the Soviet Union sometime. They could even look at a lot of the government schools in America and realize that state-run isn’t a very good idea. Things just don’t go well. American freedom must not be allowed to erode any more than it already has, and that includes a parent’s freedom to educate their child as they see fit.

Finally, what does calling religious education “abuse” do to the subject of real abuse? It’s an insult to those who have experienced it. Broken bones, damaged psyches, sexual assaults, and battered bodies are the results of real abuse. Being raised to believe in a kind and loving God “in the nuture and admonition of the Lord” is not. Let’s not forget what the title of this post really means in context. “Suffer the children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” It seems to me that being raised in a household of faith is as far removed from abuse as I could possibly imagine.

“Religion kills,” says Christopher Hitchens. In fact, he writes a whole chapter on that topic in his book. Which religion, Mr. Hitchens? True, Islam has been a bloodbath since it was invented, but there are plenty of religions out there that are much less violent. Now, obviously, I’m here to defend Christianity more than anything else, but let’s think about this. How often do you hear on the news that someone killed someone else for religious reasons? “Arminians shoot Calvinist. Must have been his time.” “Southern Baptists in church bus plow over family at Disney World. Claim they were trying to reinforce yet another boycott.” “Catholic priests drown Lutheran in holy water.” It just doesn’t happen.

Christianity doesn’t condone violence. It condones self-defense and national defense, but not crimes of passion. And that’s what it all boils down to, doesn’t it? Passion. People are passionate about their revenge or pride or lust or rage or materialism. They cross lines at the urging of that passion. Christianity isn’t immune to the passions of humans. Sometimes people do try to take by force what God would have us do by His Spirit. The Bible doesn’t condone such actions, nor does God say that He will reward them.

More often than not, religion is used to reinforce some passionate bias, such as race. Just because religion can be used as a tool in the hands of evil or foolish men doesn’t mean that religion itself is the problem. If that were the case, fields such as medicine or science would have a rough time. How many people died throughout history due to crackpot ideas about health and disease? How many have died because science has given us instruments of war? It seems to me that if we applied Hitchens’ litmus test throughout history in an equal way, every scientist and doctor ought to be made to publicly apologize for the sins of their forebears. After all, it isn’t religion alone that is bloody…

That’s what Richard Dawkins says. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and check out his article on his personal website. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you’re finished. One quick word of advice before you go, though. You might want to make sure you’ve taken your heart meds before you read the whole thing. He’s got quite a few things to say about those of us from the Bible belt. Then there’s Sam Harris in his Letter to a Christian Nation, where he writes: “Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.” Do us a favor, Sam. Don’t play it again.

It’s funny that while our squeaking atheist wheels scream for more grease, they are blind to the fact that no one has the corner market on idiots. Just search for atheists on Youtube. Dumb ones are a dime a dozen. That, by the way, is true of just about every cause or faith. People are people. Some are uneducated or lack common sense. It happens.

But, rather than focus on pandemic stupidity, I’d rather focus on the topic of intelligence. There are intelligent people in every walk of life. There are intelligent scientists, historians, teachers, pastors, writers, doctors, and homemakers. I would honestly take an honest, hardworking man or woman over a self-important “intellectual” any day. And another thing: there have been Christians from practically every walk of life. I don’t see how Christianity is antagonistic to intelligence, since plenty of people were both intelligent and men and women of faith.

I leave you with a quote by Alexis de Tocqueville, who said: “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” de Tocqueville was smarter than most folks today, but he saw the link between liberty, morality, and faith.

I’m sure most of you played with a jack-in-the-box when you were a kid. I couldn’t honestly say that I enjoyed those contraptions. They were pretty basic: turn the handle, listen to the song, out comes the….doll? Basic but dependable, that’s Jack. Unfortunately, some people seem to think that God is that way.

For some people, I should be able to pray this prayer and “pow!” out leaps God from wherever He spends most of His time, and grants my wish….I mean prayer. Christians sometimes get that attitude. They start to have an attitude of , as one pastor put it, “Gimme, gimme; my name’s Jimmy!”

Of course, atheists also treat God that way. Richard Dawkins wants to analyze God scientifically in his The God Delusion. He tells his readers how God “should” behave since He would be bound to the laws of physics. Why should God have to follow the physical laws of the universe? He made them, so why should He be put under them?

Dawkins then turns to the subject of prayer, and discusses the number of prayers that get “answered.” Not surprisingly, Dawkins finds that God doesn’t seem to answer every prayer by saying “Yes, absolutely, I’ll get right on it, sir!”

Who says God has to behave in a way that Dawkins or anyone thinks He should?  If God isn’t the Force from Star Wars, can’t He do things in a personal and- dare I say it- subjective way? He claims to be a Person, and for my part I believe Him. Oh, but He does answer. “No” is an answer. “Wait” is an answer. Sometimes silence is even an answer. “Yes” is an answer too, but Dawkins tends to chalk that up to chance.

Christianity doesn’t teach that God is a children’s toy that should follow a basic set of rules. God is a Person, and a very complex Person at that. Christianity doesn’t portray God as a genii or jack-in-the-box. To borrow from C. S. Lewis, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah is NOT a tame lion. Prayer, then, is more than just asking and receiving. It’s about asking and embracing God Himself.