Every year brings new scientific discoveries that shed light on the past. The Institute for Creation Research is dedicated to the study of origins from a biblical perspective, and ICR News has compiled what we consider to be the top 4 findings related to origin studies from the stories we reported in 2009. The previous installments featured paleontology, biological evolution, and geology, and our final finding focuses on cosmology.
Observations Confound the Big Bang
The standard model of universal origins involves a colossal cosmic explosive event over 13 billion years ago that distributed all the matter and energy necessary to produce the planets, stars, and galaxies in evidence today. But the "Big Bang" has proven to be an ill-fitting explanation for observed phenomena, and 2009 turned out to be another year in which basic evolutionary cosmological assumptions were brought into question.
The Big Bang model presumes an edgeless and Godless cosmos and requires that most of the universe be made up of "dark energy"―which happens to be undetectable and invisible. Evolutionary astronomers proposed this energy in order to add more than double the observable mass of the universe. Only in this way can they explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when calculations based on detectable matter and energy indicate it should be slowing.
But the universe appears to have edges and a center, and the earth appears to be near that center. With these boundaries, the need for dark matter explanations vanishes. The possibility that earth resides in that position, however, suggests that it was specially placed there, a concept contradictory to a naturalistic cosmology because it points to a transcendent entity acting with purpose. But the implications for earth’s special placement near the center are consistent with the earth-centeredness of God’s activities as revealed in Scripture.1
Temperature measurements collected in 2009 also contradict the Big Bang, which predicts uniform evenness in the cosmos. The data show that the universe is lopsided―half of it has a smooth temperature, but the other half is patchy. This discovery forced Big Bang cosmologists to try and patch the model with more ad hoc speculations.2 Several cosmologies that factor a Creator into the equation, however, accommodate the data with far fewer assumptions than the Big Bang.3,4
Science seems to be confirming that a Creator was necessary to have brought earth’s particularly life-friendly place in this universe into being. Genesis 1…"in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"…continues to offer the most sensible Cause for the origin of all things.
References
- Thomas, B. Science Still in the Dark about Dark Energy. ICR News. Posted on icr.org April 28, 2009.
- Thomas, B. Inflation Hypothesis Doesn’t Measure Up to New Data. ICR News. Posted on icr.org January 29, 2009, reporting research published in Erickcek, A. L., M. Kamionkowski, and S. M. Carroll. 2008. A hemispherical power asymmetry from inflation. Physical Review D. 78 (12): 123520.
- Humphreys, D. R. 1994. Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.
- Hartnett, J. 2007. Starlight, Time and the New Physics. Atlanta, GA: Creation Book Publishers, LLC.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on January 8, 2010.
