|
I offer this short video clip from a movie called "Inherit the Wind", both for its entertainment value -- featuring superb cast, production and dialog -- and ALSO for its educational value. I will explain the latter shortly. Click HERE to view it on YouTube.
This is one of my favorite scenes from "Inherit the Wind", a movie about the creationism vs. evolution trial, where a teacher is accused of the crime of teaching evolution to his class. It is (loosely ??) based upon the "Scopes Monkey Trial", which took place in Dayton, Tennessee, during the scorching July of 1925.
Many "christians" (fundamentalist mostly) are grossly offended and insulted by this film. I myself am grossly insulted and offended by the fact that what is portrayed in this film is BASICALLY a TRUE and CORRECT representation of the attitudes and beliefs held and practiced by many of them -- and that THEY live THIS pitiful travesty as representing TRUE "Christianity" !! After all, if a person INSISTS on walking down Main Street naked, is it the fault of the onlookers if they stare and sneer ???
First of all, what you DO or DO NOT believe regarding evolution and the facts of creation has absolutely ZERO to do with your salvation through Jesus Christ.
The problem is that the "fundamentalist mentality" has gone to such extremes to protect and maintain THEIR "pet dogma" that "every word of the Holy Bible is LITERAL and EXACT TRUTH", that they have hemmed themselves into a corner. No matter HOW ridiculous some of their contentions seem to be, they MUST now continue to insist that EVERY word of the Bible is to be interpreted LITERALLY, exactly as written !!!
For instance, with the literal 7 - 24 hour days of creation in Genesis. How many ever notice (much less attempt to explain) how it is that God created plants on the third day, but didn't create the sun and the moon until the forth day. Moreover, how could there possibly be a 24 hour "evening and a morning" on the first 3 days without the sun and the moon ??
The Genesis Creation account is nothing more than a Myth, whose purpose is to show that God was indeed PERSONALLY involved in the creation of His Universe, no-matter WHAT means or time-frame He might have employed to accomplish it. As C.S. Lewis explained: a Myth is NOT just a made-up Story or a Fable - it is an account of REAL happenings, passed on from generation to generation - conveying not so much the LITERAL Details of an event, but rather, its overall scope and horizon !!
NOW, for those hard-skinned individuals who are STILL reading, I will offer to you this word of appeasement, and state that I do NOT hold a much better opinion and regard for MANY on the OTHER side of the argument either -- the scientists and the so-called "intellectuals" !!
You see - in MY opinion - BOTH sides lack in flexibility, humility, imagination and openness. Charles Darwin's work is referred to as the "THEORY of Evolution". There is certainly no hard PROOF to show that, beyond a shadow of doubt, sea-scum can eventually evolve into a human being. The best that science can do is to show that minor changes in an organism CAN be brought about by evolution.
Furthermore, the "Big Bang" THEORY of Creation is NOTHING more than that -- a THEORY !! It is a model, a mathematical construct, developed by multitudes of laboratory observations, cosmic measurements and mathematical computations. It is held by REPUTABLE and knowledgeable scientists as being JUST that -- a THEORY that, at present time, best fits the available scientific data and is a model that they can work with.
However, when ANY source begins to present conjecture, myth or theory as "absolute, undeniable, unquestionable FACT" -- it is THEN that they become Clowns and Fools -- no longer worthy of being listened to or taken seriously !!
My point is illustrated by the following short section from a scientific book that I am reading. Both of the books that I am going to reference are outstanding (I think) and well worth reading. However, THIS excerpt is presented to show that scientists as well as religious fundamentalists can sound like FOOLS !! As a note of information, this author has just stated that the current estimate for the age of the universe is 10-20 BILLION years old !! Also, the expression "t=0" refers to the split instant ("zeptosecond" -- or a trillionth of a billionth of a second -- or whatever is smaller) of the "Big Bang" itself.
|
The Next Ten Billion Years, pages 208,209 ****** A little more than half an hour after t = 0 (at t = 34 minutes and 40 seconds, to be precise), almost all of the electrons and positrons have been annihilated, and the Universe has begun to resemble the empty state we find it in today. Almost, but not quite, all of the matter has gone. In addition to the billionth part of the number of photons that is present as nucleons, when the electron-positron pairs finally annihilate, just one electron in a billion is also left over, exactly the amount required to balance the positive charge on all the protons in the Universe and to ensure that eventually the matter will settle out as stable, uncharged atoms, with every proton in every atomic nucleus matched by an electron in the cloud on the outside of the atom. Where does this tiny proportion of matter come from? Why isn't there a perfect symmetry between particles and antiparticles - so that everything annihilates - and only radiation is left as the Universe cools? The answers emerge from an understanding of the world of particle physics under conditions even more extreme than those during the epoch of the life of the Universe following the first hundredth of a second - and they are among the simplest - but also most profound of the puzzles resolved by the discoveries described in Part Three.
The Eleven Dimensions of Reality, page 330 ****** The "loop" becomes an object called a seven-sphere (actually a slightly squashed seven-sphere), the seven-dimensional analog of a sphere, but the principle is the same. Mathematicians tell us that the seven-sphere is the simplest form of multidimensional structure that still allows for the Universe we see around us to be as complex as it is.
On the new picture, the Universe was born in an eleven-dimensional state, and there was no distinction between force and matter, let alone between different kinds of force -- just some kind of pure state of eleven-dimensional energy. As the energy dissipated, some of the dimensions curled up upon themselves, creating the structures we think of as matter -- the "particles" -- as waves vibrating in the coiled-up dimensions, and creating the forces of nature as the visible manifestations of the distortions of the underlying geometry. To crack the seven sphere - and unpeel it to reveal the ten dimensions of space in all their glory - would require more than even the grand unification energy. It requires, indeed, the energy of creation itself !!
NOTE: It is MORE than interesting that in the Cosmology of Jacob Boehme, ALL of Creation -- from the smallest Subatomic to the largest Galactic -- is built upon what he calls "The Three-fold Structure". In other words, reality is structured in three parts, determined by the action of three principles. Moreover, this structure functions according to a dynamic seven-fold process.
If three-foldness concerns the inner dynamics of all systems, seven-foldness is, according to Boehme, the basis, in its inexhaustible richness, for the manifestation of all processes. Seven-foldness functions in continual interaction with three-foldness: It is precisely this interaction which furnishes the key to a full comprehension of reality, at least in the view which Boehme proposes to us.
"The Source of Matter", pages 335,336 ****** So the history of the first 10 (-43) second of the existence of the Universe is, as far as the notion of time has any meaning, then one dominated by quantum gravity. Since we have no satisfactory theory of quantum gravity, that moment of creation is at present unknowable; since the notion of time itself may have no meaning for such a short interval. It may always remain unknowable, and marks the starting point for any description of the evolution of the Big Bang and of the later Universe. If the implications of Hubble's observations of the red shift and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity really can be pushed back that far, the quantum rules seem to be telling us that the Universe was "created" at an "age" of 10(-43) second. The moment of creation itself is the subject of the next chapter.
"Primordial Chaos and Ultimate Order", page 360 ****** In spite of the conceptual breakthrough that Guth's work represented, the Higgs field - that is so central to his model and to the new inflationary scenario - remains its weak link. New inflation works only because the parameters of the Higgs field are adjusted very delicately --"fine tuning" that is permitted only because we don't really know how the Higgs field behaves and that smacks of special pleading. The trick works only if the field parameters are set up in just the right way in the first place, because we know the "answers" we want to get out, and the inventors of the theory themselves accept that this is implausible. What they hope is that there may be realistic grand unified theories in which a smooth transition occurs naturally and that automatically give the "right answers" without any fine tuning. Since the details are intermeshed with details of the particle physics, and since the particle physics is not well understood, that remains only a pious hope as of 1985. Not-to-be daunted, some theorists have tried to resolve the difficulties by leaping off from a theory (GUT inflation) that is only poorly understood to another theory (SUSY inflation) that is even less well understood.
|
These excerpts are from the book: "In Search of the Big Bang" -- Quantum Physics and Cosmology -- by John Gribbin. Another great and worthwhile read by the same author is: "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" -- Quantum Physics and Reality.
However, TRUE Science and TRUE Christianity are NOT really in TOTAL disagreement. The proponents of the "Big Bang" theory (YES, there ARE other theories of Creation held by other scientists) claim that it all started from an infinitely dense mass of something they refer to as the "primordial atom", theorized to be something on the order of 10(-43) centimeter in diameter !! Exactly WHERE this "primordial atom" originated is, of course, the "unsolvable mystery"! (MAYBE, from God Himself????)
You also have to keep in mind that, prior to the "Big Bang" (if there CAN be any such thing as "prior", since TIME also came into existence at that point), there was NO universe for the "Big Bang" to expand into, no "empty space" just waiting to be filled --- there was, to put it simply, NOTHING but the "primordial atom" (can you conceive of NOTHING, I can't).
A "Christian Mystic" by name of Jacob Boehme (a member of the German Lutheran church in the early 1600's) recorded a series of visions during which he was given insight into the depths and nature of God as well as of Creation.
His books require extensive study and effort to understand, but put into its simplest form, as to the creation of the Universe, Boehme says thus:
|
In the Beginning (whatever that means, for at this point there was NO "Time"), the Primordial Will or Being existed in the infinite "NOW". There was NONE or NOTHING other than Itself. It wished to manifest Itself, to know Itself and have other creatures and beings come to know It. This desire initiated a threefold, dynamic process within this Will or Being -- A desire to reveal, a desire to remain hidden, and a dynamic tension between these two. As the process grew and became stronger and greater, the tension between repulsion and attraction also increased. Finally, a terrible and explosive FLASH occurred, whereupon spiritual and material -- inner and outer -- Creation was birthed.
|
Here we have BOTH your "primordial atom" AND your "Big Bang" !!!
Obviously, you will need to read the works of Jacob Boehme to gain a greater understanding. As I have already hinted, these are NOT easy to understand at first, but patient application WILL be rewarded !! After all, the Bible wasn't easy to understand at first either (maybe for many it still isn't ??).
You can find a GREAT deal of material about and by Jacob Boehme at my
Mystics Site HERE.
There is also a great deal of profitable material on and by a William Law. He was a disciple of Boehme's.
Also, if you DO begin to read, and come to think that Boehme had some strange ideas, read the two physics books that I recommended earlier. You won't find anything STRANGER than what is in them!!!!
|
