Roaring River

Pigs Breed Pigs

By Don Batten, PhD

How can one basic kind of organism change into something fundamentally different? A pig farmer in the UK heard an evolutionist academic talk about how breeding of farm animals shows evolution. At the end of the lecture the pig farmer said, 'Professor, I don't understand what you are talking about. When I breed pigs, I get pigs — if it were not so I would be out of business!'

As a biologist with a Ph.D. in plant physiology and over 20 years research experience, including the breeding of fruit trees, I believe genetics holds major problems for evolutionists.

Why? Because there is no mechanism for the acquisition of new, more complex characteristics in living things. There is no means of generating the new genetic information required. Evolution from microbes to man requires such a mechanism.

A recent survey of students before and after a genetics course at Central Michigan University (USA) showed that the number of students believing in evolution declined from 81% before the course to 62% after, although the course was almost certainly taught from an evolutionary perspective. If the course had been taught without the inevitable evolutionary bias, the shift in attitude towards creationism might have been even greater! To read Dr. Batten's full article

Thermodynamics Consistent with Creation

I have always looked upon the Bible as God's instruction for faith and worship instead of a science textbook. But it is incredible how both are well aligned. 

It's been a long time since I was in the pre-med program at UC, and I am not a scientist. But I have never lost my interest in reading about science. And, it has always been a significant part of my faith. Science, for me, has always pointed at origination which then begs for an originator. Cause and effect.

So it was with this all in mind when I recently re-read about the two laws of thermodynamics, considered by many as irrefutable in the principles that govern how our world works. This might get a little deep if you don't like science, but these two well established Laws of Physics provide evidence that the Universe has not existed forever, but instead had a clear moment of creation -- just like the Bible said.

The First Law of Thermodynamics

This scientific law has to do with energy. Energy can be changed but it cannot be destroyed. When we strike a match we end up with smoke, heat and ashes. The smoke disappears, the heat is useful for a moment and the ashes are thrown away. We can try with all our might, but we cannot put the smoke, heat and ashes back together and make the match like it was.

Equally true, then, would be that mass and energy cannot be created from nothing since they can only be converted from one another. Since the universe exists, and it includes both mass and energy, then it could not have created itself. It must have been created somewhere, sometime, somehow. Genesis comes to the same conclusion when it states that "the heavens and the earth were finished."

The agnostic or atheistic point of view relies on the Steady State Theory that requires a continual creation of new matter. Clearly, Genesis is more consistent with the First Law of Thermodynamics than is the Stead State Theory.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The universe is becoming less ordered and more random.

Left to themselves, things become disorganized and wear out. The universe is wearing out. Stars are burning hydrogen ... the earth's rotation is slowing ... the magnetic field is decreasing. Therefore, the universe is not eternal.

Working backward, this law points to a beginning when things were more organized than they are now, or than they will be in the future. Where, we must wonder, did the initial order come from. Perhaps the answer is in Psalms 105:25-26: "The heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain. They will wear out like a garment. Like clothing, you will change them and they will be discarded."

The universe must have had a beginning, and it must have been highly ordered. The universe could not have begun itself. Therefore, the universe was created by an entity outside the universe and above the natural laws that govern us. Hmmm.

From Nothing, Nothing Comes

The atheist has used science to justify the belief that the universe and we are nothing more than an accidental series of events ... blind forces ... we just happened. But science does not agree. All the laws of physics and chemistry demand a relationship between cause and effect. What caused these accidents?

A basic principle of science: every effect must have a cause. There must be an explanation at the root of any infinite series of effects.

Scientists can explain just about every effect in our existence, as far out as our astronomers can see. But they cannot explain the cause of the universe's existence ... because there is no natural cause for the universe to exist. The fact that it does exist begs the cause. The fact that the universe is so incredibly big and so well regulated begs for a very great cause.

Scientists before 1927 held largely to the notion that the universe was static and that it always existed. But Edwin Hubble proved that the universe is not static; instead it is expanding from its original point of creation. So if it has not always existed, then it still must have a cause. The universe cannot explain itself.

Scientists at first looked at the Big Bang as the cause for why the universe exists. But the Big Bang is another effect, not a cause. What caused the Big Bang?

The Bible presents a cause and an effect. The Word of God caused the Big Bang. The God of the Bible told us that he has always existed ... He even stated that His name was "I am." The effect is recorded in Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."

Stephen Hawking is acclaimed to be the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein. He maintained that when scientists eventually trace back to the cause of the Big Bang we will likely be starring at the face of God.

He has lived eternally. He decided to create the universe. He is the cause.

How 3 Minds Were Changed

In my previous post, I discussed how three great men of science remained skeptical of intelligent design -- a universe created purposely by God.

Albert Einstein was so convinced that the universe was static (not expanding) that he added what is now known as a cosmological fudge factor to his famous theory of relativity. He knew that without this fudge factor his theory actually demonstrated the universe was expanding from its original point of creation. His theory and his belief structure were at odds with one another. So he faked the evidence. That was in 1917. Later, he wrote: "I now want to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thought, the rest are details."

In the same year, American archeologist William F. Albright wrote a paper supporting the belief among many scientists that the Old Testament history was actually a series of legends. In his view then, the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were made up a thousand years later to defend a Jewish cause against the Persians. In 1929, Albright excavated a line of Bronze Age mounds that flowed along the route of a military campaign during Abraham's time -- exactly as was described in Genesis 14. By 1956, after many excavations along Biblical geography, Albright wrote: "There can be no doubt that archaelogy has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition."

Also in 1917, a hard-boiled atheist C. S. Lewis was convinced that religious faith was only for the uneducated, unthinking people. He was a renowned Oxford professor and he studied all the literature of the major religions, finally to conclude that "it almost looks as if it really happened." He had narrowed his investigations ultimately to Hinduism and Christianity. From there, he concluded the Gospels were not like the romantic myths. "I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like [the Christian Gospels].

The ground actually began trembling in 1915 when other great thinkers began to realize the implications of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. They found that solving Einstein's field equations demanded that the universe could not be infinitely old, but it must have had a beginning. Against these findings, the scientific community held firm. Typified by Sir Arthur Eddington's statement that "the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me."

In 1927, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the nebulae contained individual stars and were themselves galaxies far outside our own galaxy, and that these galaxies were all moving away from us at very high speeds. The universe was expanding and he could prove it.

Eddington then wrote: "Religion first became possible for a reasonable man of science in the year 1927."

Tell that to all the Christians and Jews who since the time of Moses and Christ knew the real truth.

Skeptics Provide Confirmation

Skeptics might irritate us because they refuse to see what's in front of their noses, or because they demand physical proof of anything before they will believe despite that the majority of people believe it. Talking with a skeptic feels a bit like talking to a wall.

And yet three skeptics to God's role in creating all things have, in the end, provided yet additional confirmation to the intelligent design of the universe.

The three skeptics I find most interesting professed that the world was not created, but that it always existed. They were physicist Albert Einstein, archeologist William Albright and philosopher C. S. Lewis.

They were powerful minds in the early part of the 20th century, and their work still impacts their areas of expertise, even today. By 1927, fourth colleague in time helped move them all from a strong belief that there was no God to one where the evidence changed their minds. The fourth intellectual was Edwin Hubble, the namesake of the Hubble Telescope parked in space.

The stories of how they were forced to reconsider their original tenants should give credence to the intelligent design of the universe.