First Contact

During a training program[1] held in San Diego California at the Christian Heritage College, which houses the Institute for Creation Research, I met the Physics professor. Tom-something-or-other – maybe somebody reading this knows his full name. We had a long discussion over breakfast (our only meeting). In which he described how his students were working on overthrowing Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to return to a physics of classical Newtonian mechanics. This was because of the quantum phenomena, which (he said) divorced cause-and-effect from each other and therefore could not be true in a God created world of cause-and effect (more accurately in his view personal action and consequences). The effect of relativity on moral standards was his reason for rejecting and trying to replace this physics theory. I pointed out that he had to find some way to hold an electron up in a precise orbit and stop it radiating all its energy in a continuum to make the Bohr atom[2] work. The physicists, who discovered the phenomenon at the turn of the century, tried long and hard to fit classical theory around their observation of the facts. He claimed to have someone working on this very problem. I don’t think he can have overcome the difficulty, as the creationists now seem to accept Relativity at least in their explanation of a young Earth but old looking Universe. They also seem to tacitly accept quantum mechanics. Certainly Ken Ham views the creation of video cameras as valid science and these are all based on Quantum Physics. I really was not too upset by this and merely wrote Tom off as a crank though with serious misgivings that he should be part of a larger crankier organisation. We were subjected to Creationist propaganda. One movie we sat through was the one about human footprints with dinosaurs. This I later learned even the Creationists have withdrawn as their equivalent of a Piltdown hoax (not that they will admit it). I should point out here that the Navigators did not subscribe to the views of Christian Heritage College it was a venue they had found suitable for accommodating their own programme. CHC just offered some of their propaganda to a captive audience.

Shortly after this training programme my wife and I became trainee staff with the Navigators, a Christian organisation dedicated to making disciples. Basically conveying the message of the Gospel to non-believers and teaching new believers about living the Christian life. This was a very positive experience and time and would not want anyone to think of this as brainwashing or negative in any way.

I had further exposure to the Creationist view before it became a problem to me. A member of my church,at the time, was (and as far as I know still is) an ardent creationist. He was not well liked even among a bunch of very tolerant Christians. He did have influence on our pastor and this resulted in a series of sermons on Genesis which relied heavily on Whitcomb and Morris and was presented rather badly. This made it easy to dismiss.

[1] This should not be viewed negatively this was voluntary and not a coerced situation.

[2] The Bohr atom was an early quantum mechanical model of a Hydrogen atom. The electron is seen as a little planet orbiting a proton “sun”. While not accurate in modern Quantum Mechanical views this model bridges the conceptual gap between Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics. Bohr was looking at how the electron could be maintained in an orbit. In the classical model an orbit in which the (negatively charged) electron maintains its distance from the positively charged nucleus would according to Maxwell’s findings result in the electron radiating the energy it has as a continuum of radiation, rising in frequency as it spins down to the nucleus. This is not what is observed. In fact if the electron were to behave as a point charged particle racing round the nucleus there would be a further spin – magnetic coupling in all atoms and every material would be ferromagnetic. Again this is not observed. Tom what’s-his-name had to come up with a classical theory which avoided all these problems. Which is where Quantum Mechanics had come in as Physicists had struggled to explain these phenomena classically and failed so they had looked for a better explanation. They had not been thinking “lets dream up a philosophy which will dissociate cause and effect and corrupt the world”.

2. First Contact