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4. The Big Bang

Initially the book seemed to address the issues I had in language I understood. (I’m not a Physics genius by a long way but I love the subject I studied for my first degree and read “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawkins with relish. I’m still baffled that people with similar degrees found it incomprehensible.) So to start with Humphreys’ arguments about changing the assumptions Hawkins makes to have a bounded rather than an unbounded Universe were interesting. The bubble popped fairly rapidly as he introduced errors in his understanding of what happens to space-time inside the event horizon of a black hole. After that I started to get hold of some General Relativity textbooks to check out the details. You can find critiques of Humphreys on the Web by far better qualified astrophysicists than I. In fact it became clear that the book contained a lot of jargon, relativity equations galore, but was really intended to impress the ignorant that a “scientific” explanation of the literal six twenty-four-hour days creation was available. Claims to it being peer reviewed were included in the book but a careful look at these showed that they were reviews not by astronomers and cosmologists, for scientific credibility, but by other creationists for doctrinal correctness. See  appendix A for a more complete explanation of why this is really off the wall.

Normally I could have dismissed this as the ravings of a half-baked religious nut. This is certainly what they were but the context proved a problem. The context in which the book had come to me was that Ken Ham, who is the main propagandist for the Institute for Creation Research (he also fronts the website Answers in Genesis), was the main speaker at the FIEC[1] conference that year. Ken Ham endorses “Starlight and Time” in its foreword as dealing with the astronomical problem in reconciling Genesis to the astronomical evidence. So the fact that creationist propagandists were at the conference as its main speakers meant that they were accepted by the mainstream. I watched the videos of Ken Ham’s messages and was appalled at his techniques to get people to agree with his outrageous ideas. Nevertheless the FIEC had invited him and to a large extent clearly supported his views or at least approved of them.

The FIEC’s endorsement of creationism meant that my Christian denomination regarded this as correct. This then meant that I had to come to terms with these views rather than just ignore them as a type of cult like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That is they were no longer views and attitudes of a fringe group but of my “mainstream” church of which I was a member! This was a serious knock to my worldview.

I began to ask questions. Among my fellow church members I found two camps. One did not feel there was a problem, did not see how I could have a problem and preferred not to think about it. The other group were more forceful in propounding the creationist view. They refused to see that this was a movement that had risen out of the Seventh Day Adventist Price’s teaching and the modernisation of Morris and Whitcomb. They see creationism as unchanged since the days of Noah (at least). This had the effect of making me even more disturbed that the creationist movement was a cult hiding within the mainstream church.

After a while I shared the disturbance this was causing with a good friend. He referred me to another friend who has looked at the scientific debate over Christian issues. For a while he and I met to discuss our views and findings and to try to reconcile the Bible to the scientific evidence. Last time I talked to him Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box was the new idea on the block and we looked at the idea of intelligent design. To begin with this book seemed to provide an answer. I guess the answer I was looking for was that there were areas of nature that did not have a natural explanation or had a natural and logical explanation and that that was the pointer to a creator of the Universe. Behe does a credible attempt to describe the wonders of microbiology and to apply Paley’s argument in the form he terms Irreducible Complexity. So he presents the mechanisms for building proteins and all their complexity and explains how this could not just have arisen through refinement of a simpler mechanism. Up to this point I was convinced he had an answer. Then in the second half of the book he discusses how this has worked through to man. Behe believes in the 4,500 million year old Earth. He postulates that the genetic material to code for Man was already part of the genome of some organism back then and it has survived to today. That is where I realised that this was just plain silly. Yet another possible way to reconcile the Biblical idea of creation, in some form, bit the dust. When I later read Kenneth Miller’s book Finding Darwin’s God I found a more cogent argument from a biologist about why Behe’s ideas are non-flyers. Behe like Humphreys has not submitted these ideas to his peers in biology, but the creationists have seized them as scientific evidence for special creation.

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