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Despite the fact that some of his presentation was over my head, astrophysicist Danny Faulkner still managed to keep me and the 100 or so other members of his audience captivated by his every word last Thursday evening as he spoke at the quarterly meeting of the Creation Science Study Group.
Faulkner is a physics and astronomy professor at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster. He has degrees from Bob Jones, Clcmson arid Indiana Universities. He has written a book, Universe, By Design, as well as nearly 100 scholarly papers. He has been published in several scholarly publications, including the Astronomy Journal and the Astrophysical Journal. In addition, he takes a week or two every year and travels to one of the western telescopes to do research.
Faulkner’s topic was the origin of the universe. Before his allotted hour all too quickly passed by, he treated the audience to a computer slide show that dealt with different theories of cosmology.
The ancient Greeks, for example, did not believe that the universe had a beginning, that it was eternal and that it went through cycles (i.e., the Big Bang), Their finite gods were not capable of creation.
In more modern times, Isaac Newton believed that the universe was both eternal and infinite. Albert Einstein, who introduced the theory of general relativity, believed that even an infinite universe must eventually collapse under gravity.
Edwin Hubble came up with the idea of the expansion of the universe. Willem DeSitter, using general relativity, showed that the universe is either expanding or contracting. It was at this point that Faulkner noted that Psalm 104:2 says that God “stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.”
The modern idea of the Big Bang, in which all the matter in the universe is compacted together and then explodes, was introduced by Georges LeMaitre, who coined the term, “cosmic egg.”
The Steady State theory, proposed in the 1940’s, conjectures that the universe is eternal, that its density remains constant, and that new matter appears spontaneously. Since such a universe is eternal, it has no beginning, therefore it has no Creator. Faulkner said that this was the ultimate in atheistic thought. This theory had great appeal into the 1960’s.
The Big Bang is now the accepted idea of cosmology among academics. Yet, as Faulkner pointed out, even this theory is not the same as it was 25 years ago. Back then the model countenanced neither dark matter, dark energy, nor string theory. Now, all three are integral to the theory. Therefore, according to Faulkner, this model is “extremely plastic” and thus explains nothing.
Faulkner believes in a literal reading of Genesis 1, that the earth and universe are roughly 6,000 years old He does admit, however, that not all questions can be satisfactorily answered, such as the question as to the appearance and age of billions of years for the universe. If the farthest quasars are indeed billions of light years distant, how could their light have traveled so far in 6,000 years? Faulkner posited that, since the creation itself was a miracle of God, perhaps God created the universe with the appearance of age.
Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli astrophysicist and creationist, has offered his own theory that attempts to reconcile a young earth with the appearance of great age. He says that the key is in the verse already mentioned, Psalm 104:2, where it says that God stretched out the universe. If everything was more compact before God stretched it out, then the light from now-distant galaxies would not have had anywhere near the distance to travel to reach earth, and thus could have reached the earth in a small fraction of the time.
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