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How did the earth begin? How old is the earth? Where did the dinosaurs go? How long did it take God to create the universe? Did He use evolution to do so? Was there really a Flood? How long has man been on the earth? What happened to the dinosaurs? What about the Big Bang theory?

Eventually in your walk with God, people grow to a place where they begin to ask these curious questions of reconciling science with God. As with anything else, you can find a group somewhere believing just about any theory that's out there. In this group of lessons, let's look at some biblical principles to help shine some light on these "dark" questions." I'll do so by mentioning key principles to understand from God's Word and talking about what the principles reveal to us in answering our scientific questions.

1. God's Word is the literal, infallible Word of God and is relevant for every area of our life and is the final authority of truth.

"All scripture" means the verses that address scientific issues also. If you do not believe that the Word of God is the absolute final authority on truth, then the creation of the world will never make sense to you, and furthermore you can't be saved or live Godly. Furthermore, you can't say you literally believe this verse and yet choose to ignore or dispute another. It's either all or nothing. Either it's all of the Word of God or none of it is. I'm amazed at the supposed "Christians" who want to believe New Testament scripture that says if they do such and such they will be eternally saved and yet don't want to believe the Genesis 1 account of creation. They hinge on each other. If one is not true then the other is not either and vice versa. Look at the first verses of the Bible:

In the first recorded history of the world, we have some very key issues happening, God already exists before the begining, He creates something out of nothing, the Spirit of God moves upon the waters of the created earth to change it and shape it, God creates light and divides it from the darkness, and He does all of this by His spoken Word. When you came to God in this century, the same principles were at work: God takes a life that was nothing spiritually and creates something fit for the kingdom of God, He moved upon your "waters" or spirit being to change it and shape it with His Spirit, and the light of truth begins to shine in your life to separate truth from darkness. And all of this came from the result of His Word being placed into action in your life. Simply put, if you do not believe that God created the world as Genesis 1 said then you do not believe that God can actively work among humans today, because it is the same processes that created the world that still save us today and transform our sinful lives. Therefore for Christianity to mean anything at all, the Word of God must be the inerrant Word of God. If it is not, then there is no authority in the world and no point in living for God. If it were not the final authority then of course we wouldn't have received the promises of God that we have received. So get it through your head: the Word of God is truth!

Beyond all of that, you must remember that science is a growing and gradually gained knowledge. Just because scientist believe something doesn't mean it's truth, but rather that it's the best known theory that they can think of. And as our technology improves, so does our scientific beliefs change. Astronomers not too long ago thought that the earth is the center of the universe and our solar system and that the sun and stars revolved around the earth. It appears that way to us because of the sun and stars moving across the sky, but in actuality it's the earth that is rotating not the sky. We now know that the planets of the solar system rotate around the sun, and that our solar system is about two thirds down the side of the hurricane looking Milky Way galaxy and that our galaxy rotates around other galaxies called the local group and that are billions of such places throughout the universe. In other words whatever the current scientific belief is, doesn't mean that it's truth, but just all that we know up to this point in time. And over and over again the Bible has stated things that scientists scoffed at only in time and technological advances they find out that the Bible was correct. Here are just a few of what we now know that are scientific facts that were in the Bible long before scientists "discovered them."

There are springs and fountains in the bottom of the ocean. Genesis 7:11; 8:2; Proverbs 8:28

We could preach an entire message on any of these list items, but the latter is one of my favorite things to point out in support of scripture principles, so let's focus on it. To show that we must live by faith, believing in things that we cannot see the proof of, God purposefully created everything out of something smaller. When scientists discovered atoms, they claimed that they had found the "building blocks of nature." They were then delighted to discover that every element and matter in the universe can be formed through one process or another by just a few key elements. In fact, if you were to reduce a human being to the level of the chemicals that we are made up of, all we are is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen with a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, and a few trace amounts of a few other basic elements -- all of which may be purchased at your local drugstore and basically what the earth is made out of as well. If you want a life partner, just go down and buy the stuff and make somebody right? No, there's more to it than that because you are going to have a hard time getting all of it to function like your body does.

When scientists still couldn't understand what makes all of these atoms work together to produce life, they began to look to see if possibly if atoms, which they could now view in their microscopes were made up of something even smaller that they did not yet have the technology to see. Guess what? Atoms are made up of sub-atomic particles of which there are three: protons, neutrons, and electrons. And these are the things that cause atoms to interact with each other. But then that led to another question, namely, What causes these sub-atomic particles to react and move as they do? Could there be something smaller? There is and sub-atomic particles are made up of quarks. Well actually "quarks" is the general name because we now know that sub-atomic particles are made by the combinations of seventeen smaller things: six quarks, six leptons, and five known bosons. And scientists predict even though we haven't found it yet that there will be a sixth boson type found eventually. After they get all of that squared away and understood maybe in the next decade, the question will then become "what makes the quarks interact and is there something smaller" . . . ? (see *A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, pg 165-166)

I can fearlessly predict that whatever scientist discover next as the "building block of matter" they will eventually find that there is even a smaller layer of which it is made. I'm not going out on a limb here, because the Bible says in Hebrews 11:3 that "things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." In other words, if you can have the technology to see something that is small, there will always be something smaller that you can't yet see. And when you finally get to the place where you find a way to see that, then there will be yet another level to discover. God did it that way on purpose because He said in our other text, talking about the universe:

It's really simple to understand if you believe the Word of God. If you don't, then you're in for a long road to grasp what God has already stated! And let me also point out that this scripture is not only true for going smaller and smaller, but also going larger and larger. Look up at the sky at night and on a good, dark, moonless night you can only see about 2,000 stars at one time from one particular spot with the naked eye. Take an ordinary pair of binoculars and all of a sudden you can see over 50,000 stars. With a small, inexpensive telescope say a three inch one that you can purchase for a little over a hundred bucks, and you can see over 300,000 stars. Go up to a big scope such as an sixteen inch one which you can purchase for a few thousand dollars, and the stars that you see are measured in approximately 100,000 galaxies all of which have tens of billions of stars each! Go up to the level of the multi-million dollar Hubble Telescope that is currently in space and scientists were amazed to find that there are "superclusters" visible containing thousands of galaxies each. If you take a billion light years distance which is a considerable distance, the distance that light travels in a billion years, you are only seeing about five percent of the universe that we can now see with the technology available today. Yet within that five percent that closest to us alone there is some 160,000 galaxy clusters containing three million large galaxies with over a billion stars in them and some additional thirty million "dwarf" galaxies which "only" contain millions of stars. And that's just in the first five percent of what we can currently see! (see Seeing in the Dark, Timothy Ferris, pg 272).

Perhaps now you can better understand the awe of David when he wrote keeping sheep in the fields by night and looking up at the 2,000 or so stars that he could see with his naked eye:

God has set His "glory above the heavens." In other words, no matter how big the universe is, the God that created it is bigger! The point that I'm trying to make is that no matter what level of understanding that we achieve as human beings, there will always be a deeper level beyond that because God has created it that way. It would then make sense to take the Word of God for the source of our faith and not some other theory! And to rejoice that now we understand that even though we have a GREAT big God, yet He loves greatly a very little you and me enough to come in flesh and die for us! Such is the greatness of the love of God!

Having established the Word of God as our guide book, let's move on to another important point:

Creationism states that the Word of God means exactly what it says and that God spoke the worlds and universe into existence and thus everything is in perfect harmony because there was one master designer and that creation is proof that we are no accident but a carefully orchestrated creation by the omnipotent God. Or as David again put it in the Psalm that was our first text:

In other words the complexity and yet perfect design of the universe and earth is proof that there is a creator who created all of it. This is a scriptural concept. Paul claimed that the universe was enough proof to testify to the existence of God to all men:

Or to read it in the New Living Translation:

Before we discuss the implications of all of this, let's talk about what a person currently believes if they believe in the current theory of evolution. By the way, if you are over, say the age of twenty-two or are being taught out of a science text book that is over five or six years old then what you learned is hopelessly out of date with what we now know. There is currently a big debate over whether Pluto should be considered a planet at all or if it's just a big asteroid. Likewise whatever you were taught about the origin of life has doubtlessly changed since then because like all other beliefs in this area it is a theory. I'll try to give you the latest trends but be aware that scientific discoveries change this stuff like the wind. And it's a cheap shot but I'll do it anyway to point out that if you just believe the Bible, then your info is never out of date!

Current evolutional theory states that the universe expanded out of a very dense clump of matter that was so small that it did not exist (called "singularity"). The Big Bang theory states that this "singularity of matter" that existed but somehow didn't exist, suddenly expanded about 13.7 billion years ago -- although some say it was actually closer to 10 billion years -- releasing 98% of the matter and all of the energy in our current universe and creating the universe as we know it in a matter of seconds. The Big Bang was not an explosion at all but a sudden expansion of all this clumped up matter to where it is today. We still do not know what caused this sudden, violent expansion. Neither do we know where this matter initially came from. In fact scientists tend to avoid such questions and instead tend to say "the Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang" (A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, pg 13). As Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001: "These are very close to religious questions." Yes, Dr. Linde, they are, because to believe anything about a time when no one was present requires great faith.

According to the Big Bang theory, life formed in this universe because of some very fortunate accidental results of this expansion. If gravity had been created a fraction stronger than what it was, then the universe would have collapsed on itself like a badly erected tent and folded back eventually into solidarity. If gravity had been created just a fraction weaker, then the matter expanded would never have clumped up in stars, galaxies, and produced the stable elements that were needed for life. Most Big Bang scientists believe that there have been trillions of trillions of Big Bangs up to the one that created our universe and the only reason that we exist in this particular one is that by accident everything was just right so that we could exist in it. Simply put, they believe that we are here by accidental perfections that just happened to occur after zillions of times that all of this stuff happened over and over again.

There are other things besides the value of gravity that had to be perfectly formed by accident if evolution and the big bang theory is true. Another is that for our universe to exist, the element of hydrogen has to be able to convert to helium in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of it's mass to energy. Our universe works because of the preciseness and perfectness of this one number. If it had been slightly lower say 0.0006 percent rather than 0.0007 percent, and there would be no conversion able to take place and there would be no other elements in existence, only hydrogen. If it was slightly higher, say 0.0008, then the conversion would have been so easy and frequent that there would no longer be any hydrogen left in the universe. What that means is that in the Big Bang, it was another miracle that hydrogen was created as it was!

According to evolution, another miracle coincidence that took place in that the was that the earth was placed exactly in relation to the star which we call the sun. Look up at the sky and about 65 percent of all the stars you see are actually "double stars" which are two stars orbiting around each other. According to evolution, we just got lucky and had all of the stuff that was needed for life to exist just happen to land on a planet that was just the right size and that happened to orbit a single star. If the sun was a double star, then we'd never have been here to get sun tanned in the first place!

Not only did the stuff needed for life just happen to land here, but it also happened to land on a planet that was just the perfect distance away from that star. A few feet closer to the sun and we'd all be toast. A few feet further away and you'd just think that our sanctuary was cold! And, of course, we also got lucky and just happened to land on a planet that is tilted a perfect 23.4 degrees. Any more or less and we wouldn't have the seasons and the ability to grow food as we do. Furthermore, our planet is tilted that far from the vertical sense. If we had been say, like Uranus, which rotates around a horizontal axis, we would have never been here. I guess, we were extremely lucky!

Not only were we lucky in that all of these factors just happened to work out correctly, but sometime after the earth was formed yet before life appeared in this lucky process, a meteor the size of mars hit the planet and knocked enough dirt off the planet to slowly come together and form another small body orbiting the earth which we now call the moon. The most amazing thing about this is that the sun and the moon appear as the exact same size and diameter in the sky to us. This is because of the amazing coincidence that the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon but that the moon is exactly 400 times closer to the earth than the sun. What that means is that if you believe in this "evolutionary process" that the dirt that just happened to be knocked off of the earth to form our moon, just happened to have knocked off the precise amount and just happened to fall into just the precise orbit so that the moon and sun match in the sky. And this is just one example of the things that had to "just happen to fall into place" for our earth to be so that life could eventually evolve. Without the moon, the ocean tides and such would not function and life in the sea would not exist.

And so now we come to life. All of this that we have just discussed is just to get the planet in the proper place, but for life to form by evolution, then all of these elements had to come together and begin to combine themselves into small amoebas and such. For life to evolve, then life had to first exist. And remember that scientists can tell you what basic atoms came together to make the ten thousand trillion cells that make up your body, but they still can't explain to you why those atoms would choose to come together and make that cell in the first place because they can't explain to you the actions of the sub-atomic particles that make up those atoms because they can't explain to you the actions of the quarks that form the sub-atomic particles, because they can't figure out what makes up those quarks, etc . . . . And not only that, but everyone of the ten thousand trillion cells in your body -- every one -- have your entire blueprint of your body, your DNA code, written in them. And scientists can't explain how that code got there. What made basic elements form cells that suddenly decided to work together and create life, and who placed the instruction manual that we call DNA in every one of the particular cells that were needed for it to happen? That's a question that evolution can't answer.

The point is this: we haven't talked about fossils; we haven't talked about "missing links" between humans and animals, we haven't talked about how there is not an ounce of scientific proof that one species ever mutated to another species, we haven't got into all of that that most people normally get into when discussing evolution. We could, because there are a lot of holes and problems with evolution at all of those levels, but evolution has serious problems explaining the most basic things, like how life formed in the first place! Before a jelly fish can supposedly transform into a tuna and that fish can supposedly learn to breathe air and then that creature can supposedly learn to walk on land, and supposedly some of those creatures can learn to fly -- the basic tenets of evolution -- before all of that takes place, there has be life form from elements and evolution cannot explain how that happened except to say that you must believe that it did because it's here. Forget about the animals right now. Let's not even discuss the complexities of the human DNA block or the fossil records of animals. Let's think simply about how much faith it takes to believe that a small, single-cell life form happened by chance. Professors of Probability have taken the complexity of the simplest life form that we have discovered and have calculated that the chance of it just forming on it's own is 1 X 10 to the 40,000th power. That is less probability than:

1. Shaking for 1 billion years a gigantic box filled with wire, metal, plastic, etc... and forming a computer.

2. A tornado passing through a junkyard and forming a Boeing 747.

3. 10 to the fiftieth power blind men simultaneously solving scrambles Rubik's cubes.

4. An explosion in a print shop creating an unabridged English dictionary.

Not only that, but for this single-celled life cell to even have a chance to form, all of the universe and the exact laws of physics that we have discussed had to first happen randomly by chance as well? And all of this formed out of matter that was already here and that no one can explain where it came from? And the world wants me to believe and have faith in such a theory and wants to call my belief in the Words of a God whose presence I can feel and Whom I can see working in my life every day -- that to believe His Words is ignorant and crazy??!!

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So to review what we have learned:

If the Word of God is not our final authority in areas of science, then it cannot be our final authority for salvation, eternity, or anything else. Furthermore if the Word of God is not the ultimate authority in our life, then we have no ultimate authority. As science has progressed, the Word of God has been proven correct time and time again from the tiniest physics to the distant stars.

It takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution. Faith because a lot of chance things had to happen to let it be here. Faith because you have to accept that matter was already here somehow. Faith because you have to except that somehow, even though it is not happening today, elements formed themselves, drew up a great big complex blueprint and slowly became living cells working together. There is no proof of how this happened, of course, so you must just simply believe it!

None of this is by accident, of course. The fact that is has come down to two ways to believe but that it still requires faith either way is by design. By the design of a God who created it that way because only faith in Him pleases Him. And so when you answer in your own mind "how it all began" you must believe something and one theory believes in chance and luck and the other believes in God. Hebrews 11 goes on to say:

To believe that God is means that you must believe what God says. If you don't believe that God's Word is true in Genesis 1 then how can it be true in the remainder of the verses?

But we can know that there is a God because of Creation. It's design and carefully laid laws and order are not the design of chance but the mark of the true Master of the Universe. The heavens declare the glory of God. His glory is clearly seen every day and night. And all of it works together to reveal to us how mighty His love for us, humanity, is! Because of all the things in the universe, it was you and I that He loved enough to have a relationship with and to die on a cross to buy back that relationship after it was stolen by sin that was our error! Truly, what a mighty God we serve!

I stated earlier that to believe in any theory about how the universe and earth came about, requires faith because nobody was there to witness it. That's true in that there was no human being there at the time of creation, but if you believe in God -- and are anything beyond an atheist -- then you must realize that there was somebody there at creation, God Himself! And it is this same God who moved upon men to write His Word that we have today. Moses, wrote Genesis, but he wasn't alive when all of creation happened, so it's very obvious who his source was. Peter agreed that is was God when he wrote:

It takes great faith to believe in evolution and it takes great faith to believe in creationism. Why not take the Word of the only One who was there at the scene!? Why not take the Words of the only witness who was there when it all began!?