The Universe and Our Earth

The vastness of the universe shows the greatness of God as Creator.  The universe has millions of galaxies, and our own galaxy, for example, has millions of stars - like our sun - and it would take one hundred thousand years to cross it if we travelled at the speed of light.    What an awesome God we have!

Scientists claim our earth is but a tiny planet of little significance on the periphery of this vast universe; which in a cosmographical (the map of the universe) sense is correct.  But God's concern is with the spiritual importance of our planet, and the Bible informs us that this planet Earth is at the centre of the universe in the sense that it is the place in which God has chosen to create man and give Him the gift of salvation and eternal life together with Him.  To date, as far as is known, we are the only planet that has advanced life forms such as man and animal and the means to sustain them.  The Earth has just the right amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and its position is at exactly the right distance from the sun to be suited for life.  The planet Venus is nearer the sun and has a temperature of 470c - far too hot for life, while Mars, further away from the sun has a temperature of minus 50c - too cold for normal life to exist.  If the Earth were smaller we would lose much of our atmosphere resulting in the planet being reduced to a wasteland of ice and snow.

The Age of the Earth

When we come to the age of the Earth, those who believe in evolution claim it is around 4.6 billion years old and that it came into being by chance and in a random way (the Big Bang).  Creationists, in contrast, believe that the Earth may be only a few thousand years old, that it was created by God, and that He created it in a perfect and orderly way [4].  As no man was there at the time and the origin of the world cannot be replicated in the science laboratory, dates for its beginning are impossible to verify with any precision, with the result that for over one hundred and fifty years the question of the age of the Earth has produced much heated discussion between these two opposing views.   

The debate is extremely complex and far outside the scope of this short chapter, but there are one or two simple questions we can ask here...  If the Earth were indeed thousands of millions of years old, the seawater dust would have to be over 50 feet thick.  Where is it all?  On the moon the dust was less than half an inch thick instead of many feet thick as the astronauts feared when they went there forty years ago.

What about the Earth's population?  If we accept that the average number of children per family is 2.5, and that a generation is forty years, then, even allowing for famine, war, and disease, this world's population would have reached its present level in approximately ten thousand years; which indicates the Earth is only around ten thousand years old.  But if humans emerged around sixty to one hundred thousand years ago, as the evolutionists say, then this planet's population by now would be upwards of two thousand billion billion - far too many for Earth to sustain!

Nowhere in the Bible is the age of the Earth given as part of the Scriptures.  The date of 4004BC was worked out by Archbishop Ussher in the 17th century, which was then added as a footnote in some Bibles printed in the Victorian era, but even if we disagree with his exact figures, the genealogies given in the Bible and the points briefly mentioned above (there are, of course, many more [5]), suggest the Earth cannot possibly be older than ten or twelve thousand years at the most.

The Laws of the Universe

We must also take into account the Laws of Thermodynamics (the relation between heat and mechanical energy) which are contrary to the theory that everything that now is, evolved by accident or chance from very primitive life-forms.  Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the evolutionists' claim of the Big Bang, these laws state very simply that, firstly, something complicated cannot spontaneously develop from something simple even after millions of years; i.e., "you cannot get something from nothing".  Only a Creator (i.e. a 'First Cause', or an intelligent mind, or God) can create "ex nihilo" (bring something out of nothing).  And secondly, they state that things left to themselves always run down and increase in disorder - any gardener will tell you that the garden left unattended will never become Kew Gardens, but will all too soon become overgrown and full of weeds!

So according to these laws, the evolutionists' claim that simple life-forms developed themselves into ever more complex life-forms culminating in man, is just impossible.  In contrast, the Bible states that God created all living things "after their kind" [6] and that they each have a specific purpose, and that He created man "in his own image" [7] to have fellowship with Himself.  The book of Genesis repeats time and again that every "kind" reproduces only after its own "kind", so that a dog can never become a cat, for example; and certainly there have been no so-called 'missing links' found to gainsay the Biblical record, no matter how many attempts there have been to uncover, or even manufacture, such links.

The Chicken or the Egg?

We also need to understand that God created only adult animals and man.  Not only do the Scriptures tell us that God created something out of nothing, they also say He created them in a mature condition.  The first man, Adam, was not created as a baby with no-one to look after him.  Concerning the oft-asked question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?", the answer is: the chicken.

Wine, Bread, and Fish

Likewise, when God came amongst us in the person of the Lord Jesus, He reminded us that He is the Creator by instantly creating wine from water at the wedding at Cana [8], and feeding several thousand people from just a few fish and a little bread [9].  God doesn't need millions of years to make something out of nothing: He does it in an instant.

A Thousand Years Is As One Day

It is important for us to grasp that time as seen from God's perspective is quite different from our perspective of it.  In Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 we read that a thousand years is as a passing day to Him, while for us humans it is a very long time!  For instance, it is difficult for us to think of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 as having taken place only yesterday because it is not our usual way of thinking and understanding reality, limited as we are in this life by space and time.  God, however, Who is outside of - and hence not limited by - space and time, sees all history from its beginning to its end as a present reality.

How did evolutionists - or long-earth creationists at least - get their billions of years?  It is interesting to note that if we take the timeline as suggested in the Biblical genealogies, multiplied by 360 (in the days of Peleg when the Earth was divided [10] it is thought that there was a round figure of 360 days in a year), multiplied by God's view of a thousand years as one day [11], the answer comes to over four billion years!  So it is possible, at a stretch, to extrapolate billions of years from these scriptures...  But be that as it may, the basic question for every one of us is; which viewpoint do we choose to believe in: man's or God's? 

God's Greatness

In addition to the facts above, it is worth reminding ourselves that much of God's creation is unseen; it is out of sight to the naked eye.  The vast majority of life is beneath the seas and oceans which most of us are only really able to appreciate via underwater camera work on TV documentaries, while many other parts of creation are far too small for us to observe without the use of microscopes.  Nevertheless, from the microscopically tiny to the unsearched reaches of the vast universe with its billions of stars, God's creative glory is revealed and is meant to lead us to worship the One Who is able to do such mighty things: "Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing that moveth therein" (Psalm 69:34).

As always, God does all things well.  He never makes mistakes.  How sad it is that so many folk try to leave God out of His own creation [12], preferring to believe that the existence of all things came about quite randomly with no plan, no purpose, no design.  But the Scriptures tell us very plainly that when the creation was finished, "God saw that it was good".  It was perfect.  How terrible then, that when man came along he messed it all up, and how wonderful that God was willing to come down to Planet Earth in order to put everything right in the way He had originally intended it to be.

Footnotes

[1]  See, for example, Matthew 19:4-5 and Luke 17:26-29.          [2]  Job 38:1-38 and 40:1-14.          [3]  See, for example, Job chapters 38-41 and Psalm 19:1-6.          [4]  Genesis 1:1.          [5]  For further reading please see these websites for a number of very good books, articles, DVDs and other information on creation and evolution:  Answers In Genesis;  Creation;  Creation Science Movement.          [6]  Genesis 1:21,25;  Genesis 6:20;  Genesis 7:14.          [7]  Genesis 1:27.          [8]  John 2:1-11.          [9]  Matthew 14:14-21.          [10]  Genesis 10:25.          [11]  Psalm 90:4;  2 Peter 3:8.          [12]  Romans 1:18-23.

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© Michael Smith 2013