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 From
a booklet, “Origin of the Solar System” by John C. Whitcomb,
we present the following quotation:
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“In
the light of the failure of naturalistic evolution to explain
the origin of the elements, the stars, and the planets, it is
very disappointing to find leading evangelical exponents of the
double—revelation theory appealing to Gamow’s “big- bang”
hypothesis of an expanding universe as support for the Biblical
doctrine of creation! In the first of a series of articles on
“The Story of Creation,” Christian Life magazine
invited J. Laurence Kulp, Karl Turekian, and Donald R. Carr of
Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, and
Russell Mixter and Howard Claasen of Wheaton College to discuss
“The Origin of the Universe.” These writers concluded:
“A
simple calculation shows that about five billion years ago all
matter was in one spot. An “explosion” occurred at that time
and fragments have been flying apart since, to give us an
expanding universe....
How
did the creative act take place? An increasing number of
evangelical Christian scientists and theologians can now be said
to take the following position. . . . All the elements of
the universe must have been created within
a half hour. Within less than 400 million years, the gas
composed of 90 percent hydrogen had drifted apart to a great
extent and the temperature had dropped down to that of a
comfortably warm room. None of the sparkling stars of today were
there at that time — only a gigantic dark ball
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of gas at low pressure.... Some 500
million years after the universe was started (about 1/10 of
universe history) the earth came into being.”
It
is significant that just eighteen months after this article
appeared in Christian Life, Gamow himself frankly
admitted that the “big- bang” theory could not explain the
origin of most of the elements!
“We
know that hydrogen and helium do in fact make up about 99 per
cent of the matter of the universe. This leaves us with the
problem of building the heavier elements. I hold to the opinion
that some of them were built by capture of neutrons. However
since the absence of any stable nucleus of atomic weight 5 makes
it improbable that the heavier elements could have been produced
in the first half hour in the abundance now observed, I
would agree that the lion’s share of the heavy elements may
well have been formed later in the hot interior of stars.”
This
is not an isolated instance. Time and time again, Christians
have been pressured into adopting some popular scientific theory
only to discover, to their sorrow and embarrassment, that they
had succeeded in “Harmonizing” Scripture to a scientific
concept that was proven to be erroneous after all. As someone
has well said, the person who becomes wedded to the scientific
cosmology of one generation will find himself widowed in the
next.”
BRETHREN,
ARE WE ALSO “WIDOWED”?
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