Articles 2

Mysteries of Creation

(Part 4)

First day of Creation

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen 1:4-5).

The phrase “first day” was translated from the Hebrew yom echad, which literally signifies “day one” or “one day.” (“First day” is yom hari’shon.) The succeeding days of creation, though, have been written in Hebrew as “second day,” “third day,” and so forth.

The course of the first day is exactly the opposite of the way we reckon the passage of a day today, which begins in the morning. The first day began in the evening. For this reason, and in obedience to the commandments of God (Lev 23:32; Ex 12:18), Jews have always marked the start of a 24-hour day at sunset, ending at sunset of the following day.

However, the first day, if we reread the passage, ended in the morning. It did not continue through noon and finally come to a close at the start of another evening. So, the first “day” was just a 12-hour period from evening to morning, a time of darkness. It is logical that God did His first creative act in darkness, because there was darkness before light, but did He also work in darkness for the next several days of the Creation “week”? Scripture suggests that ever since He created light, God has always worked in the light (1 John 1:5-7).

Period of inactivity?

Ralph Woodrow’s research clarifies things for us: “The word that is translated ‘were’ in the expression ‘the evening and the morning were the first day’, the second day, the third day, etc., is hayah (Strong’s Concordance, #1961). It appears many times in the Bible and has been translated a variety of ways. In the references (that follow) it is translated ‘follow’ or ‘followed’: Ex 21:22 – ‘yet no mischief follow’; 21:23 – ‘if any mischief follow’; 23:2 – ‘thou shalt not follow a multitude’; Deut. 18:22 – ‘if the thing follow not’; 2 Sam. 2:10 – ‘Judah followed David’; 1 Kings 16:21 – ‘the people followed Tibni.’

“If we apply this translation in Genesis 1, we would have: ‘And the evening and the morning followed the first day… and the evening and the morning followed the second day… and the evening and the morning followed the third day.’ This would give a good sense to the passage and allow it to flow in a logical sequence.”⁶²

It becomes clear as day, pardon the expression, that the phrase “the evening and the morning” does not denote a full Creation “day,” but instead indicates an inactive second period following the active first half of each of God’s creative “days.” Thus, the creation of light made up the daylight half of the first day, followed by a second half of darkness – a time of inactivity. The next five “days” apparently followed this pattern: God worked during daylight, then stopped when evening came.  

When was the first “day”?

According to some Jewish rabbis, Adam was created on the first day of Tishri -- the first month of the Jewish civil year, which begins in the evening of the first new moon of autumn in late September or early October.

Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) of Armagh, Ireland, regarded as the preeminent Bible chronologist to this day, drew up a timeline based on the Biblical genealogy of the first men, starting from Adam. He pinpointed the actual time of the beginning of creation to have been in autumn, in the morning of October 23, 4004 B.C.⁶⁴ The astronomer Johannes Kepler disagreed, he believed creation began in the spring.

In 1654 John Lightfoot refined Archbishop Ussher's calculation of the first day of creation to an extreme degree of precision: 9:00 A.M., October 26, 4004 B.C. in the Julian calendar, in Mesopotamia.⁶⁵

In 2005, Prophecy in the News editor-publisher J.R. Church used a Starry Night Pro astronomy computer program to search for the first new moon in the fall of 4004 B.C., which ushered in Rosh HaShanah, the start of the civil new year in the Jewish calendar. He saw that the year, and perhaps creation, astronomically began on September 25, 4004 B.C., a Sunday, the first day of the week.⁶⁶

How long is a “day”?

The Genesis account narrates that God began to create heaven and earth on the first “day.” However, interpretations of the word “day” vary considerably. The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia informs us, “the word is used in several different senses in the English Bible…

“(1) It sometimes means the time from daylight till dark…

“(2) Day also means a period of 24 hours, or the time from sunset to sunset… (…where night is put before day)…

“(3) The word ‘day’ is also used of an indefinite period, e.g ‘the day’ or ‘day that’ means in general ‘that time’ (see Gen 2:4; Lev 14:2); ‘day of trouble’ (Ps 20:1); ‘day of his wrath’ (Job 20:28); ‘day of (the LORD,’ Isa 2:12); ‘day of the Lord’ (1 Cor 5:5; 1 Thess 5:2; 2 Peter 3:10); ‘day of salvation’ (2 Cor 6:2); ‘day of Jesus Christ’ (Phil 1:6).

“(4) It is used figuratively also in John 9:4, where ‘while it is day’ means ‘while I have opportunity to work, as daytime is the time for work’…

“(5) We must also bear in mind that with God time is not reckoned as with us (see Ps 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8).

“(6) The apocalyptic use of the word ‘day’ in Dan 12:11; Rev 2:10, etc., is difficult to define. It evidently does not mean a natural day…

“(7) On the meaning of ‘day’ in the story of Creation we note (a) the word ‘day’ is used of the whole period of creation (Gen 2:4); (b) these days are days of God… the whole age or period of salvation is called ‘the day of salvation’; see above. So we believe that in harmony with Bible usage we may understand the creative days as creative periods…”⁶⁷ (Underscoring by the author.)

The wise men of Israel are said to have known that the six “days” of creation were not literal 24-hour days. Nachmanides, the 13^th century Jewish philosopher, cryptically said that the six ”days” contain “all the secrets and ages of the universe.”⁶⁸

Over the last two hundred years, differing schools of thought have polarized believers concerning the actual length of each “day” of the Creation “week,” leading to the formation of separate camps: Young Earth and Old Earth Creationists…

Young Earth Creationism

Young Earth Creationists are traditionalists who believe that, based on the Biblical narrative, the universe today is no older than a little over 6,000 or 12,000 years. They advocate two different interpretations of Creation “days”: Literal 24-Hour Days and Thousand-Year “Days.”

Literal 24-Hour Days.

Adherents of this belief hold that each set of “evening and morning” in the Genesis account constituted one literal 24-hour day. Hence, if we add the six days of creation to the time that has elapsed from 4004 B.C. until the present, the universe today is just a little over 6,000 years old.

No sunset, no sunrise. Detractors argue that the “evening and morning” cannot possibly be literal, since they are characterized by the setting and rising of the sun, which had not yet been created on the first “day.” The rotation of the earth around its axis cannot be cited, either, because Genesis 1:6-8 infers that the Earth’s sphere formed only on the second “day,” with the appearance of the firmament or vault of the sky. Besides, the earth has not always rotated around its axis in 24 hours. In conformity with the laws of nature, after gravitational attraction caused the gases and dust that would form the Earth to agglomerate, the planetesimals rotated very slowly at first, before gradually gaining momentum as the new planet solidified.

Further, if those were literal 24-hour days, why were no parts of the day ever mentioned when several entities were created in succession – say, grass in the morning, herbs at noon, trees in the afternoon?

Thousand-Year “Days.”

A second Young Earth belief holds that each creation “day” is one millennium, or a period of 1,000 years, based on two passages in the Bible: (1) “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (Ps 90:4); and (2) “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet 3:8).

If we add the 6,000 years of the first six “days” to the 6,000 years that have gone by since the creation of Adam in 4004 B.C., the universe would be about 12,000 years old today, as illustrated below:

Thousand-Year “Days” Chronology

(1 Creation “Day” = 1,000 Years)

Day	Years ago	Period (approx.)/Entity(ies) created
1	12,000-11,000	10,000-9000 B.C.; light
2	11,000-10,000	9000-8000 B.C.; firmament, waters above/below
3	10,000-9,000	8000-7000 B.C.; grass, herbs, trees
4	9,000-8,000	7000-6000 B.C.; sun, moon, stars
5	8,000-7,000	6000-5000 B.C.; sea creatures, flying creatures
6	7,000-6,000	5000-4000 B.C.; land animals, creeping things, man
7	6,000-5,000	4000-3000 B.C. (God’s day of rest)
8	5,000-4,000	3000-2000 B.C.
9	4,000-3,000	2000-1000 B.C.
10	3,000-2,000	1000-1 B.C.
11	2,000-1,000	1-1000 A.D.
12	1,000-recent	1000-2000 A.D.
	Total: 12,000
13	Present-	2000-3000 A.D. (man’s Millennium rest)
14		3000-4000 A.D. (God’s next day of rest)

NOTE: God created Adam in 4004 B.C., part of Day 6 (Ussher’s Chronology).

Out-of-place Sabbath. The Thousand-Year “Days” Chronology entails at least one major difficulty: God’s Sabbath rest on the seventh “day” (the seventh 1,000 years after the first six “days” or 6,000 years). During that supposed period of rest, God actively interacted with Cain and Abel, Enoch, and others. God’s seventh-day Sabbath thus appears out-of-place in the Thousand-Year “Days” timeline. Further, God’s next Sabbath rest would not coincide with man’s coming Millennial rest (about 2000-3000 A.D.). God’s rest would be in the next 1,000-year period yet (around 3000-4000 A.D.). This means God would not have any active dealings with man during that 1,000-year period, contrary to Biblical prophecy.

Light from the stars. If the Earth is only 6,000–12,000 years old, we cannot see light from stars hundreds of thousands or millions of light-years away. Although light is the fastest thing in the universe, it covers less than 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km.) in one year (1 light-year). Light from a star that is, say, one million light-years away will become visible on Earth only after one million years. In 1987, astronomers spotted a supernova (exploding star, SN 1987A) about 170,000 light-years away. That means the explosion took place 170,000 years ago, something they could not have seen if the Earth is just 6,000-12,000 years old.

“Time dilation.” In 1994, nuclear physicist D. Russell Humphreys, a Young Earth Creationist, published his book Starlight and Time to prove otherwise. He built his case around “an effect in general relativity called gravitational time dilation…” He explains: “Experiment and Einstein's theory agree that time and all physical processes run more slowly in areas which are lower in a gravitational field than in areas which are higher… the expanding universe was at a critical size (about fifty times smaller than it is now)… during the fourth day of Creation Week. While one ordinary day was elapsing on earth, billions of years worth of physical processes were taking place in distant parts of the universe.” Humphreys postulates that time elapsed very rapidly at the outer edges, but was virtually at a standstill at and near the center.⁶⁹ “This allows starlight from even the most distant star to arrive during or soon after the fourth day, the same day God created all the stars.”⁷⁰

Bottom line: Relativity allows us to choose by which clock to tell the age of the universe, as well as the time events occurred in it. Humphreys chose the one that tells time in terms of the "earth's frame of reference, not some other frame." He concludes that “the universe is young as measured by clocks on earth.”⁷¹

One problem with the Humphreys scenario is its having two different locales. The six 24-hour “days” transpired on Earth, while the billions of years elapsed in the outermost reaches of the universe. The Starlight and Time hypothesis falls short of explaining the apparent old age of fossils and the Earth’s geological rock layers.

Billions of years?

Some 300 years ago, the new science of geology began shaking the foundations of Young Earth Creationism by stating that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, or even 12,000 years. Two landmark books were at the frontline: A New Theory of the Earth (1696) by William Whiston and Theory of the Earth (1785) by James Hutton, called the father of modern geology. By the end of the 1800s, estimates of the age of the Earth were in hundreds of millions of years.⁷²

Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism.

Until the 19^th century, most geologists explained the origins of rock layers and other geological formations by saying that the earth had gone through many sudden catastrophes -- the most recent being the Biblical Flood. The doctrine was called “catastrophism.” In line with this view, the majority of fossilized plants and animals being unearthed today were buried during the Deluge about 4,350 years ago.

In 1830-1833, Scottish lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell formed the idea of “uniformitarianism,” explained in his Principles of Geology. Based on the concepts he laid out, the Earth’s surface is constantly changing, and geological features are the result of natural forces working slowly, but uniformly, over vast ages. The idea has since become the cornerstone of the modern science of geology.

“Stones and bones.”

By the 20^th century, cosmologists theorized, based on the estimated age of the oldest rocks, that the Earth and its moon came from the same materials that formed the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago.

In addition, paleontologists have unearthed numerous petrified plants and animals estimated to be millions and even billions of years old. Some of the most spectacular bones are those of dinosaurs, which are thought to have dominated the planet for some 120 million years before becoming extinct approximately 65 million years ago.

And then there are the manlike remains in the fossil collection. If God created the perfect man Adam on the sixth “day,” just 6,000-7,000 years ago, did He create the evidently inferior subhumans just a few hours, or even a few hundred years, earlier on the same “day”?

Sheep and dinosaurs. The first land animal specifically mentioned in the Bible is the sheep: “And Abel was a keeper of sheep…” (Gen 4:2b). If God created all land animals on the same “day” 6,000-7,000 years ago, sheep and dinosaurs would have lived alongside each other. But while there are still millions of sheep today, dinosaurs (which should have devoured the sheep) have disappeared long ago. And, because they have proven to be the more durable species, more sheep than dinosaurs should be in the fossil record. But no sheep fossil has been reported vis-à-vis numerous dinosaur remains.

Besides, God gave all animals plants for food (Gen 1:30), allowing flesh-eating only after the Flood (Gen 9:3). When did some reptiles develop sharp teeth, claws, and other predatory features to become carnivorous dinosaurs? Were some 1½ thousand years from Creation enough for all those physical changes to develop before the dinosaurs supposedly became extinct in the Flood? In contrast, there is no record of the sheep ever having changed in the last 6,000 years. It looks clear the dinosaurs appeared long before the sheep.

Old Earth Creationism

Scientific estimates pointing to an old Earth that was billions of years old divided Bible-believers. Many worried 19^th century churchmen felt the pressing need to harmonize the Biblical six-day creation story and the scientifically reckoned ancient age of the Earth.

Old Earth Creationism emerged from the confusion. Its advocates hold that God created the universe over immense ages spanning billions of years. By 1852, American commentator William Hayden estimated that about 50% of all Christians, to accept an old Earth without giving up their faith in the Bible, had adopted either one of two teachings: (1) the “Gap Theory”; and (2) the “Day-Age Theory.”⁷³

“Gap Theory.”

“Gappists” claim there is a “gap” or time interval between the first two sentences of the Bible: “1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and “2 And the earth was without form, and void…” (Gen 1:1-2a). Their theory hinges upon one simple word in verse 2, “was,” the past tense of the verb “to be” (Hebrew hayah). They argue that “hayah” can also be translated “became.” Thus, verse 2 should read, “And the earth became without form, and void…” In short, the earth was created in verse 1, but after an untold period was found in a ruined state in verse 2. The unspecified span of time between verses 1 and 2 are taken to be the geological ages arrived at by scientists. God then recreated the earth in the next verses. 

The recent popularity of the Gap Theory is credited to 19^th century Scotsman Thomas Chalmers, who wrote about it in 1814. The concept, though, has been around as early as the 2^nd century A.D. when the Hebrew scribes who composed the Onkelos Targum translated Genesis 1:2 as “and the earth was laid waste.”⁷⁴ Church theologian Origen (186-254) wrote in his commentary De Principiis that in Genesis 1:2 the original earth had been “cast downwards.”⁷⁵ Medieval scholars, such as Dionysius Peavius and Pererius, also seriously considered a time gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.”⁷⁶ The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge states that “the Dutch scholar Simon Episcopius (1583-1643) taught that the earth had originally been created before the six days of creation described in Genesis. This was roughly 200 years before geology discovered evidence for the ancient origin of earth.”⁷⁷ In 1876, George Pember further publicized the theory in his book, Earth’s Earliest Ages.

Cyrus Scofield (1843-1921), in his Scofield Reference Bible, said the verb “was” in Genesis 1:2 can also be written as “became.” The 1973-79 New International Version (NIV) had a note in the margin saying, “Now the earth was (or possibly became) formless and empty…” The inclusion of a hint supporting the Gap Theory in Bibles used by millions all over the world facilitated the widespread acceptance of the theory. 

Many scenarios. The Gap scenario has many versions.  For lack of any proof text in the Bible, anyone can come up with his or her own story of what happened. The Gappists have conjured many fantastic tableaux. The freewheeling models present a world that pre-existed in the distant, dateless past before verse 2, inhabited by manlike, but soul-less beings whose fossils are being unearthed today. One elaborate narrative tells of a technologically advanced civilization of angels and supermen who became evil under the influence of Satan. After many ages, God destroyed their world in a cataclysm called “Lucifer’s Flood.” The destruction is said to have produced the earth’s geological strata and all the plant and animal fossils.  

No Biblical basis. Hebrew expert Charles Taylor, in an article entitled “The First 100 Words," explains that the word "was" has been translated from the Hebrew verb form haythah. According to the rules of Hebrew grammar, the word cannot be correctly rendered "became" as in the Gap version. For haythah to be translated as "became" it must be preceded by a Hebrew preposition meaning "to."⁷⁸

Further, The Complete Word Study: Old Testament, KJV says that the Hebrew construction of “verse two is disjunctive and is describing the result of the creation described in verse one. It is not describing the result of any judgment.”⁷⁹

The Gap Theory, based on a single presumed word (“became”), requires God to recreate everything from light to stars to man. If a prior and original Creation truly took place, does not such a grand act of the Creator deserve a richly detailed account? Evidently, all the bizarre scenarios engendered by the Gap Theory have no Biblical basis.

“Day-Age” Theory.

In 1823, Anglican theologian George Stanley Faber introduced the Day-Age Theory, which proposed that, while the creation account in the Bible is true, the “days” were mere figures of speech and not ordinary 24-hour days – because the Hebrew word for "day" (yom) can be interpreted to mean an “age” or a long stretch of time. As the theory's name suggests, each "day" was an “age.”

Day-Agers claim that the sequence of events during the six Biblical “days" of Creation generally match the cosmic and terrestrial stages that scientists today theorize occurred during the birth and early development of the universe. The Genesis account, they contend, is a simplified summary of the discoveries of modern science, written in advance for an ancient, pre-scientific audience.

No death before sin? Some of the most telling evidences cited for an old Earth are the fossilized plants and animals estimated to be tens, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of years old. Young Earthers reject the age estimates for fossils on the belief that death was unknown before Adam sinned, based on Paul’s epistles: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom 5:12). He even stressed: “For the wages of sin is death…” (Rom 6:23a). Adam’s disobedience was the sin that brought death into the world. Since then, sinners must pay for their sins with their lives. Even plants and animals, which cannot sin, supposedly started dying only after sin came in about 6,000 years ago. Hence, no fossils are supposed to be older than 6,000 years.

Two kinds of death. Let us examine the context of Romans 5:12 in a following verse: “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam…” (Rom 5:14a, NIV). If “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses” death should have ceased when Moses came! Yet, men continued to die even after Moses, who himself died. What “death” was Paul talking about?

Christ clarifies things for us: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28). So, men can die two kinds of death. Paul was talking about spiritual death, not physical death! Plants and animals, which have no spirits and cannot sin, are exempt from spiritual death. Author Hugh Ross (The Fingerprint of God, 1989) notes that by the word “death” Paul meant human spiritual death; not biological death of either of humans or animals.⁸⁰

A fact of life. God gave Adam and the animals “every herb bearing seed” and “fruit of a tree yielding seed” (Gen 1:29-30) for food. What are the implications? When man and animals ate herbs, the plants they ate died. And why did God tell man and the animals to eat in the first place? Was not the reason for them to become strong and healthy, and live long? Without eating they would, according to the laws of nature God Himself had established, grow weak, become sickly, and eventually die. Otherwise, God would not have told them to eat at all. Plants also have to “eat” moisture and nutrients from the soil, and light from the sun, or they, too, would waste away, wither, and die.

Furthermore, why did God plant the tree of life in Eden? After Adam sinned, he had to be cast out of the Garden, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Gen 3:22). This reveals Adam had not been created immortal; he would have to eat from the tree of life to avoid dying. Death appears to have been a fact of life from the very beginning -- even in Paradise.

Natural cycle. Birth and death, growth and decay, creation and destruction seem to be the natural rhythmic cycle of the universe. Matter and antimatter appear and mutually annihilate. Stars are born and die. Oxford scholar Arthur Peacocke wrote: “Biological death was present on the earth long before human beings arrived. It is the prerequisite of our coming into existence through the creative processes of biology which God himself has installed in the world... God had already made biological death the means of his creating new forms of life. This has to be accepted, difficult though it may be for some theologies.”⁸¹

The wisdom of the Holy Scriptures declares: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:  A time to be born, and a time to die… (Eccl 3:1-2a).

Non-salvation issue

Belief in either a Young Earth or an Old Earth is a non-salvation issue. Charles Hodge (1779-1878), Presbyterian theologian at Princeton Seminary, taught that one’s belief in the age of the earth was of no consequence to spiritual salvation. He first embraced the Gap Theory, then shifted to the Day-Age doctrine towards the end of his life.⁸² Therefore, you may believe that the universe has been created in just six 24-hour days, or 6,000 years, or over millions and billions of years, and still be saved spiritually. Whatever timeline we believe in, at the end of the day, no pun intended, we are saved if we “keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ” (Rev 12:17; cf. 14:12).

The two camps, and their sub-groups, should not be regarded as adversaries. They are actually on the same side – defending the faith in one God who created heaven and earth.

Same timeline from Adam. Actually, the Young Earthers and Old Earthers, particularly Day-Agers, hold the same Biblical chronology for mankind. Both groups generally believe that God created Adam 6,000 years ago, as calculated from the life spans of his descendants. The dispute lies in the length of time involved in the other Creation events before Adam...

⁶²D. Russell Humphreys, “Seven Years of Starlight and Time,” Internet

⁶³Ralph Woodrow, “Three Days and Three Nights,” p. 42; cited in “When Is The Evening, In Scripture?”, tract, Last Day Ministries, undated

⁶⁴James Ussher, The Annals of the World, 1658; translated by Larry and Marion Pierce; book review by Bob Ulrich, Prophecy in the News, March 2004, p. 18

⁶⁵Lawrence Badash, “The Age-of-the-Earth Debate,” Scientific American, August 1989; in Dating Methods, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁶⁶J.R. Church, “Creation Week,” Prophecy in the News, Nov. 2005, p. 3

⁶⁷Day, International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, 1996

⁶⁸Quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 45

⁶⁹Creation Science Evangelism, Internet

⁷⁰D. Russell Humphreys, “Seven Years of Starlight and Time,” Institute for Creation Research, Internet

⁷¹Ibid.

⁷²Terry Mortenson, “Where Did the Idea of ‘Millions of Years’ Come From?”, The New Answers Book 2, 2008, pp. 114-117

⁷³Creationism, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁷⁴“Earth’s Age: Does Genesis 1 Indicate a Time Interval?”, Creation or Evolution, 2002, p. 29

⁷⁵Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1917, p. 342

⁷⁶“Earth’s Age…”, loc. cit.

⁷⁷The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1952, Vol. 3, p. 302; quoted in “Earth’s Age…”, loc. cit.

⁷⁸Charles Taylor, "The First 100 Words," undated

⁷⁹The Complete Word Study: Old Testament, KJV, 1994, p. 3

⁸⁰Hugh Ross, The Fingerprint of God, 1989, p. 154

⁸¹Arthur Peacocke, “The Challenge of Science to Theology and the Church,” The New Faith-Science Debate, 1989, p. 16

⁸²Mortenson, loc. cit.  

(Excerpted from Chapter 3, Conundrums of Creation, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Mysteries of Creation (Part 5) 

Age of the world

The French scientist Comte de Buffon theorized in his 1779 book Epochs of Nature that the Earth was once a hot molten ball that took around 75,000 years to cool down (the figure was 3 million years in his unpublished manuscript).⁸³ In 1899. Lord Kelvin calculated the age of the earth, based on the cooling rate of a molten sphere, at 20 to 40 million years (revised from his 1862 computation of 100 million years). With the advent of radiometric dating, in 1913 Arthur Holmes made an estimate of 1.6 billion years in his book The Age of the Earth. In 1956, Claire Patterson published her calculations for a 4.5-billion-year age of the earth, extremely close to the 4.6 billion years widely acknowledged in the scientific community today.⁸⁴

Cosmological calculations. When Edwin Hubble discovered in the mid-1920s that the universe was expanding, he suggested that finding out how fast the universe was expanding and how large it was would reveal its age.

The density of the mass or quantity of matter the cosmos contains determines how the gravitational force slows down the expansion rate, which in turn depends on the age and density of the universe.  Cosmologists measure the cosmic expansion rate by establishing the relationship between the distance of an object from Earth and the rate at which it is moving away, revealed by redshift (stretched wavelengths of light). They then assess the density of the universe to calculate its age.⁸⁵

14-16 billion years?

Scientists have variously placed the age of the universe at between 10 to 20 billion years. The wide range is the result of the uncertain expansion rate of the universe and the age of the oldest stars. Both depend on the extrapolation of available data, which are inadequate. Astronomers use the Hubble constant, a measure of the expansion rate of the universe, whose value scientists have not agreed on.⁸⁶

The NASA has nonetheless officially placed the age of the universe at 16 billion years, with a potential error of plus or minus 15%. Thus, the universe could be at least 13.5 billion years old, or 18.5 billion years old at the most. Some scientists use a figure of 12-18 billion years, but the most common estimate is 14-16 billion years.⁸⁷

Big Bang “echo.” In the 1940s George Gamow and his students Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman formed a theory that, since elements heavier than hydrogen can be formed only at a high temperature, the universe must have been supremely hot at its birth.⁸⁸ Their calculations showed temperatures of billions of degrees around one second after the Big Bang. After a few hundred thousand years of expansion, the radiant heat would have gone down to just thousands of degrees.⁸⁹

They concluded that the Big Bang produced a blackbody or thermal radiation and predicted that a trace or “echo” left by the blast still exists, pervading the universe. In 1965 American physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected by radio telescopes a uniform background of microwave radiation in space, which has since been called “cosmic microwave background radiation” (CMBR). Coming from all directions, the CMBR’s temperature is almost the same everywhere, approximately 2.7^o Celsius above absolute zero (-459.67 °F, or -273.15 °C) -- very close to what Gamow and his students had calculated.⁹⁰

15 billion years?

According to the World Book: “Observations of supernovae and the CMB radiation suggest that the present age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years. This estimate agrees with studies of the ages of stars in groups called globular star clusters, which contain the oldest stars found in the Milky Way.”⁹¹

A news report in early 2006 stated: “The latest data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe is based on three years of continuous observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow light produced when the universe was less than a million years old.”⁹² If the CMBR appeared sometime during the first million years of the Big Bang, the universe may be somewhat older than 13.7 billion years. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes: “The discovery of the 2.7 K background radiation… is regarded as convincing evidence that the universe originated approximately 15 billion years ago...”⁹³

The shape of time

In a novel concept, M.I.T. physicist and author Gerald Schroeder (Genesis and the Big Bang, The Science of God, God According to God, etc.) likewise equates the six “days” of Creation to some 15 billion years.

The “cosmic clock.”

Schroeder based his calculations on the CMBR, which he calls the “clock” of the cosmos. He explains that about “0.00001 seconds after the big bang… (t)he universe was approximately a million million times smaller and hotter than it is today… the temperature… is not a value extrapolated or estimated from conditions in the distant past or far out in space. It is measured right here on Earth in the most advanced physics laboratories and corresponds to a temperature approximately a million million times hotter than the current 3^oK black of space. That radiant energy had a frequency a million million times greater than the radiation of today’s cosmic background radiation.”⁹⁴ This translates to a ratio of 1,000,000,000,000 to 1 in the perception of earth time vis-à-vis cosmic time. Thus, at the Big Bang, one second in cosmic time was equivalent to about one trillion seconds in Earth time.

However, he points out that as the universe rapidly expanded and cooled, cosmic time would have slowed down. Frequency, wavelength, and temperature are all directly related: when temperature goes down, so too the frequency, and wavelength becomes longer (and vice-versa). So, as the radiant energy cooled, its wavelengths were stretched and its frequency became lower – as measured today in light coming from the Sun. “Waves of sunlight reaching Earth are stretched longer 2.12 parts in a million relative to similar light waves generated on Earth. This stretching of the light waves means that the rate at which they reach us is lowered by 2.12 parts per million. This lowering of the light wave frequency is the measure of the slowing of time. For every million Earth seconds, the Sun’s clock would ‘lose’ 2.12 seconds relative to our clocks here on Earth. The 2.12 parts per million equals 67 seconds per year, exactly the amount predicted by the laws of relativity.”⁹⁵

The CMBR reveals how much cosmic time has slowed down since the Big Bang. “The radiation… has been stretched a million million fold… That stretching of the light waves has slowed the frequency of the cosmic clock – expanded the perceived time between ticks of that clock – by a million million.”⁹⁶ In simple terms, time passed at a much slower rate at the edges of the expansion compared to time on Earth. Whereas an imaginary clock at the edge of the cosmos would have shown only days, a clock on earth would have already recorded billions of years. (It is the exact opposite of Humphreys’s Starlight and Time hypothesis.)

Exponential regression.

The redshift observed in galaxies suggests an expansion factor of 10¹² or 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion).⁹⁷ As the universe expanded, the waves of radiant energy stretched in the same ratio as the expansion.⁹⁸

“Each doubling in size ‘slowed’ the cosmic clock by a factor of 2.”⁹⁹ In the mathematical equations Schroeder presented, each succeeding Creation “day” was equivalent to just a half-period.¹⁰⁰ “Each successive Genesis day exponentially represents fewer years as perceived from our earthly vantage…”¹⁰¹ In other words, each “day” following Day One was only one-half the length of the “day” immediately preceding it.

Schroeder noted that the “opening chapter of Genesis acts like the zoom lens of a camera. Day by day it focuses with increasing detail on less and less time and space. The first day of Genesis encompasses the entire universe. By the third day, only earth is discussed. After day six, only that line of humanity leading to the patriarch Abraham… This narrowing of perspective… each successive day presents in greater detail a smaller scope of time and space…”¹⁰²

In Schroeder’s calculations, Day One was 8 billion years long, Day Two 4 billion years, Day Three 2 billion years, Day Four 1 billion years, Day Five ½ billion years, Day Six ¼ billion years – for a total of 15.75 billion years – i.e., the age of the universe.¹⁰³ This closely matches a 16-billion-year age estimate for the oldest stars. Schroeder suggests a plus or minus 20% margin of error.¹⁰⁴

Spiral structure.

We usually think of time as a straight line, proceeding from the past through the present to the future. However, it looks like the Designer of the universe had drawn up a Creation scheme of time that is much more elegant than just a simple straight line.

The exponentially regressing scenarios of Creation, diminishing day after day, seem to display a structural design. Schroeder notes: “Genesis has chosen a base that occurs throughout the universe, a base known in mathematics as the natural log e.”¹⁰⁵ He is referring to a figure that occurs more often in nature than any other shape: the spiral.¹⁰⁶ We see it from the macrocosm to the microcosm -- in the shape of galaxies, hurricanes and tornados, whirlpools, breaking waves, animal horns, snail shells, seahorses’ tails, mammalian ears, human cochleae, flower seed-heads, emerging fern leaves, DNA molecules. The spiral, Schroeder  hypothesizes, was the structure of time at the Creation.

In a simplified version of Schroeder’s CMBR-based timeline below, we can see an intriguing “day”-by-“day” correspondence between the Biblical account of creation and the scientific version of the birth of the universe.¹⁰⁷ (Schroeder notes that if corrections are made based on the recently observed increase in the rate of expansion of the universe, the start of Day One would be approximately 15 billion years ago.)¹⁰⁸

Schroeder’s CMBR-Based Timeline

(6 “Days” of Creation = 15.75 Billion Years)

Day	Start b.p.*	Duration	End b.p.	Bible	Science
1	15¾billion	8 billion	7¾billion	Light	Big Bang, light, electrons, atoms, galaxies
2	7 ¾ billion	4 billion	3¾billion	Firmament	Milky Way, Sun
3	3 ¾ billion	2 billion	1¾billion	Oceans, dry land, plants	Earth cooled, bodies of water, bacteria, algae
4	1 ¾ billion	1 billion	¾ billion	Sun, moon, stars	Clear, oxygen-rich atmosphere
5	¾ billion	½billion	¼ billion	Aquatic animals, reptiles, winged animals	Multi-cellular, aquatic animals, winged insects
6	¼ billion	¼ billion	ca. 6,000	Land animals, mammals, humankind	90% extinction, hominids, humans
		15¾billion

*before present

Science-Scripture match-up.

In Schroeder’s timeline, the scientific data basically parallel the day-by-day Genesis account from Day One to Day Four; but the match-up is broken on Day Five, when reptiles and insects appeared. His Day Five supposedly began 750 million years ago and ended 250 million years ago. It agrees with the fossil record, which places the age of amphibians at 417 million years, insects 350 million years, and reptiles 323 million years; but it does not conform with the Bible, which says God created “creeping things” (amphibians, reptiles, insects) on Day Six.

Moreover, God’s “seventh-day” Sabbath rest does not form part of the timeline after Day Six, which he says ended about 6,000 years ago. Did the “days” stop their exponentially regressing rate? How long was God’s Sabbath? Did it suddenly shorten to a 24-hour day?

Framework Hypothesis.

A third theory, unconnected to either Young Earth Creationism or Old Earth Creationism, does not involve any timeline of “days” at all. Known as the Framework Hypothesis (also “framework interpretation” or “literary framework view”), it proposes that the six “days” of creation in Genesis are neither literal nor figurative “days,” but literary or symbolically artistic descriptions of the origin of the universe.

The idea first appeared in the writings of the early Church father Augustine (354-430). It has gained acceptance among many theistic evolutionists and some progressive creationists through the works of modern scholars like Meredith Kline, Henri Blocher, Bruce Waltke, and Gordon Wenham, who contend that the Genesis account is so full of repetitive formulas and figurative language that the wording of the text cannot be taken literally.¹⁰⁹

For instance, they say the first and fourth “days” of creation closely resemble each other, like two descriptions of just one event. On the first day God "divided the light from the darkness” and “called the light day and the darkness… night.” This is repeated on the fourth “day” when God created two great lights "to divide the light from the darkness" and "the day from the night." The Genesis writer is said to have used the literary device of parallelism. The only difference is the introduction of “two great lights… to rule” over the realm or dominion of light on the fourth “day.” The same realm-ruler relationship pattern recurs between the second and fifth “days,” and the third and sixth “days.”

Thus, Framework theologians divide the six “days” of Creation into two triads. The first three “days” depict the creation of the first triad of realms: (1) darkness and light, night and day; (2) the firmament, waters under and above; and (3) dry land, grass, herbs, trees. The next three “days” portray the creation of the second triad of rulers: (4) the sun, moon, and stars to rule the day and the night; (5) living creatures in the waters and fowl that fly in the firmament; and (6) beasts of the earth, cattle, creeping things, and man on dry land.

Hence, the six “days” of Creation advanced according to topics, instead of chronological sequence, as illustrated in the table below:

Framework Hypothesis

(Creation “days” not literal; but figurative literary devices)

Day	First Triad: “Realms”	Second Triad: “Rulers”	Day
1	Darkness and light, night and day	Sun, moon, and stars – to rule the day and the night	4
2	The firmament, waters under and above	Creatures in the waters, fowl that fly in the firmament	5
3	Waters and dry land; grass, herbs, trees	Beasts of the earth, cattle, creeping things, man	6

⁸³Terry Mortenson, “Where Did the Idea of ‘Millions of Years’ Come From?”, The New Answers Book 2, 2008, p. 12

^84.Bodie Hodge, “How Old Is the Earth?”, The New Answers Book 2, 2008, p. 48

⁸⁵Cosmology, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁸⁶Hubble Constant, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

⁸⁷Age of the Universe, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁸⁸Big Bang Theory, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁸⁹Cosmology, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

⁹⁰Big Bang, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

⁹¹Universe, op. cit.

⁹²“Astronomers detect new clues…”, op. cit.

⁹³Expanding Universe, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

⁹⁴Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God, 1997, p. 59

⁹⁵Op. cit., p. 52

⁹⁶Op. cit., p. 59

⁹⁷Ibid.

⁹⁸Op. cit., p. 55

⁹⁹Op. cit., p. 65

¹⁰⁰Op. cit., p. 69

¹⁰¹Op. cit., p. 66

¹⁰²Op. cit., p. 65

¹⁰³Op. cit., p. 63

¹⁰⁴Op. cit., p. 69

¹⁰⁵Op. cit., p. 66

¹⁰⁶Ibid.

¹⁰⁷Op. cit., pp. 63-74

¹⁰⁸Op. cit., p. 70

¹⁰⁹Framework Interpretation, Wikipedia, Internet

(Excerpted from Chapter 3, Conundrums of Creation, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com) 

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 1)

How long was each “day” during the six days of Creation? Did it literally consist of twenty-four hours, or was “day” a figurative term that extended over billions and millions of years? Let us take a closer look and try to find out.

The scenarios of Creation events appeared smaller and smaller in scope with each new “day.” Time seems to have advanced on a similarly decreasing scale during Creation “week.” It has been likened to a spiral, a frequently occurring figure in nature, to demonstrate the diminishing rate. An exponential spiral can be graphically derived from and illustrated in a golden rectangle.

The golden rectangle

The “golden rectangle” has intrigued artists, philosophers, and mathematicians since ancient times with its special beauty, which, for inexplicable reasons, is tantalizingly pleasing to the eye. The longer side of a golden rectangle is to the shorter side as the sum of the two short sides is to the longer side. The figure has a 1-to-0.618 length-to-width ratio, known as the “golden ratio,” also called “divine proportion,” “golden section,” “magic ratio,” “golden mean,” “Fibonacci series,” and “Phi,” after the classical Greek sculptor Phidias, who made use of it. In his work Timaeus, Plato described the Phi as the most binding of all mathematical relations, calling it the key to the physics of the cosmos.

The golden ratio has served as the magical framework of many great masterpieces. Whether by design or intuition, artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael became famous for it. Great composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven used it to divide musical time.¹ The golden rectangle can be seen in many ancient and modern structures: the Parthenon, the Great Pyramid, the United Nations Building. It is also in similarly proportioned credit cards, playing cards, photograph prints, postcards, business cards, light switch plates, PC monitors, iPods. But the most holy object in the form of a golden rectangle is the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, being 2.5 cubits wide and 1.5 cubits high (Ex 25:10).

To form a golden spiral: Mark off a perfect square on one side of a golden rectangle, a smaller golden rectangle will then remain. Mark out another square from the left-over rectangle, and a still smaller golden rectangle will be left, ad infinitum. In the Creation narrative, the first and biggest square represents Day One; the second, smaller square Day Two; the next square Day Three, and so on.

A more exact chronology?

We have seen that Schroeder’s CMBR-based timeline of 15.75 billion years, though evidently a stroke of genius, does not perfectly correspond to the six “days” of Creation. Would other estimates result in a more exact chronology? What about the oft-mentioned 15-billion-years? Surprisingly, a little pencil-pushing is quickly rewarded.

As it turned out, 15 billion years produce a near-perfect match with the six “days” of Creation, God’s seventh-day rest, the ensuing 6,000 years from Adam, and the prophesied seventh Millennium! The order of the diminishing day-ages in the successively contracting squares of a golden rectangle correctly correspond to the sequence of events that scientists theorize took place in the young universe – precisely agreeing with Scripture, cosmology, paleontology and, yes, even prophecy.

The shorter 15-billion-year timeline even has an extra factor in its favor. The gematria of the number 15 spells out the short form of the Name of God [YH = 10+5). It is assuring to think that God has both initiated and initialed His creation. Below is that timeline:

Diminishing Day-Ages Chronology*

(7-“Day” Creation “Week” until 3000 A.D. = 15 Billion Years)

Day-Age	Length in Yrs.	Start, Yrs. Ago	End, Yrs. Ago
1	7,500,000,000	15,000,000,000	7,500,000,000
2	3,750,000,000	7,500,000,000	3,750,000,000
3	1,875,000,000	3,750,000,000	1,875,000,000
4	937,500,000	1,875,000,000	937,500,000
5	468,750,000	937,500,000	468,750,000
6**	234,375,000	468,750,000	234,375,000
(7)	117,187,500	234,375,000	117,187,500
(1)	58,593,750	117,187,500	58,593,750
(2)	29,296,875	58,593,750	29,296,875
(3)	14,648,438	29,296,875	14,648,438
(4)	7,324,219	14,648,438	7,324,219
(5)	3,662,110	7,324,219	3,662,110
(6)	1,831,055	3,662,110	1,831,055
(7)	915,528	1,831,055	915,528
(1)	457,764	915,528	457,764
(2)	228,882	457,764	228,882
(3)	114,441	228,882	114,441
(4)	57,221	114,441	57,221
(5)	28,611	57,221	28,611
(6)	14,306	28,611	14,306
Sub-total:	14,999,992,847
7	7,153	14,306	7,153
4000 B.C.-3000 A.D.		~6,000	on-going
Total:	15,000,000,000

*Figures approximate. **Day 6 made up of two successive exponentially regressing segments

Using the above “Diminishing Day-Ages” figures, let us make a side-by-side comparison with the other interpretations of the six “days” of Creation by Young Earth Creationists (“Literal 24-Hour Days” and “Thousand-Year Days”).

Day 1: Light, night and day

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen 1:3-5).

Interpretations of Day 1:

• Literal 24-Hour Days:    5 days before man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 12,000-11,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 15,000,000,000-7,500,000,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 7,500,000,000 years)

As interpreted by Young Earth Creationists, light was created as recently as 6,000 years ago (in 4004 B.C.) or sometime between 12,000-11,000 years ago.

On the other hand, in the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, God created light between 15 billion to 7.5 billion years ago (bya). The Day-Ages estimate accommodates scientific estimates that the Big Bang took place about 13.7 to 15 billion years ago. (Particles that survived from quantum fluctuations could have accumulated prior to the explosion.)

The divine word.

The Creator’s first words were probably “Yehi ‘or!” (“Let there be light!”). A psalmist memorialized the event around 3,000 years ago: “The entrance of thy words giveth light” (Ps 119:130). God sounded the words -- and light, from which the cosmos would form, came into being.

Some people are surprised to learn that the “Word” of God is a Person: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1-3). The Word is the Son of God, who created heaven and earth in behalf of Father God – the Ein Sof or “Infinite Nothingness,” who is outside the space-time domain.

The power of sound.

The Jewish sages knew that sound possesses great power. It can lull a baby to sleep, or incite mobs to violence. The “Word” created the universe by sound: “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth” (Ps 33:6).

Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah (1165-1230) of Worms, Germany, taught that the creation of the universe had been wrought with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.² Other teachings involve less. According to the Sefer Yetzirah: “The manipulation of the sacred letters forming the divine names (of God) was the means used to create the world.”³ Only three letters make up the sacred Names of God. These are:

Hey. The sound of hey (E “H”) is produced by simply exhaling, almost effortlessly, with no movement of the lips or tongue. In the book The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet, Rabbi Michael Munk says, “This effortless enunciation symbolizes the effortless creation of the world.”⁴ 

Symbolizing “wind,” hey is an abbreviation for Ruach (“breath” or “spirit”) – the Spirit of God.⁵ In the esoteric technique of altering the spaces between Hebrew letters, in the verse “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created…” (Gen 2:4a), the phrase “when they were created” is bahibaram in Hebrew. If the compound word is divided into two as bahi baram, it can be translated as: “With (the letter) hey (He) created them.”⁶ Hey has a value of “5,” the number of “grace” or “favor.”

Yod. With the “Y” sound, yod (J) is actually the first letter of God’s Sacred Names. Every Hebrew letter is a symbol for something, and yod, signifies a “hand.” It alludes to the unseen “hand” of God when He created heaven and earth. Its value of “10” stands for “law.” At the Creation, it probably meant the laws of nature the Creator established.

Waw. The letter waw (F), sounded as “W” or “V,” represents a hook, peg, or nail, and has a numerical value of “6.” Rabbi Munk explains the use of waw in the Creation: “The physical world was completed in six days and a complete self-contained object consists of six dimensions: above and below, right and left, before and behind.”⁷

During the Middle Ages, tales spread about wise men who could bring a dummy or mannequin to life (golem) by combining letters to form a sacred word or one of the Names of God.⁸

¹“The Most Insulting Idol of All,” Personal Update, January 2004, p. 7

² Chuck Missler, Cosmic Codes, 1999, revised 2004, p. 123

³Sefer Yetzirah, ix; quoted in Names of God, The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 9, pp. 162-163

⁴Michael Munk, The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet, p. 85

⁵Missler, op. cit., p. 109

⁶Osios R’ Akiva, Internet

⁷Munk, op. cit.

⁸Golem, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 2)

Day 2: Firmament, waters under and above

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day” (Gen 1:6-8).

Interpretations of Day 2:

• Literal 24-Hour Days:    4 days before man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 11,000-10,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 7,500,000,000-3,750,000,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 3,750,000,000 years)

A firmament, the arch or vault of the sky, can be seen only from the surface of a planet. That means planet Earth, our home world’s sphere, formed on the second “day” of Creation. Astronomer Hugh Ross says: “From what I understood to be the stated viewpoint of an observer on Earth’s surface, both the order and the description of creation events perfectly matched the established record of nature.”⁹

Young Earth Creationists say the “firmament” appeared just 5,000 or 11,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, Earth took shape sometime between 7.5 billion to 3.750 billion years ago. Squarely fitting into this time span is the scientific estimate that, based on the age of the oldest rocks, the Earth was formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago.¹⁰

A nebulous hypothesis?

The Encarta Encyclopedia tells us that Earth and the “planets reached their present sizes and arrangement probably within 10 million to 50 million years after the Sun’s ignition.”¹¹

The Nebular Hypothesis, which posits that solar systems formed from nebulae, swirling clouds of gases and dust in space, has raised many questions that remain unanswered. For instance, if all the planets had formed from one spinning disk, why are the inner planets much smaller than the outer ones? It should be the other way around.

The sun has 99.86% of all the mass of the solar system, but only 1.9% of the angular momentum. The planets have 98.1%.¹² Why? 

All the planets should spin in the same direction, but Venus, Uranus, and Pluto rotate in reverse. Some planetary orbits are tilted. One of Saturn’s 60 moons, Phoebe, has a tilted orbit nearly perpendicular to the planet’s equator. Of the nearly 200 moons in the solar system, more than 30 orbit in the opposite direction. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have moons orbiting in both directions.¹³

Why did colliding particles adhere rather than destroy each other? Science writer Erik Asphaug points out: “It turns out to be surprisingly difficult for planetesimals to accrete mass during even the most gentle collisions.”¹⁴ Even if a planet did manage to form through collisions, it would be nearly non-rotating, because the spins imparted by many small impacts would have been largely self-canceling.

Concerning gas planets, Boyle’s Law states that gas clouds dissipate, they do not agglomerate. Gases disperse rapidly in the vacuum of space, specially the two lightest gases, hydrogen and helium, which compose most of the mass of the giant gaseous planets.¹⁵

If the solar system had formed from a cloud of dust, particles that did not become part of planets, according to the Poynting-Robertson Effect, should still be falling into the sun today, burning up and giving off a measurable infrared glow. No such glow has ever been detected.

Author Stephen G. Brush observes: “Attempts to find a plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of the Solar System began about 350 years ago but have not yet been quantitatively successful, making this one of the oldest unsolved problems in modern science.”¹⁶

Waters under and above.

The “waters under the firmament” we understand as the oceans, as well as underground water, including the waters beneath the continental shelves and tectonic plates, evidenced by the formation of the Mid-Ocean Ridge stretching under both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But what were the “waters above the firmament”?

The psalmist affirms there were waters above the firmament or sky: “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens” (Ps 148:4).

Ice crystal canopy? Researcher Dr. Joseph Dillow speculates that the high-altitude waters may have been water vapor¹⁷ above the atmosphere, forming a protective canopy around the planet. Extremely low temperatures in the Earth’s upper atmosphere could have frozen much of the water vapors. In the early 1900s Isaac Vail theorized that the “waters above the firmament” might have been an ice-crystal canopy.¹⁸ Dr. Larry Vardiman thought of the ice particles as equatorial rings surrounding the Earth similar to those around Venus.¹⁹ Recent studies by Donald Cyr on light patterns that could have been produced by a crystal veil fifty miles above the Earth where noctilucent clouds form, showed a correlation with patterns in archeological artifacts (pottery, woven materials, temple construction). These relationships have reportedly been confirmed in computer simulations.²⁰

There seems to be a hint about this in the Biblical text: “Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, sparkling like ice, and awesome” (Ezek 1:22, NIV).

A hanging “circle.”

The ancients thought the world was flat. The first Greek philosopher Thales believed the world was a flat disk floating on water. Later, men realized that the circular shadow which covered the moon during lunar eclipses was that of planet Earth. World-circling sea voyages during the Age of Exploration provided additional proof that the world is a globe. With the coming of the space age, photographs from manmade satellites captured the curvature of the Earth's horizon. Finally, men first saw the Earth as a complete orb floating in space in December 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft carried astronauts around the Moon.

Yet, the prophet Isaiah knew more than 2,750 years ago that the earth was a circle, or what we call today a globe or sphere: “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isa 40:22).

Earth’s support. The cosmogonies or legends of the origin of the world of various cultures have different things supporting the Earth -- twelve pillars, four huge elephants, three great fish, a great bull, a giant tortoise, the god Atlas, etcetera.

Around 4,000 years ago, Job already knew that the earth hung in the emptiness of space: “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7).

Empty north.

Job cryptically said that the north was over the empty place. Incredibly, astronomers have discovered that the area north of the axis of the Earth, toward the pole star, is indeed nearly empty – unlike the rest of the star-filled sky! An article in the November 27, 1981, issue of Science magazine reported: “The recently announced ‘hole in space,’ a 300 million-light-year gap in the distribution of galaxies, has taken cosmologists by surprise… But three very deep core samples in the Northern Hemisphere, lying in the general direction of the constellation Bootes, showed striking gaps in the red shift distribution.”²¹

Center of the universe?

Jewish tradition has it that God formed the earth and the entire universe from a single piece of rock. In the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch, the man saw the rock holding up the world: “I then surveyed the receptacles of all the winds, perceiving that they contributed to adorn the whole creation, and to preserve the foundation of the earth. I surveyed the stone which supports the corners of the earth” (Enoch 18:1-2).

The rock is said to be the same block on Mount Moriah upon which Abraham laid his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It was also the room-sized rock inside the Holy of Holies of the Temple that King Solomon built. Falling under different hands since 70 A.D., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, the rock is today the centerpiece of the Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third holiest shrine.

The Temple Mount is in Jerusalem, which pious Jews in all ages have regarded as the center of universe. God Himself spoke of the city as being centrally located: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the center of the nations, with countries all around her” (Ezek 5:5, NIV).

Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary tells us there are also historical reasons for this: “The medieval concept that Palestine was the center of the earth is not as farfetched as one might expect. This tiny strip of land not only unites the peoples and lands of Asia, Africa, and Europe but also the five seas known as the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Palestine was sandwiched in between two dominant cultures of the ancient world – Egypt to the south and Babylon-Assyria-Persia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the northeast.”²²

Cartography and calligraphy. Mapmakers and scribes confirmed the idea. Gentile cartographers traditionally drew their world maps with the Holy Land at the center. On the next page is a simplified 11^th century world map depicting the world as a disk surrounded by water, with the east on top (a common practice for many centuries). Paradise (Eden) is in the east, as part of Asia, with the two other known continents then, Europe and Africa, occupying the northwest and southwest, respectively. Jerusalem lay in the center of the disk of the Earth.²³

In addition, the handwritings of nations west of Jerusalem – Greek, Latin, French, German, English, and others -- are written from left to right. On the other hand, the scripts of countries east of Jerusalem are written from right to left – Hebrew (Abraham came from the east), Aramaic, Chaldean, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, etc. It is as though the calligraphies of all the other peoples to the east and to the west of the Holy Land are pointing to Jerusalem as the center!

Cosmological confirmation. Dr John Hartnett, in his book Starlight, Time and the New Physics, refers to “recent observational data that overwhelmingly leads to the conclusion that the universe must have a centre, with our galaxy somewhere near it… Observations also indicate that we are in a galactocentric universe.”²⁴

D. Russell Humphreys notes: “The quantized redshift data imply that we are within about 100,000 light-years of the center, a very small distance compared to the diameter of all the matter in the cosmos, at least 40 billion light-years. The probability of us being so close to the center by accident is less than one out of a quadrillion, implying we are where we are as a result of purposeful design.”²⁵

Galaxies are moving away from the Earth in every direction. The CMBR comes to us from all directions. These strongly indicate that we are indeed in a central location.

God’s throne nearby?

As the Creator of the universe, God must have placed His throne at the very center of His creation. Ellen G. White, the 19^th century Seventh Day Adventist leader and prophetess, wrote about “suns and stars and systems, all in their appointed order circling the throne of Deity.”²⁶

Interestingly, according to the World Book, “radio telescopes and infrared telescopes have shown that a powerful gravitational force comes from the exact center of the galaxy… so strong that the mass responsible for it must be about 3 million times as great as the mass of the sun… packed into a volume of space smaller than our solar system.”²⁷ Could God’s throne be there? Earth is very near the center of the Milky Way.

No wonder the psalmist was inspired to write: “And He has exalted the horn of His people, The praise of all His saints -- Of the children of Israel, A people near to Him” (Ps 148:14, NKJV). The nearness may be more than just figurative, it may actually be physical.

Divine arrangement?

Did the arrangement of the solar system simply happen by chance? David sings of God arranging the celestial lights in the heavens: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place…” (Ps 8:3, NIV).

As any school-age child knows, the sun is much bigger than the moon. Yet, the sun and the moon, viewed from the Earth, appear to be of the same size. The impression is reinforced during solar eclipses when the moon covers the sun. That is because the sun, whose diameter of about 1,390,000 km, which is around 400 times bigger than the moon (3,480 km), is approximately 400 times farther away from the earth (149,600,000 km) than the moon (384,467 km). Incidentally, the size of the moon is just over ¼ that of the earth (12,756 km). Are not the ratios uncanny? (Notice the recurring number “4,” the Biblical number for the world. The numbers “4,” “40,” and “400” are associated with the Son of God, God’s hands-on co-Creator. Is it any wonder these numbers figure in the relationships among the Earth, the sun, and the moon?)

Moreover, the moon revolves around the Earth every 29.5 days. At the same time, it completes one rotation around its axis every 29.5 days. Thus, we always see the same side of the moon. How did the numbers happen to be identical to produce that extraordinary effect? It is too improbable to be simply the product of chance!

“Oddball” planet Earth. The distances of the seven major objects closest to the sun, excluding planet Earth, have an exponential ratio. Starting from Mercury, the distances from the Sun of Venus, Mars, the Asteroid Belt (materials that failed to become a planet), Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus approximately double from one object to the next.²⁸

In the table shown here, Earth is an out-of-place oddball in the solar system! It looks like it had been plucked from somewhere and inserted into the system’s arrangement.

(The two outermost objects, Neptune and Pluto, do not form part of the equation. They occasionally switch places, owing to Pluto’s eccentric orbit. Astronomers suspect an outside force had perturbed their orbits in the past. Pluto came closer to the Sun than Neptune in 1979 and stayed that way for the next twenty years.) 

⁹Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 1993, p. 15

¹⁰Planets, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

¹¹Planetary Science, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹²“Why ‘Six Days’?,” Personal Update, November 2003, p. 12

¹³Walt Brown, Astrophysical Sciences, Internet

¹⁴Erik Asphaug, “The Small Planets,” Scientific American, Vol. 282, May 2000, p. 54.

¹⁵Ibid.

¹⁶Stephen G. Brush, A History of Modern Planetary Physics, Vol. 3, 1996, p. 91.

¹⁷Noah’s Flood --  Where did all the water come from?, ChristianAnswers.Net, Internet

¹⁸Dennis Petersen, Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, 2002, p. 30

¹⁹ChristianAnswers.Net, op. cit.

²⁰Donald Cyr, “The Crystal Veil,” Stonehenge Viewpoint, Issue 106, 1995 

²¹Mitchell Waldrop, “Delving the Hole in Space,” Science, 27 Nov. 1981

²²Palestine, Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary,1986

²³“Three Days and Three Nights,” Las Day Ministries, undated

²⁴Carl Wieland, “Starlight and time – a further breakthrough,” June 26, 2009, Internet

²⁵D. Russell Humphreys, “The Battle for the Cosmic Center,” Internet

²⁶Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, 1990 Reprint, pp. 677-678

²⁷Milky Way, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

²⁸Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God, 1997, p. 192

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 3)

Day 3: Seas, dry land, vegetation

 “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:9-13).

Interpretations of Day 3:

• Literal 24-Hour Days:    3 days before man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 10,000-9,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 3,750,000,000-1,875,000,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 1,875,000,000 years)

 

Young Earth Creationists say God separated the seas and the dry land either around 6,000 years ago or 10,000-9,000 years ago.

In the Diminishing Day-Ages chronology, God gathered the seas for the dry land to appear between 3.75 billion and 1.875 billion years ago. The scientific estimate for the appearance of the oceans falls exactly within this period. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that “the oceans have been present for at least three billion years.”²⁹

 

One supercontinent.

As the waters came together, the exposed dry surface of the planet became one vast supercontinent surrounded by an immense ocean.

Scientists confirmed the Scriptures early in the 20^th century. German geophysicist Alfred Wegener, intrigued by the matching contours of the coastlines of eastern South America and western Africa, postulated in 1912 that all the continents were once part of just one land mass that slowly drifted apart over millions of years. This was called “continental drift,” which became part of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s.

Canadian geologist John Tuzo Wilson posits that the continents have been repeatedly breaking up and rejoining (“Wilson cycle”). As evinced by the rocks, about 800 million years ago all the continents were joined together in one supercontinent called Rodinia, with what is now North America in the middle. The movement of the Earth's mantle caused Rodinia to break up into North America, Europe, and Africa. Then, 250 million years ago, the continents reassembled to form another supercontinent – Pangaea, surrounded by a single, worldwide ocean, Panthalassa. About 200 million years ago, Pangaea broke apart into two large land masses: Gondwanaland and Laurasia. Gondwanaland then broke up to form Africa, Antarctica, Australia, South America, and India. Laurasia split apart into Eurasia and North America.³⁰

 

The plant kingdom

“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day” (Gen 1:9-13).

         

God created the first living things on Earth – plants – on Day 3.  The World Book says the oldest fossils are those of bacteria that lived about 3.5 billion years ago.³¹ Paleobiologists say these organisms (microscopic plants) appeared as soon as there was water on Earth. The timing is again a perfect match, because Day 3 in the Diminishing Day-Ages was from 3.75 billion to 1.875 billion years ago.

 

Cells to grass to trees.

The bacteria were one-celled prokaryotes (no nuclei). Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) with chlorophyll were capable of photosynthesis. They were followed by unicellular organisms with nuclei (eukaryotes); then multi-celled vegetation like moss, grass, herbs, trees.

The Jewish sage Nachmanides said the creation of grasses, plants, and trees actually transpired over a protracted period.³² The Genesis writer simply had the tendency to summarize a string of events in one or two sentences, rather than make a long-winded, detailed narration. After all, even if he did lengthily describe a bacterium that could not be seen by the unaided eye, would he have been understood and, more importantly, believed by his fellow desert nomads 3,500 years ago?

 

Prefab components?

God said, “Let the earth bring forth…” The wording implies that the elements that would constitute the grass, herbs, and trees had been laid down in the earth earlier. The various “prefabricated” components were just waiting to combine into specific forms at God’s command.

Note that each type of plant life reproduced “after his kind,” showing that the Creator had set the fixed laws of genetics in operation.

 

Plants without a sun?

At this point, there was still no mention of the sun. How did the first plants manage to survive without sunlight for photosynthesis? We get the answer from prophecy. In Acts 3:21 (NIV) Paul speaks of “the time… for God to restore everything,” which infers that former conditions (in the beginning) will be reestablished in the future.

We are told that in the future Kingdom of God there will be “no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof (Rev 21:23,22:5; also Isa 60:19). If this is a glimpse of the restored conditions in the future, then in the beginning it was light from the glory of God and His Son that enabled the first plants on earth to survive and even thrive.

 

Day 4: Sun, moon, and stars

“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day” (Gen 1:14-19).

Interpretations of Day 4:

• Literal 24-hour Days:     2 days before man was created 6,000 circa years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 9,000-8,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 1,875,000,000-937,500,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 937,500,000 years)

 

Young Earth Creationists hold that the sun, moon, stars, and other heavenly bodies were created either just 6,000 years ago or 9,000-8,000 years ago at the most.

In the Diminishing Day-Ages, the celestial lights first shone on Earth sometime between 1.875 billion and 937.5 million years ago (mya).

“Made” or “had made”?

The Creator used the words “let there be” and “let them be,” which could mean that the heavenly bodies were already in existence before Day 4. In the phrase “And God made…” the word translated “made” is from the Hebrew asah, (“to do or make”), which can be translated into several words in English, but “to create” is not one of them.  

The verb form in English is in the simple past tense (“made”). However, the pluperfect or past perfect tense “had made,” indicating a prior act, could have also been used to translate asah (ex.: Gen 1:31, 2:2, 3:1, etc.). Hence, the verse could also be rendered as: “And God had made two great lights…” Gen 1:16a), implying God had earlier created the sun, moon, and stars before they became visible on earth.

 

Gas clouds thinned?

Possibly, after the Earth had formed, the lighter gases which did not become part of the solid sphere continued to surround the planet – the way some planets, like Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, are still shrouded with gas clouds today. Venus is covered by a gaseous canopy so thick that astronomers cannot see its surface. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is also veiled by a thick blur of gases.

The Earth’s cloudy atmosphere could have thinned and become clear sometime between 1,875,000,000 and 937,000,000 years ago. From a viewpoint on the surface of the planet, that would have been the first time the sun, moon, and stars shone from the sky.

Moreover, according to ScienceDaily, “The primitive sun did not use to shine as brightly as it does at present. Four billion years ago the solar output was only about 60% of what it is today.”³³ The weak rays of the young sun would not have been able to penetrate Earth’s dense gaseous atmosphere, which might have been merely translucent.

 

Signs in the stars.

The Bible says God arranged the celestial bodies in certain ways for particular reasons: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs…” (Gen 1:14, cf. Dan 6:27).

The sun, moon, stars, and other celestial objects bear messages from God! “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world…” (Ps 19:1-4a). To communicate His messages, God uses a heavenly language that can be understood by all peoples.

The Mazzaroth. Men in Mesopotamia first visualized the shapes of the constellations, or clusters of stars, around 2700 B.C.³⁴ Collectively, they were called the Mazzaroth, which means “high ones”³⁵ or “scattered ones.”³⁶ “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?” (Job 38:31-32).

The constellations seem to have been named at the time of the Tower of Babel³⁷ circa 2000 B.C., and arranged in groups around 700 B.C.³⁸ The earliest known zodiac with all 12 signs dates from the 400s B.C.³⁹ At least one fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the 200s B.C., lists the signs of the Zodiac.⁴⁰ Adopting the Babylonian symbols that mostly represent animals, the Greeks called them ta zōdia, “the little animals,” or zōdiakos kyklos (“circle of animals”).⁴¹ The Egyptians and the Chinese also used the 12 divisions, but gave other names and symbols to them.⁴²  

The Magi. Some Biblical personages appear to have been astrologers: “And the king communed with them; and among them all was found none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: therefore stood they before the king. And in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm” (Dan 1:19-20).

Daniel was made the king’s top astrologer: “There is a man in your kingdom who has the spirit of the holy gods in him. In the time of your father he was found to have insight and intelligence and wisdom like that of the gods. King Nebuchadnezzar your father -- your father the king, I say -- appointed him chief of the magicians, enchanters, astrologers and diviners” (Dan 5:11, NIV).

Daniel probably passed on his knowledge to his assistants, especially fellow-Jews in Babylon, which lay east of Judea. Some 600 years later “wise men from the east,” apparently astrologers who knew the star signs, came to Jerusalem looking for the newly born Messiah, “Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him” (Matt 2:1-2). Christ had been prophesied as the coming “King of the Jews.” The wise men must have been Jews; else, why would they worship the King of the Jews if they were not themselves Jewish?

 

Starry story.

First century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote of an ancient belief that Adam’s son Seth and great-great grandson Enoch saw a drama inscribed in the starlit night sky. The starry story is said to be the salvation of man by a coming Messiah. How do we read the story? Where does it start? The constellations in the celestial circle have no apparent beginning or end. Ancient astrologers started the year from Aries, where the sun was at the spring equinox. Should we do likewise?

Egyptologist Frances Rolleston found the key in the 4,000-year-old zodiac of Dendereh on the ceiling of the portico of the temple of Esneh in Egypt. She discovered a picture of the Sphinx just below and between the figures of Virgo and Leo.⁴³ In Greek, Sphinx means “to bind tight” (also the root-word of “sphincter,” a ring of muscle around a body opening). The Sphinx, with the head of a woman and the body of a lion, “tightly binds” the two together. Thus, Virgo is the “head,” or start of the story, and Leo, the rear, or “ending.”

Gospel in the stars. Interpretations of the 12 constellations slightly vary, but the overall picture they paint is the same: the Gospel is in the stars! Below is a synthesis of the basic meaning of each sign:

1.      Virgo, the Virgin: a sinless woman (the pure faith, church, or religion) carrying an infant and holding a branch (the Messiah);

2.      Libra, the Weighing Scales: purchase and judgment -- the son of the woman will pay the price (for sin) and act as the coming judge;

3.      Scorpio, the Scorpion (formerly the snake Serpens battling the eagle Aquila): Satan opposing the Messiah, the Redeemer of men;

4.      Sagittarius, the Archer or mighty hunter: the Antichrist defying God and attempting to kill His Only Son, the Savior of mankind;

5.      Capricorn, the Goat-Fish or wounded scapegoat: the sacrificial offering was pierced (His blood as atonement for the sins of the world);

6.      Aquarius, the Water-Bearer: God pouring His Holy Spirit (water) upon the earth, baptizing the body of believers during the Church Age;

7.      Pisces, the Fishes (a small one and a big one): the Judeo-Christian faith, made up of two groups of people who will be saved;

8.      Aries, the Ram: the sacrificed Lamb of God, the Messiah, who has  grown greater and more powerful through His death on the cross;

9.      Taurus, the Bull: the power and longsuffering of God, patiently waiting for men to repent of their sins before rendering judgment;

10.  Gemini, the Twins: two children of the same woman (faith), also symbolic of the Bridegroom (the Messiah) and His bride (the Church);

11.  Cancer, the Crab (formerly a sheepfold): the ingathering of the flock at the “Rapture” or first resurrection at Christ’s Second Coming;

12.  Leo, the Lion: the return of Christ as Lion of Judah, pouncing on the serpent Hydra (Satan) stretching over a third of the stars (angels).

Do you see the complete story?

 

Horoscopes? Horrors!

The Mazzaroth reveals God’s plan for His chosen people. But Gentile stargazers began making predictions for their countrymen – such as national prosperity or disaster. (“Dis-aster” comes from the Latin words dis [“reverse”) and aster [“star”], a reversal or disarrangement of the stars.) The Greeks and Romans started casting personal horoscopes sometime between 600 and 200 B.C.⁴⁴ Fortune-telling, however, including horoscopes, is detestable to God: “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD” (Deut 18:10-12).

Jeremiah told the Jews: “Thus says the LORD: "Do not learn the way of the Gentiles; Do not be dismayed at the signs of heaven, For the Gentiles are dismayed at them. For the customs of the peoples are futile…” (Jer 10:2-3a, NKJV).

____________________

²⁹Atmosphere, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition
³⁰Earth, World Book 2005
³¹Bacteria, op. cit.
³²Cited by Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God, 1997, p. 71
³³ScienceDaily, March 22, 2006, Internet
³⁴Astronomy, International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia
³⁵Mazzaroth, New Exhaustive Strong's Numbers and Concordance with Expanded Greek-Hebrew Dictionary
³⁶Mazzaroth, Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary
³⁷Chuck Missler, Cosmic Codes, 1999, revised 2004, p. 200
³⁸Astronomy, op. cit.
³⁹Zodiac, World Book 2005
⁴⁰“Three Wise Men and a Star,” Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, 1975, p. 373
⁴¹Zodiac, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition
⁴²Zodiac, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2004
⁴³F. Chris Patrick, The Zodiac Conspiracy, 1993, p. 13

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 4)

Day 5: Water creatures, fowl

“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day” (Gen 1:20-23).

Interpretations of Day 5:

• Literal 24-Hour Days:    1 day before man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 8,000-7,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 937,500,000-468,750,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 468,750,000 years)

According to Young Earth Creationists, aquatic creatures and birds first appeared no later than 6,000 years ago, but no earlier than 8,000-7,000 years ago, either.

In the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, God created the first marine animals during Day-Age 5, sometime between 937.5 million and 468.75 million years ago. This corresponds precisely to the oldest known animal fossils, about 700 million years old, that the Encyclopedia Britannica identifies as Ediacara fauna, small wormlike creatures with soft bodies.⁴⁵

Oxygen-breathing animals.

Until about 700 million years ago, there was a negligibly low amount of oxygen available. (The estimated threshold or minimum amount of oxygen needed for animal life to begin and multiply on earth is 1-10% of the present atmospheric level.)⁴⁶ Photosynthesizing bacteria then began oxygenating the oceans to produce the oxygen needed by new marine animals that derived energy through respiration.

Do you see the thoughtful planning involved? God created plants on Day 3 to produce oxygen. After an adequate supply had been assured, He proceeded to create oxygen-breathing animals on Day 5.

 

The Cambrian “explosion.”

Approximately 544 million years ago, new forms of life with various anatomical structures appeared in rapid succession.⁴⁷ Writer Leslie Orgel said in the New Scientist: “Beginning at the base of the Cambrian period and extending for about 10 million years, all the major groups of skeletonized invertebrates made their first appearance in the most spectacular rise in diversity ever recorded on our planet.”⁴⁸

All the basic shapes and features of multi-cellular organisms living today first appeared during that period: mouths, eyes, gills, intestines, shells, bones, spines, appendages, joints. The seas teemed with a great variety of invertebrates: sponges, worms, bryozoans (“moss animals”), hydrozoans (jellyfish), brachiopods (clams), mollusks (snails), arthropods (trilobites), echinoderms (starfish).⁴⁹

Sir Jonathan Sacks wonders, “Something’ happened to cause an ‘explosion’ of complex multi-cellular body forms. Scientists have long been puzzled about why this burst of diversity occurred… How did life evolve at such speed that even Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, was forced to suggest that it came from Mars?”⁵⁰

Gerald Schroeder suggests the increased supply of oxygen resulted in a tenfold improvement in the conversion of food to energy. With the new energy, organisms were able to develop more complex structures.⁵¹ These were the “abundant moving creatures in the waters” (Gen 1:20).

 

The first fish.

Fish appeared 490 million years ago. The presence of a backbone differentiates the fish, a vertebrate, from invertebrates. But where it came from remains a mystery.

Author Arthur Strahler wrote: “Origin of the vertebrates is obscure -- there is no fossil record preceding the occurrence of fishes in the late Ordovician time.”⁵² Writer Francis Downes Ommanney says, “How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures we do not know. Between the Cambrian when it probably originated, and the Ordovician when the first fossils of animals with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years which we will probably never be able to fill.”⁵³ The Readers Digest sums it up: “To our knowledge, no ‘link’ connected this new beast to any previous form of life. The fish just appeared.”⁵⁴ But, of course. God created the fish.

 

Dragonflies and dragons?

God also said: “Let the waters bring forth… fowl that may fly above the earth… And… great whales” (Gen 1:20-21). “Fowl” from the waters? Were these the first birds? Did they precede the land animals? Let us take a closer look.

“Fowl.” The word is translated from the Hebrew owph, meaning “to cover with wings or obscurity.” “Bird” is tsippor in Hebrew. In its commentary on Genesis 1:20, Barnes’ Notes explains: “[Bird of wing] Here the wing is made characteristic of the class, which extends beyond what we call birds.” The commentator points out that owph (“fowl”) means more than just “birds.”⁵⁵

The idea is demonstrated in Leviticus 11:13-20: “And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray,  And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.”

God enumerated birds under the word “fowls,” but also included a flying mammal – the bat! Let us grant that in that pre-scientific time the Israelites did not know the difference between a true bird and a bat. Yet, in the last line we read a stranger thing: “fowls that creep, going upon all four.” Four-footed fowl? No member of the avian family creeps, much less on all fours, because birds have only two legs. The NKJV renders the verse in a more contemporary language: “All flying insects that creep on all fours…” (Lev 11:20, NKJV; also NIV and NASU).

It becomes clear that the word “fowls” lumps together true birds, a flying mammal, and flying insects -- even if they are biologically unrelated. It shows that owph refers to any creature that flies! Science asserts: “There is no fossil evidence of primitive wings prior to the appearance of fully developed winged insects...”⁵⁶

Thus, the “fowl” from the waters in Genesis 1:20-22 may have actually been winged insects, prehistoric predecessors of modern dragonflies, mosquitoes, and similar insects which lay their eggs and spend the larval stages of their lives in the water! 

Great whales. The “great whales” God created, rendered “great sea creatures” in NKJV and NIV, and “great sea monsters” in NASU and ASV, is hataninim hagadolim in the original Hebrew text.

In other Bible verses, the translation is “dragons”: “Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons (taninim)…” (Ps 148:7a); “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon (tanin)…” (Ps 91:13; Ps 74:13, Deut 32:33, Jer 9:11). Elsewhere, the translation is “serpents”: “And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent (tanin)… For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents (taninim)…” (Ex 7:10,12a).

“Dragons” and “serpents” are both reptiles. Hence, the Hebrew taninim hagadolim (“great whales”) must have actually been huge sea reptiles -- marine dinosaurs – the sea serpents of ancient legends!

____________________

⁴⁵Evolution, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition
⁴⁶“Reason For Almost Two Billion Year Delay In Animal Evolution On Earth Discovered,” ScienceDaily.com,, Mar. 27, 2008, Internet.
⁴⁷Earth, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)
⁴⁸Leslie Orgel, “Darwinism at the Very Beginning of Life,” New Scientist, April 15, 1982, p. 151
⁴⁹Cambrian Period, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004
⁵⁰Jonathan Sacks, “Genesis and the origin of the Origin of the species,” The Times (London), August 29, 2008
⁵¹Schroeder, The Science of God, p. 117
⁵²Arthur N. Strahler, Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy, 1987, p. 316.
⁵³Francis Downes Ommanney, The Fishes, 1963, p. 60.
⁵⁴Marvels & Mysteries of Our Animal World, The Readers Digest Association, 1964, p. 25.
⁵⁵Gen 1:20, Barnes' Notes, 1997
⁵⁶Schroeder, op. cit., p.

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 5)

Day 6: Mammals, creeping things, man

 “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:24-25).

Interpretations of Day 6:

• Literal 24-hour Days:     the day man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 7,000-6,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 468,750,000-13,306 years ago (Duration: approximately 468,735,694 years) 

Young Earth Creationists claim land animals and man first walked on earth some 6,000 years ago, or 7,000-6,000 years ago at the earliest.

In the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, God created land animals and hominids during Day-Age 6, 468,750,000 to 13,306 years ago (kya).

A multi-segmented Day 6?

In the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, the sixth segment should be Day-Age 6, ending about 234,375,000 years ago after the creation of land animals (amphibians, insects, reptiles, mammals). But it cannot be the Biblical Day 6, because it ended before man could be created.

However, if we continue with the exponentially regressing pattern, we see the coming of hominids in the succeeding segments until around 28,611 years ago. For still unclear reasons, it appears that the time segments after Day-Age 5 are not individual day-ages, but parts of a multi-segmented Day-Age 6! There is no apparent basis, but the time segments match the scientific estimates accurately.

There is a clue in the Bible, though. More time and words were used to relate the events of Day 6, because more things happened and more entities were created on that last creative “day.” Moreover, there is a textual parallel in the next chapter, where one “day” is used to mean several days: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” (Gen 2:4). We know that the “the earth and the heavens” were not created in one single “day,’ but over several “days.”

Did God (Elohim) use more segments of time for Day-Age 6 to create animals of a higher order, as well as to perfect man -- the prime paradigm of His creative work? Let go through those time segments.

Day-Age 6-a

• Circa 468,750,000 to 234,375,000 years ago (Duration: approximately 234,375,000 years)  

First of worst extinctions. Paleontologists have identified at least 17 mass extinctions since life began on earth. Eight are major, all of which took place in the last 500 million years. However, five events are the most devastating: the first took place around 438 million years ago during Day-Age 6-a. Over 85% of species became extinct.⁵⁷

Amphibians created. God created land animals and “creeping things” on Day 6. Fossil remains show that amphibians, a kind of creeping creature, crawled onto dry land around 417 million years ago during Day-Age 6-a.

Second of worst extinctions. The second of the five worst mass extinction events also happened during Day-Age 6-a, approximately 367 million years ago. This time, 82% of all species were lost.⁵⁸

Insects created. God created insects approximately 350 million years ago during Day-Age 6-a. Scientists are puzzled why insects, comprising 80% of all living and extinct animal species, have no known evolutionary ancestors.

A U.S. government reference (Insects, 1952) states: “There is… no fossil evidence bearing on the question of insect origin; the oldest insects known show no transition to other arthropods.”⁵⁹

Reptiles created. God created more “creeping things” – reptiles. The record of the rocks reveals that cold-blooded saurians, the forerunners of modern lizards, arose on the face of the planet starting approximately 323 million years ago during Day-Age 6-a. 

Mammals created. God created warm-blooded mammals -- the “beasts of the earth” (wild animals) and “cattle” (domestic animals).

The fossil record shows that the mammals first walked upon the earth 248 million years ago during Day-Age 6-a.

Third of worst extinctions. The third and most devastating of the five worst mass extinctions also occurred during Day-Age 6-a, some 245 million years ago. As much as 96% of all species were wiped out.

The destruction was so great paleontologists use this event to mark the end of the ancient or Paleozoic Era and the beginning of the middle or Mesozoic Era, when many new groups of animals arose.⁶⁰

Day-Age 6-b

• Circa 234,375,000 to 117,187,500 years ago (Duration: approximately 117,187,500 years)  

Fourth of worst extinctions. The fourth of the five worst mass extinctions transpired some 208 million years ago, claiming about 76% of all species at the time, including many reptiles.⁶¹

Archaeopteryx appeared. A chimeric creature appeared 150 million years ago. Scientists say it was the first true bird – with feathers and wings, and a “wishbone” (the fused collarbones underpinning wing muscles). However, it also had jaws with teeth, claws on its wings, and a long tail like dinosaurs. It was half-bird, half-reptile – the archaeopteryx!

It seems to be alluded to in Scripture. Leviticus 11:18 (NKJV) lists birds: “the white owl, the jackdaw, and the carrion vulture.” The “while owl” is tanshemeth in the Hebrew original. Several verses later, 11:30 lists reptiles: “the gecko, the monitor lizard, the sand reptile, the sand lizard, and the chameleon.” Strangely, “chameleon” is also tanshemeth in the original. The word tanshemeth, applicable to both a bird and a reptile, perfectly describes the archaeopteryx! Was tanshemeth the Scriptural term for the archaeopteryx?

Day-Age 6-c

• Circa 117,187,500 to 58,593,750 years ago (Duration: approximately 58,593,750 years)  

Fifth of worst extinctions. The fifth and most recent of the five worst mass extinctions occurred more or less 65 million years ago, with the death of 76% of all species, most notably the dinosaurs.⁶²

Primates created. Around the time that “terrible lizards” (dinosaurs) became extinct, primates – animals that resemble modern lemurs, monkeys, and apes – came onto the scene some 65,000,000 years ago during Day-Age 6-c.

Day-Age 6-d

• Circa 58,593,750 to 29,296,875 years ago (Duration: approximately 29,296,875 years)  

Rise of mammals. As the level of atmospheric oxygen continued to rise from 10% to 17% about 50 million years ago, then 23% some 40 million years ago, mammals dominated the planet.

Paul Falkowski, a marine science professor, explains: "In the fossil record, we see that this rise in oxygen content corresponds exactly to a really rapid rise of large, placental mammals… The more oxygen, the bigger the mammals… the rise in oxygen content allowed mammals to become very, very large – mammals like 12-foot-tall sloths and huge saber-toothed cats.”⁶³ Some hornless rhinoceroses measured about 30 feet long and stood 18 feet high at the shoulder.

Day-Age 6-e

• Circa 29,296,875 to 14,648,437 years ago (Duration: approximately 14,648,437 years. From here on, fractions are added to succeeding numbers to keep figures rounded.)  

Day-Age 6-f

• Circa 14,648,437 to 7,324,218 years ago (Duration: approximately 7,324,218 years)  

Manlike creatures.

The Jewish philosopher Maimonides said in his exegesis of Genesis that there were manlike creatures before Adam.⁶⁴ Similarly, the Talmud and other ancient Jewish commentaries mention pre-Adamic animals with human forms but without the neshamah or God-given spirit.⁶⁵ How did they know that before fossils were discovered?

Anthropologists call manlike creatures thought to be ancestors of man “hominids.” They call living apes “hominoids,” because they are only similar to humans, but not man’s supposed ancestors.

Ramapithecus, 14-8 mya. Found in 1932 in northern India (now part of Pakistan), parts of a fossilized jaw and some teeth, dated about 14-8 million years old, were named Ramapithecus -- “Rama's ape,” after Rama, a mythical prince of India, combined with pithekos, Greek for “ape.” In 1976, a complete jaw was discovered. With a distinctly simian V shape, it differs markedly from the parabolic shape of hominid jaws.⁶⁶ More complete fossils have been found in China and Pakistan, confirming that Ramapithecus was not a hominid, but a true ape.⁶⁷

Day-Age 6-g

• Circa 7,324,218 to 3,662,109 years ago (Duration: approximately 3,662,109 years)  

Sahelanthropus tchadensis, 7-6 mya.  In 2001 the fossils of the supposedly oldest hominid species, estimated at 7-6 million years old,  were found in the north central African nation of Chad.⁶⁸ Dubbed Sahelanthropus (“Sahel man,” after the semi-arid region and the Greek word anthropos, meaning “human”), it has an apelike skull. The fossil pieces are so few, it is uncertain if Sahelanthropus walked bipedally.⁶⁹ 

Orrorin tugenensis, 6 mya. Found in the Tugen Hills of central Kenya in 2000, the fossils received the name Orrorin tugenensis, which means “original man in the Tugen region.” Thought to be 6 million years old,⁷⁰ the fossilized skeleton has simian features, including long, curved finger bones for grasping and movement in trees, and apelike canine and premolar teeth.⁷¹

Ardipithecus, 4.4 mya. Unearthed in Ethiopia in 1994, this fossil find dated to be 4.4-million years old has been named Ardipithecus, from words in the Afar and Greek languages meaning “ground ape.”⁷² “Ardi,” however, has apelike teeth and skeleton, suggesting its ability to walk upright might not have been well developed.⁷³

Australopithecus, 4-1 mya. In 1924, a fossilized skull was dug up in Taung, South Africa. It was named Australopithecus, which means “southern ape.” Thought to be man’s ancestor, six species have since been identified. An almost complete 3,200,000-year-old skeleton of a female unearthed in 1974 by Donald Johanson at Hadar, Ethiopia, was nicknamed “Lucy,” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which played on the night of the find.⁷⁴

Australopithecines, some 3½ to 5 feet tall, had a brain (390-550 cu cm) about one-third of that of a modern human; a low cranium behind a projecting face; small canine teeth like those of humans, but large cheek teeth (molars) like apes. Although Lucy had arms proportionally longer than those of modern people, she is said to have walked upright,⁷⁵ based on a knee joint. (Johanson later said the knee fragment was discovered a mile and a half away in a rock layer 200 feet deeper, but was included due to “anatomical similarity.”)⁷⁶

Bruce Bower, in the Science News of 2 June 2001, reported that, in one study, Australopithecine inner ear bones used to maintain balance were found to be greatly similar to those of chimpanzees and gorillas, but markedly different from those of humans.⁷⁷ Mark Cartmill et al. wrote in the July-August 1986 issue of American Scientist: “At present we have no grounds for thinking that there was anything distinctively human about australopithecine ecology and behavior... they were surprisingly apelike in skull form, premolar dentition, limb proportions, and morphology of some joint surfaces, and they may still have been spending a significant amount of time in the trees.”⁷⁸ 

Anatomist Sir Solly Zuckerman and Dr. Charles Oxnard, in contrast  to anthropologists using subjective and less analytical visual techniques, developed a multivariate analysis technique with computers performing millions of analyses on homologous Australopithecine, simian, and human bones. Their finding: Australopithecus is not a missing link between ape and man.⁷⁹ Sir Solly observed: “When compared with human and simian skulls, the Australopithecine skull is in appearance overwhelmingly simian – not human… Our findings leave little doubt that… Australopithecus resembles not Homo sapiens but the living monkeys and apes.”⁸⁰

Paleontologist Richard Leakey said in his book Origins (1977) that it is “unlikely that our direct ancestors are evolutionary descendants of the australopithecines.”⁸¹ James Shreeve remarked in the Science magazine issue of May 3, 1996: “The proportions calculated for (Australopithecus) africanus turned out to be amazingly close to those of a chimpanzee, with big arms and small legs... One might say we are kicking Lucy out of the family tree…”⁸² As their family name pithecus (“ape”) denotes, these prehistoric pithecoid creatures were just apes.

Day-Age 6-h

• Circa 3,662,109 to 1,831,054 years ago (Duration: approximately 1,831,054 years.)  

Kenyanthropus platyops, 3.5 mya. A fossilized cranium and other bones, estimated to be 3.5 million years old, were found in 1999 in northern Kenya. The creature had a mixture of features not seen in earlier hominid fossils: a much flatter face and smaller molars; the cheekbone joined the rest of the face in a forward position; and the region beneath the nose opening was flat. Researchers placed it under a new genus and species: Kenyanthropus platyops. In Greek anthropos means “humen being,” while platyops means “flat” – combined to mean “flat-faced human from Kenya.”⁸³

Homo habilis, 2.8-1.5 mya. So named for the primitive stone tools found with its fossilized skull in 1960, Homo habilis means “handy man” -- from Latin words meaning “human” (homo) and “able or skillful” (habilis). The first to be classified under the genus Homo, the species had a bigger braincase of about 600 cu cm.⁸⁴ It was also taller.

The fossil had been found beneath volcanic ash dated at about 2.6 million years, pushing back the presumed origin of man by millions of years. Its discoverer, Richard Leakey, says: “Either we toss out this skull or we toss out our theories of early man.” He adds that “it leaves in ruins the modern notion that all early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary change.”⁸⁵

The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis were discovered in 1986. They showed the creature clearly had apelike proportions and should never have been classified as human. Hugh Ross comments on the web: “Starting about 2-4 million years ago, God began creating man-like mammals or ‘hominids.’ These creatures stood on two feet, had large brains, and used tools. Some even buried their dead and painted on cave walls… God replaced them with Adam and Eve.”⁸⁶

Homo rudolfensis, 1.9 mya. In 1972, more than 150 fragments of bone fossils were discovered in eastern Kenya. As the size of the skull and several anatomical features differed from those of earlier finds, scientists classified it under a new species named Homo rudolfensis, after Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana). Its best-known fossils from the lake area date from about 1.9 million years ago.⁸⁷

Richard Leakey notes: “This Australopithecine material suggests a form of locomotion that was not entirely upright nor bipedal. The Rudolf Australopithecines, in fact, may have been close to the ‘knuckle-walker’ condition, not unlike the extant African apes.”⁸⁸

Day-Age 6-i

• Circa 1,831,054 to 915,527 years ago (Duration: approximately 915,527 years)  

Homo erectus, 1.5 mya. A skullcap and tooth found in 1891 by Eugene Dubois in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) was first named Pithecanthropus erectus (“erect ape-man”). Popularly known as “Java man,” it is dated about 1,500,000 years old. It had a larger brain (about 850 cc) and a rounder cranium than earlier species.⁸⁹

In China, at a site known as Chou K’ou Tien (Dragon-Bone Hill), 25 miles from Peking, from 1921 to 1934 a total of 14 skull fragments, 11 jawbones, 7 thigh pieces, 2 arm bones, a wrist bone, and 147 teeth similar to Java Man were found. Called Sinanthropus pekinensis – “Peking Man” – its composite skull was named “Nellie.”⁹⁰

Forty years after finding “Java man,” Dubois conceded it was a big ape. “Pithecanthropus was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons, superior to its near relatives on account of its exceedingly large brain volume, and distinguished at the same time by its erect attitude.”⁹¹ He admitted withholding parts of four simian thigh bones found in the same area.

The World Book states: “Modern humans could not have evolved from these late populations of H. erectus, a much more primitive type of human.”⁹²

Day-Age 6-j:

• Circa 915,527 to 457,763 years ago (Duration: approximately 457,763 years)  

Homo heidelbergensis, 600-300 kya. In 1907 a fossilized manlike jaw was discovered 16 kilometers southeast of Heidelberg, Germany. It had no chin, but was unusually thick and broad, as well as long, suggesting the individual had a projecting lower face. The teeth also were too small for the massive mandible.

Other specimens from Africa (Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania), Europe (Greece, France), and possibly Asia (China) have been dated at from approximately 600 to 300 thousand years ago (kya).⁹³ Their craniums have heavy brow ridges, long and low braincases, and thick vault bones like H. erectus, but larger.

____________________

⁵⁷Mass Extinctions, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁵⁸Ibid.

⁵⁹Frank M. Carpenter, “Fossil Insects,” Insects, 1952, p. 18.

⁶⁰Mass Extinctions, loc. cit.  

⁶¹Ibid.

⁶²Ibid.

⁶³Paul Falkowski, “Oxygen Increase Caused Mammals To Triumph, Science, Sept. 30, 2005, quoted by ScienceDaily, Oct. 3, 2005

⁶⁴Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 1:7; cited by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 123

⁶⁵Talmud Keliim 8:5; cited by Schroeder, loc. cit.

⁶⁶Ramapithecus, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

⁶⁷Ramapithecus, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

⁶⁸Australopithecus, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

⁶⁹Human Evolution, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁷⁰Australopithecus, loc. cit.

⁷¹Human Evolution, loc. cit.

⁷²From articles in Time, October 12, 2009, and The Week, October 16, 2009; cited in “Is ‘Ardi’ the Missing Link?”, Petah Tikvah, January-March 2010, p. 22

⁷³Australopithecines, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁷⁴Donald C. Johanson, “Finding Lucy and Other Fossil Treasures,” Australopithecines, loc. cit.

⁷⁵Australopithecus, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

⁷⁶Dennis Petersen, Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, 2002, p. 129

⁷⁷Bruce Bower, “Evolution’s Youth Movement,” Science News, 2 June 2001, p. 347

⁷⁸Matt Cartmill et al., “One Hundred Years of Paleoanthropology,” American Scientist, July–August 1986, p. 417.

⁷⁹Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention, pp. 164–165.

⁸⁰Solly Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower, 1970, p. 90

⁸¹Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins, 1977, p. 86

⁸²James Shreeve, “New Skeleton Gives Path from Trees to Ground an Odd Turn,” Science, 3 May 1996, p. 654.

⁸³Human Evolution, loc. cit.

⁸⁴Homo habilis, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁸⁵Richard Leakey, National Geographic, June 1973; quoted by Petersen, op. cit., p. 130

⁸⁶Hugh Ross, Reasons To Believe, July 8, 1997, Internet

⁸⁷Human Evolution, loc. cit.

⁸⁸Richard Leakey, “Further Evidence of Lower Pleistocene Hominids from East Rudolf, North Kenya,” Nature, Vol. 231, 28 May 1971, p. 245

⁸⁹Homo erectus, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁹⁰Petersen, op. cit., p. 133

⁹¹Eugene Dubois, “On the Fossil Human Skulls Recently Discovered in Java and Pithecanthropus Erectus,” Man, Vol. 37, January 1937, p. 4

⁹²Homo erectus, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

⁹³Homo heidelbegensis, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 6)

The image of God

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Gen 1:26).

Science and Scripture are again in complete agreement: human beings were the last form of living creatures to appear on earth.

 

A “plural” God?

Oddly, God spoke in the first person plural: “let us… in our image… after our likeness…” Apart from the verse above, God’s reference to Himself in the plural is seen in a few other Biblical verses: Genesis 3:22 (“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us…”); Genesis 11:7 (“Come, let us go down and confuse their language…”); Isaiah 6:8 (“Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”).

Some scholars say God referred to Himself in the plural, because the Godhead is said to have three Persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Others suggest the way He spoke was “communicative (including the attendant angels),”⁹⁴ that is, God was speaking for both Himself and the angels in His presence. In Genesis 3:22, the phrase “one of us” in both Hebrew and the literal English translation clearly means one among many. We can only conclude that by “us” God means Himself plus others who were with Him.   

God and “gods.” In the Scriptures, the word “God” is usually translated from the Hebrew elohim (“gods”), the plural form of El and its variants Elah, Eloah, Eloha. Scholars “interpret the –im ending as an expression of majesty (pluralis majestatis) or excellence (pluralis excellentiae), expressing high dignity or greatness…”⁹⁵ Others disagree. “Theologians who dispute this cite the hypothesis that plurals of majesty came about in more modern times. Richard Toporoski, a classical scholar, asserts that plurals of majesty first appeared in the reign of Diocletian (284-305 CE)… The use of the plural as a form of respectful address is quite foreign to Hebrew.”⁹⁶

In Psalm 82, the angels are called “gods” (elohim): “God (Elohim) standeth in the congregation of the mighty (el); he judgeth among the gods (elohim)… I have said, Ye are gods (elohim); and all of you are children of the most High” (Ps 82:1,6).

In Psalm 149:2, the English word “Maker” was actually “Makers” in the Hebrew original, as indicated by the plural verb. It thus should read: “Let Israel rejoice in their Makers; Let the children of Zion be joyful in their King.” Similarly, in Ecclesiastes 12:1, “Creator” was “Creators” in the original: “Remember now thy Creators in the days of thy youth…” The pluralization of words in Hebrew requires correct spellings that differ markedly from the singular, so the plurals could not have been mere scribal “slips of the pen.” The plurals had been deliberately written.

God showed Himself to Abraham as three angels. “And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground” (Gen 18:1-2).

In view of the above, did God have angels acting for Him during the Creation? The Angel of the LORD? Moreover, do the terms “image” and “likeness” imply that the Angel of the LORD and the angels have a physical form after which they fashioned man?

Physical resemblance?

The terms “image” and “likeness” may have two implications: First, they could signify that man, or at least a part of him, has been made a spirit like God and the angels. Second, they could mean that man has been patterned after the physical configurations of the Creator (the Angel of the LORD) and the angels, literally.

The terms are used at least once in the Bible in the physical sense: “And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth” (Gen 5:3). The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible explains: “Man’s resemblance to God is analogous to Seth’s resemblance to his father Adam. This makes it certain that physical resemblance must not be excluded.”⁹⁷

The form of angels. If God and the angels were spirits, why did God create the physical universe? Of what use would it be to them? God also planted a garden in Eden, but it was not for Adam, whom He made only to be its gardener (Gen 2:5,8,15). Did God create the material world for His own and the angels’ enjoyment? That is what we are told in Revelation 4:11 – “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” That being the case, the Spirit of God, and those of His angels, needed physical bodies to experience and enjoy the delights of the material universe. Indeed, we read about “the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3:8).

The Scriptures hint angels can change their physical forms. In Psalm 68:17 (“The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels [shin’an]…”), the Hebrew word used for angels is shin’an, the root meaning of which is “to change or alter.” This strongly suggests angels can change or alter their forms at will. 

As we know, God and the angels descended to earth from time to time in physical form. Of all organic structures, the human figure appears to be the most suitable and most efficient design for the terrestrial setting. James, Christ’s own brother, reiterates that the human form has been patterned after that of God: “Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9).

One kind, several forms. If man was created in the “image” and “likeness” of God, how can the appearance of various manlike creatures before Adam be explained?

The Torah account tends to skip over some details to simplify the narrative, as we have seen earlier. On Day 6 amphibians, reptiles and insects are lumped together under just one term: “creeping things” (Gen 1:24-25). It is the same in Leviticus 11:13-23, where true birds, the bat, and flying insects are all bunched in just one word, “fowl.”

Similarly, it looks like Genesis 1:26 has grouped together in one word – “man” – all the different species of subhumans and hominids, different versions and “likenesses” of the same type which eventually culminated in Adam, the crowning glory of God’s creation.

 

Day-Age 6-k:

• Circa 457,763 to 228,882 years ago (Duration: approximately 228,882 years)

 

Homo Neanderthalensis, 300 kya. In 1856 workmen found fossil bones in a limestone cave in the Neander valley (thal), near Dusseldorf, Germany. Anatomist Prof. Schaafhausen declared the bones were human.⁹⁸ The remains were named Neanderthal man.

Over 60 more similar fragments have since been unearthed in other parts of Europe, as well as Asia and Africa. Undoubtedly human, the “Neandertals were larger and more muscular than modern humans and are believed to have lived in Europe and western Asia from 300,000 years ago to as recently as 30,000 years ago.”⁹⁹ The bones indicate a powerful body, though of short stature -- males averaged 1.7 m (5’ 5”) tall and 84 kg (185 lb), females 1.5 m (5’) tall and 80 kg (176 lb).¹⁰⁰ The cranial capacity was about 1,500 cu cm (90 cu in), around 10-15% larger than that of modern men! (The larger brain is thought to be in correlation to the greater muscle mass of the Neanderthals.)

At first scientists thought Neanderthals had a crouching and apelike posture. They later realized some of the bones bore signs of arthritis and rickets. They concluded that Neanderthals actually walked upright, not stooped on bent knees. Recent dental and x-ray studies suggest they matured at a slower rate, but lived longer than people today.

Neanderthals used fire, made stone tools and leather, played music (indicated by a wooden flute), cared for the injured and elderly (bones show survival to old age after suffering wounds, fractures, diseases, even blindness).¹⁰¹ They seemed to have worshipped bears and buried their dead, covering them with flowers.

In 1997, researchers announced they had extracted a small amount of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil. They “compared the Neandertal DNA sequence to sequences in the same region of DNA for 994 modern human lineages, which included Australians, Pacific Islanders, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and Europeans. The Neandertal DNA sequence differed from all the modern human DNA by either 27 or 28 base pairs. In comparison, modern human sequences in this region of DNA differ from each other on average by 8 base pairs.”¹⁰² The DNA evidence, the World Book says, supports the belief that the Neanderthals were a separate species and not ancestors of modern humans.¹⁰³

 

Day-Age 6-l:

• Circa 228,882 to 114,441 years ago (Duration: approximately 114,441 years)

Day-Age 6-m:

• Circa 114,441 to 57,221 years ago (Duration: approximately 57,221 years.)

 

Homo sapiens, 200-100 kya. In 1868, fossilized human bones were discovered in the Cro-Magnon cave in southwestern France. Anthropologists have classified the evidently more advanced species, which appeared between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago,¹⁰⁴ as Homo sapiens – Latin for “wise human being.”

Also called “Cro-Magnon man,” more than 100 specimens have since been found. A population appears to have lived in Europe from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Cro-Magnon bones closely resemble those of modern men. They indicate a powerfully muscled body of about 166-171 cm (5” 5” to 5’ 7”) tall. They were distinguished from Neanderthals by a high forehead with a slight browridge, a short wide face, and a prominent chin (the first specimen with a well-defined chin). The H. sapiens brain volume was about 1,600 cc (100 cu in), bigger than that of modern men.¹⁰⁵

Finely shaped artifacts reveal the Cro-Magnons had mastered the techniques of making useful objects from stone, bone, shell, and clay, such as tools, trinkets, lamps, needles. They wore fitted clothes, jewelry, and other ornaments.¹⁰⁶ Most notably, they produced beautiful paintings of animals in the caves of southwestern France and northern Spain.

Like Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons buried their dead. This suggests they believed in an other world of spirits. After all, the Creator had spoken to them: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen 1:28). 

No relation. Remains of Cro-Magnons and the older Neanderthals overlap in the fossil record, showing the two species lived alongside each other for a long period of time – no less than 70,000 years. This precludes any notion that Cro-Magnons evolved from Neanderthals.

Neither did modern man. Neanderthals had an ear canal (labyrinth, three hollow rings involved in balance) that was distinctly different in size and location from that of people today. The Word Book notes: “Because the features of the Neandertal's labyrinth do not exist in modern humans, the scientists believe that the muscular hominid belongs to a separate species, or at least is not an ancestor of modern humans.”¹⁰⁷

Researchers have extracted DNA samples from a 40,000-year-old human skeleton (from the Cro-Magnon era) found at Lake Mungo in Australia. The DNA differs from that of living people.¹⁰⁸ The findings reinforce the belief that the earlier species were not ancestors of modern humans. (Of course we know Adam had none, do we not?)

____________________

⁹⁴Names of God, Kabbalah, Wikipedia, Internet

⁹⁵Ibid.

⁹⁶Ibid.

⁹⁷The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, p. 683

⁹⁸David Menton, “Did Humans Really Evolve from Apelike Creatures?”, The New Answers Book 2, 2008, p. 91

⁹⁹Mitochondria, “Neandertals Were Not Close Relations, Say DNA Test,” Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹⁰⁰Human Evolution, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹⁰¹David Menton, “Did Humans Really Evolve from Apelike Creatures?”, The New Answers Book 2, 2008, p. 92

¹⁰²Homo Neanderthalensis, “Neandertals Were Not Close Relations, DNA Testing Finds,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

¹⁰³Prehistoric people, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

¹⁰⁴Human being, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

¹⁰⁵Cro-Magnon, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

¹⁰⁶Cro-Magnon, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹⁰⁷Neanderthals, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

¹⁰⁸Prehistoric People, loc. cit.

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

Primordial Planet Puzzles (Part 7)

A vegetarian world

“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so” (Gen 1:29-30).

Were plants and fruits alone sufficient to have kept the first men in the excellent health necessary for long and active lives?

A well-rounded diet? Nutritionists name six kinds of nutrients: water, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. The first four are “macronutrients” we must have in large amounts. Much water is needed, since the body is 50-75% water. A lot of carbohydrates and fats are a must for energy; proteins for body tissues. Vitamins and minerals, the “micronutrients,” are taken in minute quantities, but are vital for growth and organ functions.

Plants and fruits have high water contents. Grains, legumes, and rootcrops are mostly carbohydrates. Oil sources, like coconut, olive, corn, soybean, sunflower, supply fats. Fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins and minerals. But proteins are best obtained from animals as milk, eggs, meat, fish. These are complete proteins containing all the essential amino acids. Cereals, nuts, and vegetables, lacking one or more essential amino acids, are incomplete proteins. A primeval vegetarian diet would not have been well-rounded. Or was it?

Were all the nutrients that the first men and animals needed in the right amounts in the plants and fruits that have since become extinct? The herbivorous dinosaurs were the biggest creatures on earth and lasted for millions of years. The biggest and strongest land animals today are the plant-eating elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, buffaloes. Part of the dinosaurs’ diet 248-65 million years ago were leaves of the ginkgo tree, today a “living fossil” in China and Japan. Used for centuries as a medicine, ginkgo is reputed to help improve memory and concentration among those with Alzheimer’s disease. It calls to mind the “tree of life… the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2).

Flesh-eating creatures

In many paleontological digs around the globe, animal bones have been found with manlike fossils. Java and Peking man sites yielded remains of bats, monkeys, rhinoceroses, elephants, wild cats. Hominids ate many herbivores like deer, goats, and oxen, but their diet included carnivorous predators and scavengers such as lions, wolves, bears.

Traders or raiders? Archeologists believe, based on mixed artifacts found, that primitive Neanderthals may have traded with the more modern Cro-Magnons. The May 16, 1996, issue of Nature reported the discovery southeast of Auxerre, France, of Neanderthal fossils with bone and ivory jewelry nearly identical to those of Cro-Magnons. The find suggested that Neanderthals probably bartered with Cro-Magnons.¹⁰⁹

Did they trade with each other or raid one another? Skeletal remains show that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons lived in a brutal period. There were signs of violence in the form of broken bones, scars, and healed-over bone growths. In particular, there was a high incidence of neck and head injuries. The artifacts could have been spoils of war.

Man-eating men. A French-American team has unearthed evidence of cannibalism at a Neanderthal site in France. The Encarta Encyclopedia tells of hominid and animal fossils that had been butchered the same way: "faunal and hominid remains were subjected to similar treatment. In the case of Moula-Guercy, crania and limb bones of both taxa are broken… Bone fracture is presumably related to processing for marrow and brains in both Homo and Cervus.”¹¹⁰

Other Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and early Homo sapiens (Cro-Magnon) sites piece together the same grisly picture: With sharp stone tools, hominids dismembered and defleshed their kills. They used stone hammers and anvils to break open the big bones for the marrow. Many skulls had been bashed open to extract the brains. Evidence indicates some Neanderthals may have done the same to their relatives.

Signs of cannibalism are present in only a few sites, but because the total number of sites is small, it was statistically a widespread practice.

Day-Age 6-n:

• Circa 57,221 to 28,611 years ago (Duration: approximately 28,611 years)

Day-Age 6-o:

• Circa 28,611 to 13,306 years ago (Duration: approximately 14,306 years)

 

End of Day 6

“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Gen 1:31-2:1).

Day-Age 6 Summary:

• Total duration (Day-Age 6-a to 6-o): circa 468,735,694 years. (To round figures, 0.8858 remainder from the exponential regression has been added to the remaining 14,305.1142 years, for a full 14,306 years. See table at the end of this chapter.)

 

Day 7: Day of rest

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made” (Gen 2:1-3).

Interpretations of Day 7:

• Literal 24-Hour Days:    1 day after man was created circa 6,000 years ago
• Thousand-Year Days:    circa 6,000-5,000 years ago
• Diminishing Day-Ages:  circa 13,306 to 6,153 years ago (Duration: approximately 7,153 years)

 

Shift to 1,000-year “days”?

After the seven-“day” Creation “week,” the flow of time appears to have shifted inexplicably to a dual mode for all, as laid down in 2 Peter 3:8 (“one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”; cf. Ps 90:4): literal 24-hour days from man’s standpoint, and prophetic 1,000-year “days” from God’s viewpoint.

Thus, both Young and Old Earth Creationists now reckon days as 24-hour periods, but at the same time are subject to God’s 1,000-year “days” in the prophetic countdown.

Countdown to completion.

 In the Diminishing Day-Ages timeline, some 7,153 years were still remaining in 4004 B.C. at the creation of modern man’s ancestor, Adam, before the full 15 billion years could be completed.

Homo sapiens sapiens. The subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, whose first specimen was Adam, includes all people living today. The braincase of modern man ranges from about 1,000 to 2,000 cu cm (60 to 120 cu in), averaging around 1,350 cu cm (80 cu in),¹¹¹ slightly smaller than those of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, but proportional to a less massive muscular build.

The World Book reports that, after scientifically comparing DNA samples of modern men with those of Neanderthals and other extinct hominids, many scientists conclude that the results indicate all people today form a separate species distinct from prehistoric humans.¹¹² (The scientists, however, fell short of saying how the first man came about.)

Homo sapiens sapiens timeline.

·         Circa 6,000-5,000 years ago. God created Adam some 6,000 years ago (4004 B.C.) The wheel was invented around 5,500 years ago (3500 B.C.) in  Sumer, Mesopotamia,¹¹³ where an early writing system in the form of pictographs also appeared at about the same time; followed 5,300 years ago by Egyptian hieroglyphics (3300-3200 B.C.).¹¹⁴

·         Circa 5,000-4,000 years ago. The Bronze Age began some 5,000 years ago (3000 B.C.) in Greece and China.¹¹⁵ Noah was born around the same time (2948 B.C.). The Flood took place in 2348 B.C.

·         Circa 4,000-3,000 years ago. Abraham was born about 4,000 years ago (1996 B.C.) The Iron Age began sometime around 1500-1000 B.C., with the use of iron for tools and weapons.¹¹⁶

·         Circa 3,000-2,000 years ago. David lived and died about 3,000 years ago (1015 B.C.), followed by his son Solomon (975 B.C.). Rome was founded in 753 B.C., made a republic in 509 B.C., and became an empire in 27 B.C.¹¹⁷

·         Circa 2,000-1,000 years ago. Christ was born about 2,000 years ago (5 B.C.). The eastern Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D.; the Dark Ages (early Middle Ages) began, ending in the 900s; the Medieval Period (late Middle Ages) lasted until the 1400s.

·         Circa 1,000 years ago-present. Christians launched Crusades from 1096 to 1396 to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Renaissance, an era of learning and cultural revival, lasted from about 1450 to 1600. In the Age of Enlightenment, from the 1600s to the late 1700s, philosophers held reason as the best tool for finding truth. The modern age began in the 1700s.

·         Next 1,000 years. The Millennium, the prophesied 1,000-year era of peace (mankind’s great Sabbath of rest), during which Christ will reign on earth as King of Kings (Rev 20:1-7).

 

Diminishing Day-Ages Chronology

(7-“Day” Creation “Week” until 3000 A.D. = 15 Billion Years)

Day-Ages	Scriptures	Beginning, circa years ago	Science/History	Occurrence, circa years ago
Day 1	Light	15,000,000,000	Big Bang	13,700,000,000
			Milky Way	8,000,000,000
Day 2	Firmament	7,500,000,000	Sun, Earth, Moon	4,600,000,000
Day 3	Seas, dry land, vegetation	3,750,000,000	Oceans; bacteria/ cells w/out nuclei	3,500,000,000
Day 4	Heavenly lights	1,875,000,000	Atmosphere thinned
			Cells with nuclei	1,800,000,000
Day 5	Sea creatures,	937,500,000	Animal life forms	700,000,000
	flying creatures		Cambrian Explosion	544,000,000
			Chordates, fish	490,000,000
Day 6-a		468,750,000	85% extinction	438,000,000
	Land animals		Amphibians	417,000,000
			82% extinction	367,000,000
	Creeping		Insects	350,000,000
	things		Reptiles	323,000,000
	Beasts, cattle		Mammals	248,000,000
			96% extinction	245,000,000
6-b		234,375,000	76% extinction	208,000,000
			Archaeopteryx	150,000,000
6-c		117,187,500	76% extinction	65,000,000
			Primates (lemurs,	“
6-d		58,593,750	monkeys,
6-e		29,296,875	apes)
6-f		14,648,437	Ramapithecus	14,000,000
6-g		7,324,218	Sahelanthropus	7,000,000
			Orrorin tugenensis	6,000,000
			Ardipithecus	4,400,000
			Australopithecus	4,000,000
6-h		3,662,109	Kenyanthropus	3,500,000
			Homo habilis	2,800,000
			Homo rudolfensis	1,900,000
6-i		1,831,054	Homo erectus	1,500,000
6-j		915,527	H. heidelbergensis	600,000
6-k	Man	457,763	H. Neanderthalensis	300,000
6-l		228,882	Homo sapiens	200,000
6-m	“	114,441
6-n		57,221
6-o		28,611
Day 7	Day of rest	14,306
Day 8	Adam	6,000	Wheel, writing	5,500
Day 9	Noah, Flood	5,000	Bronze Age	5,000
Day 10	Abraham	4,000	Iron Age	3,500
Day 11	David, Solomon	3,000	Rome	2,750
Day 12	Christ	2,000	Dark/Middle Ages	1,600
Day 13	(Crusades)	1,000	Modern Age	250
Day 14	Millennium/rest	(near future)

__________________

^109.Nature, May 16, 1996
^110.“1999: Archaeologists Find Evidence that Neandertals Practiced Cannibalism,” Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004
^111.Human Evolution, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004
^112.Prehistoric people, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)
^113.Wheel, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition
^114.Writing, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004
^115.Bronze Age, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition
^116.Iron Age, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)
^117.Ancient Rome, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

(Excerpted from Chapter 4, Primordial Planet Puzzles, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

 

Early Earth Enigmas (Part 1)

The universe appears to have been mathematically designed. Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who taught that the universe was built upon numbers, is known to have said: “Nature geometrizes.”¹

Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi, United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, is awed: “The believer might wonder, as does Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society, in his Just Six Numbers, at the extraordinary precision of the six mathematical constants that determine the shape of the Universe, such that if even one were fractionally different neither we nor the Universe would exist.”² 

Nobel laureate for physics Steven Weinberg concurs: “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values… One constant does seem to require incredible fine tuning.” He quantifies the tuning as one part in 10¹²⁰!³ 

Sir James Jeans, knighted British physicist, once remarked: “From the intrinsic evidence of His creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.”⁴

Isaiah expresses the same thought in enigmatic terms: “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, Measured heaven with a span And calculated the dust of the earth in a measure? Weighed the mountains in scales And the hills in a balance? (Isa 40:12, NKJV).

“Anthropic” planet

Earth, a tiny planet, is just one of the countless objects in the vastness of space, yet it is the only one known to support life. Scientists are puzzled by the numerous “accidents” that favor life on earth. Many conclude that Earth is “anthropic” -- that is, “specially made for man.”

Size of the Earth.

The scientific data suggest that the Earth did not randomly come into existence. It has precise measurements that look like the product of careful planning and design. So said God to Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?” (Job 38:4-5, NKJV).

If the Earth were larger, gravity would be stronger. Hydrogen would be unable to escape from the surface and collect in the atmosphere, rendering the planet inhospitable to life. If the Earth were smaller, gravity would be weaker. Oxygen would escape into space, and animals could have never emerged on the planet.

Location and motion.

Astrophysicist Paul Davies, in his book The Goldilocks Enigma (2007), nicknamed the Earth “the Goldilocks Planet.” It has just the right temperature, neither too hot nor too cold.⁵

Distance from the sun. The Earth lies at an ideal distance from the Sun: 93,000,000 miles (150,000,000 km) away. If the distance changed by as little as 2%, all life on Earth would perish. If the Earth were a bit farther from the sun, water would freeze; a little closer, water would evaporate. Consider our neighbors: Venus, closer to the Sun, is too hot; while Mars, farther away, is too cold.

Earth’s orbit. The Earth’s orbit around the Sun is just about 3% off a perfect circle – just right to keep water liquid. If its orbit were as elliptical as that of Mars, water would alternately boil when we are nearest to the Sun and freeze when we are farthest.

The Earth orbits the sun at a speed of about 66,600 miles per hour. That velocity is perfect to offset the gravitational pull of the sun, as well as keep the earth at an ideal distance. If the speed were slower, the Earth would be gradually pulled toward the sun, eventually having all life scorched to extinction. If faster, the Earth would move farther and farther away from the sun, and eventually become a frozen wasteland.

Rotation and axis. The Earth’s rotation period cannot be changed by even just a few percent. Too slow, the temperature differences between night and day would be too great. Too fast, wind velocities would become disastrous.

The tilt of the Earth’s axis is at a 23.5^o angle relative to the sun. Greater, summers would be much hotter and winters much colder, wreaking havoc on plant cycles and agriculture.

Neighboring objects. For a satellite, the moon is too big for the Earth. And, yet, it is just the right size. Its gravitational pull produces the tides that prevent the oceans from either boiling or freezing. Coastal waters are cleansed, oxygen and nutrients which sustain marine life are replenished, and the tilt of the Earth is stabilized.

The gargantuan planet Jupiter, with its massive gravitational force, occupies a nearby location that is favorable to our planet. Otherwise, Earth would be struck about a thousand times more frequently by asteroids, comets, and space debris.

Atmosphere and magnetosphere.

Oxygen. This life-sustaining gas comprises 21% of the Earth’s atmosphere. Much more than that would be harmful – oxygen could be toxic if breathed too long, as well as make the environment fire-prone.

Ozone, an unstable oxygen molecule, forms a layer in the top level of the atmosphere. The ozone layer blocks most of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation that can burn sensitive skin, damage eyes, and cause cancer.

Nitrogen. This constitutes 78% of the gases surrounding the planet. It dilutes the oxygen, serving as a fertilizer for plant life. Lightning bolts around the world mix nitrogen with oxygen each day, producing compounds that come down to earth with rain and enrich the soil.

Carbon dioxide. The amount of this gas in the atmosphere (3/100 of 1%) is just right – less would not be enough to keep vegetation thriving; more, say 10%, would be fatal to both animals and humans.

All the other necessary elements are present – carbon, hydrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, as well as liquid water -- in the right proportions, as though deliberately combined. Science writer Stuart Clark wonders: “Chemically speaking, Earth is simply better set up for life than its neighbors. So how come we got all the good stuff?”⁶

Magnetosphere. The Earth has just enough internal radioactivity to maintain its iron core in a molten state,⁷ thus creating a protective force field surrounding the planet as far as 40,000 miles out. The magnetosphere protects the Earth against cosmic radiation.

Isaiah tells us why God did all these: “For this is what the LORD says -- he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited…” (Isa 45:18a, NIV). 

The air we breathe

When the Earth became a solid body, about 4.6 billion years ago, the atmosphere is believed to have consisted solely of volcanic emissions -- a mixture of water vapor (85%), carbon dioxide (10%), sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen, with almost no oxygen.⁸

Rise of oxygen.

Around 2.4 billion years ago, new marine microorganisms capable of photosynthesis (primitive plants) began splitting water molecules to produce oxygen using the sun's energy.⁹  

Subsequently, oxygen escaped from the oceans to the atmosphere, starting the formation of the ozone layer, which acted as a sunscreen that reduced harmful ultraviolet rays striking the oceans. This allowed photosynthetic bacteria that previously lived in the depths to move up to the surface and increase the output of oxygen.¹⁰

About 100 million years later, organisms with 2-3 different cell types and deriving energy from oxygen appeared. Then followed more complex cells equipped with mitochondria (sausage-shaped structures that produce energy in cells).¹¹ Further increases of oxygen in the air led to the emergence of new air-breathing marine animals approximately 570 million years ago.¹²

Bigger creatures.

The availability of more oxygen greatly enhanced the metabolic efficiency of organisms in extracting nutrients from food and converting them to energy. Many marine creatures grew to enormous sizes. Chambered nautiluses that are eight inches wide today measured nine feet across.¹³ On land, cockroaches were about a foot long. Dragonflies had wings almost three feet in span.¹⁴

Air bubbles in amber (fossil resin from trees) strongly suggest that oxygen in the atmosphere might have been as high as 25%.¹⁵ Then, in the last 10 million years, atmospheric oxygen went down to its present level of 21%. Why?

Some scientists speculate that great fires burned over the earth about 10 million years ago, reducing the number of trees and, consequently, the amount of photosynthesis and oxygen.¹⁶

 

The wonders of water

Earth is the only planet positively known to have liquid water. The most abundant substance on earth, water covers approximately 71% of the planet’s surface.

Water is essential to life. Combined with carbon and certain other key elements, water is the basis of almost all the molecules of living organisms. Fluids primarily made up of water, like sap and blood, carry the vital materials that plants, animals, and humans need to live. Water is an ideal solvent for metabolism as it dissolves the food that sustains living organisms.

Where all the water came from remains an enigma. If the solar system and the Earth had formed from clouds of gases and dust, hardly any water would be found on Earth. Any water this close to the Sun would have been vaporized and blown away by the solar wind, like water vapor in the tails of comets.

 

Law of nature altered?

Most liquids contract as their temperature goes down. So, too, water. As it gets colder, water in rivers, lakes, and seas becomes denser and heavier, sinking and forcing the lighter, warmer water beneath to rise to the top. Yet, on reaching precisely 7^oF (4^oC) above zero, the process is inexplicably reversed! Water begins to expand until frozen into ice, its volume increasing by 10%. Being lighter, ice floats above liquid water.

The ice on the surface serves as an insulator that keeps the water below from freezing, protecting organisms beneath. If water did not stop contracting just before freezing point, ice would be heavier and sink to the bottom, where the sun's heat could not melt it. Eventually, layers upon layers of ice would pile up, turning the Earth into an ice planet.

Did God recalibrate a law of nature to make Earth hospitable to life? This reminds us of what He said through Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jer 29:11, NIV).

____________________

¹Quoted by Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, A Kabbalah for the Modern World, 1974, p. 16

²Jonathan Sacks, “Genesis and the origin of the Origin of the species,” The Times (London), August 29, 2008

³Steven Weinberg, “Life in the Universe,” Scientific American, October 1994

⁴Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 1930

⁵Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, 2007

⁶Stuart Clark, “Unknown Earth: Our Planet’s Seven Biggest Mysteries,” New Scientist, Sept. 7, 2008

⁷Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God, 1997, p. 191

⁸Atmosphere, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

⁹ScienceDaily, Mar. 22, 2006, Internet

¹“Rise Of Oxygen Caused Earth's Earliest Ice Age,” ScienceDaily, May 7, 2009, Internet

¹¹“Oxygen Triggered The Evolution Of Complex Life Forms,” Exo Life, Jan 29, 2004, Internet

¹²Atmosphere, loc. cit.

¹³National Geographic, January 1976; quoted by Dennis Petersen, Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, p. 100

¹⁴Dennis Petersen, Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, 2002, pp. 32-33

¹⁵Petersen, op. cit., p. 35

¹⁶“Oxygen Increase Caused Mammals To Triumph, Researchers Say,” ScienceDaily, Oct. 3, 2005, Internet

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

 

Early Earth Enigmas (Part 2)

 

First life forms

Scientists believe life on earth began in the water. Charles Darwin, who advanced the theory of evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, once wrote to a friend that life might have begun in “some warm little pond.” His evolutionary theory assumes that, billions of years ago, microscopic life spontaneously appeared.

 

Spontaneous generation?

Richard Dawkins, an atheist, summarizes the idea in his book, The Selfish Gene (1976): “The newly formed Earth had an atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, and water. These simple compounds were broken up by energy from sunlight, lightning, and exploding volcanoes, then reformed into amino acids. These accumulated in the sea and combined into protein-like compounds, producing a potentially ‘organic soup.’ Then, ‘a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident’ – a molecule that had the ability to reproduce itself.” (The accident, the author admitted, was exceedingly improbable.) Similar molecules clustered together, and then, by an exceedingly improbable accident again, wrapped a protective barrier of other protein molecules around themselves as a membrane. Thus, it is thought, the first “living” cell generated itself. (In the preface to his book, Dawkins says: “This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction.”)¹⁷

The first organic molecules are said to have been simple sugars and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Proteins, in turn, are the building blocks of living cells. The first living cell is presumed to have been anaerobic (surviving without oxygen), using methane for energy.¹⁸ 

The sudden appearance of life all by itself from non-living matter is called “spontaneous generation” or abiogenesis, which comes from the Greek words a (“without”), bio (“life”) and genesis (“birth”). However, this theory violates the law of biogenesis, which states that all life must come from preceding life of its kind.

Spontaneous dissolution. “Spontaneous generation” has serious problems. First, the same energy from sunlight, lightning, and volcanic explosions that split up the compounds in the atmosphere would have even more quickly destroyed any amino acids that formed. So, the amino acids had to reach the oceans quickly for protection. However, science writer George Wald observes that in the water “spontaneous dissolution is much more probable, and hence proceeds more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis.”¹⁹ Mike Riddle, a creationist, explains that water immediately destroys amino acids by hydrolysis (“water splitting”). The entry of a water molecule between two bonded molecules (such as amino acids) causes them to split. The “water tends to break chains of amino acids apart. If any protein had formed in the oceans 3.5 billion years ago, they would have quickly disintegrated.”²⁰

“Catch 22” situation. If there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, there would have been no ozone layer, and the ultraviolet rays from the sun would have instantly destroyed any newly forming amino acids. If there was oxygen, it would have soon oxidized and destroyed any self-organizing amino acids. Either way, the emergence of life was doomed from the start. Author Michael Denton notes in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985): “What we have is a sort of a ‘Catch 22’ situation. If we have oxygen we have no organic compounds, but if we don’t have oxygen we have none either”²¹ It was a no-win situation. But then something, or Someone, intervened.

 

Biogenesis vs. Abiogenesis

In the 1600s scientists believed life could arise from decaying matter, because maggots and flies emerged from dung, rotting meat, and garbage. Italian biologist Francesco Redi demonstrated in 1668 that maggots did not appear in meat if kept away from flies.²² In 1768 another Italian, naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani, proved that substances originally containing microorganisms, when boiled and then sealed, remained microbe-free.²³

It did not keep German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), a rabid Darwinian, from promoting abiogenesis. Biochemist Michael Behe says: “From the limited view of cells that microscopes provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a ‘simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon,’ not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced from inanimate material.”²⁴

Famous French microbiologist Louis Pasteur refuted abiogenesis in 1862 in his “On the Organized Particles Existing in the Air.” He showed that microbes would grow only if a solution was exposed to air with spores of bacteria. In 1869, British physicist John Tyndall demonstrated that when dust was present putrefaction occurred; in the absence of dust, no decay took place.²⁵

 

Lab-created “life”?

In 1953 chemist Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and Nobel laureate Harold Urey, put a mixture of gases through heat and electricity and produced a tar-like substance with some amino acids in it. The Miller-Urey result rocked the world: the “building blocks of life,” it was claimed, could be produced in the laboratory!

However, the experiment used a manmade “atmosphere” that did not include oxygen, which would have produced a different result. The process also had “unnatural” components such as a “trap” (which quickly removed chemical products from the destructive energy sources that made them). Further, biologist Gary Parker notes: “The molecules Miller made did not include only the amino acids required for living systems; they included even greater quantities of amino acids that would be highly destructive to any ‘evolving’ life.”²⁶

Besides, half the amino acids produced were chemically “right-handed.” Every living protein, whether in animals, plants, molds, bacteria, and even viruses -- except in some diseased or aging tissue – is made up of at least 300 amino acids, practically all of them structurally “left-handed.” Hence, the probability of a living protein being formed through sheer chance is equal to unerringly getting 300 “heads” in a row from the toss of a coin.

Co-authors Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds for a living protein to form solely by chance in one place as just one chance in 10^40,000. In comparison, statisticians regard a probability of less than 1 in 10⁵⁰ to be an absolute impossibility. They concluded that it was “an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”²⁷

The Miller-Urey experiment (and all other experiments after it) failed to produce even one single living protein – never mind that a protein still has a long, long way to go before becoming a complete living cell.

 

Enough time and chance?

Some scientists argue that, given enough time, as well as chance, all things are possible – even the emergence of the first living things from inanimate matter. Writer C. Folsome asked them in the magazine Scientific American: “Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book Energy Flow and Biology, computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.”²⁸

Chemist Ilya Prigogine, 1977 Nobel Prize laureate, sums it up in Physics Today: “The idea of the spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore improbable, even on the scale of billions of years.”²⁹ Gerald Schroeder informs us that: “Since 1979, articles based on the premise that life arose through chance random reactions over billions of years are not accepted in reputable journals.”³⁰

 

The “simple” cell.

Charles Darwin believed that single-celled organisms were most primitive. Until the first half of the 20^th century, scientists called the most basic living unit the “simple cell” -- made up of nothing more than a jelly-like “protoplasm.”

In 1963 Dr. George Palade of the Rockefeller Institute discovered a complex network of minuscule tubes and sacs within the protoplasm, now called the “endoplasmic reticulum.”³¹ It became evident that there is no such thing as a “simple” cell. Even the earliest unicellular organisms on earth were unimaginably complex. Molecular biologist Jonathan Wells and mathematician William Dembski concur that “the simplest life forms we know, the prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria, which lack a nucleus), are themselves immensely complex. Moreover, they are every bit as high-tech as the eukaryotic cells…”³² Single-celled animals can “catch food, digest it, get rid of wastes, move around, build houses, engage in sexual activity… with no tissues, no organs, no hearts and no minds…”³³ They even communicate with each other using chemicals.

We read in the National Geographic: “Each cell is a world brimming with as many as two hundred trillion tiny groups of atoms called molecules.”³⁴ Newsweek is quite graphic: “Each of those 100 trillion cells functions like a walled city. Power plants generate the cell’s energy. Factories produce proteins, vital units of chemical commerce. Complex transportation systems guide specific chemicals from point to point within the cell and beyond. Sentries at the barricades control the export and import markets, and monitor the outside world for signs of danger. Disciplined biological armies stand ready to grapple with invaders. A centralized genetic government maintains order.”³⁵

In addition, the “simple” cell has one capability not even today’s most advanced machines can do: It can replicate its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.

____________________

^17.Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, p. 16

^18.ScienceDaily, Mar. 22, 2006, Internet

^19.George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, August 1954, pp. 49-50

^20.Mike Riddle, “Can Natural Processes Explain the Origin of Life?”, The New Answers Book 2, 2008, p. 66

^21.Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1985, p. 261

^22.Spontaneous Generation, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

^23.Spontaneous Generation, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

^24.Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 1996, pp. 23-24

^25.Spontaneous Generation, op. cit.

^26.Gary Parker and Henry Morris, What Is Creation Science, 1982, p. 40

^27.Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, 1981, p. 24

^28.C. Folsome, “Life: Origin and Evolution, Scientific American, 1979; quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 89

^29.I. Prigogine, et al. , “Thermodynamics of Evolution,” Physics Today, Nov. 1972, pp. 25:23, and Dec. 1972, pp. 25:38

^30.Schroeder, op. cit., p. 89

^31.Petersen, op. cit., p. 92

^32.Jonathan Wells and William Dembski, How to Be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (or Not), 2008, p. 4

^33.L.L. Larison Cudmore, The Center of Life, 1977, pp. 13-14

^34.Rick Gore, “The Awesome Worlds Within a Cell,” National Geographic, September 1976, pp. 357-360

^35.Peter Gwynne, Sharon Begley and Mary Hager, “The Secrets of the Human Cell,” Newsweek, August 20, 1979, p. 48

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

 

Early Earth Enigmas (Part 3)

 

The theory of evolution

The roots of the theory of evolution goes back many years before Charles Darwin. In the 17^th century, scientists like Francis Bacon and William Harvey recognized it. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (d. 1802), wrote about it. The French naturalist Chevalier de Lamarck proposed a similar theory in 1809. In 1835 and 1837, Edward Blyth, a creationist, published a treatise on natural selection.³⁶

In 1855, Alfred Russel Wallace published the theory of evolution in a brief note in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. On March 9, 1858, he explained the theory in a letter to Charles Darwin.³⁷ Twenty months later, in 1859, Darwin published a more detailed version of the theory in his book that he had been at work on earlier: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It became an instant sensation.

The Theory of Evolution posits that all living things changed through the ages into all the life forms today. From the first living cell, “simple” organisms evolved into fish, then into amphibians, then into reptiles, then into birds and mammals, then into primates and, eventually, man.

Darwin speculated that similarities in different species, such as the five digits of a man’s hand, a bat’s wing, and a dolphin’s flipper, which he called “homology,” constituted evidence for a common ancestry. He capitalized on the idea of “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest” – that is, nature selected the fittest organisms to survive. The “fittest” individuals supposedly had traits that enabled them to fare better than other members of their groups.

Darwin’s book led many Christians to abandon their belief in the Biblical creation by God. Almost all universities and public schools today teach Darwinian evolution, which holds that the ten million-plus species on earth evolved from a single cell that suddenly came to life around 3.5 billion years ago. We must give credit to Darwin for honesty, though, because he admitted that his theory needed to be proven.

 

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”?

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel helped spread Darwin's theory of evolution through lectures and books. He popularized the catchphrase “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Accordingly, every animal’s embryonic stages (ontogeny) replicate in just a few weeks its species’ evolutionary history (phylogeny) which took millions of years. Thus, a human fetus begins life as a single cell, just like the first organisms on earth. Next, the cell multiplies as a hollow ball similar to sponges. The embryo then folds in to form a cuplike structure like jellyfish and corals. It afterward lengthens, passing through phases with gill slits, fin-like limbs, and a tail typical of fish and amphibians. The embryo then takes on a basic mammalian form, before finally assuming the shape of a primate.  

Haeckel, however, cheated. He altered illustrations to fit his theory when the similarity of embryos was not satisfactory. He was found out, charged with fraud, and convicted by a university court at Jena, Germany. Eventually, “The theory of recapitulation was destroyed in 1921 by Professor Walter Garstang in a famous paper. Since then no respectable biologist has ever used the theory of recapitulation, because it was utterly unsound, created by a Nazi-like preacher named Haeckel.”³⁸ Co-authors George Gaylord Simpson and William S. Beck (Life: An Introduction to Biology, 1965) confirm this: “It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny.”³⁹

Surprisingly, many modern textbooks still include the disproved idea as proof for evolution.

 

Mutation: engine of evolution?

Evolutionists claim that mutation, a change in the genetic material (DNA) inside the cells of plants and animals, is the engine of evolution. Mutational changes are said to be passed on to descendants – producing “improved” new members of the species, which gradually turn into a new distinct species.

Harmful, not helpful. For mutation to happen, new information has to be introduced in the genes of the organism. Yet, practically all mutations showed a loss, rather than a gain, of genetic information – resulting in missing eyes, limbs, wings, tails, etc. Author Lee Spetner (Not by Chance, 1996) reports:  “All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.”⁴⁰

In any case, slight mutational changes are usually insignificant, but major genetic mutations, instead of producing improved organisms, are generally harmful to the species. Author Peo C. Koller (Chromosomes and Genes, 1971) tells us: “The greatest proportion of mutations are deleterious to the individual who carries the mutated gene. It was found in experiments that, for every successful or useful mutation, there are many thousands which are harmful.”⁴¹ The Encylopedia Americana says that “mutants illustrated in biology textbooks are a collection of freaks and monstrosities, and mutation seems to be a destructive rather than a constructive process.”⁴²

Author G. Ledyard Stebbins (Processes of Organic Evolution, 1971) relates that in laboratory experiments, mutated insects were kept with normal members of their species. “After a greater or lesser number of generations the mutants are eliminated.”⁴³ They were unable to compete and died off, because they had become less adapted for survival than their normal fellows.

Statistically improbable. Researchers often conduct experiments with fruit flies, chosen for their short life spans. Gordon Rattray Taylor, former chief science advisor of BBC TV (The Great Evolution Mystery, 1983), observed: “It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world -- flies which produce a new generation every eleven days -- they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.”⁴⁴ Although fruit flies can be made to mutate into deformed specimens, they are all still fruit flies.

Co-authors P. Moorhead and M. Kaplan (“Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” 1967) report: “The Wistar Institute symposium in 1967 brought together leading biologists and mathematicians in what turned out to be a futile attempt to find a mathematically reasonable basis for the assumption that random mutations are the driving force behind evolution. Unfortunately, each time the mathematics showed the statistical improbability of a given assumption…”⁴⁵

Pierre-Paul Grasse, former French Academy of Sciences president and an evolutionist, admits: “No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.”⁴⁶

 

Anti-mutation mechanisms.

Two British scientists, Dr. A.R. Fersht and Dr. G.R. Lambert, made an important “discovery that enzymes exist within living cells that have just one assignment in nature. They find and correct any errors in the genetic code. These errors can creep into the code because of radiation, some chemicals, or for other reasons. However, these enzymes faithfully correct any errors, preventing mutations.”⁴⁷ Francis Hitching (The Neck of the Giraffe, 1982) adds: “Genes are a powerful stabilizing mechanism whose main function is to prevent new forms evolving.”⁴⁸

The law of genetics dictates that the offspring of the parent organism shall be of the same species. This is exactly what the Bible teaches: “But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds” (1 Cor 15:38-39).

 

Microevolution vs. macroevolution

 

Pierre-Paul Grasse, a zoologist, observed that adaptations within species have nothing to do with evolution. They are just minor changes around a stable genotype. For example, there are no less than 200 breeds of dog today, descended from just a few ancient dogs and wolves. They range from tiny Chihuahuas to burly St. Bernards, from cuddly Pomeranians to vicious pit bulls. Yet, they are all still dogs. Citrus fruits vary greatly – from sweet nectarines to sour lemons, little limes to large pomelos -- but each one is still a citrus. They are examples of “microevolution.” What Darwin “discovered” – such as the variations in the beaks of finches in the Galapagos Islands -- were limited biological principles that govern microevolution (change within a species), not those governing “speciation” or “macroevolution” (change from one species to another).

In breeding experiments, scientists have tried to keep modifying selected plants and animals indefinitely by crossbreeding to see if they could develop new species. Result? “Breeders usually find that after a few generations, an optimum is reached beyond which further improvement is impossible, and there has been no new species formed… Breeding procedures, therefore, would seem to refute, rather than support evolution.”⁴⁹

Microevolution in reverse. In the 1930s brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, Munich Zoo and Berlin Zoo directors, respectively, recreated extinct animals. First was the tarpan, a Stone Age horse whose drawings were on the walls of caves in France and the last of which died in captivity in 1887. They crossed stallions known to have descended from the tarpan with modern mares. After just two breedings, a foal with all the tarpan characteristics was born.

They had actually followed their father, who, while running the Berlin Zoo, crossed the ibex (a wild goat) with domesticated goats. The older Heck produced animals with the exact color of the bezoar, the Middle Eastern wild goat that was the progenitor of all goats today. 

The Heck brothers also recreated the auroch, the ancestor of modern cattle. The last of the huge auroch, which weighed up to a ton, died in a game preserve in Poland in 1627. After ten years of crossbreeding, they obtained a calf with all the traits of an auroch.⁵⁰

____________________

³⁶Loren C. Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X, 1979, pp. 45–80

³⁷Wallace, Alfred Russell, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition

³⁸Ashley Montagu, quoted by Luther D. Sunderland in Darwin’s Enigma, 1984, p. 119

³⁹George Gaylord Simpson and William S. Beck, Life: An Introduction to Biology, 1965, p. 241

⁴⁰Lee Spetner, Not by Chance, 1996, p. 138

⁴¹Peo C. Koller, Chromosomes and Genes, 1971, p. 127

⁴²Encyclopedia Americana, 1977, Vol. 10, p. 742

⁴³G. Ledyard Stebbins, Processes of Organic Evolution, 1971, pp. 24-25

⁴⁴Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, 1983, p. 48

⁴⁵P. Moorhead and M. Kaplan, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” Proceedings of the Symposium, Wistar Institute of Biology, 1967; cited by Schroeder, op. cit. p. 119

⁴⁶Pierre-Paul Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, 1977, pp. 88,103

⁴⁷Martin Hunter, “There’s a Lot of Holes in Evolutionary Theory,” May 12, 1998, tract

⁴⁸Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, 1982, p. 103

⁴⁹On Call, July 3, 1972, pp. 8,9

⁵⁰“Turning Back Nature’s Clock,” Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, 1975, pp. 104-105

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

  

 Early Earth Enigmas (Part 4)

 

Problems with evolution

There were a few gaps in the “evolutionary tree” when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Believers in the theory expected these gaps to be filled as fossil finds increased.

We read in the Newsweek magazine issue of March 29, 1982: “Darwin, and most of those who followed him, believed that the work of evolution was slow, gradual and continuous and that a complete lineage of ancestors, shading imperceptibly one into the next, could in theory be reconstructed for all living animals… But a century of digging since then has only made their absence more glaring.”⁵¹

 

Evolutionary gaps.

David B. Kitts of the School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma, said in the September 1974 issue of the journal Evolution: “Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”⁵²

Norman D. Newell, former Curator of Historical Geology at the American Museum of Natural History, wrote in Adventures in Earth History (1970) that “the gaps which separate the highest categories may never be bridged in the fossil record. Many of the discontinuities tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting.”⁵³

In Darwin’s time, all living things fell under two kingdoms: plant and animal. As science progressed and scientists recognized finer distinctions between organisms, the number of kingdoms rose to the five that we have today: Prokaryotae, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. As the groupings increased, the “missing links” multiplied.

 

No transitional forms.

Many one-celled life forms exist, but there are no known forms of life with 2, 3, 4, or 5 cells. Multi-celled organisms with 6–20 cells are parasites that depend on complex animals as hosts to perform functions such as respiration and digestion for them. If evolution is true, there should be transitional forms with 2–5 cells even as fossils.

Plants. Some 375,000 species of plants exist on earth today, and most have not changed from the way they first appeared as fossils. Geneticist Jerry Bergman notes in the Technical Journal (Internet): “A major problem for Neo-Darwinism is the complete lack of evidence for plant evolution in the fossil record. As a whole, the fossil evidence of prehistoric plants is actually very good, yet no convincing transitional forms have been discovered in the abundant fossil record.”⁵⁴

If plants evolved, nonvascular plants should have preceded vascular plants (with sap-carrying channels). However, there are no fossilized nonvascular plants in the rock layers formed before the earliest vascular plants appeared. Further, no traces of stages leading to the development of seeds and fruits have been found. Darwin wrote to his friend, botanist Joseph Hooker, that the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record was an “abominable mystery.”⁵⁵ 

Arthropods. Of creatures with jointed legs, the U.S. government handbook Insects states: “There is, however, no fossil evidence bearing on the question of insect origin; the oldest insects known show no transition to other arthropods”⁵⁶ like spiders, scorpions, centipedes, crustaceans, etc.

Vertebrates. A backbone distinguishes the fish, the first vertebrate, from invertebrates. For the fish to evolve into an amphibian, it had to develop a pelvic bone for legs to be attached to; but no fossil fish with an emergent pelvis has ever been found, not even the coelacanth. The fish has a heart with two chambers, an amphibian heart has three. The lungfish, which has gills plus a swim bladder it uses for breathing out of water, is often said to be the link between fish and amphibians. But the skull is entirely different. David Attenborough (Life on Earth, 1979) says that “the bones of their skulls are so different from those of the first fossil amphibians that one cannot be derived from the other.”⁵⁷ Apparently, neither the lungfish nor the coelacanth evolved into amphibians.

Richard Milton (Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, 1997) notes: “Although each of these classes (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and primates) is well represented in the fossil record, as of yet no one has discovered a fossil creature that is indisputably transitional between one species and another species. Not a single undisputed ‘missing link’ has been found in all the exposed rocks of the Earth’s crust despite the most careful and extensive searches.”⁵⁸

A “missing link”? Just a second. Have we not earlier seen the archaeopteryx, which looks like the link between reptiles and birds?

Some scientists believe birds evolved from theropods (dinosaurs that walked on hind legs). However, theropods had tiny “arms,” compared to the large wings of early birds. Moreover, their “hands” differed. Ann C. Burke and Alan Feduccia tell us in Science magazine (October 24, 1997): “Theropods have ‘fingers’ I, II, and III (having lost the ‘ring finger’ and little finger), while birds have fingers II, III, and IV.”⁵⁹ In the same issue, Richard Hinchliffe notes that “most theropod dinosaurs and in particular the birdlike dromaeosaurs are all very much later in the fossil record than Archaeopteryx (the supposed first bird).”⁶⁰ In a subsequent issue (November 14, 1997), John Ruben et. al. argue that “a transition from a crocodilian to a bird lung would be impossible, because the transitional animal would have a life-threatening hernia or hole in its diaphragm.”⁶¹

While the archaeopteryx appears like half-reptile and half-bird, no fossil remains look like an intermediate between a reptile and the archaeopteryx, or between the archaeopteryx and a true bird. W.E. Swinton (“The Origin of Birds,” Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, 1960) concluded: “The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.”⁶²  

Hybrids? There are other creatures that look like crosses between species, but are not. Whales, porpoises, dolphins, and manatees live in the water and look like fish, but they are mammals that suckle their young. Of course, the most enigmatic hybrid-looking animal is the platypus. It has a bill like a duck, feeds underwater like a fish, and lays eggs like a bird or reptile, but is actually a mammal that produces milk for its offspring. The only member of the Ornithorhynchidae (“bird-snout”) family, the platypus has neither “evolutionary” ancestors nor descendants even vaguely resembling it.

Charles Darwin had agonized: “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?... Why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?⁶³

And why, if evolution is true, does it seem to have stopped?

 

Vestigial organs?

Several seemingly useless parts of the human body, presumed to be evolutionary “leftovers,” are cited as proofs for the theory of evolution. Are they? Here are some of the best known.

Appendix. It is most often mentioned by evolutionists as one of the so-called “vestigial organs.” But it has been found that the appendix is part of the lymphatic system, which, especially in early life, produces antibodies that fight infections in the digestive system.⁶⁴

Tonsils (adenoids). These used to be removed from children when inflamed, but are now medically known to protect the nose and throat from infection against invading bacteria and viruses. They also filter out harmful substances that could pass into the digestive system. There are indications that people who have had their tonsils removed experience more problems in the upper respiratory tract.⁶⁵

Thymus. An organ in the chest cavity that shrinks from childhood until maturity, the thymus is now recognized as the control center of the body’s defense system against germs.

Coccyx. Better known as the “tailbone,” it supposedly shows man evolved from monkeys. However, patients who have had their tailbones removed have difficulty sitting. The coccyx also holds the muscles for bowel and childbirth movements, supports internal organs, and keeps the end of the alimentary canal closed. It anchors the gluteus maximus, the large muscle along the back of the thigh, which enables us to walk upright (something monkeys cannot do).

Writers Mario Seiglie et al. tell us in The Good News magazine (November-December 2006): “The list of what were once considered vestigial organs in our body has gone down from 100 in the early 20^th century to virtually zero…”⁶⁶                       

____________________

⁵¹Enigmas of Evolution,” Newsweek, March 29, 1982, p. 39

⁵²David B. Kitts, “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, September 1974, p. 467

⁵³Norman D. Newell, “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” Adventures in Earth History, 1970, pp. 644–645

⁵⁴“The Evolution of Plants: A Major Problem for Darwinists,” Technical Journal, 2002, Internet

⁵⁵Quoted in “What About Plant Evolution,” The Good News, November-December 2009, p. 13

⁵⁶Frank M. Carpenter, “Fossil Insects,” Insects, 1952, p. 18

⁵⁷David Attenborough, Life on Earth, 1979, p. 137

⁵⁸Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, 1997, pp. 253-254

⁵⁹Ann C. Burke and Alan Feduccia, “Developmental Patterns and the Identification of Homologies in the Avian Hand,” Science, 24 October 1997, pp. 666–668

⁶⁰Richard Hinchliffe, “The Forward March of the Bird-Dinosaurs Halted?” Science, 24 October 1997, p. 597

⁶¹John A. Ruben et al., “Lung Structure and Ventilation in Theropod Dinosaurs and Early Birds, Science, pp. 1267–1270

⁶²W. E. Swinton, “The Origin of Birds,” Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, 1960, p. 1

⁶³Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, Masterpieces of Science edition, 1958, pp. 136-137

⁶⁴David Menton, “The Human Tail and Other Tales of Evolution,” St. Louis MetroVoice, January 1994

⁶⁵J.D. Ratcliff, Your Body and How It Works, 1974, p. 137

⁶⁶Mario Seiglie, Tom Robinson and Scott Ashley, “Evolution’s ‘vestigial organ’ argument debunked,” God, Science and the Bible, The Good News, November/December 2006, p. 11

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

 

Early Earth Enigmas (Part 5)

 

 “Irreducible complexity.”

All organisms, from cells to humans, are “irreducibly complex” – all their basic components have to be in place before they can function. Thus, all species, extinct or extant, appear fully developed. There is no known partially-developed species.

Evolution, though, is believed to work through small, gradual steps, keeping new traits that it finds functional. Will it keep in reserve anything that does not work, even if potentially useful? There are no instances of half-developed appendages or organs in any fossilized or living organism – no budding eyes that could not see or partial wings that could not fly.

Blood clotting. Vital to healing wounds, blood-clotting in animals and man involves 20–30 complex chemical steps. Omission of one step, inclusion of an abnormal step, or alteration of the timing of a step will prevent blood from clotting and lead to death. If the first few of the many blood clotting factors were not immediately useful, the body would not have kept them, unaware that the rest of the factors would also form. How did such a complex, yet precise, process fully develop?

Charles Darwin had confessed in his famous book: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”⁶⁷

The eye. As a human embryo develops in its mother’s womb, some one million optic nerves start to grow from the back of each eye, simultaneous with a corresponding one million nerves from the brain. Each of the millions of nerves from both sides has to make its way through the tissues in between and connect to its counterpart – much like two work teams digging a tunnel from opposite sides of a mountain must meet precisely at the center according to the engineer’s plan.

Most animals, invertebrates as well as vertebrates, have eyes. Even the sea wasp, a jellyfish, has eyes. Among of the strangest are multiple-lensed, compound eyes found in fossilized worms!⁶⁸

Did the eye evolve? Darwin admitted the failure of his theory to explain the development of the eye. “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”⁶⁹

Solomon understood the matter quite well. “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them” (Prov 20:12).

In the sixth edition of his book, Darwin junked the idea of natural selection or “survival of the fittest” as the driving force behind the theory of evolution: “Natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures,” he said.⁷⁰

 

Genetic pre-programming.

How does evolution explain metamorphosis -- the form-changing stages in the life cycles of insects, amphibians, and crustaceans? Most of them hatch from eggs as larvae. Were they once all larvae before they evolved into more advanced forms? One may say larvae, just like some worms, reproduced sexually in the distant past. But there is no trace of reproductive organs in any type of larva. And, if a larva could not reproduce, how could it have evolved?

Some insect larvae pass through a cocoon stage when their brains, nerves, muscles, eyes, and other organs dissolve into goo. Does it mean some larvae evolved into goo before becoming, say, butterflies? How did they survive as goo for thousands or even millions of years?

Metamorphosis exemplifies genetic pre-programming. Similarly, ants and termites have the ability to grow wings in order to migrate when their colonies become overpopulated or destroyed. The insects use their wings for just one short flight, before shedding them to seek mates.⁷¹ Obviously, these are not cases of biological evolution.

 

The Cambrian “explosion.”

For nearly 3 billion years since life first appeared on earth, organisms remained microscopic in size: bacteria, protozoan, Ediacaran spheres and discs without mouths and appendages.⁷² Then, suddenly: the Cambrian “explosion.” Time magazine’s cover story in its Dec. 4, 1995, issue tells us in graphic terms: “Creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialized with the suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom. This explosion of biological diversity is described by scientists as biology’s Big Bang”⁷³

All anatomical designs. In a quantum leap, life advanced from microbial, amorphous organisms to complex multi-cellular life forms: rotifers, annelids (worms), arthropods, fish – equipped with jointed, food-gathering appendages, intestines, notochords, gills, eyes – all the anatomical designs found in the animal phyla existing today. Oddly, no new phylum has appeared since the Cambrian Explosion. Succeeding developments have been confined to variations within each phylum.⁷⁴

In fact, says Paul Chien, Biology Dept. Chair of the University of San Francisco, the number of phyla has even decreased! “A simple way of putting it is that currently we have about 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla discovered during that period of time (Cambrian) adds up to over 50 phyla. That means more phyla in the very, very beginning, where we found the first fossils, than exist now… The theory of evolution implies that things get more complex and get more and more diverse from one single origin. But the whole thing turns out to be reversed -- we have more diverse groups in the very beginning, and in fact more and more of them die off over time, and we have less and less now.”⁷⁵

He adds: “Also, the animal explosion caught people’s attention when the Chinese confirmed they found a genus now called Yunnanzoon that was present in the very beginning. This genus is considered a chordate, and the phylum Chordata includes fish, mammals and man. An evolutionist would say the ancestor of humans was present then. Looked at more objectively, you could say the most complex animal group, the chordates, were represented at the beginning, and they did not go through a slow gradual evolution to become a chordate.”⁷⁶

No ancestors. For new life forms to appear, it would have taken hundreds of millions of years for the thousands of mutations needed to alter existing genes. Yet, the fossil record indicates that the Cambrian Explosion transpired in 5 million years or less.⁷⁷ Further, there is no evidence of mutational evolution within the 5-million-year span of the Cambrian explosion.^78,79 Colin Patterson (Evolution, 1978) avers: "Most of the major groups of animals (phyla) appear fully fledged in the early Cambrian rocks and we know of no fossil forms linking them."⁸⁰

Paleontologist Alfred S. Romer corroborates that: “Below this (Cambrian period), there are vast thicknesses of sediments in which the progenitors of the Cambrian forms would be expected. But we do not find them; these older beds are almost barren of evidence of life, and the general picture could reasonably be said to be consistent with the idea of a special creation at the beginning of Cambrian times.”⁸¹

Surprisingly, even staunch evolutionist Richard Dawkins seems to agree: “If progressive evolution, from simple to complex is correct, the ancestors of these full-blown creatures in the Cambrian should be found; but they have not been found and scientists admit there is little prospect of their ever being found. On the basis of the facts alone, on the basis of what is actually found in the earth, the theory of a sudden creative act in which the major forms of life were established fits best.”⁸²

Darwin had acknowledged the possibility of his theory’s demise: “If numerous species… have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution.”⁸³ 

Sudden entry and exit. Many scientists have arrived at that conclusion. David M. Raup (Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, January 1979): “Species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.”⁸⁴ Steven M. Stanley (The New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981): “The record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much… After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before becoming extinct.”⁸⁵ Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (“Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, May 1977): “The history of most fossils includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: (1) Stasis. Most species… appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear… (2) Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors: it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’.”⁸⁶

George Sim Johnston (“An Evening with Darwin in New York,” Crisis, April 2006) sums it all up: “This is the verdict of modern paleontology: The record does not show gradual, Darwinian evolution. Otto Schindewolf, perhaps the leading paleontologist of the 20^th century, wrote that the fossils ‘directly contradict’ Darwin.”⁸⁷

Darwin confessed to fellow-scientists in his letters: “It (the theory of evolution) is a mere rage of a hypothesis with as many flaws and holes as sound parts…” He considered the possibility that, “I… have devoted my life to a fantasy.”⁸⁸

 

Unscientific theory.

C.F. Morgan (“Evolution Not Based on Fact,” 1998) points out that “true science is limited to observable phenomena. To be truly scientific, something must be observable, documentable, repeatable, experimentally verifiable, and testable, among other things. Conversely, evolution is a philosophical belief about the past based upon subjective interpretations and opinions of scientific data which exists in the present… Evolution is not a fact. It is not even a good theory. It has never been observed, and there is no direct evidence that it has ever occurred. It is no more than a religious or philosophical belief based upon choice, not science.”⁸⁹

Mathematician I.L. Cohen (Darwin Was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities, 1984) confirms that “every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary as it is not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability concepts. Darwin was wrong… The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake in science.”⁹⁰

Arthur L. Bruce (“Evolution Is a Creation Myth,” 1998) comments: “Actually, evolution is not even a scientific theory because it cannot be tested by the scientific method. It is an unscientific hypothesis or speculation about origins that contradicts the basic laws and facts of science. It is the ‘creation myth’ upon which the religion of secular humanism is founded. Its proper place for study in the public schools is not the science classroom but the social studies or humanities classroom where it should be examined in comparison with the classical myths and other religions of the world.”⁹¹ (In the late 1990s the states of Alabama, Arizona, and New Mexico declared that the subject of evolution can only be taught as one theory of origins and not as fact.)

Austin H. Clark (“Animal Evolution,” Quarterly Review of Biology, December 1928) concedes: “Thus so far as concerns the major groups of animals, the creationists seem to have the better of the argument. There is not the slightest evidence that any one of the major groups arose from any other. Each is a special animal complex related, more or less closely, to all the rest, and appearing, therefore, as a special and distinct creation.”⁹²

Sir Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe (Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism, 1981) conclude: “The speculations of The Origin of Species turned out to be wrong… It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out…”⁹³

 ____________________

⁶⁷Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859, p. 179

⁶⁸Donald G. Mikulic et al., “A Silurian Soft-Bodied Biota,” Science, 10 May 1985, pp. 715–717

⁶⁹Darwin, op. cit., pp. 146,175

⁷⁰Op. cit., Sixth Edition, The Modern Library, 1872, p. 66

⁷¹Termite, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)

⁷²Schroeder, op. cit. p. 94

⁷³Madeline Nash, “When Life Exploded,” Time, Dec. 4, 1995, p. 68

⁷⁴Schroeder, op. cit. pp. 92-93

⁷⁵Paul Chien, “Explosion of Life,” 30 June 1997 Interview, origins.org/articles/chien_explosionoflife.html, p. 2

⁷⁶Op. cit., p. 3

⁷⁷S. Bowring et al., “Calibrating Rates of Early Cambrian Evolution,” Science, 1993; cited by Schroeder, op. cit., pp. 116-117

⁷⁸R. Gore, “The Cambrian Explosion of Life,” National Geographic, October 1993

⁷⁹R. Kerr, “Evolution’s Big Bang Gets Even More Explosive,” Science, 1993

⁸⁰Colin Patterson, Evolution, 1978, p. 133

⁸¹Alfred S. Romer, “Darwin and the Fossil Record,” Natural History, October 1959, p. 466

⁸²Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, p. 14

⁸³Charles Darwin, op. cit., 1902 edition, Part Two, p. 54

⁸⁴David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, January 1979, p. 23

⁸⁵Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981, p. xv

⁸⁶Stephen J. Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, May 1977, pp. 13-14

⁸⁷George Sim Johnston, “An Evening with Darwin in New York,” Crisis, April 2006, Internet

⁸⁸Adrian Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, 1991, pp. 475-477

⁸⁹C.F. (Frank) Morgan, “Evolution Not Based on Fact,” May 4, 1998, “Letters to the Editor,” National Institute for Inventors tract

⁹⁰I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities, 1984, p. 209-210

⁹¹Arthur L. Bruce, “Evolution Is a Creation Myth,” May 23, 1998, “Letters to the Editor,” National Institute for Inventors tract

⁹²Austin H. Clark, “Animal Evolution,” Quarterly Review of Biology, December 1928, p. 539

⁹³Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism, 1981, pp. 96–97

 

 (Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

 

Early Earth Enigmas (Part 6)

 

Divinely designed DNA?

When the cell of a bacterium divides, it becomes two bacteria, not two amoebae. Apple trees bear apples, not oranges. A smooth-coated Siamese cat cannot give birth to thick-furred Persian kittens, although they belong to the same feline family. All living species, as well as varieties within them, stay the same from one generation to the next.

The Creator had apparently intended it to be that way from the very beginning: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so” (Gen 1:24).

Physically responsible for this biological order is a chemical molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which forms part of threadlike chromosomes inside all living cells (except red blood cells and some viruses). In the form of two intertwined chains in a double helix (spiral), like a twisted ladder, each DNA comprises thousands of encoded genes that govern heredity, the transmission of physical characteristics from parent to offspring.

 

“Chicken or egg” paradox.

Proteins depend on DNA for their formation. Yet, DNA cannot form without pre-existing protein. Which came first?

Chemistry lecturer John C. Walton further lamented: “The origin of the genetic code presents formidable unsolved problems. The coded information in the nucleotide sequence is meaningless without the translation machinery, but the specification for this machinery is itself coded in the DNA. Thus without the machinery the information is meaningless, but without the coded information the machinery cannot be produced! This presents a paradox of the ‘chicken and egg’ variety, and attempts to solve it have so far been sterile.”⁹⁴

 

Stored genetic information.

DNA is stored information written in a genetic language with a four-letter (nucleotide) alphabet and grammatical rules, telling the cells how to function and reproduce. Despite having only four letters, through their various combinations DNA is able to maintain the distinctions not only among all species, but also between individuals of each species. The language components in the human gene are identical to that of other organisms, say, a snail. Only the sequence is different.⁹⁵

One of the tiniest one-celled organisms is the bacterium R. coli. Scientists estimate it has about 2,000 genes, with some 1,000 enzymes each. Every enzyme contains roughly one billion nucleotides or letters of the chemical alphabet, comparable to bytes in computer language.

Physicist Jonathan Sarfati reckons that the “amount of information that could be stored in a pinhead’s volume of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books 500 times as high as the distance from Earth to the moon, each with a different, yet specific content. Putting it another way, while we think that our new 40 gigabyte hard drives are advanced technology, a pinhead of DNA could hold 100 million times more information.”⁹⁶

 

Information from intelligence.

Information is nonmaterial and, therefore, could not have originated from matter. Information can only come from intelligence. Co-authors L. Lester and R. Bohlin tell us: “Intelligence is a necessity in the origin of any informational code, including the genetic code…”⁹⁷ The vast amounts of information in the DNA can only have come from an intelligent source.

1962 Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA structure, had said that the more he studied the DNA double-helix, the more he became convinced that it could not have evolved by chance. In his book Life Itself, he wrote: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origins of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”⁹⁸

On December 16, 2010, the History Channel aired interviews with scientists who admitted that evolution of the DNA molecule by chance or accident is totally impossible.⁹⁹

Designed on purpose. Biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania (Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 1996) construes that “the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity; rather they were planned. The designer knew what the systems would look like when they were completed, then took steps to bring the systems about… Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent design.”¹⁰⁰

Natural processes, such as mutation, cannot alter the DNA. I.L. Cohen says that “any physical change of any size, shape or form is strictly the result of purposeful alignment of billions of nucleotides (in the DNA). Nature or species do not have the capacity to rearrange them nor to add to them… The only way we know for a DNA to be altered is through a meaningful intervention from an outside source of intelligence – one who knows what it is doing, such as our genetic engineers are now performing in the laboratories…”¹⁰¹

Every living cell (except a few highly specialized ones) carries in its DNA all the information needed reproduce a new, identical organism. To clone an entire human being, the scientist needs just one cell.

 ____________________

 

⁹⁴John C. Walton, “Organization and the Origin of Life,” Origins, 1977, pp. 30–31

⁹⁵Dawkins, op. cit., Oxford University Press 30^th Anniversary Edition, 2006, p. 2

⁹⁶Jonathan Sarfati, DNA: Marvelous Messages or Mostly Mess?, March 2003, Internet

⁹⁷L. Lester and R. Bohlin, The Natural Limits to Biological Change, 1989, p. 157

⁹⁸Francis Crick, Life Itself, p. 88; quoted by Gary Stearman, “Rael, Inc., “Cloning for Life,” Prophecy in the News, February 2003, p. 12

⁹⁹Jan Marcussen, Newsletter, Mid-January Y2K+11, p. 2

¹⁰⁰Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 1996, p. 193

¹⁰¹Cohen, loc. cit.

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)

 

 Early Earth Enigmas (Part 7)

 

Alternative theories

The absence in the fossil record of transitional forms that would prove the Theory of Evolution has led many frustrated evolutionists to consider alternative theories for the development of life forms on Earth.

 

Theistic Evolution.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, many Catholics and Protestants accepted Theistic Evolution, the belief that the process of biological evolution was divinely supervised. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created the first cell, then afterward allowed evolution to proceed, intervening only occasionally. He waited for primitive man to evolve into the first perfect human being before endowing him with a soul. The hybrid doctrine is a combination of divine creation and Darwinian evolution.

Botanist Asa Gray (d. 1888), one of Darwin's leading American disciples, embraced a variant of the concept. He argued that, only in special cases like those of human beings and complex organs such as the eye, did God carry out direct special creation.

Geologist Arnold Guyot, a staunch anti-Darwinist, advocated at least three interventions by the Creator: first, when He created matter; second, when He created life; and, third, when He created man.¹⁰²

 

Punctuated Equilibrium.

In an attempt to explain the absence of transitional forms, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History curator, jointly proposed the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in several articles in scientific publications (Mammals in Paleontology, 1972; Nature, 1993; Paleontology, 2007).^103,104,105 Newsweek magazine reported on March 29, 1982: “In 1972 Gould and Niles Eldredge collaborated on a paper intended… to resolve a professional embarrassment for paleontologists: their inability to find the fossils of transitional forms between species, the so-called ‘missing links’.” Their concept: “Instead of changing gradually as one generation shades into the next, evolution as Gould sees it, proceeds in discrete leaps. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium there are no transitional forms between species, and thus no missing links!”¹⁰⁶ 

Gould and Eldredge speculate that speciation (the change from an old species to a new one) usually occurs in small, isolated, peripheral groups rather than in the main populations of species, making their fossilized remains harder to find. Fossils of the general population are usually found, which creates the impression of the unchanging nature or stasis of most species over millions of years.¹⁰⁷

Panspermia (spores from space).

Sir Fred Hoyle mused that “life could not have originated here on the Earth. Nor does it look as though biological evolution can be explained from within an earth-bound theory of life.”¹⁰⁸ Earlier, in 1908, Svante Arrhenius theorized that spores could have drifted to Earth from other star systems. These gave rise to the first living cells that later evolved into more complex organisms.¹⁰⁹

Nobel laureate Francis Crick similarly proposed that “life on earth may have sprung from tiny organisms from a distant planet, sent here by space ship as part of a deliberate act of seeding”¹¹⁰ Crick gave the old theory, known as “panspermia” (from Greek pan, “of all,” and sperma, “seed”), a new twist: “directed panspermia.” Some people find this plausible. J. Horgan wrote in the Scientific American (February 1992): “Given the weaknesses of all theories of terrestrial genesis (the origin of life on Earth), directed panspermia (the deliberate planting of life on Earth) should still be considered a serious possibility.”¹¹¹

Panspermia, though, fails to answer the question of life’s origin. It merely takes the problem of creation out to space. Just how life arose on a planet many light years away is not explained.

 

Progressive Creation

In the 1930s Russell L. Mixter, a Wheaton College graduate, formed the concept that God created the universe and the various forms of life on earth gradually, over millions and billions of years. Creation was accomplished in progressive steps -- hence the name of the doctrine:  Progressive Creationism. In 1954 theologian Bernard Ramm wrote The Christian View of Science and Scripture, popularizing the idea which no longer demanded a young Earth and the recent creation of man.¹¹²

Progressive Creationism is thus a form of Old Earth creationism, accepting geological and cosmological estimates for the age of the Earth and the universe, while teaching that the successive species of plants and animals in the fossil record were the products of divine creation, not Darwinian evolution. As earlier organisms died off and became extinct, God created new species to replace them.

Most of God’s replacements were typically improved models. Each time, the basic forms or "templates" of previously existing life are used -- with just a few minor adjustments. For instance, the DNA of a gorilla has been found to be 97.8% similar to a man’s; the chimpanzee’s DNA resembles that of a human being by 98.2%.

The leading proponents of Progressive Creationism are Reasons To Believe, organized by astronomer Hugh Ross, and Answers in Creation, another organization set up in 2003 to publish rebuttals to Young Earth Creationists’ scientific claims, which are regarded as pseudoscience.¹¹³

____________________

¹⁰²Theistic Evolution, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹⁰³“Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” Mammals in Paleontology, 1972, pp. 82-115

¹⁰⁴“Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age,” Nature 366, 1993, pp. 223-227

¹⁰⁵“Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleontology, 2007, pp. 115-151

¹⁰⁶Enigmas of Evolution,” Newsweek, March 29, 1982, p. 39

¹⁰⁷Evolution, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004

¹⁰⁸Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, 1983, p. 242

¹⁰⁹Cited by Gary Stearman, “Rael, Inc., “Cloning for Life,” Prophecy in the News, February 2003, p. 11

¹¹⁰Francis Crick, “Life Itself – Its Origin and Nature,” Futura, 1982; quoted by Mark Eastman and Chuck Missler, The Creator Beyond Time and Space, 1996, p. 62

¹¹¹J. Horgan, “Profile: Francis H.C. Crick,” Scientific American, February 1992; quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 90

¹¹²Old Earth Creationism, Wikipedia, Internet

¹¹³Progressive Creationism, Wikipedia, Internet

 

(Excerpted from Chapter 5, Early Earth Enigmas, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)