William Curtisa
Cosmology, which in the discipline of astronomy deals with the origin, structure, and space-time relationships of the universe, has at the present time three naturalistic, and three creationist approaches to the origin of the universe.
The naturalistic theories are: 1) the Steady State, 2) the Big Bang, and 3) the Plasma theory. Creationists may be classified into three groups generally referred to as: 1) theistic evolutionists, 2) accommodation theorists, and 3) literal six-day creationists. This paper will deal with the most widely accepted of the naturalist theories, the Big Bang, and its relation to the latest astronomical discoveries, along with an apologetic for a literal, point in time, creation consistent with scientific data.
Measuring Distance in Astronomy
Measuring distance in space may be classified in two categories: direct, and indirect.
Direct measurement is done by bouncing radar and laser beams off the moon and the planets. For nearby stars, as well as the planets, trigonometric parallax (the angular difference of an object as seen by an observer from two different locations) may be used to measure their distance from the observer. When the distances exceed 25 Parsecs,1 the angle of parallax becomes too small to measure, so astronomers have developed indirect techniques which are believed to measure the distance of an object in space from earth.
Indirect measurement is based on three different techniques, all of which are open to some question. 1) Luminosity of light varies with the square of the distance travelled, and the distance is then estimated on how luminous they appear on earth. 2) Cepheids, which are pulsating variable stars in space, are read as their light varies and their distance estimated. Most important to the Big Bang theory is 3) the Red Phase Shift, seen in the light received from many of the stars. This so-called Red Shift has been interpreted as the relative velocity between the star and the observer. More will be
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said about the third indirect method as this perspective is developed.
What we know about the Universe
Structures have been found recently that are larger than anything astronomers have predicted. At this point it might be helpful to review what we presently know of the universe. Let us start with the nearby and progress to the outermost.
First, there is the inner solar system (Fig. 1) in which the earth is uniquely placed to support life as we know it. The diameter of the known solar system (Fig. 2) is about 80 Astronomical Units.2 There are about 30 stars ten light years or less from the earth. These are our near neighbors and the distances to these stars are all derived from trigonometric parallax.
Figure 1. Inner Solar System
Next comes our galaxy which is called the Milky Way (Fig. 3). The distance across the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years. This estimate of distance, as are all further distances, is based on indirect methods of measurement. The Milky Way belongs to a local group of galaxies (Fig. 4) which includes the Andromeda galaxy. Some galaxies are spirals, some elliptical, and some are irregular. The distance across this local group is about 4 million light years. The larger group of galaxies of which our local group is a part is the Virgo Super Cluster (Fig. 5). This Super Cluster, which is now known to be smaller than most, is 60 million light years across.
In 1989 Margaret J. Geller and John P. Huchra of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered something much larger than the Virgo Super Cluster. It was north of the Milky Way and it measured 500 million light years across. They called it the “Great Galactic Wall” (Fig. 6). The wall is so large and so massive that it could not have been built by gravitational attraction during the 15 billion year age of the universe (Geller and Huchra 1989).
In 1990 a structure was found that is over ten times larger. David Koo of the University of California, Alexander Szalay of Johns Hopkins University, and Richard Kron and Jeffrey Munn of the University of Chicago surveyed the North Galactic Pole from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Thomas Broadhurst and Richard Ellis of the University of Durham, Australia, did a similar survey of the South Galactic Pole from the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Australia (Feinberg 1990). These astronomers found that when they charted the hundreds of galaxies that had been measured, they were organized in clumps. The Super Clusters appear at regular intervals about 400 (some say 200) million light years apart. Each clump contains the same density of galaxies. There are seven clumps including the great wall to the north and seven to the south. Koo suspects that we may be seeing a series of “Great Walls” and when all directions are mapped we may be inside a series of bubbles or shells (Fig. 7, ibid).
For the naturalist, it will take a lot of hard work to explain how the universe could generate these great massive
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clumps. The idea that the universe could be structured so well at such vast distances is a major stumbling block to the Big Bang theory. Stephen Hawking says: “Either we have failed to see 99% of the universe, or we are wrong about how the universe began” (Harris 1992:226).
Historical Development of the Big Bang Theory
Edwin P. Hubble, an eminent American astronomer in the 1920s, explained the red shift seen in the light emanating from the stars and galaxies as relative velocity. Thus it was postulated that the universe is expanding. Since everything appeared to be red shifted, it seemed logical that the cosmos was once concentrated in a very small space at a definite time, and expanded from there (Hubble 1936).
Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, and Alexander A. Friedman, a Russian physicist, each used Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity to describe how such an expanding universe might evolve. George Gamov, a Russian-born physicist, who made his reputation by explaining radioactive decay, began to develop the quantitative aspects of the theory after coming to the U.S. in the 1930s (Gamov 1952). In the early 1930s other astronomers showed that most stars were composed predominately of hydrogen and helium. It was reasonable to assume that hydrogen was the first element to form in an evolutionary scenario because its nucleus contains but a single proton. Helium, the next heaviest element, whose nucleus contains two protons and two neutrons, was the first higher element formed by the fusion of hydrogen. But protons will fuse only if some force overcomes the immense electrostatic repulsion between them. This process seemed to require so much heat and pressure that only a primordial event of the magnitude of a nuclear explosion could have provided the right conditions, hence the Big Bang. Stephen Brush wrote a complete history of the entire theory (Brush 1992).
Figure 2. Solar System
Today the most widely accepted hypothesis as to the origin of the universe and everything in it is the evolutionary cosmological theory called the Big Bang. It is almost universally spoken of as an established fact in popular science journals and scholarly papers alike (Bergman 1992).
In this decade, the Big Bang has received much publicity in the media and has come under attack as well as received support from the scientific community. The main evidence for the Big Bang is actually very limited and consists primarily of: 1) the red shift, 2) the so-called cosmic background noise, and 3) the postulate that the motion of the stars and all stellar objects is necessary in order to prevent gravitational collapse. We will examine these aspects from a scientific approach and draw some scientific and philosophical conclusions.
Analyzing the Data
The Expanding Universe:
The expansion of the universe is primarily based on the interpretation of the red shift seen in the spectral analysis of
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stellar light. A tremendous amount of data has been gathered on the red shift phenomenon since the first measurements were taken in 1912. Although a minority of galaxies manifest a blue shift (e.g., Andromeda), it is accepted by most astronomers that this minority can be explained without doing harm to the hypothesis that the entire universe is expanding. It should be pointed out to these astronomers that, not overlooking the exception when the exception is almost at the limits of one’s measuring devices, is what led Kepler to solve the puzzle of elliptical orbits. And, of course, this was in opposition to the majority view of his time which was that the planets were in circular orbit.
Hubble (1936) and Gamov (1952) explain the red shift as a relative velocity indication of the light source. This explanation comes from wave phenomena in a medium as shown by the studies of Doppler. He proved that sound coming to an observer from a source moving relative to the observer, has its wave length changed, altering the sound which the observer hears. Thus sound coming from a source moving away from the observer would have a longer wave length as the source extends its distance between pulses. When the analogy was applied to light (which has both wave and matter properties and requires no medium of transport), Hubble concluded that the transition to the infra-red side of the spectrum, i.e., a longer wavelength, showed that these nebulae were constantly moving further away.
In 1929, Hubble tied the apparent distance of these nebulae to their apparent speed, i.e., red shift, implying that the greater red shifted objects were the farthest away. These observations led Hubble to the hypothesis that the universe is constantly expanding. Since it does not appear that energy is being added to our present system, these stars cannot be continuing to accelerate. Logically, therefore, their higher velocity was imparted at the beginning of the assumed expansion. Thus the theory of an expanding universe, first hypothesized by Friedman and Lemaitre, was said to have been verified on an experimental basis by Hubble and his associates. This has become the predominant naturalistic explanation for the evolution of the universe.
The first question we need to ask regarding this hypothesis is: does the red shift of the spectral lines actually indicates a relative velocity of these stars from the observer on earth? The second question is: what about the significant anomalies, of which there are several, such as blue shifted galaxies and the apparent dichotomy of the data from quasars (discussed below)? A minority of scientists have concluded that the red shift measurements of galaxies alone do not prove an expanding universe because other equally valid explanations exist for them (Silk 1989).
Figure 3. Milky Way Galaxy
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These explanations fall into three categories. The most straight-forward is that we are looking at a perfectly ordered system set in relative motion with some stars moving toward us and others moving away, hence accommodating the anomalies of blue shifts and quasars. William G. Tifft of the University of Arizona has examined lists of red shifts from distant galaxies (1992). Before plotting the red shifts on a graph, he corrected them for the effect of the earth’s motion. If the red shifts from these objects are the result of their speeding away from earth, their red shifts should be evenly spread over the range of known red shifts. Tifft found that they are not. The red shifts are clumped in patterns at intervals of about 72 km per second, with some half that value, and some one-third.
Astronomers were skeptical, so a team from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh refigured the values, but they came up with the same results!
Tifft did a second study of the data which shocked astronomers. He showed that galaxy red shifts measured from earth have changed during the years they have been under observation (Tifft 1992). This change is completely unexplainable by the proponents of the Big Bang theory. Researchers say that the change in red shifts is real, and large enough that within a few years Tifft expects to test the rate of these changes.
This is exactly what we would expect in a created and ordered universe. Some celestial bodies are moving away, some are moving toward us, and some are moving sideways relative to us. Big Bang theorists, on the other hand, insist that the universe is expanding and everything is moving away from us.
Other explanations for the red shift are that they do not indicate relative velocity at all but are caused by a loss of energy as light photons travel the vast expanse of space, hence the red shift. Or there is the possibility that the red shift is a gravitational effect caused by varying densities of the source. It is clear from Einstein’s theory of general relativity that light is influenced by gravity. This phenomenon was verified experimentally in 1919 (Born 1962), and again, in 1976 by Irwin Shapiro and his colleagues at M.I.T. working with radio signals between the Viking spacecraft on Mars and antennae on Earth (Shapiro et al. 1979).
According to the theory of general relativity, the spectrum of light from a source located at a distance R from a
Figure 4. Local Group of Galaxies
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mass M will suffer a gravitational red shift z when detected by a distant observer such that z = GM/Rc2, where G is the gravitational constant and c is the speed of light.
Therefore, with gravity altering the electromagnetic signal (light), the more dense the source, the greater the red shift. Thus if the source were as dense as a black hole, light would not escape at all. This also allows for the anomalies of blue-shifted galaxies and quasars.
This brings us to a discussion of quasars. Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe, some of them having luminosities more than 100 times greater than the brightest known galaxy. Beginning in the early 1960s, with the growth of radio astronomy, more than 250 Quasi-Stellar objects have now been determined. Some quasars discovered since the mid-1980s have a z of more that 4, which astronomers assumed would make them the most distant objects yet found in the universe (a z of 4 means that the spectral lines are shifted to wavelengths 4 times greater than normal, implying their relative velocity moving away from the earth is 93% of the speed of light).
Figure 5. Virgo Supercluster
Arp Loses Because He Is Not “Scientifically Correct”
Halton Arp, a Harvard graduate, was once considered the world’s leading expert on quasars. As a practicing astronomer at Cal Tech and Mt. Palomar Observatory, he showed from 15 years of field research, that quasars with their enormous red shift were not distant anomalies at the outer limits of cosmic space but were bodies within our own galactic neighborhood. (Arp 1987; Jueneman 1990a, 1990b).
The evidence that Arp discovered is, of course, at odds with the red shift hypothesis underlying the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang theorizes that a galaxy’s distance and the velocity of its recession are compatable with Hubble’s equation which is v = Hr, where r is the distance in mega-parsecs and v is the velocity in km/sec. H is Hubble’s constant which, it should be noted, has varied over the years from 1 to 100, with a current best estimate of 55, and with a variance of ± 7. Needless to say, most of the astronomical community knew their pet theory was in big trouble if Arp was correct!
Arp at first was given a chance to change his conclusions. If he refused he was told that he would be denied all telescope time. He refused to deny what he had discovered. So today Arp is an astronomer in exile in West Germany, unwelcome at Palomar, and all the North American major observatories as well (Arp 1987:cover). Note that his quasar data are consistent with an ordered universe having a variety of stellar objects traveling at differing velocities in whatever proximity they have been placed, just like our own solar system.
Cosmic Background Radiation:
It was predicted early in the original work on the Big Bang theory that there should exist background radiation permeating the universe equal to a few degrees Kelvin. This was called the “echo” of the original explosion. In 1965
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Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, radio engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel NJ, discovered microwave background radiation of 2.7° K (Brush 1992). Evolutionary cosmologists were delighted, claiming the discovery was proof of a Big Bang. Penzias and Wilson were awarded Nobel Prizes.
Since the Big Bang theory predicts a homogeneous universe with matter evenly distributed throughout (which it most certainly is not, as seen previously), evolutionary cosmologists expected that the background radiation would be perfectly smooth. Just as predicted, the south pole data taken from earth itself showed the background radiation was perfectly smooth (Flam 1992:30). Big Bang proponents were assured for a time that they had been proven right. But in the last decade the discovery of massive super clusters of galaxies and great voids in space show that the universe is not homogeneous. Therefore the background radiation should reflect this variation.
Now there was an absolutely essential need for evolutionary cosmologists to find variations in the background radiation. Thus they put great pressure on NASA to send up a specially designed satellite called the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). On the chance that ground-based measurements might be in error, a satellite with extremely sensitive instruments was needed. This is due to the fact that very little of the radiation of this magnitude can penetrate earth’s atmosphere. The infrared absolute spectrophotometer on the COBE satellite does its measuring by comparing the background radiation it picks up with a black body radiator where deviations from the perfect black body should show “lumpiness” consistent with the real, structured universe.
The results obtained from COBE were clear: no significant variations were found, and the cosmic microwave appears smooth to at least one part in 100,000 (Burbidge 1992).
Yet recent announcements by George Smoot and his team at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, claimed that the COBE data shows faint temperature fluctuations on the order of 1/100,000 of a degree (the number varies with each announcement). This was heralded as proof that the background radiation is not homogeneous and the Big Bang was now proven!
The supposed discovery received headlines and major media coverage throughout the nation. The latest issues of Science, however, paint a very different picture. Hamilton says that “the unevenness in the background radiation is a miniscule signal much smaller than the
Figure 6. The Great Galactic Wall
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noise Smoot’s team has attempted to filter out – the results could be open to challenge. Add the fact that other measurements taken from the South Pole are at odds with the COBE data and you have the elements of a major astrophysical dispute.” (Hamilton 1992:431, emphasis added).
Flam points out that temperature variations are “one part per million and barely perceptible” (1992:28). In the conclusion we will comment on this development. Now let us look at the structured or so-called “lumpy” universe.
The Structured Universe:
J.B.S. Haldane, a noted English scientist, once said “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” With the advent of space exploration in our generation we have increased our knowledge of the universe a hundred-fold. We know now that there is little accumulation of dust on the moon which should be there if it had been any great time in space. We have seen close-up pictures of Saturn’s rings which show created structure that could not have been thrown out from some nebular mass or the planet itself. Man has investigated Mars and found no life there, even though all the elements are present which evolutionists claim are necessary to produce life.
More recently, astronomers have discovered great clusters of galaxies at various reaches of outer space (Saunders et al. 1991). These superclusters of thousands of galaxies are interrupted by voids some 200 million light years across. This has led scientists to conclude that 20 billion years is not enough time for thousands of galaxies to clump together the way the Big Bang theory proposes. Even the recently proposed Cold Dark Matter (invisible and untestable) theories fail to explain the formation of the universe. In short, there are no known naturalistic forces in existence which could form a structured system like our universe.
Conclusion
For the past decade the Big Bang theory has come under attack from the scientific community itself. With the publishing of Jayant Narlikar’s “What if the Big Bang Didn’t Happen?” (1991) and Eric Lerner’s The Big Bang Never Happened (1991) the controversy has accelerated.
Let us summarize scientific objections to the Big Bang:
1. The principle of conservation of angular momentum is violated by the Big Bang theory. The initial primordial explosion should have propelled all the matter/energy of the cosmos out radially from its center and, by the principle of conservation of angular momentum, none of it could, without some additional outside forces being exerted later, have acquired any kind of curvilinear motion. Yet there is great variety of curving and orbiting motions of planets, stars, and galaxies all held in perfect balance.
2. The universe is not uniform in large scale structure as both the Big Bang and Steady State naturalistic theories require. Furthermore, background radiation data do not show the variation necessary to explain huge agglomerations of matter in some regions, and vast empty spaces in others.
3. Then there is the contradiction of the force of gravity working against the force of the primeval explosion. If the initial explosion is driving all matter apart in an expanding universe, how can one justify the accumulation of matter in any one location, such as a star? With gravity the only force directly related to the amount of matter, this problem of the amount of mass needed to provide enough gravity to hold even one galaxy together has been a problem for cosmologists for years. Actual observed mass in celestial bodies is only one-tenth that required to hold galactic structures
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together, considering the angular velocities observed. This has caused astronomers to postulate great amounts of “cold dark matter” and “black holes.”
Einstein himself, in 1917, recognized the problem of the gravitational forces required to hold the system together. He came up with values that would cause the universe to collapse. Therefore he added to his equations of general relativity a constant that countered these forces. The result was a universe that was unchanging in all directions. It was only under great pressure from expanding universe cosmologists that Einstein killed off his cosmological constant (Szalay 1992].
4. By far the most serious scientific objection to the Big Bang comes from one of the most basic laws of science, namely the second law of thermodynamics. Explosions produce disorder, not order! Every energy transformation process known to man produces disorder and a loss of available energy. How could a primeval, chaotic, disorderly, explosion, in the first place, or the on-going second law of thermodynamics, in the second place, have created the complex, ordered universe we have now?
5. An expanding universe does not correlate with our solar system and its fixed spatial relationships.
To summarize, the Big Bang theory proposes that self-existent, self-organizing matter, operating by random natural processes, over eternal eons of time, has evolved into the complex structured and ordered universe that we live in. It is so orderly that we count on its predictability for our very life.
But would an explosion of matter create this order and complexity? Would an asteroid striking earth create anything but disorder?
The most important question is — are we willing to acknowledge a miraculous creation at the beginning? If we acknowledge a supernatural Creator we must also acknowledge His ability to supernaturally create and organize the cosmos all at once. Both true science and true logic agree perfectly with the Biblical statement, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1; Ps 33:6, 9), and it is He who sustains it by His power (Heb 1:3).
We do not need to account for the missing mass because it truly is missing. This is not to say that the creationist closes the door to scientific inquiry. Rather, he accepts the fact of creation and proceeds from there to better understand the system God has designed. In doing this He edifies us and we better understand Him, “for since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power, and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that man is without excuse” (Rom 1:20).
Figure 7. The Structure of the Universe
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