The following is a monthly article written by Rev Kenneth Stewart to the Stornoway RPCS congregation…

Dear congregation, 

Whether we look at the big picture through a telescope or the small picture through a microscope, we ‘see’ God’s invisible ‘eternal power and divine nature’ (Romans 1: 20-23). And, contrary to the expectations of so many, the unexpected and astonishing level of inherent complexity and finely tuned intricacy makes the case for that eternal power and Godhead increasingly compelling. Science is increasingly making the case for theism – not that it needed to be made. 

Tempting as it is to discover the astonishing activity and order revealed by the microscope on the micro level, we will confine ourselves for the moment to the macro level and to the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas day in 2021 and arriving at its destination one month later – nearly a million miles from the earth.  

Its discoveries have surprised materialistic evolutionists – but not creationists. Particularly, it has further challenged the supposedly unchallengeable model of the big bang.  

Most of us will be familiar with the fundamental postulate of the theory – which is that, around 14 billion years ago, a single atom of incomprehensible density (wherever it came from and however it came to exist in that particular form) exploded to ‘create’ the universe in which we live today.  

The resultant matter from the exploding atom was, supposedly, just hydrogen and helium, with lithium traces, which, over many billions of years (and billions are required), condensed to form stars and galaxies. Heavier elements, including oxygen, nitrogen and carbon were believed to have formed many more millions of years later within the core of these stars. 

However, just two years ago, the James Watt telescope detected a carbon cloud which was ‘dated’ to a mere 350 million years after the big bang – billions of years before carbon is supposed to have existed.  

Again, it has also discovered a fully formed galaxy, glowing brightly with hydrogen and oxygen which, according to current timescales, must have formed less than a mere three hundred million years after the ‘big bang.’ This galaxy is also 1600 light years wide (that’s how far light travels in 1600 years) and has a mass of several million suns. 

Naturalistic evolutionists are simply stumped as to how such a fully formed galaxy could be formed in such an astonishingly brief time. 

The reality is that the big bang theory, once such a confident theory, is beginning to fall out of favour. Indeed, it has been in fairly serious difficulty for some time (Incidentally, so has its companion evolutionary theory: for example, in 2016 and at the prompting of several mainstream and prominent evolutionary biologists,  the Royal Society held a conference at which five serious problems with the evolutionary biological model were discussed as well as the possible need for a new theory) But back to cosmology and the big bang… 

Not to mention other difficulties with the theory, it simply requires too many assumptions to make it work. Not least of these assumptions is the amount of ‘missing matter’ in the universe. To be credible, the theory requires that 96% of the universe must consist of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ – neither of which have ever been observed.  

Also, the fact that the universe is mainly matter with far smaller amounts of antimatter (not the same as dark matter) is inexplicable in a big bang cosmology where the amounts of both should be the same. 

A further problem lies in the fact that, despite the vast distances between parts of deep space, deep space radiation exists at a remarkably even temperature throughout the entire cosmos. Surprisingly, despite historic scientific opposition to considering variations in the speed of light, some evolutionary cosmologists are now suggesting that the original expansion of the universe, along with the original speed of light, must have been far greater following the big bang than it is now – and that’s just because there seems to be no other way to explain how heat could equalize so quickly throughout the whole universe in such a hopelessly inadequate short time frame.  

But here we go again! Why, we wonder, have creation scientists been routinely ridiculed for suggesting that the speed of light might have been greater originally (as an explanation for the rapidity of creative processes) when it’s suddenly academically respectable for evolutionary cosmologists to suggest the same thing when they encounter an inexplicable problem? 

I am not a cosmologist and neither am I a scientist – but it’s always seemed obvious to me that, leaving aside the inexplicable origin and the fanciful fate of the singularly dense solitary atom, the whole explanatory cosmological framework, as currently adopted by the scientific community, does indeed make some kind of sense – providing things have always been the same.  

But what if they were not? 

In other words, if we factor in a series of divine creative events rather than an exploding atom, what we are factoring in would be not only intelligent design but also extraordinary and unimaginable forces of heat and light: in other words, incalculable energy. These factors are what are referred to these days as ‘game changers’ – and so, for example, while we do not dispute the rate at which carbon 14 decays today, and in the recent past, that does not mean that we can extrapolate backwards into a time when all the constants were variable.  

All this means that, as the writer to the Hebrews writes, ‘by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are not visible’ (Hebrews 11: 3) I suppose I often draw attention to what the Bible doesn’t say – especially when we would expect it to say something different! Well, here is a case in point. If you read the text I’ve just quoted again, I wonder if you would agree with me that it would be more natural to expect the writer to say, ‘by faith we believe that…’ Instead, he writes, ‘by faith we understand that…’ I wonder if that is God telling us that the glorious work of creation is not just something to be believed on God’s own authority (although that would be enough) but something to understand as being the only rational explanation for what we see through our telescopes. 

Your minister