A Look at the Days of Creation

In this session, Dr. Ankerberg and Dr. Ross discuss these matters and address a view that helps to show how the Genesisaccount and science fit together. Both God’s book of nature and book of Scripture point toward the perfect God who has uniquely designed our creation for His divine purposes.

today on the johnny Karberg show we will provide answers for those who have abandoned their christian faith because of science. Somewhere along the line, you were persuaded that the biblical account of creation cannot be reconciled with modern science today. But in this series we will argue that the latest scientific evidence will actually lead you to believe in God. Further, we will answer the question Should we expect to find agreement between the record of nature and the record of scripture? Sure we should. Because it’s the same author. I mean, you look at a building that was done by an architect and another building by the same architect. You say it’s a frank Lloyd wright building. You look at the universe, It was built by God. It’s got all over it, not made in Usa but made by the living God. And you look at the scriptures that too came from God. Now the author is the same interpreters work on both. The interpreters may disagree, but not the evidence, not the raw data itself. The raw data itself comes from the same Lord. Otherwise we throw away the doctrine of creation. Otherwise we throw away the inspiration. The full inerrant word of God. We can’t throw away either. They both come from the living God. My guest today is astronomer Dr Hugh ross who received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto and did postdoctoral research at caltech on quasars. He’s the author of many books, including his latest navigating genesis. We will also hear from Hebrew scholar. Dr walter Kaiser, a man thought by many to be one of the world’s most knowledgeable authorities on the old testament in Hebrew language Join us and hear how the latest scientific evidence is. In agreement with the biblical account of creation in Genesis one and 2 on this special edition of the johnny Coburg show. Yeah, welcome to our program. We got a great one for you today. We’re gonna talk about at least three topics. Number one is when you look into the sky at night and you see the stars, how many are out there? Well today you’re gonna find out second. We’re gonna talk about one of the strongest evidences that God has designed and fine tuned the universe. It’s what the scientists call dark energy. And uh we’re gonna talk about that today. And then we’re going to talk about genesis chapter one. How long are the six creative days or actually all seven days that you find in genesis chapter one and genesis two. And so we’ve got fascinating topics today. And Hugh, let’s start with the first one and that is briefly how many stars are actually in the universe. Right now, all the observable universe contains about 50 billion trillion stars. And we know that thanks to the Hubble ultra deep field, which actually showed us all the stars and Galaxies that could possibly exist within a narrow window of space. All right now folks, The question is, are all these stars necessary or did God just go overboard and we’re gonna show you a clip of what’s going on. I want you to watch a few tens of thousands of light years beyond the center of our Milky Way. We arrive at the halo where most of the oldest stars reside. This earlier generation of stars is important in the construction of life essential elements. These ancient stars in one sense, are the forebears to our planet and to our own existence as stars exhaust their fuel and die, they bequeathed to us their ashes. The heavy elements needed for the next generation of stars and for planet building, our earth could not even exist without nine billion years worth of ashes from dead and dying stars, stars about the size of our sun, or smaller loser outer layers gradually when the last of their nuclear fuel supply is exhausted, all that remains is a burnt out core like a cinder after a fire. These cinders called white dwarfs take over 10 billion years to cool and play a critical role in our existence for only on the surface of a special white dwarf binary star, as the life essential element flooring manufactured without flooring, certain proteins would be unable to form, and life in the universe would be impossible. Even more remarkable is the fact that even with as many as a trillion Galaxies in the universe, our galaxy, the Milky Way is likely one of only a few where sufficient flooring production sites exist when a star larger than her son runs out of fuel, the outer gas shells undergo a sudden collapse, they crash into the core with enough momentum to ignite one final eruption, an explosion so intense. Then, when it happens in our own galaxy, it’s bright enough to be seen during daylight hours. This final cataclysmic blast, a supernova produces many elements essential for life. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, iron, copper, silver, and many others. It scatters them throughout the interstellar neighborhood to be absorbed later by star producing gas and dust clouds. All of these various types of stars in all of their various stages of life and death, play a vital role in our well being And far from being a waste every minute of the past 14 billion years of star formation was necessary in order to enrich our planet with the elements that make life possible, argue that’s absolutely astonishing. And in the bible the first verse in the bible, you have 10 words that encompass what we just saw in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We didn’t know all this stuff was going on until recently. And yet you’re saying the star formation and how they burn the fuel is absolutely necessary for us that once God puts man on the earth creates us and puts us here, we need all that’s been prepared ahead of time for us to exist, right? There are 98 elements that we see in the periodic table. We need the whole lot to have advanced life here on the planet earth and the total mass of the universe determines what elements you get in the first four minutes of the existence of the universe and that precise ratio of hydrogen and helium determines what kind of elements future stars will build. And it takes three generations successive generations of star formation in order to produce all the elements we need for life. For example, the uranium and thorium that we get from supernova is crucial for building the continents so we can have both oceans and continents on the surface of earth. Why so many? Why so many? Well again, the total mass determines what mixed developments you get in the first four minutes. The total mass also determines how rapidly the universe will expand over its history. And it’s important that the stars be a certain distance apart from one another in the narrow window of time in which human civilization can exist. Absolutely incredible. Let’s go to the second one, which is dark energy and you say this is one of the greatest evidences of fine tuning that we have in the universe. It also is another crucial factor for life to exist anywhere in the universe. And it demonstrates that God has put these laws here for our benefit. And first of all, what is it? We’ve got a clip from your journey toward creation documentary movie and folks, I want you to watch this When we travel to about six or 7 billion light years away from Earth. We are confronted with a remarkable discovery. In April 2000 scientists published the results of a landmark study, in which they used a balloon mounted telescope over the cold stable atmosphere of Antarctica to test several characteristics of the universe known as the Boomerang project. The cold stable atmosphere of the South Pole enabled scientists to more precisely calculate the universe’s rate of expansion. Apparently for the first eight billion years after the creation event, the expansion of the universe was slowing down like shrapnel after an explosion. But the boomerang experiments revealed that for the last six billion years the expansion of the universe has been speeding up. Scientists discovered that there are two factors precisely governing the expansion of the cosmos throughout its history. Mass density and space energy density. The mass density, which dominated the first half of the universe’s existence, slows down cosmic expansion, while the space energy density, which dominates the more recent half of cosmic history, speeds it up. This delicate balance represents the greatest fine tuning ever discovered. If the mass density were to vary by more than one part in 10 to the 60th Or the space energy density varied more than one part in 10 to the 120th life would be impossible anywhere anytime in the universe Q. This is absolutely unbelievable. This thing of dark energy. There’s a lot of it and you say that it points to a very highly intelligent creator. How intelligent give us some kind of an illustration of what you’re talking about. Oh the clip was talking about space energy density, we call that today. Dark energy makes up three quarters of all the stuff of the universe and it’s the energy embedded in the space surface of the universe. The bigger the surface becomes, the more powerful the impact of dark energy on accelerating the expansion of the universe. If you accelerate too quickly, all you get is gas, you never get stars and Galaxies if you accelerate it too slowly then all you get are black holes and neutron stars. Either way, life is impossible And astronomers have calculated, you must fine tune the value of dark energy to better than one part in 10 to the 120th in order for life to be possible in the universe. Now you can compare that degree of fine tuning design to the best example that we humans have been able to achieve. And as I’ve looked at it that would be the gravity wave telescope that caltech and M. I. T. Physicists invented and designed and our government built. But what we’re seeing in dark energy Is a degree of knowledge and intellect that ranks 10 to the 97 times superior to what we see in this gravity wave telescope and at least that many times more powerful in other words the one that designed dark energy is at least 10 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more intelligent and more knowledgeable than those caltech and M. I. T. Physicists and at least that many times better funded than our U. S. Government I think you know where I’m going, intellect knowledge, creativity and power are attributes that only a personal being can manifest. So that’s God. Beyond space and time that created the universe must also be a personal being but manifest personality to agree orders and orders of magnitude greater than we human beings are capable of. Now this incredibly intelligent creator Gave some simple information to moses in Genesis chapter one and he talked about after he created the heavens and the Earth we have six creative days and the seventh day he rested. The question arises, what does God mean? When he says he did all of this Day, one Day 2 Day three We had a debate that you participated in between those who hold that. The Bible is saying those days are 24 hours and those of you that are saying it’s long periods of time. And I invited the leading Evangelical hebrew scholar dr walter Kaiser to be a part of our panel. And when this question came up I asked him what is a literal interpretation of the bible in terms of Yam and folks I want you to listen And Dr. Walter Kaiser? I’m going to begin with you. What is the meaning of the word day in Genesis one and 2 is the Bible literally teaching a day is 24 hours long. Or is it literally teaching that a day is a long period of time. Now. You were one of the translators on the N. I. V. Bible and uh you’ve taught hebrew and you know seven different languages at least the last time I was counting and so help us out but put it in the cookies on the lower shelf. So my mother can understand what is the bible literally teaching about the word day. Well john is delighted to be with you and also to talk to your mother too. But it is a delight to uh revise your question a little bit. I think it should be. What are the meanings of the word day? I’m the one that generally argues there’s only one meaning to a word as an author uses it. But in this particular context, of course in genesis, he dares to use the word in at least three, maybe four different ways. The word day Yom and the hebrew appears over 500 times in the king. James bible. And uh according to the englishman’s Hebrew concordance, there are over 58 different ways that is handled. That doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary. It means context is king And therefore I think that needs to be taken into account. So day in verse five is daylight uh day in the fourth day is when God creates 24 hour days. Uh, in genesis 24, their uses it in a prepositional clause in the day that the Lord God created and sums up the whole creative activity, which would be like our way of saying in the day of Southern Sons presidency or in the day of abraham Lincoln. So the answer is, you must hold carefully to the context. Okay, so why do you think that God is, he’s saying then or teaching us that it’s a long period of time. You’ve got three options there. Yeah, I think that, uh, each one of them has to be taken very carefully. The early church fathers and the medieval fathers were very, very careful on this point in which it was regarded as uh, a longer period of time, but always for different reasons. Uh, there was in Augustine Augustine depending on your level. Sophistication, but in the Augustine or Augustine way of saying, he said, we had a day one, a day two and day three before we had any 24 hour days created and therefore, uh, you need to be very careful that there were no people here. So it’s not a human perspective at that point, it’s a divine perspective. After all, we have astronauts going round and round the globe and from their perspective, they see a number of sunrises and sunsets, evening and morning, evening, morning, evening and morning, evening and morning. Now God is a little bit further out, I would suspect than our solar system, Therefore that needs to be taken into account to it seems that that wasn’t the point on which the biblical text was anxious to make the it’s real point where the biblical text wanted to come down was it was God who created the whole thing in the beginning. Boom God, he made the whole thing. So the argument that really needs to be joined with modern society, is is there an absolute beginning or is it relative? And this biblical text says, look, it’s absolutely there was nothing and and accept God and he may he created. So that’s how I would handle it. That was a great debate and we’re gonna be offering it to the folks during this series as well. But it was fun listening to Dr Kaiser and uh you know, the last point that he made there the first thing you need to come away with from this text is there was an absolute beginning to the universe. This has not always been the scientific opinion. It’s just been recently that that’s come into vogue talk about that the bible and science agree that it all started someplace. That’s right. We have spacetime theorems and physics that tell us that the universe has a beginning that includes the beginning of space and time itself, which means that before God created universe, he was independent of cosmic time. So time, from his perspective is gonna obviously be different than it is from our perspective. Yeah, I love that illustration if you’re an astronaut because we’ve got astronauts up there right now the news is reporting on and they’re seeing five or six days within like an eight hour period of time. They’re going around so fast and so for one day for them you might have, you know, all kinds of revolutions of the earth and God is further out as he said. So what is his perspective? What is his time period? And that brings me to the question, how do you think about these yams that are in the text? How do they correspond to what you’re seeing in astronomy? Does the science and the bible agree at that spot? Well, I’m no Hebrew scholar. But when I first read genesis like walt, I saw that there were three different ways. This word day was being used. And later I discovered that in Hebrew the only word you got for a long period of time is the word. But what convinced me was reading through genesis one and realizing there’s an evening in the morning for the first six days, but there isn’t for the seventh day and three places in the bible saw 95 john five and hebrews four, it tells us we’re still in God’s seventh day. So the 7th day is not yet finished. The other thing that persuaded me is that you see in genesis one, both the human male and the human female are made on the sixth day. But in genesis two, there’s obviously a considerable passage of time between God creating Adam and God creating eve. So the 6th and 7th day are long periods of time. The grammar is used in genesis. One would tell us all the days are long periods of time here. Before you were a christian, you studied almost all the holy books that you could find and when you compare them with what the bible said, you realize the bible is the only one that gives this kind of information explain what you mean. Well, it’s the only one that actually tells us that God creates independent of time outside of time rather than within time that eternally exists. It’s also the only one that got the order of events right. In genesis, one with respect of the scientific record, got the timescale right? And also gave the explanation for the fossil record why we see so much new species of life coming into existence before humanity and virtually done afterwards for six days, God creates. On the seventh day, he stops his work of creation of all the holy books I looked at was the only one that perfectly fit with the Book of Nature was declaring as after all the bible tells us God revealed himself through two ways the Book of Nature and the book of scripture. And it’s the bible that gives us the perfect fit. Now folks, if you enjoyed this information today, then wait till we get to next week because we’re gonna talk more about what the bible is revealing to us in genesis chapter one in genesis chapter two, I hope you’ll join us then stay tuned for scenes from next week’s program. Okay. Mhm. While astronomers do admit that we have no tangible evidence or a universe beyond our own, in fact, we have improved that. We never will get that tangible evidence that comes through Einstein’s theory of general relativity. That if God made two universes, once you’ve got observers in universe, a a spacetime envelope in that universe can never overlap the spacetime envelope of any other possibly existing universe. So we’re limited through our science to learn only about the universe in which we live, and from the bible, we do know that God made other realms, the angels live in a different realm than we do. So there’s no question that there is reality beyond our universe. The question is, how many such relative God make He could have made to. He could have made 1000. He could have made an infinite number. But I remember back in the early 1980s telling audiences that inevitably the scientific evidence for the God of the Bible becomes so overwhelming that atheists would have no choice but to propose a multiverse, mainly that there’s an infinite number of universes that manifest all possible characteristics we can conceive of. And in that case you could argue that by pure chance we live in that universe in which all the characteristics are in place to make life possible. But in one respect that speculation explains too much. If you’re going to appeal to a multiverse to eliminate the involvement of God’s creative activity, that same multiverse model would eliminate the conclusion that any of us human beings have produced any intellectual content. I could just as well argue that all the scientific papers published by Stephen Hawking are not from his mind and simply from the multiverse, A multiverse didn’t. But in one sense, I would argue that the atheistic version of the multiverse is testable. Or giving analogy, I could flip a coin one million consecutive times. If it came up heads all one million times, you’d probably conclude it was designed to come up heads. But what if there were an infinite number of coins being flipped? The laws of probability tells one of them would give you one million consecutive heads. But here’s how you can put it to the test, show me the coin. If I see heads on both sides that I know not to bet tails. Or if I see that the coin has been waited to always come up heads. I know not to bet tales, we can do the same thing with the universe, we can choose to examine it more detail than what we’ve examined it so far and examining in more detail. We see it the evidence for design for the benefit. Humanity goes up rather than down and goes up dramatically. Then that’s a strike against the atheistic model for the multiverse. Well, thanks for being with me today. If you enjoyed today’s program and would like to watch it again or wish to view some of our other programs and topics, just go to our free johnny Karberg show app or you may watch our programs at our website at J A show dot org. Today’s series is entitled step by step through creation. And in these four programs, astronomer and astrophysicist, Dr. Hugh Ross and I will take you verse by verse through Genesis one and 2 and show you how the biblical account of creation can be reconciled with scientific evidence. Today, All 4\/2 hour television programs in this series are available on DVD for a gift of $49. Then we also taped a second series with dr ross entitled, Science discovers the universe had a beginning. In this series. He answers the questions what scientific evidence has led astronomers to conclude the universe had a beginning. Just as the bible says, what evidence shows that God meticulously created and designed the universe so that human life can live on earth? How is God positioned jupiter Saturn and Neptune to protect the earth and how did God exquisitely designed the sun, the moon and stars for man’s benefit. This series is also available on DVD for a gift of 49 hours. Then we’re also making available to new study guides that parallel our series and are available for a gift of $8 each. Again, you may watch any of these episodes free on our john Ekberg show app or you may download each episode for only $5 an episode at our website at J A show dot org folks. Our goal is to help encourage and strengthen you and your walk with the Lord and possibly God is speaking to you today and you’d like to know how to become a christian or you would like to pray and invite jesus christ to be your personal savior. If so, just go to our website right now and click on, pray to accept jesus as your savior. Now, possibly God is speaking to you today, if you would like to have someone pray with you or you have a question you would like to ask. There’s a phone number on your screen right now that you may call, call that number and someone will be happy to pray with you, thank you for joining me today. I hope that you’ll join me again at the same time next week