January 1997
Is our universe expanding or static? If it is expanding, is there sufficient mass to cause it all to collapse back in upon itself under gravity's influence? If the universe is static and not now expanding, is it stable? What holds it all together--if anything?
These are questions gaining more attention these days as our knowledge data base in astronomy and astrophysics increases, and old theories are brought into question. There is much than can be said about these questions from the Biblical revelation.
Several separate passages in the New Testament make reference to the creation of the universe. For example, John's gospel speaks of an earlier state of existence than is described in Verse 1 of Genesis,
In the beginning was the Word, [logos] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; [i.e., before creation] all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." (John 1: 1-3)
This passage teaches that Jesus was eternally existent with God the Father prior to the creation of "all things." There was a time when our material and spiritual universe did not exist. It had a definite beginning. But before that God was. In fact, God is--because time itself was created by God.
Chapter One of Paul's Epistle to the Colossians gives a further description of the role of Jesus in creation, consistent with that of John's gospel,
[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born [prototokos] of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities [these words in Greek refer to the hierarchical angelic powers]---all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
The Holy Spirit, in giving us this inspired passage of Scripture, explains that all things (both visible and invisible) in the entire universe were created through this same Jesus, the eternal Word. We may think of the universe and its intricate design as being conceived of in the mind of the Father then spoken into existence by the Son (who makes the invisible, visible). The Holy Spirit is the One who energizes and supplies life to the creation, not only at the time of creation but also moment by moment after that.
We are also told that all things were created for Jesus. He is "the heir of all things." That means that we are house guests in Someone Else's universe! This implies a future accountability for all of us--history is headed somewhere--at the end of road stands Jesus to whom all power and authority has already been given (see John 5:22-29).
A. W. Tozer, Pastor at Moody Bible Church in Chicago some 50 years ago, once wrote of this as follows:
The teaching of the New Testament is that now, at this very moment, there is a Man in heaven appearing in the presence of God for us. He is as certainly a man as was Adam or Moses or Paul; he is a man glorified, but his glorification did not de-humanize him. Today he is a real man, of the race of mankind, bearing our lineaments and dimensions, a visible and audible man, whom any other man would recognize instantly as one of us.
But more than this, he is the heir of all things, Lord of all lords, head of the church, firstborn of the new creation. He is the way to God, the life of the believer, the hope of Israel, and the high priest of every true worshiper. He holds the keys of death and hell, and stands as advocate and surety for everyone who believes on him in truth. Salvation comes not by accepting the finished work, or deciding for Christ; it comes by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, the whole, living, victorious Lord who, as God and man, fought our fight and won it, accepted our debt as his own and paid it, took our sins and died under them, and rose again to set us free. This is the true Christ; nothing less will do.
One of the key words in the Colossians passage above ("...and in Christ all things hold together") is the Greek word sunistemi which means "to stand-together," "to be compacted together," "to cohere," "to be constituted with."
This passage can be applied to the structure of the atom, for example. The nucleus of every atom is held together by what physicists call "weak" and "strong" forces. [Physicists today are familiar with four basic forces in the natural world: gravity, and electrical forces, plus a "strong," and a "weak" nuclear force. The first two forces decrease in strength inversely with the square of the distance between two objects, the latter two forces act only at very short ranges].
The nucleus of the atom contains positively-charged and neutral particles--to use a simplistic model. Mutual electrostatic repulsion between the like-positive protons would drive the nucleus apart if it were not for the "strong force" which binds the nucleus together. There is thus an active force imposed on the universe, which actively holds the very atoms of the material world together moment by moment, day by day, century by century. Similarly accelerated electrons circling the nucleus should quickly radiate all their energy away and fall into the nucleus unless there exists an invisible energy source to counteract this.
The third New Testament creation-related passage which talks about atomic structure and physics is found in the Apostle Peter's Second Epistle:
"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise (rhoizedon, a rushing roar) and the elements (stoicheion , atoms) will be dissolved with fire and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up." (2 Peter 3:10)
The Greek word translated "elements" in the above-mentioned passage from Colossians, and in 2 Peter also, is stoicheion which can mean "the building blocks of the universe," or "the ordered arrangement of things." It can also mean the "atomic elements." The word translated "dissolved" in 2 Peter 3:10 is literally (in Greek) luo, meaning "unloosed." This language suggests that there will come a time in the future when God lets go of the nuclear forces which holds the atom together. This passage like the one in Colossians strongly suggests that the active power of God is behind the mysterious strong force that holds every atomic nucleus together. If this is so, all the other fundamental forces of nature are likewise forces that originate with Christ and His sustaining direction of the old creation.
If God "sustains the universe by His mighty word of power," moment by moment, were He to merely relax His grasp on the universe--every atom would come apart "by fire" (that is, by nuclear fire). It is inescapable that the Bible claims that God dynamically sustains the universe, including the very atoms themselves. Atoms, it would seem, are "stable" only because force and energy are being supplied into their physical nuclear binding fields from "outside" the system.
Whatever we may think of God and physics, the Bible leaves us with no room to doubt that God does care about the sparrow that falls to the ground, the widow, the orphan, and the homeless. He does not lose track of His children and watches over them with infinite, patient, intimate Fatherly care. Not only does He sustains the universe by His mighty word of power, God also alters the status quo from time to time and, in response to prayer, frequently changes the course of entire nations. In a future day his intrusive re-intervention will be very radical indeed.
Another important claim of scripture about the old creation is that God is the present Sustainer of the universe. That is, He is not uninvolved, remote, detached and impersonal--leaving things to run by themselves by any means. Among secular scientists today there are many who acknowledge that God exists. But He is usually considered as only a First Cause--the One who brought the universe into existence and set it into motion. But most of these same scientists assume God was not involved after the initial act of creation. This is contrary to clear statements in the Bible that God is very much involved in every event that takes place in the on-going history of the entire universe. Causality links everything together, because God "works (Gr: energizes) all things according to the counsel of His will" (Ephesians 1:11).
The opening verses of the Letter to the Hebrews give us another New Testament picture of God's role in the creation.
"In many separate revelations [each of which set forth a portion of the Truth] and in different ways God spoke of old to [our] forefathers in and by the prophets, [But] in the last of these days He has spoken to us in [the person of a] Son, Whom He appointed Heir and lawful Owner of all things, also by and through Whom He created the worlds and the reaches of space and the ages of time [He made, produced, built, operated, and arranged them in order]. HebĘ1:3 He is the sole expression of the glory of God [the Light-being, the out-raying or radiance of the divine], and He is the perfect imprint and very image of [God's] nature, upholding and maintaining and guiding and propelling the universe by His mighty word of power. When He had by offering Himself accomplished our cleansing of sins and riddance of guilt, He sat down at the right hand of the divine Majesty on high, Heb 1:4 [Taking a place and rank by which] He Himself became as much superior to angels as the glorious Name (title) which He has inherited is different from and more excellent than theirs." (Hebrews 1:1-4 Amplified Bible).
A fifth great New Testament passage concerning Jesus and His place in creation is found in Revelation Chapter 1,
"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet...I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters; in his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth issued a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, "Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades."
Here Jesus is called "the Alpha and Omega," "the First and the Last." Not only is Jesus the Son of God to be found at the beginning of history, He also stands at the end of history and at the end of every life. He is the Judge of all, and He is the heir of all things.
Truth from science must in the long run must agree with Biblical revelation--if the Bible is true. If the Bible "says what it means and means what it says" (to quote Chuck Missler) then it is Jesus who holds the universe in his hands just as the old American folk spiritual says. Our moment-by-moment existence depends on His gracious sustenance of every electron, every atom, every molecule and every spiritual entity as well. We are safe when we place our trust in Him, and put our whole lives into His hands!
Can we not then stand in awe of our great God and Creator, along with the Psalmist who wrote,
"O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it; for his hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would hearken to his voice!" (Psalm 95:1-7)
Next month, God willing, we'll look further at this subject in a discussion of theories of the vacuum, and the interaction between the material creation and the invisible, intangible (but very real) spiritual world which God has also created around us and within which the material world is embedded.
February 1997
Last month we reviewed passages in the New testament which give us information about God's creation of the universe. We learned that all created things in the material and in the spiritual realm were created through Jesus the eternal Son of God. Also, everything was created for Jesus--He is the heir of all things. Third, the moment-by-moment control of the universe is determined in minutest detail by God--down from the throne of God through the ranks of the angels and into the created order.
We also saw in our last study that active force fields applied from outside the known, physical universe are required to hold everything together in a stable configuration. This is succinctly stated by the Apostle Paul in Colossians, "In Christ all things cohere (are held together)."
This month we'll look at a related subject--the likelihood that external energy flows into our known universe from outside on a continual basis. This energy appears out of nowhere literally, that is from empty space--from "the vacuum."
Aristotle (384-322 BC) taught that the physical world was made up of four elements: air, earth, fire and water. Tying these all together (so that the "elements" intercommunicated) was a "subtle" medium, a fifth element--the aether--later to be known as the vacuum. (Latin: vacuus, empty). In a sense the aether was the substratum of the material world. The Greeks believed that "nature abhors a vacuum" so they could not imagine space as being totally empty.
The Greeks believed the stars were suspended from, or attached to, a rotating crystalline shell. When some of the "stars" (planets) were observed to be moving with respect to the "fixed" stars, a series of rotating crystal spheres was postulated. The earth was said to be fixed, immovable, and at the center of the cosmos. Not until the 16th Century were these Greek (Ptolemaic) ideas challenged by the Copernican revolution. Until Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) challenged the notion, the velocity of light was assumed by most everyone to be infinite, so the nature of the space between the earth and the crystal spheres was not of great concern. Rene Descartes (1596-1640) championed the theory that the aether was a plenum, from the Greek word meaning "full." Because it was so difficult for the scientists of that era to understand "action at a distance," Descartes imagined that a very dense medium of very small particles pervaded everything. This medium was capable of transmitting force from one object to another by collisions. The aether "particles" were in constant motion and there were no spaces between the particles. In a sense the aether was more solid than matter, yet invisible. Descartes's universe was purely a "mechanical universe" and his theories were soon superseded.
Galileo's former secretary, Evangelista Torricelli filled a long glass tube with mercury in 1644. Inverting the tube into a dish of mercury he observed that the mercury dropped some 30 inches at the closed upper end of the tube, thereby creating what was obviously a vacuum. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) took this work even further and soon everyone was convinced that the vacuum of space was empty after all.
If light were corpuscular in nature as some believed, it was not difficult to image light "particles" (we now call them photons) could traverse a pure vacuum without the necessity of a real medium pervading space. But other experiments soon began to show that light was a wave phenomenon. Of course waves could be travel through the plenum aether by collisions, however at the time only compressional waves were imagined. [Sound waves or seismic waves are compressional in nature, but light waves proved to be transverse]. In parallel with all these growing controversies, the velocity of light was finally measured by Olaf Roemer in 1675 and found to be finite, although the values he obtained were a few percent higher than the present value, 299,792.4358 km/sec.
By the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) the aether was believed by many to be luminiferous. That is, it was said to be more fluid than solid, but elastic, thus it was a medium which would support waves. James Clerk Maxwell (1839-1879) enjoyed great success when he found a set of equations which beautifully described how light waves could travel through such a luminiferous aether. For a waves to exist at all, it is natural to suppose that there is some sort of supporting medium. Such a medium must possess elasticity (a spring-like property) and also inertia, (a mass-like like property). In fact, the velocity of a wave in any medium is equal to the square root of the stiffness divided by the density of the medium.
In the case of electromagnetic waves (gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves, heat, and light of various wavelengths), Maxwell found that the aether possessed an electric-field scaling parameter, called "dielectric permittivity," and a magnetic-field scaling parameter, called magnetic permeability, such that the velocity of light was equal to one over the square root of permeability times permittivity. In support of the notion that the aether was a real medium it was observed that empty space behaved like a transmission line with a "characteristic impedance" of 377 ohms, (which is the ratio of permeability to permittivity for "free space.")
Maxwell's equations also explained how light slows down in glass, in gases, in water--because media other than the vacuum have differing permeabilities and permittivities. The aether was once again thought of as a very real medium which could be stretched or compressed--it had resilience or compliance, and inertia. Yet no known physical substance had a stiffness to mass density ratio anywhere near 9 x 1016 which was required of the aether as a medium. The aether appeared to possess elasticity but negligible inertia.
The idea that some kind of aether medium existed prevailed until 1887 when Michelson and Morley an interferometer in an attempt to detect the relative motion of the earth and the aether--the aether must be viscous and should be dragged along at least partially with the earth. According to 19th Century preconceptions, the velocity of the earth going around the sun should be about 30 km/sec. Yet when the measurements were made no motion of the earth relative to the ether could be detected at all. In other words, the aether apparently did not exist. Until Einstein's Theory of Relativity was published in 1905 the negative result of the M-M experiment baffled scientists.
Einstein showed that the velocity of light has the same value in all reference frames, whatever their velocity may be relative to other frames. From this point modern physics took off in the direction of Special and General Relatively Theory, and Quantum Mechanics. For many scientists the notion that an actual aether medium existed was simply discarded. Yet the apparent non-existence of an aether raised many problems---the M-M experiment was not the end of the story.
If all the air molecules are pumped out of a chamber, the chamber still contains residual radiation (electromagnetic noise from stars, x-rays, and heat radiation). Even before quantum mechanics, it was shown by classical radiation theory that if the temperature of the container is lowered to absolute zero, there remains a residual amount of thermal energy that can not by any means be removed. This residual energy in an empty container at absolute zero, was named "zero-point energy" (ZPE).
Contemporary Physicist Dr. Hal E. Putoff, notes that the "vacuum" is a vast reservoir of seething energy out of which particles are being formed and annihilated constantly. The energy potentials in the vacuum are staggering, but most of the time the forces involved balance each other out to zero. Zero Point Energy, he says,..."is the energy of empty space...finally when quantum theory was developed, it became absolutely clear that space, if you look at in a microscopic scale, is more like the base of a waterfall with a lot of frothy, seething activity going on, rather than just something like a placid, empty space...This is, by the way, not a fringe concept. It is a basic underlying concept in modern quantum theory."
Putoff continues, "When the idea of the hydrogen atom was first put forward...one of the questions at the time was: why doesn't the electron simply radiate its energy away and spiral into the nucleus, in a way similar to the way our satellites have certain losses and spiral into the planet? At the time, the answer was simply, well it is just the magic of quantum theory, it doesn't obey classical rules, and for some reason hydrogen atoms are like little perpetual motion machines. But in fact, from the standpoint of the zero point energy approach...indeed you expect an electron in a hydrogen atom to radiate its energy away, but it picks up energy from the background zero point energy and therefore is sustained by it. What that means in terms of physics is that is shows why atoms can be seen as perpetual motion machines, it is just that they always have an energy input from the background to make up for the losses."
Australian Astronomer Barry Setterfield has, in the past year, picked up on this latest theory of the vacuum to explain the red shift of light from distant galaxies. Arizona astronomer William Tifft's research has recently shown that red-lifted light from the stars is quantized--this turns out to be also related to ZPE. Setterfield's new model also takes into account the evidence that the velocity of light is not a fixed constant. Setterfield concludes that the universe is not expanding at all, (as the Big Bang model has long supposed) but is static (it has a fixed diameter). The original energy input of outside energy on Day Two of creation--when God stretched out the firmament to its maximum expanse--accounts for the red-shift and the subsequent velocity of light decrease!
Setterfield has also provided a rough calculation at the rate at which "outside" energy from the "vacuum" would have to be fed into the universe per square meter per second if Hal Putoff is correct and electrons orbiting the nucleus do radiate energy after all. The compensatory energy that must be constantly supplied from the vacuum is a staggering 1.071 X 10117 kilowatts per square meter! (In scientific notion that is 10 followed by 117 zeroes, kilowatts per square meter).
It is an old tenant of philosophy that ex nihilo nihil fit--out of nothing nothing comes. To imagine that vast amounts of energy flow into our physical universe from nowhere, from empty space, out of the "vacuum" at first appears impossible. To save the day we must resort either to magic or we must seek some rational explanation in Biblical revelation. The latter is not hard to do.
One the Second Day of creation week, God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." And God made the firmament and separated 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 there was evening and there was morning, a second day. (Genesis 1:6-8)
The Hebrew word usually translated firmament (raqia) strongly suggests an originally super dense medium stretched out very thin ("like a tent") on the second day of creation week. This means that what God created on Day One and Two was time, matter, energy, and space (the aether). These are the building blocks from which He constructed the universe evidently.
A careful examination of Biblical references to the terms "firmament," "the heavens" and "the heavenly places" and how they are used will show that the Bible depicts the spiritual realm as more solid, more substantial, more permanent than the present, observable, material world. When God created the universe he created it "two-storied." The spiritual realm is where the angels dwell. It is a so much more solid and substantial and permanent than our fading material world, that we can best describe ourselves as ghosts in a shadow-like world surrounded and embedded in the more substantial world of the spirit. This view of heaven is beautifully portrayed by C.S. Lewis in his fictional study The Great Divorce. Thinking of heaven as more solid that the material world suggests the aether is intensely solid with objects in the physical world being akin to voids in the plenum of space. It is as if we had come full circle all the way back to Descartes!
If the vacuum is not no-thing, what is the aether made of? It can not be pure spirit or even "condensed spirit" or we would be flirting with pantheism, because God is a Spirit, the angels and men are created spirits and each of these is a "life-form." But the aether is not alive. The aether does appears to have real metric properties which can change as space is expanded or contracted--it appears to be a substance that is more a part of the created spiritual world that a tangible physical substance.
Is the aether the substrate, the boundary layer between our physical material world and the created world of the spirit (called in Scripture "the heavenly places")? This is probably not an unreasonable working hypothesis.
From behind the curtains of our present world, God supplies not only force but it would seem He also supplies also energy to sustain the Created order. In more ways than one we owe not only only lives but the moment by moment sustenance of the physical universe to His energetic involvement. Knowing the Creator personally gives us every reason to feel secure and to stand in awe of Almighty God who has by no means left us alone in the cosmos--it's very existence is a direct expression of his power and His will.
References:
1. A History of the Theories of the Aether and Electricity, by Sir Edmund Whittaker. Dover Pub., NY, 1989.
2. Thomas G. Barnes, Space Medium,. Geo/Space research Fn, El Paso, 1986.
3. The Classical Vacuum, by Timothy H. Boyer, Sci. Am. (August 1985).
4. Is the vacuum really empty?, by Walter Greiner and Joseph Hamilton, Am. Sci. Mar-Apr. 1980.
5. The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, Crossway Bks, Wheaton, IL 1982.
6. Evidence for a non-constant velocity of light and references to the nature of the vacuum and ZPE will be found on my Internet web pages at http://ldolphin.org/
7. INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRMAMENT, by Gerardus D. Bouw, Ph.D.
8. Aether Theories, by Mountain Man (PRF Brown)
9. An excellent technical resource on the Quantum Vacuum and the New Physics is The California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics (Palo Alto, Dr. Bernard Haisch) /P>
March 1997 (Easter Issue)
In considering the material and physical realms of the universe--the subject of our last three studies--we have not yet raised the issue of the nature of time and eternity. Let's touch on this as we meditate on the meaning of Easter and the death of Jesus on the cross.
The night Jesus was betrayed closed a long full day after his final Passover meal with his disciples. In the Garden of Gethsemane that same night Jesus endured a terrible emotional and spiritual ordeal in prayer before His Father. The writer of Hebrews records this, "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered..." (Hebrews 5:7, 8)
"There--with only Peter, James and John nearby--Jesus experienced a protracted period of excruciating torment of spirit which found expression in groanings...and streaming tears, and ended in a terrible sweat, almost like blood.
There is a great mystery here. Jesus seems to face the experience with puzzlement and deep unrest of heart. For the first time in his ministry, he appeals to his own disciples for help, asking them to watch and pray for him. He confesses being deeply troubled in his spirit. Each of his three prayers questions the necessity for this experience and each is addressed to the one who could save him from death. Luke tells us that before the third prayer an angel was sent to strengthen him...His cry to the Father was one of such desperate need that the Father answered by strengthening him through an angel. But when the angel had finished, the third and most terrible experience began.
The author implies that Jesus faced the emotional misery which sin produces: its shame, guilt and despair. He felt the iron bands of sin's enslaving power. He was oppressed by a sense of hopelessness, total discouragement and utter defeat. He is anticipating the moment on the cross when he would be forsaken of the Father, since he would then be bearing the sin of the world as though it were his own. The very thought of it crushed his heart as in a winepress. No sinner on earth has ever felt the stain and shame of sin as he did. He understood exactly the same feeling we have (in much lesser degree) when we are angry with ourselves and so filled with shame and self-loathing that we cannot believe that God can do anything but hate us for our evil. Jesus knows what that is like. He went the whole way and took the full brunt. We will never pass through a Gethsemane as torturous as he did. He saw our sins as his own, and thus fulfilled beyond any other priest's experience the ability to deal gently with other's sins since he was so fully aware of the sense of personal defilement sin leaves." (Ray C. Stedman, Commentary on Hebrews, http://www.pbc.org/dp/stedman/hebrews2/).
After the prayer in the Garden, Jesus was up the rest of that night without sleep enduring cross-examination, scourging, beating, cruel mockery and unspeakable brutality. He was already greatly weakened when he carried his cross, stumbling, early the next morning to the place of crucifixion alongside the main public highway--probably just outside the Damascus Gate.
Medical doctors and forensic experts have written books about the common Roman form of execution---death by crucifixion. Often the dying process took several days. The nailing of hands and feet forced the victim to push up against the weight of his own body to take a single breath. In the hot sun, terrible thirst ensued and death came in most cases from suffocation amidst great pain. The victim was also naked and humiliated---death on the cross was reserved for the most wretched of all criminals. *
A superficial reading of the gospel narratives concerning the death of Jesus will show that He was nailed to the cross at 9 o'clock in the morning, and was dead by 3 in the afternoon. It would seem off hand that his ordeal, terrible as it was, was completed in a mere six hours. This, however, is not the full story. We must look behind the scenes.
Paul in his letter to the Colossians tells us about invisible events taking place, beyond the physical realm, and outside of our ordinary space-time continuum during the dying of Jesus on the cross, "...in Christ all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him." (Col. 1:19-22) When He died for us on the cross Jesus met fully the onslaught of demons, fallen angels, and all the power of evil forces in the heavens, disarming all of them completely--because "in Christ God was reconciling all things to Himself." Jesus' victory over man's greatest enemy, death, is boldly announced in the letter to the Hebrews: "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage." (Heb. 2:14,15) For the final outworking in history of Satan's defeat at the cross we now eagerly are all waiting. What is the completed work of Christ on the cross in the eternal time frame will come to pass in human history at God's appointed time on our earthly calendars. Time, you see, does not "flow" at the same rate nor have the same "content" in heaven as it does in earth.
The greatest mystery of Christ's passion concerns the transaction in eternity that took place between the sinless Son of God and His heavenly Father. Jesus was, for the first three hours on the cross, our Great High Priest. From noon till 3 P.M. (during which time a strange and terrible darkness came over the earth--Luke 23:44), the High Priest became the Sacrifice. In being made sin for us, in literally taking the sins of the world upon Himself, Jesus became a vile and loathsome thing cut off from God and man--not just in time but also in eternity. **
The work of Jesus on the cross, as far as we are concerned, is completely finished. Jesus is not now hanging on a cross. He has been raised from the dead, and sits in heaven, fully in charge of the universe as a resurrected man. One man, one son of Adam, Jesus the Lord is now living in glory and He is presently in charge of the universe. But in another sense, if we could step into eternity and view an eternal being such as the Son of God experiencing all things--if we could see things from the vantage point of heaven--we would perceive that a part of the eternal God must suffer forever, outside of time, because of human sin. All the obvious physical pain of Jesus recorded by observers who wrote the Bible, was but the prelude to His real outside-of-time-suffering, which involved being cut off forever from the Father's love and presence. Jesus was consigned to carry our sins out of the universe, He had to go to hell on our behalf, as it were. Jesus was banished forever like the scapegoat of the Old Covenant Law (Lev. 16:10). We live in fallen and mortal bodies, able to die. Jesus was not like us--He had known no sin, his body was sinless and He need not die. Yet by His own choice He became sin by absorbing evil into his own person. It was no mere mortal who bore our sins, but the Son of God Himself, He whose basic existence is and always was to live in eternity. Jesus carried our sins out of time and into eternity.
It is a paradox concerning the nature of time and eternity that neither heaven nor hell are yet populated--all believers reach heaven at the same "time." The dying thief, Stephen the first martyr, the Apostle John--and all the rest of us will arrive in heaven at precisely the same "instant When a person in our time frame dies, he or she leaves time and enters eternity and "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," that person time travels instantly ahead to the event called the Second Coming of Jesus. By the way, if heaven is still empty, except for Jesus, as seen from our vantage point in time, prayers to Mary or St. Jude or any of the saints is pointless. As far as eternity is concerned, we all get to heaven at the same "time." To confuse you even further I might add that in other sense all believers are already in heaven in spirit and soul, though not in body, (see Eph. 2 and Heb. 12:18-29). Without our new resurrection bodies, however, we can not experience heaven in all its fullness. Yet since heaven surrounds us on all sides, we are really already there in spirit. All that is lacking if the transformation of our perishing outer bodies!
Paul the Apostle wrote in his Corinthians letters about the "fellowship of Christ's sufferings" and of "making up in his own body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, that is the church." He spoke of "always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might be revealed in us..." Paul said these things long after Jesus had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven where He now rules, His work on the cross having been completed and finished. The Apostle understand that there is an aspect of cross that is indeed eternal. The crucifixion was one of those important points in our one-dimensional time frame when eternity broke through the normal flow of history and changed everything forever, sending ripples backwards and forwards in time. There are other hints about Jesus in eternity. He is spoken of in the book of Revelation as the "Lamb slain before the foundation of the world." Peter writes, "You know that your were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake." (1 Peter 1:18-20)
Without in any way diminishing the work of Christ on the cross as finished, completed, and accomplished in space-time and in history, it is possible to say that a part of God suffers eternally for man's sins. From Scripture we learn that a holy God must ultimately be just. He must ultimately remove evil in all its forms from His presence. Those persons who have permanently rebelled against His gracious mercy can not cease to exist after death, but remain eternally conscious in a place of everlasting, endless punishment. Since God is omnipresent, He, too, is to be found in hell, sustaining its fires and experiencing its pains. We could say that ultimately God removes evil from the universe by absorbing it into Himself. God apparently willingly endures hell for the sake of his children who have accepted his grace.
The loving God who created us surely suffers infinitely more than any human parent when a beloved child refuses the good and chooses a path leading to hurt, harm and self-destruction. Surely it must be grievously painful for a God (who is love) to be denied the opportunity to give of Himself to the objects of His love. And no man can suffer more than Christ has already suffered, nor are our sufferings, however great, something Christ has not already experienced. *** "God's kindness is meant to lead us to repentance," says Paul (Rom. 2:4). "Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire." (Heb. 12:28, 29)
The same fires which heal, purify and warm the righteous are the consuming, everlasting burnings of Gehenna--where beings who refused to become the human persons they were designed to be must finally endure the "backside" of God's love--which is hell.
"God is going to invade this earth in force. But what's the good of saying you're on his side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else, something it never entered your head to conceive comes crashing in. Something so beautiful to us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left. This time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love, or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down, when it's become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realize it or not. Now, today, in this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever; we must take it or leave it." (C.S. Lewis)
Notes:
* For descriptions of the crucifixion itself see "A Physician Testifies About the Crucifixion" (C. Truman, Davis, MD), "Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ" (David Terasaka, MD), and also "The Crucifixion of Jesus." Online links in my library, http://www.ldolphin.org/sixhours.html/.
** The aspects of time and eternity as they enter into the sufferings of Christ on the cross are discussed in detail by Arthur Custance in his book The Seed of the Woman, available online, (http://custance.org/). These paradoxical concepts of time and eternity are also explained by Ray Stedman in an article from his book Authentic Christianity, Time and Eternity.
*** Other Bible passages on this subject are Isaiah's foreview of the Messiah and His sufferings given in Isaiah 52:13-53:12. Psalm 22, written by King David is also about the sufferings of Messiah on the cross which did not occur in our time domain until a thousand years later.
April 1997
An old southern spiritual says of God, "He's got the whole, wide world in His hands." This is perfectly sound theology--as we saw in our last two articles. Both force and energy from outside our material universe are apparently necessary to hold together, and to sustain, the cosmos in which we live. These active outside agents appear to emerge from the vacuum of empty space!
But the modern view of the vacuum is not that of emptiness and void. The vacuum seems to be a boundary layer, a substratum or interface, between the physical and the spiritual realms of creation. This month we'll consider what lies on the other side of the vacuum.
In a wonderful fictional account of what heaven may be like, C.S. Lewis takes the reader in The Great Divorce on an incredible journey in company with an unruly, boisterous assortment of miscreants who board an unusual bus in the outskirts of a dreary, cold, dark and dismal city. The bus soon ascends into the clouds and lands on a bright meadow at the top of high cliffs. To their dismay the visitors find they are actually semi-transparent--mere greasy smudges of smoke in the bright light of that lofty country. Common objects there are much more solid than the visitors are--the grass hurts their feet and water droplets pierce them like bullets. Coming down from towering mountains are streams of bright, "solid" people, clothed in garments of light. Their job is to persuade the visitors from below to stay and to grow more solid by walking with them higher into the mountains. Sadly most of the bus riders elect to return to their gloomy city, which we discover, lies on the outskirts of hell.
In writing this wonderful story, Lewis totally reverses our common view of life after death--and He is Biblically correct in doing so. For we are the ghosts of the universe and our present material world is shadowy, ephemeral and fading away. The "high countries" of heaven are permanent and more substantial than the world we now experience. Living "in heaven's bright land" requires that we become more solid and real than we are now--our present bodies are totally unsuited for the intensity of life we will be able to experience in heaven. Incidentally, these realities are perceived through the eyes of faith, and are not accessible to us from the limited methodology of science, "...we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. " (2 Cor. 4:18)
When a person enters into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ the Lord, he or she is made new in spirit and soul. In regenerated spirit and soul we can indeed experience the heavenly realm to some degree here and now. But our bodies are not, as yet, made new. And it is through the sense organs of these present bodies that we relate to the present physical, material world. To fully experience the lands of heaven we must receive wonderful new bodies "...flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable...this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality." (1 Cor. 15:50-53, see also 2 Cor. 5:1-4)
"In the beginning created the heavens and the earth." These openings words of the Bible are equivalent to saying that God brought into existence "the entire universe." The creation includes both a material and a spiritual realms--that is, the universe is "two-storied." The term "heavens" (shamayim, plural) includes more than the clouds, the upper atmosphere, and interstellar space--it extends beyond to include an unseen dimension behind the vacuum. * The Apostle Paul in his own words tells about an experience he had when he was caught up into the third level of the heavens:
"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise ** and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter...And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated." (2 Cor. 12:2-8)
Although we can neither visibly see nor scientifically measure the spiritual world, this unseen dimension of the universe is of supreme importance. The notion of three vertical tiers to the heavens is however misleading--tending to imply that the spiritual dimension is "up" and far away--light-years beyond the farthest stars. We should think instead of matter and spirit intermingled together as an integrated whole. The physical world is a small region of heaven, embedded, as it were, in the vacuum. The cosmos is not really merely scaled in the vertical direction with hell at the bottom of the stack deep in the heart of the planet and heaven at the top inaccessibly high above the reach of space ships and telescopes. To think of heaven as above means that heavenly realities transcend the physical--the Creator is greater than His creation. Isaiah (57:15) says that God is "the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity;" who declares "...my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways...For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Other statements in scripture call attention to God's presence everywhere--this is called God's "imminence." When Paul the Apostle visited Athens, he spoke from Mars Hills to the citizens of that great city:
"Men of Athens...the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. And he made from one (man, Adam) every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hopes that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for 'In him we live and move and have our being;' as even one of your poets have said, 'For we are indeed his offspring.'" (Acts 17:22-31)
It is the invisible dimension of the spiritual world where God himself dwells. The heavenlies are also inhabited by the "heavenly hosts," that is by "myriads" *** of angels. These beings were created and named one by one by God and appointed as "ministering spirits"; they have special bodies suited for the spiritual real which they inhabit. (see Heb. 1:7, 14; 1 Cor. 15:40) Our material world is embedded in the spiritual--this is the meaning of the vacuum as a plenum or substrate. Every day we sense and participate in, but can not see, happenings in the invisible world of the spirit, for instance in spiritual warfare we are part of God's armies in company with His angels. We are buffeted and influenced constantly by unseen events occurring in the heavenly places, (Eph. 6:12).
From the New Testament we learn that the entire physical creation, has its source and origin in unseen, invisible things: "...faith is the assurance (hupostasis = "to stand under", i.e., support, foundation) of things not seen...By faith we understand that the world (aionos = ages, or world) was created (katartizo = to fit, or render complete) by the word (rhemati = the oracles, sayings, or spoken utterances) of God, so that what is seen came into being out of that which is unseen." (Hebrews 11:3) However, the physical world, the material realm, is perfectly real and solid (not maya, or illusion, as Hinduism supposes), but it is the world of the fading, the transitory, the impermanent, and the perishable. The Biblical view is in some ways similar to the Greek (Platonic) idea of invisible ideas and archetypes which produces resulting forms in the physical world. But there are important differences of course in the Greek and Hebrew world-views. For one thing, something has gone wrong in the original material creation which produces death and decay, corruption and disintegration. There is also active evil present in the heavens. Evil in the universe has damaged the original close and harmonious coupling that once existed between the spiritual and material dimensions of existence. The old creation is fallen and God is preparing a new.
A number of references in scripture tell us that things built by God in the spiritual world are more durable, more real as it were, than their "shadowy" and temporary counterparts in the physical world. While on Mt. Sinai God told Moses to erect a Tabernacle and to equip it with an elaborate set of furnishings: an altar, a laver, a great lampstand, a table of incense, a table for the shewbread, plus the Ark of the Covenant. All had to be built exactly as prescribed in every detail: "...And see that you (Moses) make them (all these things) after the pattern for them which is being shown to you on the mountain." (Exodus 25:40) This passages shows that there exists a permanent temple in the heavenlies--the tabernacle of Moses was a mere copy. In this unseen temple, Jesus as our Great High Priest now serves: "...we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tabernacle which is set up, not by man, but by the Lord." (Hebrews 8:1-2)
During the last week of his life, when so much happened in the life of Jesus that large portions of the gospels focus on those tightly concatenated events, Jesus gathered His disciples for the last time to spoke many comforting words to them (in what is called "The Upper Room Discourse"--John 14-16) As part of His teaching Jesus announced plans for the building of a new habitation for all His people: "Let not your hearts be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also." (John 14:1-3) The "Father's house" is the universe we live in, the whole universe, both the visible and the invisible. Jesus taught that the universe could be compared to a house having many rooms, all made for sentient beings to live in. Like the homes we now live in, the various rooms in God's house serve various purposes. We typically have living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and a library or study in our homes today. The idea that the universe as like a house to live in is found elsewhere in the Bible. For example God says in Isaiah: "For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it); he did not create it a chaos, he formed it (to be inhabited!): I am the LORD, and there is no other." (Isaiah 45:18) "Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house which you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things are mine, says the LORD. But this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit and who trembles at my word." (Isaiah 66:1, 2)
Isaiah hints in the latter passage that God's house contains at least a living room chair and its accompanying footstool! The part of the universe we know about now consists of a throne (heaven) and a footstool (earth). We are left on our own to infer the real existence of kitchens, closets, banquet halls and libraries in the heavenly lands! For example, the library in God's house must surely contain books in multi-dimensional living color--books that contain in minute detail the history of the world as it really happened, all recorded by special angels (see Ezek. 9:2 for instance).
If then we are being prepared now to live in wonderful new bodies we also can look forward to dwelling in a splendid new house and city. Our place of honor there is something we can influence to a large extent, by our life-style choices here and now: "In a great house (the universe) there are not only vessels of gold and silver (people), but also of wood and of earthenware, and some for noble use and some for ignoble. If anyone purifies himself from what is ignoble (base), then he will be a vessel for noble use, consecrated and useful to the master of the house, ready for any good work." (2 Tim. 2:20-21)
What lies on the other side of the vacuum? "...this will be made manifest at the proper time by the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen." (I Tim. 6:15-16) Many people around us are content to live only in the world of shadows, in the dimension of the temporary and the perishing--ignorant of the invisible bright world of the spirit which surrounds us. God's offer to all mankind today to journey to the High Countries is still open: "The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.' And let him who hears say, 'Come.' And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price." (Rev. 22:17)
Notes:
* The New Testament calls this spiritual dimension the heavenly places, or the heavenlies [epouranios, from epi = above and ouranios, the heavens]. The English word "heaven" comes from a word meaning to lift up or to heave, referring to God's stretching out of space on the second day of creation.
** The Greek word is borrowed from ancient Persian for "a walled garden."
*** The Greek word for "ten thousand" is often used to signify
"countless numbers of."
May 1997
Five planets (Gk: wanderers) were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. They named these "non-fixed stars" after their gods. In addition to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus was found in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930. (1) Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) thought there should be an additional planet between Mars and Jupiter. A bit later Johann David Titius (1729-1794) noted the curious spacing of the planets--each was twice the distance from the Sun as its predecessor. Johannes Bode formulated this as a "law" in 1778 leading to an intensive search for the "missing" planet.
In January of 1801 the mystery of the missing planet unfolded rapidly. However only a broad belt of rock fragments--the asteroid belt--was found. These rings of fragments averaged 2.8 AU from the Sun (AU stands for "astronomical unit," with the earth being at 1 AU from the Sun). The first four asteroids discovered were Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno--the named list today numbers several hundred. The biggest are 200 to 480 miles in diameter. (2)
The asteroids are not ordinary pieces of rocks and clouds of dust that never quite coalesced to become a legitimate planet. There are enough asteroid pieces in orbit now to form an object less than a tenth a mass of the moon, but originally there may have been a planet at that location with a gravity two-thirds of the earth's, a 4.5 year orbit and a perhaps a 57.5 hour day. (2) Another estimate is that the original planet may have been perhaps 15 times larger than the earth. (3)
Some asteroids do not lie in the plane of the ecliptic and many have highly elliptical orbits that endanger the earth from time to time. Because of their high relative velocities with respect to the earth, even a small asteroid would hit the earth with tens or hundreds of megatons of energy release. An exploding planet would heavily bombard, disturb, and crater planets and moons and that of course is what we observe in examining objects in our solar system. The dangers of future collisions by asteroids or comets to life on earth is a very real source of concern in government science circles these days, though it seems doubtful that an adequate warning and defense system will ever be built. Earth's atmosphere destroys or weakens most objects which fall in on us from space. Meteors the size of a grain of sand burn up at the rate of many thousands per day in the earth's atmosphere. "Fireballs" which may not burn up completely, and sometimes weigh up to several tons hit the earth as meteorites at a rate of perhaps ten per year. Now that investigators are searching with opened eyes, eroded and filled-in large impact craters have been found to dot the globe, testifying to many large (and probably major) impacts in the past. The moon and airless planets are all heavily cratered, in fact the evidence points to most of these craters being "early" in the history of the universe. Probably mostly occurred at the same time. Slowly rotating bodies, such a Mercury for example, are much more cratered on one side than on the other.
The Book of the Revelation, incidentally, describes what may be in fact two such future collisions during the coming judgment of the end-time,
"And the second angel sounded, and something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea; and a third of the sea became blood; and a third of the creatures, which were in the sea and had life, died; and a third of the ships were destroyed. And the third angel sounded, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood; and a third of the waters became wormwood; and many men died from the waters, because they were made bitter." (Revelation 8:8-11) [For a relevant commentary see www.pbc.org/dp/stedman/ revelation/4200.html)
Instead of just one catastrophe related to an impact from outer space as possibly related to the extinction of the dinosaurs, Astronomer Tom Van Flandern (3) considers several such events as probable during earth's history. His hypothesis is based on different compositions of various asteroids and comets. Converting the atomic time scale (that is, the conventional old-earth geological time scale) to ordinary dynamic time would place these events within the framework of human history: the Flood, the breakup of the continents, the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs, Astronomer Dodwell's observed shift in the tilt of the earth's axis in 2345 BC, Joshua's Long Day--and so on. For now we must postpone discussing such fascinating topics.
The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter gives every evidence that a planet was once there but somehow blew up! Following Greek mythology the planet could have been named Hephaestus, had it been known to the Greeks, or Vulcan (but see note in ref. 2) in equivalent Roman mythology. Hephaestus is the god of smiths and fire. He was born lame and weak and rejected by his mother Hera (Juno) who threw him down from Mt. Olympus. Thetis, the gentle sea god found him and nurtured him and returned him to Olympus but he later disputed (along with his mother) against Zeus (Jupiter) who threw him out of Olympus a second time. He fell on the island Lemnos with a thump so hard the island shook. There, restored to health, he built robots of gold and silver to support his weak legs and went on to craft many wonderful artifacts including the twelve golden thrones of the Olympians as well as their weapons and treasures. He married Aphrodite (Venus). The Romans called Hephaestus Vulcan and said that his forge was beneath Mt. Etna. He has been identified by many scholars (4) as associated with Cain's antediluvian descendant Tubal-Cain:
"Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. And Cain had relations with his wife and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city Enoch, after the name of his son. Now to Enoch was born Irad; and Irad became the father of Mehujael; and Mehujael became the father of Methushael; and Methushael became the father of Lamech. And Lamech took to himself two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other, Zillah. And Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. And his brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah..." (Genesis 4:16-22)
Is there a connection between the Greek and Roman pantheon of Gods, the Flood, and a planet that perhaps once exploded? Writing of the Nephilim--who sprang from the illicit union of fallen angels with Antediluvian daughters of Eve--Ray Stedman says,
It is clear that the result of this union of demon-possessed men with women was a race of mighty men, "men of renown." Here, I think, is the explanation for the stories of mythology with which many of you are familiar, the demi-gods--half man and half god--such as Hercules, and others. Mythology is no mere invention of the mind of man; it grows out of the traditions, memories, and legends which were a corruption and perversion of primitive truths. We are told in this passage that this occurred "also afterward." This "also afterward" means that after the Flood a similar incursion of demonic beings took place. This second invasion resulted in the presence in the land of Canaan of certain gigantic races which are called in our Bible, the Canaanites. Many of you who have stumbled over those long lists of "ites" in the Old Testament are familiar with these various races--the Jebusites, the Geshurites, the Hittites, etc. All of these are divisions of the Nephilim (they are also called the Rephaim in the Old Testament) who were already in the land when Abraham came to the promised land. They represent an attempt on the part of demonic powers to derail the divine program of bringing a Redeemer into the world through the human race. (5, 6)
If a planet did explode in ancient times showering the earth with debris, it could well have caused the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs. The pioneering research of A-Bomb Physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, geologist Walter, about 15 years ago showed the a thin layer of the rare element Iridium apparently lies in the strata of the standard geological column known as the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary. (7) This transitional layer, 65 millions ago on the atomic time scale, was a time when massive extinctions, especially of the dinosaurs, appear in the fossil record. It is now widely believed that the earth was struck at that time by a large asteroid--the impact site probably at the Yucatan peninsula.
According to the Setterfield model describing the decrease in the speed of light since the fall of man, 65 million years BP (Before Present) in atomic time corresponds to 3005 BC in ordinary Biblical (dynamical) calendar time. However Setterfield's preferred (Masoretic text) date for the Flood is ~3500 BC, or 600 million years BP in atomic time. The Flood might have been triggered by a collision from space, but possibly not. (8)
For those who want a credible and professional theory of how one or more exploded planets could cause great catastrophes on earth, secular astronomer Tom Van Flandern has written an excellent and stimulating book on this subject. He believes that three significant disastrous planetary-explosion events are associated with the birth of all asteroids and comets and with breaks in earth's geological record. (3)
Of course ordinary planets don't explode! They are all far too stable or too small for a runaway nuclear explosion to occur spontaneously. There is, however, one intriguing possibility. The terrestrial planets contain about 19% water. When the velocity of light was very high just after creation, and after radioactive decay had commenced, short-lived radioactive elements in the terrestrial planets could have heated rapidly leading to crustal fracture on a planet from superheated steam. (More on this next month). But even so, one or more planetary explosions may have been caused by intelligent, sentient beings--namely by mighty fallen angels! C.S. Lewis did not think it out of the ordinary for each planet to be under the governmental jurisdiction of a single great angel, a concept found in the Talmud. (9) We know from Scripture that four amazing angels, the four-faced, winged Cherubim surround the throne of God. The Archangel Michael is especially charged with the care and well-being of Israel, other angels (fallen and unfallen) oversee the affairs of the nations (Daniel 10). Lucifer, the present angelic "god" of our own planet was once the virtual Prime Minister of the universe in the throne room of God before his fall. (10)
The universe we live in is a fallen universe, is a dying world. The fall of Satan effectively wrecked and ruined the original creation, setting it spiraling downward to disorder and decay as described by what we now call the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Romans 8:20-22). Angelic conflict was involved in the original series of events that brought about the fall of man into sin and the initial devastation of the physical universe. Although one group of fallen angels was removed by God and confined to Tartarus at the time of the Flood (Jude 6) this does not mean angelic conflict has by any means ceased! Angelic conflict continues to this day and hour! In fact we followers of the Lord Jesus Christ are enjoined to enter into and take part in the ongoing conflict of the ages,
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm." (Ephesians 6:12-13)
Angels war against one another apparently with impressive weaponry that would amaze even the best of our modern science fiction Star Wars writers. Yet the Bible boldly declares that we the followers of Christ have more effective weapons than angelic planet-destroying laser cannons or matter-antimatter missiles.
"For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our (cosmic) warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete." (2 Corinthians 10:3-6)
As C.S. Lewis vividly portrays in the third book of his trilogy, That Hideous Strength, the final showdown between good and evil as set to occur on our carefully protected, but beleaguered planet Earth--as the Seed of the Serpent and his angelic hosts are thrown down and enchained by Yahweh Sabaoth, Jesus the Messiah, the Seed of the Woman Eve.
"Terror and pit and snare will confront you, O inhabitant of the earth. Then it will be that he who flees the report of disaster will fall into the pit, And he who climbs out of the pit will be caught in the snare; For the windows above will be opened, and the foundations of the earth will shake. The earth will be broken asunder, The earth will be split through, The earth will be shaken violently. The earth will reel to and fro like a drunkard, And it will totter like a shack, For its transgression is heavy upon it, And it will fall, never to rise again. So it will happen in that day, that the Lord will punish the host of heaven, on high, And the kings of the earth, on earth. And they will be gathered together like prisoners in the dungeon, And will be confined in prison; And after many days they will be punished. Then the moon will be abashed and the sun ashamed, For the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, And His glory will be before His elders. O Lord, Thou art my God; I will exalt Thee, I will give thanks to Thy name; For Thou hast worked wonders, Plans formed long ago, with perfect faithfulness." (Isaiah 24:17-25:1, the "Little Apocalypse").
"Uniformitarianism"--that great neo-pagan philosophy which claims that there have been long stable ages billions of years in extent with unchanging environmental conditions and all the delicate balances needed for life to "evolve" by "accident" from simple to complex--uniformitarianism is in full retreat in these latter days. At the end of the age God is apparently making the true and brief history of our universe more clear for all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The final story is far more exciting than previous generations could ever have imagined. What is most amazing of all to me is that we are not bystanders but active agents on behalf of our Creator and King. The final chapters are surely about to unfold before us. In the service of the coming King there is much work you can do. Do make yourself available to the Commander of the Armies of the Lord!
References:
1. Jastrow and Thompson, Astronomy: Fundamentals and Frontiers, John Wiley and Sons, New York 1977.
2. J. Tim Unruh, Phaeton: The Lost Planet. An account of Biblical Catastrophism on a Cosmic Scale on-line: on-line at http://ldolphin.org/unruh. Tim reminds me that a hypothetical planet called at the time "Vulcan" was proposed inside the orbit or Mercury in the 1800's. Mercury's anomalous orbit was later accounted for by Relativity Theory.
3. Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated, by Tom Van Flandern. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA 1993. See also http://www.metaresearch.org; and http://www.planetarymysteries.com/vanflandern-.html for bio and book ordering. For a convincing summary of all of Van Flandern's evidence on the exploded planet hypothesis and the origin of the asteroids and comets see http://home.sprynet.com/interserv/sabot/planet.htm. Also see The Asteroid Belt: Remnant of a Former Planet? on Internet at http://www.n-polk.k12.ia.us/Pages/AiS/Asteroid.html.
Late Update: In the March 15 issue of Van Flandern's Meta Research Bulletin, the author gives a fascinating discussion of the Face on Mars, planetary explosions, comets and asteroids. He believes the first major event, 338 million years ago at the Permian/Triassic (P/T) geologic boundary (atomic time scale) was the explosion of "Planet K" (Krypton?) which he estimates was 15 times more massive than the earth, in the outer asteroid belt. [Did this event initiate the Flood of Noah?]. A second event, the explosion of "Planet V" (the original fifth planet, he thinks) took place at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary, 65 million years ago, and would be associated with dinosaur extinction. The third event, 3.2 Mya at the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary, he believes was the explosion of "Body C" which was about 1% as massive as the earth. [Clearly the picture of one possible planetary explosion as I have sketched it above is preliminary and only accounts for part of the evidence]. Another group of asteroids has recently been discovered beyond Neptune at 50 AU, consistent with Bode's Law. Thus there may have been yet another planet at that location once upon a time.After writing this article I had lunch with Donald Patten who reminded me of his book The Mars-Earth Wars which deals with these same subjects. It is available from the author, 13540 39th Ave. NE, Seattle, WN 98125.
4. Noah's Three Sons, by Arthur Custance, PhD, http://custance.org.
5. Ray C. Stedman, Genesis: Signs of Collapse http://www.pbc.org/dp/stedman/genesis/0325.html
6. Chuck Missler, Briefing Package on the Nephilim
7. Alvarez, Walter, and Frank Asaro. What Caused The Mass Extinction? An Extraterrestrial Impact; October, page 44. Scientific American, October 1990.
8. Setterfield, Barry, Creation and Catastrophe, 80-page monograph plus color wall chart, 25 x 36 inches. Set available for $30 pp from Koinonia House, PO Box D, CDA, Idaho 83816. Summary: http://ldolphin.org/catastrophe.html.
9. C.S. Lewis, Science Fiction Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and Out of the Silent Planet, Macmillan, New York, 1965.
10.. See God and His Angels on my web pages.
The 104th Psalm is a beautiful hymn about creation that complements the information given to us in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible. Here as in other Scriptures, the origin of the universe and our planet are not pictured as a massive explosion (such as a Big Bang) but as an orderly series of events in which everything was crafted by the hands of an artisan, a Master Builder. The early earth after creation is nowhere pictured as a place of smoking volcanoes, sulfurous fumes and violent quakes. The Apostle Peter quite simply says that the earth "was formed out of water and by means of water" (2 Peter 3:5). The whole purpose of creation was to produce an environment, a habitat for man. The universe was designed for man to manage and govern (Genesis 1:26-31, Hebrews 2:6-8) All that has changed as far as we are concerned--Adam forfeited his rightful place as steward over the creation. The world we live in has been ruined, and the human race in its ongoing rebellion against God continues to require interventions by God when He calls men into courts of judgment. God's last major judgment was the Flood of Noah--and this great disaster was actually not very long ago in the history of our race.
Seventy-one percent of the earth's surface today is indeed water--the oceans average 3.8 kilometers deep. Twenty-nine percent of the earth's surface is land--whose average elevation is only 623 meters! If all the continents and land masses were leveled into the sea using a giant bull-dozer, nearly two miles of water would cover our entire earth. Glaciers and ice caps hold about two percent of earth's water--were they all to melt sea levels around the world would rise 40 meters--a big problem for many large sea-level cities should this happen. The earth's atmosphere today holds only about 2 inches of precipitable water--this is constantly being replenished by the hydrological cycle. (1)
The earth before the Flood of Noah was a very different place! Our long years of educational brainwashing in the mythology of evolutionary theory and an old-earth has numbed us to the clear testimony of the Bible that God's intervention in human affairs in the time of Noah, the tenth man from Adam, changed things forever on our planet. (2) Since Old Testament chronologies are actually quite complete we can date the Flood as most likely occurring between 2500 BC and 3400 BC--depending on our choice of the Masoretic Hebrew text or the Greek Septuagint of the Old Testament, respectively.
The earth before the Flood seems to have possessed a uniform sub-tropical climate. There may have been no rainfall, no ice and snow and no major seasonal changes. (For instance palm-tree fossils have been found in Alaska, frozen warm-climate mammoths in Siberia, and coal in Antarctica).
The oceans would have been much warmer. Earth's rivers and streams may well have originated in powerful springs such as the spring that supplied the four rivers of Eden. I personally subscribe to a vapor-canopy model of earth's atmosphere before the Flood which could have provided the greenhouse effect for a world-wide mild climate. But vapor canopy models are very limited by basic thermodynamic considerations. In his classic pioneering study (3), Joseph Dillow suggested a pre-Flood atmospheric pressure at sea level twice the present value--a big help to the extinct flying reptile, the Pteranadon, who would probably not get off the ground in today's atmosphere. Too much water vapor in the upper atmosphere before the Flood would obscure the stars, and even the sun and moon, because of perpetual cloud cover. For the atmosphere to support the weight of additional water vapor would require raising the surface temperature rapidly towards the boiling point of water. Condensation of water vapor during very heavy, prolonged rainfall would release enormous amounts of latent heat of condensation. However, in spite of these difficulties a modest vapor canopy, perhaps holding 40 feet of rain water may have existed prior to the deluge of the Flood.
Most of the water for the great Flood of Noah came from the so-called "fountains of the great deep" (Gen. 7:11). This source of water is mentioned before the rain from the "windows of heaven." During the formation of the earth on the second and third days of creation, large quantities of water were evidently placed between the earth's crust and mantle in what might be called giant subterranean reservoirs. This water was probably under high pressure to begin with (causing artesian springs and geysers to abound), but after the fall of man and the angels--when some of the heavier atomic elements were apparently made unstable by reduced nuclear binding forces so that radioactive decay commenced--the shorter-lived isotopes could well have heated the subsurface waters to a point of criticality where they could scarcely be contained by the strength of the overlying crust. We mentioned this in last month's article as one possible cause for the explosion of a planet where the asteroid belt now is found. Extensive volcanic activity may have occurred at the same time--the fountains of the great deep were thus broken open and volcanic ash hurtling into the stratosphere could have collapsed the vapor canopy by dispersing condensation nuclei around which raindrops formed. (4) [Incidentally, gravitational compaction of the earth at the time of earth's formation would not have raised the interior temperature above 1000 degrees C, yet the earth's core--present temperature about 4300 degrees--has evidently melted and overturned in the past. Radioactive heating is believed to have supplied the extra energy needed--see http://ldolphin.org/Early.html].
The Flood in Noah's time was certainly a direct act of judgment by God on a world which had become thoroughly and continually evil:
"Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. And the Lord said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.'" (Genesis 6:5-7).
But since God is in full control of nature--there are no "accidents" in God's universe--the exact mechanisms the Lord used to initiate the Flood need not preoccupy our attention. Erudite scientific models for the geophysical processes that accompanied the Flood have been presented at three Pittsburgh International Conferences on Creation (5)--the proceedings are available and highly recommended. On the Internet will be found Dr. Walter Brown's outstanding book on the Flood (6) which especially concentrates on possible mechanisms for the bursting open of the fountains of the great deep.
Hebrew has several words to describe ordinary floods, but Genesis 7-11 uses the unique word mabbul (found only elsewhere in Psalm 29:10). When Hebrew scholars put the Old Testament into Greek, they chose the Greek word kataklusmos, from the verb "to inundate" in place of the Hebrew mabbul. All the language of Genesis, and especially the words of the Apostle Peter, give us the clearest possible picture of a world-wide cataclysmic, universal, disaster from which only eight human beings escaped with their lives.
Warning of false teachers and strong-willed skeptics Peter tells us,
"For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly thereafter; and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day with {their} lawless deeds), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment...Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.' For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But the present heavens and earth by His word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men..." (2 Peter 2:4-3:7)
Noah and his sons (and perhaps some hired hands) probably had less than 76 years to build the Ark in which Noah's family and selected animals were to find refuge from the Flood. We know the size of the Ark from Genesis 6:14-16, and many fine books have been written in recent years (7) analyzing the design and adequacy of this great barge. The Ark is said to have landed on the Mountains of Ararat in Eastern Turkey after the Flood. Many amazing search expeditions (8) there have been launched in our century though all have thus far been inconclusive. There would be no need to labor many decades building a boat to escape a local flood, simple flight to the next valley or to a nearby mountain would have sufficed. Nor would a local flood require such an elaborate plan to save representative animal species. Scripture is clear: the purpose of the earth was to judge and destroy a decadent, thoroughly evil human civilization which probably numbered some billions of individuals--along with their cities and all the infrastructures. Noah escaped not because he was blameless (justified by his faith as we are), but because he (and his family) responded to God's mercy and grace. A good many other individuals who lived in the 1655 to 2255 years between Adam and Noah no doubt responded to the gospel preached by Adam, by Enoch, and by others who knew the Lord. By the time of the Flood apparently the entire "civilized" world had become totally unresponsive to the offer of God's free salvation. Crazy Noah kept on building his weird boat on dry land --far from the ocean--in a country where it never rained! He probably enduring constant mocking, scorn and ridicule up until the end. Noah's friends were welcome to find refuge on the Ark by faith in God, but no one else believed God's clear warnings.
"Then Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him entered the ark because of the water of the flood. Of clean animals and animals that are not clean and birds and everything that creeps on the ground, there went into the ark to Noah by twos, male and female, as God had commanded Noah. And it came about after the seven days, that the water of the flood came upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. And the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. On the very same day Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark, they and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, all sorts of birds. So they went into the ark to Noah, by twos of all flesh in which was the breath of life. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, entered as God had commanded him; and the Lord closed it behind him. Then the flood came upon the earth for forty days; and the water increased and lifted up the ark, so that it rose above the earth. And the water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the surface of the water. And the water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. The water prevailed fifteen cubits [~23 feet] higher, and the mountains were covered. And all flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. Thus He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark. And the water prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days..." (Genesis 7:7-24)
The period of the Flood lasted an entire year--the Ark finally landed on the very same day of the Hebrew calendar that Jesus Christ would be raised from the dead about three millennia later in history, taking into account the calendar change in Exodus 12. The great subterranean caverns of the great deep collapsed, so that the waters receded into what are now our deep ocean basins. With the great weight of water removed from the land, isostatic rebound allowed great mountains, capped with sediments, to "float" up on the underlying mantle below the crust. (Mountains before the Flood were most likely much lower than they are now). Seeds sprouted, life began again, and Noah and his family left the Ark to repopulate the earth under a new covenant with God (Gen. 8:18-9:17). Gone were all the cities--buried under miles of sediments. Gone were any highways and communications systems or transportation vehicles, and the relatively advanced technology of what was probably a surpassingly sophisticated Antediluvian world. Four men and four women who knew and loved the living God personally began to repopulate the earth. They started with only meager resources and animals from the Ark--plus the bountiful grace of God.
The post-Flood climate was now very different--assuming the collapse of the vapor canopy. An ice-age followed. Earth's original one continent broke up and spread apart (rapid continental drift)--either during the Flood--or as some believe--during the days of Peleg about 100 to 300 years later. (9) The dinosaurs, once contemporary with men, rapidly died out, quite possibly from a separate disaster not long after the Flood. Storms, natural disasters and great seasonal weather changes set in during the years immediately following the Flood as well. Everything was different, yet life survived, recovered and proliferated. Great civilizations were built up again in a matter of only hundreds of years.
Next month our plan is to look at world population statistics and growth rates both for the ancient world and for the past few hundred years especially when guided by the vast pre-Flood knowledge accumulated by the eight Flood survivors with life spans and 300+ years and the long life experiences of post-Flood peoples with similar longevity. The mathematics and census data lead to an inescapable conclusion: Our earth has surely again reached a critical time on God's calendar of events for world history. Another great and terrible judgment most certainly lies just ahead. As God provided an Ark of Refuge in the Days of Noah, so He invites all to find eternal safe harbor and refuge through a personal relationship with His Son, Jesus Christ the Lord. We are invited to come "into" the Body of Christ by faith and thereby to find rescue and everlasting life.
"And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it shall be also in the days of the Son of Man: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. "It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed." (Luke 17:26-30)
Time is running out!
References:
1. Michael J. Oard, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood, Institute for Creation Research, Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021, 1990. (http://www.icr.org/).
2. For a history of how evolutionary theory and old-earth geology developed as parallel world-views that sought from their inception to replace a Biblical world-view see Ian T. Taylor, In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order, Bible-Science Association, PO Box 260, Zimmerman, MN 55398-0260. (1-800-422-4253)
3. Joseph Dillow, The Waters Above: Earth's Preflood Vapor Canopy, Moody Press, Chicago 1982.
4. Setterfield, Barry, Creation and Catastrophe, 80-page monograph plus color wall chart, 25 x 36 inches. Set available for $30 pp from Koinonia House, PO Box D, CDA, Idaho 83816. Summary: http://ldolphin.org/catastrophe.html.
5. Proceedings of the [1st, 2nd and 3rd] International Conference(s) on Creationism, Creation Science Fellowship, 362 Ashland Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15228.
6. Walter Brown, PhD, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, Center for Scientific Creation, on-line or in book form: http://www.creationscience.com/.
7. John Woodmorappe, Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, Institute Creation Research, Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021, 1990. (http://www.icr.org/).
8. Noah's Ark Home Page (B. J. Corbin), http://www.noahsarksearch.com//; The Noah's Ark Project (Douglas Peterson), http://user.mc.net/dougp/noahs_ark/: Christian Information Ministry (Noah's Ark, Creation, Theology; Richardson, TX), http://www.fni.com/cim/index.html.
9. Watson, John A., The Division of the Earth in Peleg's Day: Tectonic or Linguistics, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, Vol. 11, Part 1, 1997. PO Box 6302, Acacia Ridge, D.C. Queensland 4110, Australia.
10.. Flood Related Web sites: John Woodmorappe, The Realities
of Creation, http://earth.nettrek.net.au/~rik/cyber/johnw.htm;
Creation Evidence Museum (Dr. Carl E. Baugh), http://www.texoma.com/~linesden/cem/;
Dinosaurs, Fossils and Other Mysteries (Dennis Petersen), http://users.aol.com/crfcresci/crf.html;
The Paluxy Dinosaur/Man track Controversy (Glen J. Kuban), http://members.aol.com/Paluxy2/paluxy.htm.
August 1997
| The D&M "5 sided" pyramid on Mars, (1.6 miles base length by 1640 feet high, compared to Cheop's pyramid at Giza, 750 by 450 feet), near the "Face" the "City" and the "Fort." in Cydonia, Mars. |
The Red Planet is in the news again. It's been 32 years since Mariner 4 was there and 21 years since the Viking Orbiter/Lander program. Happily, NASA Pathfinder's bouncy landing on the 4th of July put us back in the Mars business after far too many years of no new data. Planet Number Four of our solar system most resembles the earth, but is half our size and 50% further away from the sun than we are. A Martian day is but 38 minutes longer than a day on earth, and the axial tilt just 1.7 degrees greater. Mars apparently had an atmosphere at one time (oxidizing the surface soils and rocks red)--but at present the atmospheric pressure is almost nil (7 millibars compared to earth's 1000). Thus the daily temperature range runs from -220 to +170 F. The polar "ice" caps are dusty frozen carbon dioxide. There are occasional strong winds and great dust storms. Mars has no magnetic field to speak of.
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) thought he saw seasonally changing canali ("channels") on Mars-so alien life on Mars was a major theme of science fiction writers from well before the turn of our century until now. Mars was of course named for the Roman God of war, son of Jupiter and Juno (Mars is the Greek god Ares). The name Mars may have been derived from Marduk, chief god of Nimrod's Babylonian pantheon. Cairo, Egypt ("Al Kahira" i.e., Mars) was founded on August 5, 969 AD by conquering Fatimid armies. Advice from local astrologers to delay the construction was apparently overlooked. (1) The soothsayers were fearful that the ascendant planet Mars and certain other omens meant the Turks would soon conquer the city. The intended name of the city until the astrologers' dire warning had been Al Mansuriya ("the victorious"). Mars and Egypt seem to be strangely linked from ancient times, probably from Pharaonic times in ancient Egyptian astrology and mythology.
When strange pyramidal mountains, a great stone face, and other anomalous features were photographed on Mars in 1976, Schiaparelli's canals were suddenly out of fashion, however the possibilities of a now-destroyed civilization on Mars became the topic of even more serious scientific study.
Mars has some amazing features. Most all the cratering in found on one side, and the side of the planet opposite all the craters bulges outward as if struck an enormous blow from colliding asteroids. (2) Mars' tiny, irregular, moons Deimos (~8 miles diameter) and Phobos (~14 miles) may in fact be captured asteroids. In the May issue of Personal Update we discussed the possibility that a planet between Mars and Jupiter blew up, and if this happened Mars would probably have caught the worst of the onslaught of asteroid and planet fragments. These could very possibly included lots of ice and watery comets. Perhaps the flash floods on Mars came during that terrible cosmic bombardment. Astronomer Tom Van Flandern (3) thinks the asteroid bombardment blew away the atmosphere and flipped Mars on its axis. If so, the "Face" on Mars would have been near the old equator.
There is presently no surface water on Mars-but quite possibly much underground water in the form of permafrost. Gigantic water-carved canyons bear witness of enormous floods in the past. Surface features on Mars are amazing: the Valles Marineris canyon system is nearly 2500 miles long and up to 5 miles deep, making our Grand Canyon seem like a mere scratch on a level Earth. Three Tharsis shield volcanoes rise 6 to 11 miles above the surrounding plateau. Olympus Mons, the biggest mountain on Mars rises 15 miles high above the surrounding plain-its base is a mere 300 miles across! Flat basins suggest former oceans. In the region known as Cydonia are found the strangest features of all: The "Face," the "Fort," the "City" and several huge pyramidal mountains. (4) It is not hard to imagine these are the remnants of a settlement on the shores of an ancient Martian ocean.
In September of this year, if all goes well, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, now in transit, (5) should be orbiting Mars. While NASA continues to ignore the strong scientific interest in the Face on Mars, hopefully new imagery from Surveyor this fall will tell us more. Tom Van Flandern expresses the opinion that,
The unusual landforms at Cydonia on Mars are either natural features, or they are artificial constructs of intelligent beings. A number of tests of artificiality have been proposed since the area was discovered. For example, it has been noted that the "Face" is a three-dimensional face, not merely a profile or a drawing on a flat surface. As such, it still looks like a face from every angle...
The "Face" on Mars has now passed each test of artificiality yet proposed. These tests include a three dimensional structure, a lack of fractal patterns in the image, an apparent bilateral symmetry, being built on the Martian equator, being built with a culturally significant orientation, and serving an apparent culturally significant purpose. It would be an exaggeration to say that the case for artificiality is now compelling; for many will still find that conclusion less likely than all these "coincidences" put together. Yet the balance of the evidence, considered objectively, now weighs in favor of artificiality over a natural origin of the Cydonian landforms.
It is with some relief that the author hastens to point out that Mars Global Surveyor is now en route to the red planet for a mapping mission, with cameras able to take high resolution pictures of such potential quality that the truth of the hypothesis should be made considerably clearer to all, perhaps as soon as the end of 1997. If the spacecraft reveals that the Cydonia landforms are naturally occurring objects, the author is ready to stand convicted of frightfully bad judgment on this matter. By implication, his other exceptions to mainstream astronomy, such as the exploded planet hypothesis, may be regarded in the same light--especially since the exploding was directly responsible for this new evidence and for suggesting this line of reasoning. However, in view of the preceding considerations, all might be wise to prepare for the alternative the possibility of a cultural shock probably unrivaled by any other in our generation.
Lately reputable scientists have shown that the origin of life on earth by mere time plus chance is not plausible. (6) Panspermia--the theory that earth was seeded with life from outer space is now seriously discussed in many circles. For many scientists, the universe is indeed so vast that surely "we are not alone?" Was there once life on Mars? Will organic molecules be found there beneath the baked surface?
On the subject of life on other planets the Bible is strangely silent. The creation account of Genesis is written from the point of view of an observer who is standing on the earth. In Jewish tradition, the rabbis said the Lord stood on the Foundation Stone when He created things. This stone would later be part of Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem where the temples were built! Geocentricity is still today an interesting theory (7) but neither well-known nor very popular. There is no longer any great aesthetic beauty in attempting to place the earth at the center of the physical universe. But Earth is still unique--it is the moral center of all that God has done in the universe. It was on this planet that God became a man, being born of a virgin into our race. It was on a cross near the present Damascus Gate on Mt. Moriah that Jesus the Son of God died for the sins of the world. Furthermore "...in Christ all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, [and He] reconcile(d) to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross." (Col. 1:19-2) This is an amazing statement, because it means that all evil and estrangement from God that existed anywhere in the universe, all brokenness and ruin anywhere in the entire creation was fixed and repaired by the work of Jesus on the Cross. Finally, it is to the Planet Earth that Jesus will return to rule forever. After His parting words to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, "as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, 'Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.'" (Acts 1:9-11)
The Bible speaks of Jesus as the Second or Last of two men named Adam. The first Adam, made in the very image and likeness of God lost his rightful place as governor and steward over the original creation. Adam's hapless race, including all of us, were doomed by sin to death and sorrow. The very universe itself was ruined and damaged by evil among the angels. But by Christ's cosmic sacrifice, all things can be and will be made new. One day there will be "new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." (2 Peter 3:13).
But is there other life in outer space? There are innumerable angels. There appear to have been one or more "races" of Nephilim--half angel, half human. Yes, I believe there could well be many other forms of life on other worlds. In his science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis' hero from earth is kidnapped by bad guys who take him to Mars and later to Venus. Earth, it turns out is the "dark world" ruled over by a "bent angel." Once the space ship leaves the gloom and spiritual darkness of our planet, the universe, Lewis imagines, is teeming everywhere with life. This notion might not be far from the truth-we'll have to wait and see.
References:
1. Cairo: Biography of a City, by James Aldridge, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1969.
2. The Mars-Earth Wars by Donald Patten, though controversial, is especially helpful in understanding possible models for catastrophism on Mars. His book is available from the author, 13540 39th Ave. NE, Seattle, WN 98125.
3. Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated, by Tom Van Flandern. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA 1993. See also http://www.metaresearch.org/
4. Scientific study group of the Mars Anomalies, Prof. Stan McDaniel and team, http://www.mcdanielreport.com/
5. Global Surveyor: see http://bang.lanl.gov/solarsys/survey96.htm. Wonderful web sites on Mars are everywhere in Internet these days. One can start most anywhere and fine endless links, for example see http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/mars.html or http://www.seds.org/~spider/mars/mars.html to get your Mars surfing started.
6. Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science & Cosmology by R. C. Sproul:, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 1994 and Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, by Lee Spetner, Ph.D., The Judaica Press, Brooklyn, 1997 are highly recommended.
7. For more on Geocentricity see the work of Gerardus D. Bouw, Ph.D. at http://www2.baldwinw.edu/~gbouw/g/
September 1997
Classical Physics reached its apex in Sir Isaac Newton's Day (1642-1727). The "Clockwork Universe" was so tightly linked together that the chains of cause and effect--which we called "determinism"--were obvious to everyone. God was in His heaven and watchfully controlled everything down to the smallest detail. The same universal laws of physics prevailed within the miniature universe of the atom, and beyond the furthermost star.
In 1801 Thomas Young reported his famous double-slit experiment with light beams. If light were corpuscular, photons directed at the slits should divide equally and exit the other side uniformly. Instead Young found interference patterns that clearly showed light was a wave phenomenon. Soon electric and magnetic fields were discovered and the propagation of light waves was accounted for eloquently by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). By the turn of this century it was clear that light and atomic particles behaved at times as if they were bunched-up wave packets, and at other times like rigid billiard balls.
An obscure clerk in a Swiss Patent office began to turn things upside down in 1905. The young Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect. Light shining on certain chemically coated services resulted in the emission of electrons, in numbers proportional to the light intensity but not at constant velocities. Einstein's paper came the same year that Max Planck (1858-1947) explained "blackbody" radiation--light emission from heated surfaces. Building on the work of Wein, Stefan, and Boltzmann, Planck's formula showed that the intensity of radiated light from a heated object involved quantum jumps within the atoms of the surface--and these were statistically distributed. His formula contained a new constant, Planck's constant, h. (6.6 x 10-24 joule-second).
The next surprise was that light photons, though massless, carried momentum and energy, and furthermore photon energy and momentum were quantized. When atoms emit photons, they do so only at discrete wavelengths. The energy of photons could be calculated from the simple formula, E = hf = hc/l. h is Planck's constant, c the velocity of light, f the frequency of the light or l the wavelength. Soon a mathematical model for atomic particles knows as "Quantum Mechanics" was developed. (1)This theory has been spectacularly successful but it has disturbed some theologians who see the probability-based calculations of QM as undermining the principle of determinism. Though quantum mechanics dismissed the notion of so-called "hidden variables" this does not mean that God has lost control of things. "Chance" is not an entity that does things-it is philosophically meaningless, for example, to say that "time plus chance" has brought our universe into being, or brought order out of chaos. (2) In spite of the complex probability-based models of QM, God still is in full control. (3)
Very upsetting discoveries have been made about photons (and now other particles) from quantum mechanics: apparently one particle is able to communicate information with another particle after the particles have been separated by time and distance-as much as 10 km in a recent experiment! (4) But this communication is "instantaneous"-or at least much faster than the speed of light. This leads to the hypothesis that two particles separated by time and space in our ordinary 4-dimensional world may be at the same point in hyperspace-they may be connected in a higher dimension. Similar weird and wonderful things seem to occur with gravitational forces: apparently all objects in the universe are "in touch" with each other instantly as far as gravity is concerned, yet ordinarily information signals can not travel from point A to point B faster than the speed of light. (5) At latest count at least 11 higher dimensions have been invoked in the mathematical models that attempt to tie together the Laws of Physics. (6)
Physicists like to keep things simple, to do as little work as possible, they follow "Occam's Razor" (7) and have a sense of elegance and beauty about nature-therefore simple theories are to be preferred to complex theories-and if possible a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) would be wonderful to discover. GUTs attempt to link together the four forces of physics, (7) and the fundamental constants, c, the velocity of light, e, the charge on the electron h, Planck's constant, and G, the gravitational constant. When one brings quantum mechanics into attempts to unify the laws of physics, Planck's constant is found to define the "fuzziness," or the "grain size" of the universe. Thus the smallest meaningful length is (Gh/c3)1/2 = 10-35 meters. The smallest time increment of time is the Planck time, 10-42 seconds (the time required for a photon traveling at c to traverse a distance equal to a Planck length), and the Planck mass, (hc/G2)1/2 = 1019 Gev, the smallest meaningful mass, and so on.
Quantum mechanics furthermore has revealed that attempts to
make measurements, for instance on an atom, would disturb the
atom such that precision in one measuring one parameter automatically
meant fuzziness in another parameter. If one wanted to locate
an electron's location accurately by means of a measuring apparatus,
the apparatus disturbed the environment-precision in position
measurement meant the electron's momentum became proportionally
uncertain. The same was true for particle momentum and time and
for angular momentum and spin angle as pairs of variables. Planck's
famous Uncertainty Principle can be expressed as
Recently QM has been applied to cosmology in attempts to unravel the early history of our universe-assuming the basic Big Bang model is correct-and assuming the speed of light is a fixed constant in time!
All of the above discussion is based on the assumption--since Einstein--that the speed of light, c, is indeed a fixed constant. However as we noted in our earlier Personal Update articles on the aether, the velocity of light, c, is determined by the properties of space and space may be a very real medium after all. When all of the available measurements of c are carefully studied--using the best possible methods of statistical analysis--the result is that the speed of light has apparently decreased in the past 300 years. The statistical confidence level that this is the case is at least 95%. (9)
Some have thought that a non-constant c would lead to an unstable universe, but so far no papers have been presented that show that changing c would disturb the basic operation or stability of the cosmos. In fact, several theoretical papers have suggested that the velocity of light after the second day of creation week--when God stretched out the aether--had an initial value about 5 x 108 times greater than the present value of 3 x 108 meters/sec. As far as this writer has been able to understand, changing c mostly affects the run rate of atomic clocks versus ordinary (Newtonian) dynamical time. While the universe appears to be 10-20 billion years old in atomic time, in reality it was all created only thousands of years ago in dynamical time.
We began this discussion by mentioning the relationship between Planck's constant, c, and the wavelength (or frequency) of photons emitted from orbital transitions within the atom namely, E = hf = hc/l. Astronomers measure wavelength of light from distant stars (not frequency) and wavelengths of stellar light are known to be invariant with time, as is the "fine-structure constant" a = e2/hc = 1/137. This means that hc is a fixed constant, invariant with time. But if c was much higher in the past then h was a much smaller number than it is now--h and c are inversely proportional. Therefore, the universe was less "fuzzy" in the beginning, quantum mechanical effects would have been negligible, and Planck length and time even smaller than they are now (they are already very small numbers)! The universe was more "certain" in the past, and more "orderly" than it is now! This increased uncertainty in the physical world is of course paralleled by the inexorable deterioration of the human condition due to sin as revealed in the Bible.
Of course a decrease in the value of Planck's constant by 10 orders of magnitude in the past pretty well shoots down Quantum Cosmology as a viable model. (There are many other reasons for discarding Big Bang cosmology anyway!) The laws of physics have been disrupted in the past by the fall of the angels and the fall of man as we have pointed out in this series. One can not take observations of the present universe for 50 or 100 years and extrapolate the results back to t = 0. This will give the wrong answer-the real history of our universe is not based on "uniformitarian" principles (2 Peter 3:4). The Big Bang model also ignores the many steps God took to create the raw material of our universe and to mold and fashion it or a unique period of time (144 hours) called "creation week." During creation week the universe-being uncompleted-was not yet set in motion, it was "Under Construction"-the Laws of effects went into effect for the first time after the Seventh Day. And, the original creation has been since drastically disrupted by cosmic forces of evil.
In any case the mysteries of our universe only deepen as we understand more and benefit from God's unfolding ("general") revelation hidden in nature, as well as by new light on his ("special") revelation given to us in Holy Writ.
References:
1. Six Roads from Newton: Great Discoveries in Physics, by Edward Speyer, (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1994).
2. For more on the amazing world of chaos--where hidden patterns of order have been discovered see, Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick, (Viking, New York, 1987), and also Can Order Come out of Chaos, by Henry M. Morris and John D. Morris, (Institute of Creation Research, San Diego, June 1997). Available at http://ldolphin.org/chaos.html
3. Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science & Cosmology by R. C. Sproul:, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 1994 and Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, by Lee Spetner, Ph.D., The Judaica Press, Brooklyn, 1997.
4. Far Apart, Two Particles Respond Faster than Light, by Malcolm W. Browne, The New York Times, July 22, 1997, p. C1.
5. On the Speed of Gravity, by Tom Van Flandern, Galilean Electrodynamics, vol. 4., no. 2, March/April 1993. 141 Rhinecliff St. Arlington, MA 02174.
6. The New Physics, Paul Davies, Ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1989.
7. Occam's razor is a logical principle attributed to philosopher-theologian William of Occam (c. 1285-1349). The principle states that we should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything, or that we should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony.
8. The "strong" nuclear and "weak" nuclear forces operate at ranges of the order of the size of the nucleus, i.e., < 10-15 meters. The other important forces in physics are the electromagnetic force (between charged particles), and gravity. The latter two forces are active out to infinite distances between objects, but decrease as the inverse square of the distance. Gravity (attractive only) is weaker than electromagnetic forces (either attractive or repulsive), by a factor of 38 orders of magnitude (10-38)!
9. All of the available data on c, two statistical analyses and some preliminary explanations may be found at http://ldolphin.org/constc.shtml. Only those constants that have units of time in them are apparently changing. (The speed of light has units of distance divided by time. Planck's constant has units or work times time). The speed of light seems to have dropped precipitously until about the time of Abraham (c. 2150 BC) and then decreased slowly with an exponential tail down to the modern epoch.
Postscript: Since this article was written there has been much more published on this subject. Barry Setterfield says, "As it is presently structured, the Vc model has lengths remaining invariant during the process of declining c. An examination of the atomic constants making up the Planck length also gives that result. Planck time alters by 10 orders of magnitude as does atomic time and the rate of ticking of both of those clocks. The correction to actual orbital or dynamical time can be done from the redshift/distance relationship. Since redshift and the value of c are directly linked through the ZPE, and since astronomical distance and time are directly linked, the graph of redshift against distance is the same graph of c versus time. It is also the same as the rate of ticking of the atomic clock with orbital time since atomic clocks tick in sync with c. Thus the same graph has three functions - you only need rescale the axes." (August 22, 2002)
October 1997
Born into this world with two eyes, two ears, to arms, two legs and a wonderful data crunching computer system in both halves of our brains, we humans develop a perception of space as small infants. We do not have to be told that the world we live in has three dimensions: length, width, and height. It is almost intuitively obvious.
The Greek philosopher Euclid (330-275 BC) put this down in a mathematical format we now call plain geometry--which ruled the world for the next 2000 years--almost like a religion! In grade school we all learned that the angles of a triangle must add up to 180 degrees, and that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. A line had one dimension, a square had two, and a cube three. Beyond that it was for centuries thought impossible for there to be more dimensions at all. Aristotle and Ptolemy added their weight to Euclid by "proving" that any more than three dimensions was "impossible." (1)
But of course for those who believed in God, there must be a fourth dimension. God would surely live there, thus He could watch everything that was happening in our 3-D world. Medieval art even accommodated this orthodoxy--paintings were flattened and two dimensional so the viewer could (sort of) see the world as God sees it.
Until the middle of the last century there was not much talk of a possible Fourth Dimension. But a sickly, brilliant mathematician--the second of six children born to a poor Lutheran pastor--Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) blew the world apart when he proved mathematically that more than three dimensions were not only possible but also highly likely. In a brilliant lecture on June 10, 1854 this shy, mentally unstable, young man toppled the Euclidean world order once and for all.
Riemann had discovered what we now call "field theory" which connects forces in the universe with the geometry of space. The Pythagorean Theorem from the Greeks had shown that in a two-dimensional world where a and b are the short sides of a triangle and c is the hypotenuse, then a2 + b2 = c2. For a cube which had sides, a, b, and c, the diagonal, d, inside the cube, crossing from one corner to another was given by a2 + b2 + c2 = d2. Well, it did not stop there, because from purely mathematical considerations Riemann could imagine an N-dimensional cube whose diagonal, z, was simply given by a formula with N terms on the left side, a2 + b2 + c2 + .... = z2. The math was easy, the implications were world-shaking.
As originally conceived, the "fourth dimension" was an additional spatial dimension, and not the fourth dimension now called "time." It was Einstein who stumbled upon Riemann's pioneering work and in 1905 put 3 plus 1 together and realized that material objects not only have length, width, and height, but they also endure in time. The fourth dimension was obviously time! Newton's physics had imagined an absolute clock somewhere in the universe that kept the time for all bodies large and small, whether at rest or in motion. So strongly embedded were the old views that the average person on the street has not yet grasped the radical nature of Einstein's revolution. But now it is clear that space and time are part of an integrated whole--what we call the "space-time" continuum. Time as well as space can be bent, shrunk or expanded--as can the other three dimensions of the world we live. But if few ordinary people grasp what Einstein had to tell us, Riemann's revolution has had an even greater, lasting effect on physics.
However to talk about time as the fourth dimension is to jump over 50 years of fascinating history before 1905 when the obscure little man in the Swiss patent office changed the known world all over again.
Riemann's 1854 lecture was an instant success. The world was not flat and it was not necessarily even limited to three dimensions--there might be four--or even more! God was now crowded up into the higher levels of newly discovered "hyperspace." Riemann had been friends with Wilhelm Weber who was experimenting with electric sparks, magnets and flowing currents, so Faraday and then Maxwell were ready to apply Riemann's work to what became the very successful model we now called "electromagnetic theory."
James Clerk Maxwell, for instance, showed that moving electric charges constitute what we call current flow and flowing currents produce magnetic fields. Light waves, radio waves, x-rays all "obey" Maxwell's elegant equations,
The first equation says that electric lines of force begin and end on charges (such as electrons). The third equation tells us that there are (apparently) no magnetic monopoles--magnetic lines are closed loops. The second and fourth equations are vector equations actually representing three equations each, and they tell us how electric and magnetic fields are related to one another. Maxwell's four equations are actually eight. However if one adopts the mathematics of Riemann space all eight equations can be written in the following form called "tensor notation,"
The second equation says it all!
It is this ability of Riemann geometry to simplify physics that is so appealing to scientists who always prefer elegance, beauty, symmetry and simplicity when attempting to explain the physical world. Introducing more dimensions, even though they can not be seen or directly measured, improves our ability to understand how the world works.
Georg Bernhard Riemann took ordinary "flat" geometry and crumpled it up, making spherical space which was positively curved, or saddle-shaped space with negative curvature. All this could now be beautifully described in the new short hand of tensors. Whole systems of simultaneous differential equations involving many dimensions could be written down and manipulated with ease.
Riemann showed that spaces could be multiply connected, as shown below. A small bug living in the flat world of the top sheet of paper could hypothetically encounter a "Riemann slit" in the fabric of his known world and inadvertently cross over into a "parallel" universe.
A strange cast of characters seized upon Riemann's ideas soon after his famous lecture. American psychic Henry Slade achieved notoriety in 1877 when Leipzig physics professor Johann Zollner rushed to the former's defense of magic parlor tricks and ghosts by claiming that what was impossible in our ordinary three dimensional world was readily possible if a fourth dimension were added. Unfortunately the ensuing uproar led more to popular turn-of-the century science fiction, and an impetus for ESP and psychic research which continues to this day--more than to legitimate applications in physics. The greatest applications of Riemann's new geometry to physics had to wait half a century for Einstein and his successors.
In 1884 the Christian headmaster of the City of London School, Edwin Abbott, wrote a wonderful novel about creatures who lived in an imaginary world called "Flatland." (2) It was now immediately easy for ordinary people like you and me to imagine what it would be like living in a two dimensional world--on a flat sheet of paper--with occasional intrusions of "beings" from a higher three-dimensional "hyperspace." Even more fantastic science fiction now unfolded into being overnight and by the turn of the century the common man's perception of his world would never be the same.
If four dimensions are not only possible, but now certain, why not 5 or 10 or 26 dimensions? Indeed, if we jump from Einstein to the present time, that is precisely what has happened in modern physics. All this has taken place because introducing (mathematically) additional dimensions to the physical world "unifies" the laws, forces and fields of physics, and leads (usually) to simpler and more "elegant" ways of looking at the universe we live in.
Discussion of hyperspace rapidly became very complex after Einstein--we must save that for another article. But let us note several things: It is indeed quite likely that the physical, material world we live in has many more than four dimensions. Ten is a reasonable number to make our physics simple. Discussion of hyperspace still leaves the issue of where God now lives, since he was long ago excluded from the "fourth" dimension. Unfortunately some modern Christian apologists have implied that God is merely a higher-dimensional being, a cosmic giant who pokes his fingers into our world from time to time alarming us with visions or miracles which we can not fully understand. Is God a super-being from another dimension?
I don't mean to imply that miracles, visions and UFO intrusions from higher dimensions do not occur! They most certainly occur and I believe they are all real extra-dimensional happenings. The point is: God is not made of matter, He is Spirit and spirit is something fundamentally different from matter.
There is an all-important point to keep in mind in our discussions of modern physics and that is that "God is a Spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." (John 4:24). Spirit is not the same thing as matter! We can talk endlessly about matter/energy, space and time in the created material world, but that still leaves a higher realm of God and his angels. Who are they and where do they live? What are the unseen worlds they inhabit? Beyond our amazing physical world is yet another realm where different laws apply and where time flows at a different pace.
To talk first of matter and now of spirit is also to go beyond the scope of this short introductory article. Suffice it to say, that our knowledge and understanding of the physical world comes through the scientific method which is based both on observations and on mathematical models than can be tested and verified by measurements and experiments. The spiritual world is something we know about by personal revelation from our God. (3) Most marvelous of all, God has created man to live simultaneously in the material and in the spiritual world. He wants us to be at home in two worlds, he wants us in His training program designed to prepare us for an amazing greater world which is to come. The opening of doors for us to enter into other worlds was accomplished by the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ on the Cross--we live in a moral universe, and much more than physics is involved in the superhyperspace the Bible calls the "heavens."
"Since we have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, 'I believed, and so I spoke,' we too believe, and so we speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." (2 Cor. 4:13-18)
References:
1. Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension, Anchor Books Doubleday, New York. 1994. A wonderfully valuable and important book.
2. Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland, 1884. Available on Internet: http://www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/
3. For more on the limitations of science see http://ldolphin.org/scilim.shtml. Steps in the scientific method are outlined in http://ldolphin.org/SciMeth2.html, and http://ldolphin.org/reveln.html describes the nature of Biblical revelation in contrast with mere mystical experience and with data from science.
November 1997
By assuming that time was the mysterious "fourth dimension" of 19th Century sci-fi speculation, Einstein was able to show that we live in a space-time continuum where ordinary dimensions are both elastic and also interrelated. Mass and energy are two different forms of the same thing, the speed of light is the top limiting velocity in the physical world, space is curved, and gravity affects the curvature of space. Einstein's legacy was extensive and sweeping in its consequences. His Special and General Relativity theories have been well established by many experiments.
In 1919 Einstein received a letter from an obscure mathematician, Theodr Kaluza, who suggested that he could tie together electromagnetism into a simpler theory if he assumed there were five dimensions--four spatial dimensions plus time. In last month's discussion we mentioned that Bernard Riemann's power tensor mathematical notation made dealing with N dimensions ("Hilbert space") easy to do. Four dimensions required a matrix of four rows and four columns. It was simple to add a fifth dimension.
The Kaluza-Klein theory in effect replaces points, P, on a line with tiny circles on a hose (diagram below). Later on when more dimensions were added, the minute circles were replaced by very small vibrating strings.
When higher dimensions are added, the new dimensions are found to be curled "compactified" into a very small "space" whose size is of the order of the Planck length, (Gh/c3)1/2 = 10-35 meters.
If five dimensions are better than four, why not add more? (The whole point of additional dimensions in hyperspace is that the Laws of Nature become simpler when higher dimensions are added).
Kaluza and Klein enjoyed initial popularity but their theory was more or less dead by the 1930's, though their work pointed along a path which led to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Quantum Mechanics itself moved into the limelight occupying everyone's attention in the '30s and '40s.
But by 1960 particle physicists were flooding journals with data about new and previously unknown particles. In 1971 a Dutch graduate student Gerard 't Hooft proposed a theory unifying three of the quantum forces (excluding gravity). The next major effort to unify physics (often called the Yang-Mills field theory) by Glashow, Salam, Weinberg and others attempted to include the strong and weak nuclear forces leading to the hypothesis that there are some 11 dimensions. Finally the result was what has become the "Standard Model."
The SM can explain the existence and behavior of every known atomic particle up to energies of one trillion electron volts. But things were no longer all that simple! There were now 36 quarks in six "flavors" and three "colors," plus their antimatter counterparts. Eight Yang-Mills fields were needed to describe particles called "gluons" which bind the quarks. Four Yang-Mills fields were invoked to describe the weak and electromagnetic forces, six types of leptons were needed to describe the weak interactions (including the electron, muon, tau lepton, and their neutrino counterparts). Not only that, there were now a large number of mysterious "Higgs" particles necessary to adjust the masses and constants that describe the particles. Finally at least 19 arbitrary constants describe the masses of the particles and the strengths of all the various interactions! In many ways the Standard Model was not "beautiful" at all--many considered it quite "ugly." On top of all this the model was still incomplete--it was not yet a GUT (Grand Unifying Theory).
The Kaluza-Klein theory was resurrected in the 1980s in the search for "The Theory of Everything." The next step onwards and upwards was "Supergravity." If The K-K theory using Riemann metric tensors was redefined for 4 + N dimensions and the N dimensions were "curled up," ("compactified") then sets of equations can be split from the new larger tensor that lead to the previous theories as subsets.
"Superstring" theory followed next: What had originally been a point in space became now a small circle by a small length of vibrating string. The string had 10 modes of vibration in the clockwise direction and 16 counter-clockwise, 26 dimensions was the end result! So far the laws of physics still seemed to simplify in higher dimensions--at least the mathematical physicists considered this to be the case. The symmetries of the subatomic world seem to be but remnants of the symmetry of high dimensional space.
Einstein's original Riemann Metric Tensor (top left corner) with added dimensions results in Supersymmetry.
Supergravity "almost" fulfills Einstein's dream (Kaku, Ref. 1)
In his excellent briefing package "Beyond Perception" Chuck Missler goes into much greater detail about quantum mechanics, particle physics and hyperspace. The average reader should not feel intimidated if some of what we have said is difficult to grasp. The experts often admit their perplexity and they often disagree with one another. The latest and best models leave a lot to be desired, and life has not gotten simpler--which was the original hope of modern physics.
There were, and are, still flies in the ointment concerning hyperspace. Has the world really become simpler and easier to understand by invoking the higher dimensionality of hyperspace? No one may be smart enough to take work further it would seem. No reasonable experimental tests seem possible to test the theories.
In the September issue of Personal Update we pointed out that a higher speed of light in the past would shrink this already tiny very small dimension, the Planck Length, where many of the higher order dimensions are supposed to be curled up. The Planck Length would appear to have been 20 orders of magnitude smaller at the time of creation--a mere 10-55 meters in size--exceedingly tiny by all known standards and probably meaningless.
The existence of higher dimensions can not be proved--the required atomic accelerator energy levels are well beyond present technology. Therefore we can not be sure that they are really there. "Elegance" and "beauty" and "simpler equations" are attractive reasons for favoring a new theoretical model but they are not infallible guidelines. Not everything that meets these aesthetic criteria describes the world as it really is. At best we are probably only "seeing through a glass darkly." (3)
Does Modern Physics Correspond to Reality?
Advertising the book The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2000-year-old Mystery, by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, Barnes and Noble Booksellers says in their fall catalog, "Applying mathematical logic to the mystery, the authors turn up evidence of a long-suppressed secret challenging Christian dogma--that Christ's body actually rests in a Reennes-le-Chateau tomb! This fascinating study illuminates the real secret maintained over the centuries by the Templars and others, revealing at the same time a "heretical" Christian teaching stressing responsibility over blind faith..."
How can mathematical logic contradict known historical fact concerning the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ? Can mathematics prove anything? It should already be obvious from what we have said that mathematics is capable of describing an almost infinite number of dimensions and a multiplicity of "parallel" universes. Do these fictitious worlds correspond with the tangibles of the known material world and are they in harmony with Biblical revelation? In some cases the answer is no!
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead we encounter beautiful ornate and symmetric paintings and drawings that purport to show the journey of the soul after death. These mandalas have great power and fascination because they seem to correspond to symbols of the "self"--what C. G. Jung called "archetypes of the collective unconscious." (2) The fact that mandalas have experiential meaning to more than one person does not mean they are true depictions of the afterlife, or that they tell us anything concrete about unseen dimensions in the material or the spiritual world. Is it not possible that some of the sophisticated theories of modern physics are in the same category?
When human beings, or their collective work in science or philosophy. become autonomous--independent of the truth and life that are in God alone--the end result is likely to be deception, delusion and wasted effort. God's common grace to all men partly overrules this path to error and wrong answers, but it does not correct all our faulty reasonings. It is possible for science to be systematically wrong for long periods of time, if the foundations and initial assumptions were faulty to begin with.
The Apostle Peter (speaking for the other apostles of Jesus) urges us to stick to known facts, and to measure all things against the Word of God. He says, "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2 Peter 1:16)
Many of the forefathers of physics were godly men who followed Jesus the Lord and invited in help in all they did. Thus the very early foundations for good science were well-laid. (4) However, this pioneering example of piety has not been followed by the vast majority of modern physicists and astronomers who retain an agnostic or atheistic (and therefore pagan) world view. Is such a wide-spread ignorance of the living God likely to lead to the right answers in science? History (and the Bible) tell us otherwise.
Were our present generation of bright and gifted scientists to turn wholeheartedly to the God of our scientific forefathers, we should soon be dazzled and amazed by God's explanation of the way things really are. Our God delights to make Himself known to all men. Should we not ask questions of the One who is the Architect and Builder of the universe to whom we must all give account? Without His inputs we remain lost and confused with nothing to show for all our labors, and we are in fact really fools in God's eyes as we grope around in the dark. An Intelligence much greater than our own has created us. Without His help we can not hope to tune in and see things as they really are.
..."I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater (suzetetes = the learned scholar, disputer) of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe...but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore, as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord." (1 Corinthians 1:19-31)
References:
1. General Reading: Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension, Anchor Books Doubleday, New York. 1994.
D. Stauffer and H. E. Stanley, From Newton to Mandelbrot, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995.
P. C. W. Davies, The Forces of Nature, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 1986.
A. Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, Collier Books, Macmillan, New York, 1986.
E. David Pearl, Superstrings and the Search for The Theory of Everything, Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1988.
Barry Parker, Chaos in the Cosmos: The Stunning Complexity of the Universe, Plenum Press, New York, 1996.
Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, W. W. Norton, New York, 1994.
David Park, The How and the Why: An Essay on the Origins and Development of Physical Theory, Princeton U. Press, 1988.
Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland, 1884. http://www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/
2. Sacred Mandalas: The Art and Books of Tibet, http://www.nyingma.org/dp/exbro.html and The Psychology of C. G. Jung, by Jolande Jacobi, Yale University Press, 1973. Some scientists today have openly tried to fit modern physics into pagan mythologies. For instance see Paul A. Laviolette, Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous Creation, Park Street Press, Rochester, VT., 1995.
3. Does the Universe Have More Than Three Dimensions, by Sten Odenwald, http://www.seymoursimon.com/cool-science-and-great-links.htm
4. The Creationist Basis for Modern Science, http://www.christiananswers.net/aig/hot/hot001.htm, and http://www.ChristianAnswers.net/aig/tools/!pastsci.htm
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