The Secular "Science" Creation Myth
Dr. Jerry Bergman
(Investigator 206, 2022 September)
The main stereotype of the creation science controversy is creation is
religion based on belief and evolution is based on science and facts.
This claim is widely accepted as a false dichotomy. One of the leading
Darwinists even wrote an entire book on this false dichotomy
appropriately titled Darwinism as Religion.
Bill Nye 'the science guy' and best-selling author, correctly observed that:
Every civilization and tribe on Earth has a creation story, a myth that
explains how we all came to be here. In the world of modern science, we
have one, too. We’ve studied the cosmos carefully and come to realize
that there must have been a primordial moment, an instant of time 10-24
times briefer than the blink of an eye, when the universe was
concentrated into a volume far smaller than an atom. It exploded, for
lack of a better word, and all that we can observe in nature, including
ourselves, emerged from that Big Bang. Furthermore, it's clear that we
are made from the same material as the distant stars. We are stardust,
built from the same elements that were forged in the nuclear furnace of
ancient supernovae.
A few lethal problems exist with this creation story. First, where did
the primordial egg "smaller than an atom" come from, what caused it to
explode, and how do we know that everything came from this uniform
primordial egg. Lastly, how can a particle whose volume is "far smaller
than an atom" produce the more than ten-trillion galaxies in the
universe, each with 400 billion stars. Furthermore, the number may be
far larger:
The deeper we look into the cosmos, the more galaxies we see. One 2016
study estimated that the observable universe contains two trillion—or
two million million—galaxies. Some of those distant systems are similar
to our own Milky Way galaxy, while others are quite different.
No one knows the exact number of galaxies (it is too large to determine
by humans), but a newer estimate was made by Professor David Kornreich
at Ithaca College in New York State. He used a rough estimate of 10
trillion galaxies in the universe. Multiplying that number by the Milky
Way's estimated 100 billion stars results in
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, or 1 septillion [1024] stars.
The mass of the universe would be at least 2.0 × 1049 tons which
would include 1.575 × 1058 electrons and protons in the universe.
Plus, we need to add in the many other subatomic particles now known to
exist.
How all of this came from a particle smaller than an atom remains
unexplained, and actually is unexplainable. The greatest cosmologist of
the last century, the late Cambridge University professor Stephen
Hawking speculated on the details of the evolutionary origin of
everything, i.e., the secular astronomy 'creation story,' in his latest
book. Random forces first produced simple organic molecules by which
"somehow, some ... atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules
of DNA.... As DNA reproduced itself, there would have been random
errors, many harmful, and ... a few errors would have been favorable to
the survival of the species—these would have been chosen by Darwinian
natural selection."
Eventually, multi-cellular organisms, which, after more millions of
years, by accumulating mistakes called mutations, evolved into fish
that, after millions of more years, evolved into mammals and, after a
few hundred more million years, eventually evolved into humans (covered
in pages 73-76).
Thus, he concludes, humans and all life are the result of chance and
billions of mistakes. Since Hawking concluded that science has proven
the origin of all life was by evolution, the last question left for
religion was how the universe began. This question, Hawking assures us,
has been answered by the Big Bang which ultimately produced the
creation of everything from nothing. The first something that appeared
from nothing was "smaller than a proton" (p. 34). Then, from this
smaller-than-a-proton object space, visible matter, stars, and planets
somehow followed. Thus, the Big Bang explains the origin of space,
matter, energy, and time, all of which appeared from nothing (pp.
29-31). Hawking's book, called "stunningly brilliant," produced 8,169
glowing reviews on Amazon plus many more elsewhere.
Hawking explains, thanks to the Big Bang, "you can get a whole universe
for free" because "the fantastically enormous universe of space and
energy can materialize out of nothing" (pp. 31-32). Thus, Hawking
writes, "the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and
complexity, could simply have popped into existence ... [and] we do not
need a God to set it up so that the Big Bang could bang" (p. 34).
Hawking rejected theism because, he concluded, God is not needed to
explain the existence of either the universe or life.
Most people are aware of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim belief that
God, who exists outside of time, created the Earth and all life on it.
The courts have consistently ruled that this worldview cannot be taught
in government schools because it is religious. Because only the secular
worldview can be taught, refutations to this secular 'creation story'
cannot be offered by the instructor. Ideally, at least it should be
brought out that the first law of thermodynamics, also called the law
of conservation of energy (i.e., energy can be neither created nor
destroyed under natural circumstances), is violated by Hawking's
theory. However much energy there was at the start of the universe,
there will be the same amount at the end.
It also should be mentioned that Darwinism is here defined as the
progression from non-living molecules to living cells, then to
bacteria-like life-forms, advancing next to fish, amphibians, reptiles,
mammals, primates, and, lastly, to humans. The mechanism that produces
this wonder is natural selection acting on the accumulation of
mutations which are claimed to produce most all of the original genetic
variety.
In short, Darwinism teaches that we are the product of billions of
damage events to the genome called genetic mutations (consistent with
the second law of thermodynamics, the so-called 'law of entropy' that
predicts increasing disorder,) in which natural selection preserves the
most-fit and allows the less-fit to perish. These damage events are
caused by toxins, including dangerous radiation such as X-rays, gamma
rays, cosmic rays, and mutagenic chemicals, plus biological mutations
such as copying errors. So, the big question is, How does a Big Bang
(in violation of the first law of thermodynamics) generate increasingly
complex life by means of a process (that violates the second law of
thermodynamics) using genetic mutations (that do obey the second law of
thermodynamics)? The fact is science has refuted the secular creation
story, leaving the alternative as the only viable possibility of
creation.