No 17

(Astronomy Part 1)

The universe was created by God; the Bible says so in Genesis 1 :1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Most Christians are in agreement with this statement to the effect that God created everything, including the universe “Ex Nihilo” (from nothing) and as we have seen, there are varying viewpoints, but the general consensus among Christians is that God is the Creator of all things. In past studies, we have seen that the size of the universe is way beyond our comprehension (See Day 4 of Creation). The nearest star (solar system) is billions of miles away and science has developed very precise ways of measuring distance in space by mathematics. “So how do we reconcile the fact that the light that we see coming from stars that are trillions of miles from earth took billions of years to travel through space before we could see it?” (Starlight & Time by Dr Russell Humphreys). Creationists have never come up with a plausible theory about this in the context of a six-day creation. Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR) has been well established and is the best theory of gravity we have today; it is used as the framework for all modern cosmologies. According to GR, gravity affects time – clocks at a low altitude click more slowly than clocks at a high altitude and this has been proven experimentally on earth. An atomic clock was placed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich England and it ticked 5 microseconds slower than an identical clock that was placed at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder Colorado, USA. This amount of time does not sound like much but we will look at the details of this discovery in another study and see that this theory is very interesting. “9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9). This theory of time/gravity sounds very technical to us, but for God, it just part of His vast wisdom.