The Creation

"Our Society welcomes members of all beliefs and the subject of religion has until recently been harmoniously avoided. However, recently Lloyd and now Henry have promoted, on this forum, a case for the Universe being created by god. That now permits me to put my case for the negative.

The "paper" referred to by Henry is a religious document, "©1994-2005 Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois." The author of the "paper," Hugh Ross, may be an astronomer but first and formost he is a religious apologist who runs a christian website called "Reasons to Believe."


I respect the right of any person to hold and espouse whatever religious beliefs they like - but I hold no respect whatsoever for their actual beliefs. Any case for god's creation of the entire Universe demands a rebuttal right here, because it's a blot on the astronomy sky-scape. It impinges on the science of astronomy. In fact it is unscientific - and astromomy is a science.


Science begins with the questions and develops answers which conform with the evidence - but religions - like those of Hugh Ross - start with an answer, tolerate no questions and have no evidence.

Mr Ross starts with a belief that a supernatural being invented the Universe and then "cherry-picks" quotes and facts which support that end - that is not science. He talks about "fingerprints of god" - that is not science. There is no scientific evidence - whatsover - for a godly creation. None. Zilch. Zero. Faith is not evidence.

Carl Sagan taught us to admire the beauty and wonder of the natural Universe:

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.”

It is astonishing that astronomers can now trace the truth about the evolution of the Universe back to a very tiny fraction of the very first second of it's existence - but they are the very first to admit that they can, so far, only speculate what occurred before then.

I find it truly awesome that we are just minute specks of dust, an insignificant but intelligent species, which has developed the brain-power to begin to understand the Universe of which we are part. We have discovered so much about it, right back almost to the very beginning of space-time. In my opinion, god is a lemon whose juice has now been almost squeezed right out of the Universe. Attribute that first fraction of a second to your particular god, if you must - but if any further evidence about the Big Bang eventually emerges, it will come exclusively from the efforts of human science and it will lack the fingerprints of any god.

In my opinion.

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