Category: Current Events

Is the Big Bang Finally Over?

We may all be at the edges of our seats to learn where all of this will take us

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Set of Universe Infographics – Solar system, Planets comparison, Sun and Moon Facts, Space Junk made by man, Big Bang Theory, Galaxies Classification, Milky Way description. Vector illustration

The question that forms the title of this blog article is the subject of a recent video on YoutTube. I am embedding the video here so you can watch and listen for yourself. The suggestion, however, that the James Webb Telescope is disproving the “Big Bang”, is overstated. You might even call it clickbait!

Before launching into my thoughts on this, however, what is meant by the “Big Bang” needs to be defined. The terminology is credited to Fred Hoyle. When Hoyle coined the phrase in a 1949 a talk on BBC Radio, he was probably speaking tongue in cheek.

Hoyle (like most scientists of his age) had long believed in a steady state universe. The new evidence indicating that the universe is expanding was like a big bang to them. It rocked the long-held view that our universe is static and unchanging.

The laws of physics seemed immutable. Why wouldn’t scientists believe the universe was equally immutable?

That the evidence that the universe is expanding was unsettling to the accepted “science” at the time is an understatement. As Hoyle was describing the then recent discoveries and the theories that derived from that evidence, he said:

“These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.”

Because these discoveries came as a shock wave to scientists in the first half of the 20th Century. the term, “big bang”, may have been used to characterize how those discoveries were received!

The evidence that the universe is actually expanding raised the specter that the universe isn’t static, and it might even have had an origination “point”. This realization that the universe may have had a beginning wasn’t lost on scientists at the time, and it wasn’t eagerly received.

The term didn’t really “stick” until the 1970’s, and it isn’t really a good descriptor for what we (think we) know happened. It probably wasn’t a “bang” for instance, because no sound was likely generated. The history of the development of this evidence is interesting and can be found on Wikipedia.

The Big Bang does suggest a beginning to the Universe (to put it bluntly). This possibility, of course, has theological implications, another realization that wasn’t lost on scientists who largely viewed the universe through a materialistic lens. That possibility was largely downplayed then, and many scientists have continued to downplay that possibility.

The current suggestion that the James Webb Telescope is disproving the “Big Bang” (the implication of an expanding universe with a “beginning”) continues in that vein. It may be more wishful thinking, however, than reality.

As I understand the James Webb discoveries that are fueling this resurgence in old thinking include images of old stars and galaxies that are more formed than they should be on our standard (Big Bang expansion) model of the Universe. If the universe expanded, I believe the thinking goes, it must have progressed from a simpler state to a more complex state.

This kind of thinking is parallel to the evolutionary paradigm: that life began with a simple, self-replicating molecule, and it progressed to ever increasing complexity over a long span of time. The universe, also, has been viewed in the same sort of way. This is the paradigm of the person who believes in raw, natural processes that developed from the bottom up.

The new images that reveal more highly developed stars and galaxies than we imagined in the earliest stage of the universe is surprising on the progressive view. They do not contradict the fact that the universe is expanding, and it doesn’t disprove the appearance of a “beginning”.

People are “surprised that things grew so quickly”. People are perplexed that stars and galaxies are so well-formed at such an early stage, when they would expect to find “fledgling” galaxies in more undeveloped states.

People are scratching their heads at the appearance of extremely small and extremely large galaxies in the early Universe because it does not comport with the progression of the expansion of the Universe as modern scientists have modeled it before the advent of the James Webb Telescope. It would be more accurate to say that models for how that expansion occurred are being called into question: not the fact of expansion from “a point of beginning”.

We still don’t have evidence that reveals how the universe was formed. We can’t see back that far, and doubt exists whether we ever will be able to see back that far. As the Wikipedia article states: “[T]he Big Bang model does not describe how energy, time, and space were caused, but rather it describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state.”

The James Webb findings do not negate the evidence we have that our universe is expanding from some very dense “point”. If anything, the findings evoke even more theological implications, perhaps, than the Big Bang models in their modern forms.

The idea that the Universe developed from simple to complex over time is difficult to maintain when stars, galaxies, and other formations in the farthest (and earliest) regions of the universe that we can see are so well-formed and “mature”. (Should I note that this evidence is more consistent with the idea of the universe being created than we previously thought?)

Of course, we have had other clues that this should not surprise us: the expansion inflation model (incorporating an early, extremely rapid and short “burst” of expansion) was necessary to accommodate the short time frame in which the Universe appeared to have “developed” based on what we could see before the James Webb telescope. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised to find even greater “development” at earlier stages.

We shouldn’t be surprised either that modern scientists who are committed to a materialistic worldview are struggling with these things. The materialistic worldview has colored modern science for a couple hundred years, at least..

The expansion of the Universe is what led Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose to the calculation of “singularity” that “proved” the so-called Big Bang (that expansion necessitates a “beginning”). Vilenkin (and some other guy who I can’t remember, lol) determined that even a multiverse that is expanding would have to have a “singularity” (a euphemism, it seems, for a beginning).

So far, modern discoveries have continued to negate good reason to believe in a static universe (which theory was discarded after centuries of use when we found that our universe is expanding) or an oscillating or cyclic universe. Multiverse(s) seem to make sense theoretically, but we will likely never be able to prove it/them anymore than we are likely to see back before the “beginning” of this universe.

Scientists like Neil de Grasse Tyson, Hawking, and Penrose who are committed to finding explanations for these things that do not implicate a Beginner (a/k/a God), will likely continue to try to prove their point. Hawking spent much of the rest of his life after mathematically proving the “singularity” trying to get around “singularity” and its theological implications. Penrose (and Vilenkin) do not concede any theological implications either.

Nothing (much) has changed on that score, but it certainly is producing some head scratching! Some scientists, like Hoyle, who were once very antagonistic about people drawing theological implications from cosmology have backed off their dogmatic stances. Penrose seems to concede the possibility of a legitimate “metaphysical” component to reality, though he “doesn’t go there” in his own thinking.

There certainly is a lot of head scratching going on. These definitely are interesting times. We may all be at the edges of our seats to learn where all of this will take us, though I strongly doubt that we will get definitive answers to our most fundamental questions, like the origin of the Universe, in my lifetime – if ever.

The new discoveries do call into question the expansion models that scientists have developed, but they do not call into question the evidence that the universe is, indeed, expanding. The new discoveries do not align with they way scientists have believed the universe expanded, but the evidence that the universe expanded from a “point” of singularity remains solid.

What is the Basic Order of the Universe? Bottom Up? Or Top Down?

Stephen Meyer says, “I think nature is actually telling us something”

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Digital golden ratio

Where does order in nature and the cosmos come from? Stephen Meyer & Saleem Ali recently met up with Justin Brierly on the Unbelievable? podcast to discuss the nature of order in the universe. Saleem Ali’s focus on the comparison between natural order and human social systems in his book, Earthly, Order, is the backdrop for the discussion with Stephen Meyer, who wrote Return of the God Hypothesis.

Saleem Ali’s book, Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life, explores the linkage between natural order and societal order. He ultimately argues that mankind should synthesize social structures to match the order found in the natural world for the benefit of mankind and the environment in which we live. In reaching this conclusion, Ali devotes attentions to the beauty of natural order, which he sometimes calls design.

Saleem takes the consensus, scientific approach to the natural order. He assumes that natural order developed from the bottom up: that stars and planetary systems formed from initial cosmological constants present in the fabric of the universe at the instant after the “Big Bang” and that life formed spontaneously from inert matter into self-replicating molecules that grew exponentially more complex over time.

Saleem Ali is the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware. He has a B.S. degree in Chemistry and Environmental Studies from Tufts University, 1994, and M.S. degree in Environmental Studies from Yale University, 1996, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000. Stephen Meyer, who also wrote Signature in a Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, has degrees in physics and earth science from Whitworth College, 1981, and an M.Phil. in history and Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Cambridge University, 1987 and 1991.

In Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer attempts to show that what we see in nature is better explained by a top down model of order. He argues that “specified complexity” defies a bottom up explanation, and begs for a top down approach. He claims that this is a not a “god of the gaps” argument. Rather, it is the natural conclusion to be drawn from what we observe: that the specified complexity we observe in the world always comes from a mind.

Meyer doesn’t necessarily chart new ground in the evidence or the methods he uses to reach his conclusions. He using principals consistent with good science and the evidence revealed by modern science to argue that they point in a different direction than the modern scientific consensus. He argues that the evidence we see in science is better explained by the conception of top down order and it points to a particular kind of top down order.

I am not going to attempt to describe either book more than what I know, most of which can be gleaned from the descriptions of those books and the descriptions provided by both gentlemen. I am also not going to attempt to get too deep into the conversation between Ali and Meyer. You can watch their interaction yourself if it piques your interest. (Linked in the photo below.)

Saleel Ali’s perspective is the one you have heard. It is the perspective that is included in every textbook (by law). It is grounded in the predominant view: that the universe is self-organizing, and life is self-replicating. His responses to Meyer reflect a carefully guarded reluctance to allow for intelligent agency in the design we see in the natural world.

Stephen Meyer and other people, some religious and some not at all, are questioning the propriety of that reluctance to allow for intelligent agency, or what we might simply call “mind”, in or behind the processes that created the universe and life in the universe. One argument in favor of that view is derived from the scientific experiments intended to show how life evolved on earth, says Meyer:

“I love these new approaches in the origin of life and the simulation experiments that are done to test them. I think that they are telling us something, though, about the importance of, as Thomas Nagel put it in Mind and Cosmos[i], that in addition to physical order there is a reality of consciousness and mind, and, we can see hints of that in life…. You see this actually in the origin of life simulation experiments that are conducted to test these new models, because the logic of simulation experiment is to try to reconstruct conditions that we think might have been present on the early earth, and then see what happens in the present. So our knowledge of those cause and effect processes that we see ensuing will help us reconstruct what might have caused life to arise on planet earth.”

These experiments are a kind of “reverse engineering” of the conditions that might have given rise to life from the inert chemistry of the primordial earth, assuming that life developed in that way. Reverse engineering requires an enormous amount of intentional effort and creative design. It also suggests that our efforts at reverse engineering proves an initial engineering that was also the product of intentional effort and creative design. Meyer continues:

“There is something that has emerged invariably from these experiments, and that is to get the chemistry to move in a life relevant direction, the chemist repeatedly has to impose constraints on what the chemical reactions would naturally do. If you have got reagent A and reagent B, and they are combined, they will make A/B, but they will make a whole slew of versions of A/B…. The chemist has to fish the A/B version three out of that gamesh of possibilities…. What the chemist is doing at that point is excluding some options, electing another…. [Often]what they will do is just buy the reagent that they want off the shelf that has already been purified by an intelligent agent. At each step along the way there is an impartation of information. If you exclude some options and elect others, you are imparting information into your simulation, and that information is invariably coming from the experimenter.”

The impartation of information, of influence, of direction is the activity of a “mind” – a causal agent. By agent, I don’t mean a compound that is, itself, a product of inert matter that always reacts according to its properties; I mean a “will” that is directed by “mind”. A billiard ball is inert until it is stricken by a person with a cue, and then it acts according to its properties and the laws of motion until friction causes it to slow and to stop. Meyer says:

“So, I think nature is actually telling us something. These simulations invariably require the imposition of intelligence to proceed in a life relevant direction. You have to ask, ‘What are they simulating?’ If this is something that is consistently arising in all simulation experiments, maybe they are pointing to a need for a top down explanation (explaining the origin of life) because all of the simulations require top down imposition of intelligence and information into the systems.”

These experiments intended to show the possibility that life might arise spontaneously, given the right conditions, are demonstrations of the importance of outside influence to cause it to happen – if indeed it can happen that way.

The famous Miller-Ulrey experiment still referenced in high school textbooks was heralded as proof of the concept. It comes woefully short, however, in demonstrating that life might have arisen out of a primordial soup. (I explored the limits of that famous experiment in What’s in Your primordial Soup?) In the Miller-Ulrey experiment, the experiment was done with elements that were not known to have existed in the early “primordial soup” of the earth at the time in which we know that life arose.

To be fair, though, they were just trying to show that it’s possible: that life can form on its own, given the right environment. On the other hand, it is a good example of the way in which an intelligent agent (the scientist) must jury-rig an experiment to try to produce the intended result he is trying to achieve.

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Of the Holy Spirit, Truth, Tares, and Wheat at the Asbury Revival

“[N]o one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

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I listened to Voddie Bauchaum summarize what is wrong at Asbury recently. The video title is (Wow) The Asbury Revival is NOT of God. His summary is similar to other skeptical takes I have heard, so I will summarize his summary here. (You can also watch the video and hear what he says for yourself.)

Bauchaum said he listened to four testimonies of students who attended the “revival”, and they “confirmed exactly what I figured was going on.” It’s a small sampling size, but I have no reason to believe he didn’t hear what he heard.

His conclusions were more in number than his sampling size. First, he said, “This event is nothing more than strange fire.” (The whole event.) For proof, he offered what the students said in their testimonies: One student admitted said he experienced a “fit of laughter”; another student claimed his mother began speaking in “unknown tongues”. (If Bauchaum supplied a summary of the other two testimonies he heard, I missed it.)

The phrase, “strange fire”, is a reference to Leviticus 10:1-3 an incident in which two priests put incense into censors and offered “strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not.” (KJV) Those men were consumed by fire from the Lord, the passage says. Therefore, Bauchaum is comparing the people at Asbury to the two rogue priests who presented offerings to God they were not instructed to give and were killed for it.

Clearly, Bauchaum is suggesting that “this event” is not of God; it is “unauthorized” worship; and God views it like He viewed the priests who offered strange fire and were killed for it.

As further proof that this event could not be from God, he said, “A lot of this took place out of the church!” He added that “the university ordains women for ministry, so there is a lot wrong here.”

He went on to explain to say that he was looking for a man of God taking the pulpit to open the Bible and preach the word of God, “and it never happened.” Though he didn’t say it, I am left to assume that revivals must happen only inside church buildings, and then only when a man of God preaches the word of God from a proper pulpit.

I note that he didn’t do much research if he only heard four testimonies, as I found testimonies all over the Internet, including many statements by professors and school administrators. The happenings at Asbury took place over roughly a two-week period, so there was a lot of footage to see and many people who were there talking about it.

I also note that the chapel service began with someone preaching, but, then, I don’t know if he was “a men of God”, and I don’t recall whether he used a pulpit. (Sarcasm alert.)

Bauchaum warned that Satan tricks people with music. As anecdotal proof, he recounted his own experience attending a Pentecostal church a few times when he was a new believer. He recalled feeling emotional, on the verge of tears, because he felt like God was moving, but he determined it was “nonsense” after reading the Bible for himself for several weeks.

To his credit, he said that he “matured really fast” during during those few weeks. (I am not being sarcastic now. These were his words, not mine.) He said he desired to hear someone preach the Word of God because he was hungry for preaching.

To be fair, I can appreciate. I have been in his shoes before when all I wanted was to hear a meaty sermon that dug deep into God’s word.

Bauchaum recalled an old Paul Washer sermon in which people were moved by the preaching of the word, not by the music. As proof that this is the way it should be done, he quoted Romans 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (No issue there.)

I don’t know if Bauchaum is a cessationist (someone who believes the “gifts of the Holy spirit” have ceased), so I don’t want to make any assumptions. If he is a cessationist, then it would not matter if people had limbs grow back: a cessationist has already determined God doesn’t do those things anymore.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, I can admit that his concerns might be just as validly expressed by someone who is not a cessationist. His concerns do suggest a need for some circumspection, but I have greater concern over his conclusions than any of the spectacle he described that took place on the Asbury University campus for over two weeks in February of 2023.

Continue reading “Of the Holy Spirit, Truth, Tares, and Wheat at the Asbury Revival” →

Why did Paul Go to Corinth with a Demonstration of the Spirit’s Power?

“My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power….”

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Ruins of Ancient Corinth in Peloponnese, Greece

Over the couple weeks that I was paying attention to what happened at Asbury University in Wilmore, KY (and other places now too), and considering the people criticizing it or cautioning us about it, I have prayerfully considered the matter. I have written about the “Asbury revival” a handful of times, so I am not going to rehash what I have written.

I continue to mull over the seeming positive development of 20-somthings worshiping, publicly confessing sins, praying for each other, and exalting the name of Jesus while people have been critical of what was happening and questioning God’s involvement in it. At the same, I have been drawn in my daily Bible reading to the concern Paul expressed in most of his letters for unity in the body of Christ.

This focus that has been impressed on me as I read the Bible and meditate on it predates the Asbury thing by many months, but it is directly relevant to it. The lack of unity in the American Church stands in sharp contrast to Paul’s emphasis on unity in the body of Christ. Our lack of unity has been publicly demonstrated in the vitriolic responses to the “He gets us” commercials aired during the Super Bowl and now to the Asbury “revival”.

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is all about unity and order in the local body of believers in Corinth. At the same time, the Corinthian Christians seemed to lack no shortage of what we might call the “outpouring” or “movement” of the Holy Spirit. None of Paul’s letters deals more with “the spiritual gifts” than this one.

I need to comment that the free exercise of the spiritual gifts, and God moving in peoples’ hearts and minds do not necessarily go hand in hand, as we will see, Paul also did not discourage the Corinthians from using the spiritual gifts.

This is the problem, though: while the spiritual gifts were demonstrably evidenced in the Corinthian church, they Corinthians were not producing an abundance of the fruits of the Spirit among. This lack of the fruit of the Holy Spirit was the problem in Corinth.

As a key indicator of that lack of fruit, Paul focused on their quarrelsome cliques: one group followed Paul, another group followed Apollos, and other groups of people claimed to follow Cephas, or simply Christ. That local body was being torn apart by arguments over who they should follow and other aspects of the Christian life, like whether they should be eating food sacrificed to idols. Meanwhile, they were ignoring other problems in their midst like sexual sin, relational issues, and other things.

They exhibited the spiritual gifts abundantly. Those exhibitions of spiritual gifting might be called today a “movement” or “outpouring” of the Holy Spirit, but the fruit of the Holy Spirit was lacking. Whether the Spirit was “moving” or people were simply exercising gifts given by the spirit are two different things.

I have experienced that incongruity myself. A lack of harmony between a hyper focus on the spiritual gifts and a lack of unity, faithfulness, maturity, and holiness in the local body of Christ has caused many to pull back from Charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christian expression. Me included.

We sometimes fail to appreciate the difference between the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit. We think that a demonstration of the gifts of the Holy Spirit means that we are blessed by God, and everything we do is approved by God, but that isn’t necessarily true.

If those two things went hand in hand, Paul would have had no issues with the Corinthian church, because the Corinthians experienced a liberal “outpouring of the Spirit” characterized by prophecy, speaking in tongues, miracles, etc. Though the Corinthian church was demonstrably Charismatic (or Pentecostal), it was woefully lacking in unity and personal holiness.

Having acknowledged that, we need to notice that Paul’s issue with the Corinthians wasn’t (primarily) their misuse (or ineffective use) of the spiritual gifts. The more serious concern was their prideful, boastful, quarrelsome lack of unity and toleration of sin in their midst.

Something else occurs to me that I hadn’t noticed before, and this is the focus of my writing today. The Corinthians were Greek, of course. Paul famously says to the Corinthians that Greeks demand wisdom, while Jews (his people) demand signs.

Both of these things are forms of error, but the Corinthians, being Greek, were particularly prone to err along the lines of their particular, cultural bias. They valued discourse, argument and persuasive oratory. Thus, Paul said,

“When I came to you, brothers and sisters, announcing the mystery of God to you, I did not come with brilliance of speech or wisdom. I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not be based on human wisdom but on God’s power.”

1 Corinthians 2:1‭-‬5 CSB

Paul says he did not come with brilliance of speech or with persuasive words. He came with “a demonstration of the Spirit’s power”. As I will show below, Paul’s focus is on the Greek tendency to err in demanding “wisdom”, not the Jewish tendency to demand “signs” (though the Corinthians experienced no shortage of “signs”). This is interesting to me in the light of the Asbury University phenomenon.

Continue reading “Why did Paul Go to Corinth with a Demonstration of the Spirit’s Power?” →

Asbury University and the Manifest Presence of God

I am cautioned, at the same time, by the words of Jesus to the woman at the well that we need to worship God in spirit and truth.

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I don’t recall where I obtained this capture, but I am grateful for it.

I woke up thinking about the phrase, “manifest presence of God”. I am not sure where I even heard that phrase. I had not thought of it in ages, but the phrase popped into my head when I slipped from my dreams last night into a brief state of consciousness.

I would say that the so-called “Asbury revival” is an example of the manifest presence of God. What happened there was completely organic. It began after Chapel ended. it began after a very ordinary sermon on a very normal Wednesday morning.

It wasn’t planned or orchestrated. There was no leader. Some students simply lingered. They did not want to stop worshipping. They began praying for each other. Then someone felt the need to repent openly for sin. Others did the same.

One thing led to another. At the same time, students who left the chapel began to make their way back to the Chapel for reasons they could not express. Other students heard that Chapel hadn’t ended and began coming to see what was going on.

Administrators found out something was going on, and they investigated. They recognized that something special was happening, and they had the wisdom to give their blessing to it, not to take over leadership of it, but to let what God was doing simply unfold.

The ongoing Chapel was student led from the beginning. Most of the time, the students leading worship were off to the side. People playing instruments came and went. No one was the center of attention – only Jesus who was lifted up in reverent, tender worship one moment and exuberant praise in the next.

Administrators stayed in the background and supported the students. They protected them when outsiders came flooding in, and they prayed with them. They kept Christian celebrities from taking over the stage and they kept news media out. The University President described it this way:

“What we have experienced since that Wednesday morning has been a current of immeasurable goodness flooding our community and quickly moving into other regions of the world. Words fail any effort to communicate the abundance of experiences and stories that will leave us forever changed.”

The routine chapel service that started on February 8, 2023, was officially ended on February 23, 2023, fittingly on the National Day of Prayer.

God’s manifest present was demonstrated in the repentance of sin, the deep and abiding sense of God’s peace, love, forgiveness, and healing. People spoke of physical healing and deliverance, but it wasn’t front and center. There was little to no spectacle.

The atmosphere in the Chapel was reverent and convicting, but uplifting at the same time, and Jesus was at the center of it. God God was exalted, and Jesus was lifted up as people confessed their sins to one another and to God, repented with tears and weeping, found forgiveness and new joy, prayed for each other and worshipped God. All without a program, or a plan, or a person directing what happened.

Many people would say this was a revival. I don’t know, but it was an example of the manifest presence of God. God simply “showed up”. Not that He was not already present; rather His presence was manifest. To individuals and to all who worshipped corporately.

As I think about the idea of the manifest presence of God, I am reminded of Psalm 139. We can go nowhere that God is not present. We cannot escape him. If we ascended into the heavens, or even to hell, He is there!

He is intimate with us. He knows our innermost thoughts and the intents of our heart. He can even number the hairs on our head, and He knows the words we speak before we even say them.

God is present with us, but his presence is not always manifest. We do not always feel the presence of God. Sometimes, we go long (weeks, months or years) with no sense of the presence of God in our lives. Sometimes, we have trouble even giving mental assent, if we are being honest, to the fact that God is present with us.

When we do feel or sense or see evidence of the presence of God in our lives, we are encouraged, inspired, comforted, and renewed by it. Those times when we are aware of God’s presence can sustain us through the longer, wilderness times. We need to know God in this way.

Jesus is the Bread of Life and the Living Water! What bread that we eat does not satisfy our hunger, and what water that we drink does not quench our thirst? How much more should the Bread of Life and Living Water fill us up and sustain us?!

Continue reading “Asbury University and the Manifest Presence of God” →