Light and darkness

There are parallels between faith and science despite the denier’s atheistic claims to the contrary. In fact, the only reason we can even do science is that there are design, order, and laws in nature. The men credited with being the founders of many branches of science believed that they were learning about the Creator by studying His creation, such as:

     a. Galileo - astronomy

     b. Newton, Faraday – physics (Newton wrote more about God than science)

     c. Mendel – genetics

     d. Kepler, Mather – astronomy

     e. Pasteur, Boyle – chemistry

     f. Linneaus – botany

     g. Steno – geology

     h. Bacon – developed scientific method

     i. Pascal – hydrostatics (barometer)

j. Faraday - electromagnetism

They believed what Romans 1:20 says: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse”; and what Hebrews 11:3 says: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear”. Most deniers are materialists, which means they only believe in the material world. They deny the existence of the immaterial or spiritual realm, which creates many problems for their worldview. They must try to assert material causes and explanations for everything. This violates the very law of cause and effect, because if you keep working backwards from effect to cause, you arrive at an uncaused first cause. This is called the Kalam Cosmological Argument. This uncaused first cause must be outside of time, space, matter, and energy and be intelligent and all powerful. This sounds just like the God the Bible describes. The alternative is that nothing created everything. This violates many laws of science such as the first law of thermodynamics which is also called the law of conservation of matter and energy. It says that there is no new matter or energy. There are only matter and energy that change form. A log can be set on fire, but its burning is only converting its energy into light and heat. Even after it has burned up, the ash can be made into charcoal and used to cook food. Who doesn’t like a good BBQ?

     Denying the divine Designer creates many other scientific problems. If all current life forms evolved from simpler, more primitive ones; where does the increase in genetic information come from? They try to assert that mutations do this, but mutations are always a loss of information, not an increase; and they almost always result in sterility and death. The deniers claim to believe in survival of the fittest. A mutation would be the least fit and therefore eliminated. The mathematical odds of any of this happening are so small that they are essentially zero. The law of biogenesis says that life only comes from other life. So, how did the jump from non-living to living occur if there is no God? If there is no immaterial, what is consciousness and why does it exist? Studies have shown that the brain is merely an interface for the mind between the immaterial and the material. The mind is more than an illusion created by chemicals in the brain. If that were true, how could we be certain of anything?

     Science is merely one means of learning, and it has its limits. Scientists have been wrong many, many times. This is not a big problem if scientists are honest about their limitations. Science at its heart is supposed to be a means to check hypotheses for errors, not an end-all infallible fountain for the answers to everything. Science cannot answer the most fundamental questions such as where do we come from?, why are we here?, and where are we going? The atheist must surrender to the darkness of his worldview and assert that there is no meaning or purpose, and in the end we are just annihilated at death. When scientists have an idea, if they were honest about its limitations and uncertainty, that would not be a problem. Yet they assert their ideas as settled fact and then issue ad hominin, straw man, and other fallacious charges against anyone who dares question them as though they are the sole arbiters of knowledge. This is nothing but pride. When their hypotheses or theories turn out to be wrong, you usually won’t see a major news report about it issued with the same fervor the idea was presented with when it supposedly proved the creationists’ view wrong. When you read articles about science, look for words and phrases such as scientists think, maybe, perhaps, likely, possibly, it could have, they might have, suggested, roughly, would have been, it appears, this implies, if, potentially, it is estimated, should, and perhaps the one that best illustrates the issue – scientists believe. None of these words and phrases are statements of certainty or fact. They are the opposite. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge this, they attack and attempt to silence any dissent. This is not science. This is defense of a worldview, which is a religion in itself. A religion is an organized system of beliefs.

     Atheists accuse Christians of dodging a lack of explanation through science by just saying that we don’t know how or why, but that is just how the Bible says God did it. They call it the God of the gaps theory. There are several major problems with this attack. The first is that the Bible is not a scientific textbook attempting to explain every detail of everything scientifically. It would be impossibly long, and that is not the main purpose of the Bible. It is a collection of writings about God and our relationship with Him. However, there is no established scientific fact that contradicts anything in the Bible. In fact, there are scientific facts accepted today that were in the Bible hundreds and even thousands of years before scientists “discovered” them. Another problem is that the evolutionists hypocritically do this themselves. They use evolution of the gaps to fill in gaps in their understanding. When problems with one of their theories are pointed out, they just invent another one to supposedly fill the gap. For example, when it is pointed out that comets cannot last millions of years because they would run out of material long before that, they assert the hypothesis of an Oort cloud. In 1950, a Dutch scientist named James Oort proposed the hypothesis that there is a vast cloud of material outside the solar system where new comets form and are introduced into the solar system. There is just one problem with that. The only evidence of this cloud was in the mind of James Oort. Since then, telescopes such as the Hubble, the James Webb, the Nancy Grace Roman, and the Vera Rubin have been developed which can see across the universe. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes have now left the solar system and are transmitting data from interstellar space. Yet there is still no evidence of an Oort cloud. The images coming back from the James Webb telescope show that the farthest galaxies are fully developed. This was publicly predicted by creationist astronomer Dr. Jason Lisle. According to the big bang theory, the farthest galaxies are the earliest and closest to the big bang. They should not be fully developed, but they are. This fits perfectly with what we would expect to see based on Genesis 1. To fill in the gap of their theory’s lack of explanation for this, the evolutionists proposed our universe may only be one of many. Of course, this cannot be verified or disproven. We cannot even see all of our universe. How could we see beyond it? This is a convenient dodge of the problem, but all it really does is push the problem back one level. It does not address the problem at all. It also has many difficulties.

     There is still no missing link between apes and man. What they don’t tell you is that there would have to be thousands if not millions of examples of missing links, yet there are none. There have been many frauds foisted on the unsuspecting public such as:

      1. Piltdown man was a deliberate hoax. The jaw and skull were not from the same specimen

          and were not old. The teeth were filed to look like they were worn and they were stained to

          look old.

      2. Nebraska man was a single tooth of an extinct pig.

      3. Neanderthal man was man. Some even think there are traces of Neanderthal DNA in

          modern men.

      4. Java man was a gibbon with withheld bones so it could be made to look like a missing

           link.

      5. Cro-Magnon man was man a with larger cranial capacity than we have today.

      6. Lucy’s leg bones were 200 feet further down than the others. The head bones were 1 ½ 

          miles away from those. The bones are not human nor transitional. The bones that would

          show how it moved are missing. The bones were deliberately assembled in such a way as

          to make it look transitional.

      7. Ramapithecus was a few teeth and jaw fragments that were misassembled.

      8. Peking man was a few bone fragments which disappeared when questioned.

      9. Tasmanian aboriginals were used to fake transitionals.

When asked where the additional genetic information needed for evolution came from, some give such ideas as the backs of crystals and even aliens. Where is the scientific evidence of aliens, and how did they have it, transport it, and insert it thousands of times in each cell of the living creatures that were already here, and why would they? Then same people mock Christians for being unscientific.

     One of the most intriguing areas of science is the study of light, and there are some parallels between what we know about light scientifically and what that may mean spiritually. As in other areas, the scientific understanding of light has changed over the years. Things that were once thought to be settled were overthrown by later discoveries, sometimes with much resistance and even ridicule. That is why we should start with what the Bible says about light in Genesis 1. First, God made the heaven and the earth. The planet was covered with water, so the land above the water line was not yet formed and filled with living creatures. Then, God created light, divided it from the darkness, and called them day and night. The evening and the morning were the first day. Critics point out that the sun was not created until the fourth day. This is true. This among many other reasons such as the grammar, the plain reading of the text, and the context of other relevant passages, is how we know the six days were six literal 24-hour days. The plants which depend on sunlight were not created until the fifth day. They only had to go less than 24 hours without sunlight. The sun is not the only source of light. The new Jerusalem will have neither the sun or moon. The glory of God will give it light (Rev 21:23-25).

     There was the question of whether light is a wave or a particle. Experiments showed that light behaves like a wave, but later experiments showed it also behaves like a particle. The famous double slit experiment not only addressed this, it helped open the door to quantum mechanics. When a single photon is fired at a panel that has two slits, it behaves like a wave and produces an interference pattern. However, when under observation, it behaves like a particle. It was observed that photons act like packets of light and energy or quanta rather than as a single unit. Quantum mechanics deals with how things behave at the subatomic level, while relativity deals with the opposite scale – how things behave on the astronomical. Quantum mechanics seems so strange that when it was first introduced many scientists rejected it. Even Einstein replied to it by saying that God does not play dice with the universe. He also believed that the universe had no beginning. To his credit, he eventually accepted both ideas after seeing the evidence. Both of these theories seem very strange to us because we do not experience life at those scales. Scientists have had trouble reconciling these two theories, and despite much concerted effort, they have not figured it out yet, although both theories have been verified over and over. They are still searching for what is called the theory of everything – theory that reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics. Some think the answer may have something to do with gravity. Although both theories seem to be strange because they do not describe how we experience life, they do bear weight on our lives. For example, if quantum mechanics was wrong, the GPS in our phones would not work. The system has to correct for the difference in time between sea level and space where the satellites are.

     Since light has no mass, why does it react to gravity? Gravity is created by mass. The more mass an object has, the greater the gravity. Einstein proposed in special relativity that light bends when it is influenced by mass. This could be confirmed by a solar eclipse. Normally, the sun’s light is too bright to see if starlight bends around it, but during an eclipse, starlight passing near the sun could be observed, and if the theory was correct, it should appear that a star’s place moved which would show that the light is being bent by gravity from the sun’s mass. An eclipse on May 29, 1919 confirmed it, and Einstein became the most famous physicist in the world. The results of this experiment also showed that gravity is not a force pulling things toward it. It acts directly on spacetime, warping it. The light is traveling through that change in spacetime. Einstein and other scientists often used thought experiments to develop their theories. One such illustration helps to understand the idea of bent spacetime. If two people start off heading to the north pole from two different places on earth, from their individual perspective they are both heading straight north; but from an astronomical perspective they are traveling along the curvature of the earth. So, the answer to the question “Are they traveling in a straight line or a curved one?” is yes. It depends on your perspective.

     Relativity says that space and time are one thing, not two separate ones. We can observe this right here on earth. Atomic clocks are the most accurate in the world. They measure time through the vibrations of atoms and are accurate to one second in 15 billion years. An atomic clock at low elevation will be slightly off from one at high altitude because it is lower in earth’s “gravity well”. When this is extended across the vastness of space, the effects are much more dramatic. The faster one travels, the slower time passes. If it were possible to travel at the speed of light, time would stop altogether.  It also says that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than light. Its speed is about 186,000 miles per second. A light year is not a measurement of time but of distance. It is the distance light travels in one year – about 5.8 trillion miles. Light only and always travels at this speed no matter what the observer is doing. Whether he is standing still or moving 1,000 miles per second, whether he is moving toward or away from the light, it is always and only traveling at that speed.

     Evolutionists point to distant starlight as a problem for the idea of a young earth and a young universe. If the astronomers are correct about the distances to the stars and other galaxies, which they appear to be, then how could distant starlight get to the earth in less than 6,000 years? There are several possible explanations for this, but we are not 100% sure about any of them. Some seem to work better and have less problems than others. We should keep in mind that creation was a one-time, supernatural event. God did things in the first six days that He did not do again afterward. On the seventh day He rested, which means He ceased to create. He was done making the world. Also, a little humility would serve us well. Nobody but God knows everything, and just because something cannot currently be proven scientifically does not mean it is false. In one sense, light does not travel at all since time stops when traveling at the speed of light. Special relativity says that since the speed of light is the same at all perspectives, space and time are not the same for all observers. Time dilation and length contraction say that the greater the speed at which an object is moving, the more the rate of time changes from the object’s perspective, and the shorter the length of an object appears. From our perspective, it seems as though we can be still, but from an astronomical perspective, the earth is rotating on its axis and is revolving around the sun. Since the speed of light is fixed and nothing else can travel that fast, it has no reference point for itself, yet it is the reference point for everything else.

     However, the evolutionists have their own starlight problems as well. They say that some stars are further away than what should allow their light to reach earth, even with their idea of 13.5 billion years. When the cosmic background radiation was discovered, it threw a real wrench into the big bang theory and the idea of billions of years. It shows an amazing level of uniformity throughout the universe. If you have a cup of hot coffee and place ice cubes in it, the ice will start melting and the coffee will start cooling until it eventually reaches a stable temperature. When hot things and cold things come in contact, the temperature evens out. The cosmic background radiation is so uniform that even 13.5 billion years is not enough to explain this. However, the evidence fits the Genesis model quite well.

     There is also the problem of red shift. We can only see a small portion of the total spectrum as visible light. The shortest waves of radiation like gamma rays tend toward the blue end of the spectrum, while longer waves such as radio waves tend to be toward the red end of the spectrum. When you are standing still and something approaches you like a train, the sound of its horn sounds higher because the waves are compacted as they move toward you. As soon as it passes, the sound drops noticeably. That is because the sound waves are spreading out. This is called the Doppler Effect. The radiation from stars does the same thing. If a star is moving away from us, we will see its radiation shifting to the red end of the spectrum. Everywhere we look, we see this red shift. This indicates that all celestial bodies are moving away from us in every direction, and it appears that the rate this is happening is speeding up. This would mean that the universe is much younger than some say. This contradicts the big bang model and billions of years, but it fits the Genesis 1 account well.

     Then there is the idea of black holes. Relativity predicted the existence of black holes. Observations seem to confirm that they do exist. Some now believe that one is at the center of every galaxy including our own, the Milky Way. They call ours Sagittarius A. The theory states that when a star is running out of fuel, it expands rapidly and then collapses into a comparatively small but extremely dense singularity. Its mass is so great that its gravity pulls everything into it including light. That is why we cannot observe a black hole directly. Some think that if there was a way to extract the data from this intense object, it might reveal the theory of everything.

     Let us remember that the Bible is not a science textbook. It does not delve deeply into the matters addressed above. It is a spiritual guide to knowing God and doing His will. Yet let us also remember that there is no scientific fact that disproves anything in the Bible, and there is interfacing between the Bible and science. They are not at odds. The creation reflects its Creator (Rom 1:20). Although there is no verse in the Bible talking about general relativity or quantum mechanics in a specific, detailed, scientific manner, there are correlations. Some of them are quite clear, such as the creation account in Genesis 1. The expansion of the universe is described by present tense active verb - stretching. God is stretching out the heavens (Job 26:7, Is 40:22, Is 44:24, Zech 12:1). The Hebrew word is nata. The earth hangs on nothing (Job 26:7), and it is round (Is 40:22). Some correlations between the scientific information and possible spiritual correlations should be looked at with an open mind because although the word of God does not change, science does. Some of the correlations are addressed above, and some are below.

     Since the universe, space, time, matter, and energy had a beginning, whoever or whatever

created them must be outside of the universe, space, time, matter, and energy. Therefore, the uncaused first cause must be infinite, eternal, immaterial, and all powerful. That sounds exactly like the God the Bible describes. Since the universe has an intelligent Creator, we should expect to see intelligent design and fine tuning, which we do to astonishing degree. Light represents many things in the Bible:

     1. God Himself (Jn 9:5, 1Jn 1:5), truth (Ps 43:3, Jn 3:21)

2. God's favor (Est 8:16, Job 29:3, Ps 89:15, Is 60:1)

3. God's word (Ps 119:105 & 130, Prov 6:23, 2Cor 4:4, 2Pet 1:19

     4. Righteousness (Mt 5:14-16, 1Thes 5:5)

     5. Life (Ps 36:9, Prov 6:23, Jn 1:4, Jn 8:12, 2Tim 1:10)

     6. Exposure of sin (Jn 3:20, 1Cor 4:5, Eph 5:13)

Light has attributes of both a wave and a particle. A wave is not matter but a particle is. Spiritual light affects us spiritually, and that effect is manifested outwardly in behavior (Mt 5:14-15, 1Thes 5:5). Whether the light affects us positively or negatively depends on how we respond to it. It can show us the salvation of God, or it can condemn us if we reject it (Jn 3:19-21).

     At the speed of light, time stops altogether. When the Lord returns for His people, it will happen in the twinkling of an eye. “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed (1Cor 15:52).” The Greek word moment translated here is atomos, or the smallest possible division of time. The word translated twinkling here is the word rhipē, which means a slight movement of the eye. That is how fast the rapture will take place. When this event happens, time will no longer be a factor for those who participate in it. They will be transformed into their eternal state (1Cor 15:50-58, Phul 3:30-21, 1Thes 4:13-18, 1Jn 3:1-3, Rev 21-22). The speed of light is the universe’s speed limit and it never changes. Thus, it has no reference point. It is the reference for everything else. The light of God has no reference point. It is the reference point (Jn 8,9, and 12). This is why truth is absolute, objective, and transcendent. It is not relative or subjective to time and place. There is no “my truth” and “your truth”. There is only His truth. The basics of the laws of logic confirm this:

     1. Identity – you can only be one thing at a time

     2. Non-contradiction – something is either true or false

     3. Excluded middle – something is either true or false, and there is no third option

     Black holes cannot be observed directly because they are literally black holes. The theory says that they are stars that exploded and then collapsed. Their mass is so concentrated and so intense that nothing can escape their gravity, not even light. The only way scientists can confirm that they exist is by observing their effect on nearby objects and the event horizon – a border between things outside it and those have fallen in.  Darkness is merely the absence of light. It has no substance of its own. The smallest light can overcome the greatest darkness, but darkness cannot do anything at all. This principle is established in the first five verses of the Bible (Gen 1:1-5). Considering the symbolism of light in the Bible, the correlation is that darkness represents:

     1. Evil (Ps 143:3, Prov 4:19, Eph 5:8 & 11), lies (Jn 8)

     2. Death (Job 10:21, Job 17:13, Ps 107:10)

     3. Loss of spiritual direction (Deut 28:29, Ps 82:50, Ecc 2:14, Is 9:2, Jn 1:5, Jn 12:35 & 46,

         Rom 2:19),

     4. Hell (Mt 22:13, Mt 25:13)

     5. The devil (Lk 22:53, Acts 26:18, 2Cor 4:4-6)

Some scientists think that black holes are a portal to another dimension or even another universe. While the idea of multiple universes has Biblical and scientific issues, there is another world besides the physical one. The invisible spiritual world is just as real as the visible one, and it is more real in some ways because the visible world is temporal, and the invisible is eternal (Rom 1:20, 2Cor 4:16-18, Heb 11:1-3). We don’t know a lot about the spiritual world, although the Bible offers us some information. We need to be very careful about what information we are heeding, especially if it doesn’t have a Biblical basis. A great question generally is, “What scripture is that?”. Context is always key – the context of the passage, the context of the book it is in, and the context of the whole Bible. Exegesis is drawing out the meaning in the scripture. Eisegesis is inserting a meaning into the Bible. Seekers of truth do exegesis. People looking for the next sensational doctrine do eisegesis. There are a lot of unbiblical ideas out there, and it is our responsibility to know God and the Bible for ourselves and to pray for the love of the truth, which God will give us (2Thes 2:10).  

     Time dilation and length contraction show us something important about perspective and perception. If we are looking at something from a faulty perspective, we will perceive it incorrectly. Everyone looks at the world through worldview eyeglasses which tell us how to see things. We all have presuppositions. The question is “are they correct?”.   If we have the wrong prescription lenses, we may think we are seeing everything the way it is, but we can be deceived into a false interpretation of it. We cannot trust our own hearts to tell us the truth all the time. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?  I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings (Jer 19:9-10).” We can always trust God. He is the source of truth. If we get deceived, it is not God’s fault. If we persistently show God that we reject His truth, He will let us exercise our free will into delusion despite His patient and loving efforts to lead us to truth (Is 66:4, Rom 1:18-32, 2Thes 2:1-12). “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1Jn 1:5).”