"And On the Fourth Day..."

Hi. My name’s God. I’m here to feed the mice.

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

8/8/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/Religious/mice.htm

Earlier this week, a fellow named Ed Conrad  posted a message discussing the Ultra Deep Field "hundreds of galaxies" shot that Hubble sent to an astounded world about seven years ago. Conrad is an "Intelligent Design" advocate, and so his premise is essentially, "it’s big, it’s pretty, it’s complicated, I don’t understand it, and therefore God must have done it."

The image is an amazing one. Over a period of several months, technicians had Hubble take thousands of shots of a piece of the sky that, when combined together, covered an area about the same as that of a match head held at arm’s length. The piece of sky in question appeared dark to the naked eye.

What they wound up with was an image that showed hundreds of galaxies, each with billions of stars, each lying on its own plane, different colors, different shapes, different sizes. In that little, "empty" patch of sky lay billions upon billions of stars.

It’s a step closer to comprehending the fantastic scale of the universe. Andromeda is the closest galaxy to earth’s own Milky Way, a scant 4.5 million light years away. Many of the galaxies in the Hubble image were further from one another than that. If there was a solar system like ours in that image – and there are probably millions of them – then each one would be about the size of a pinhead as seen from here on the surface of the moon.

Of this, Conrad wrote, "Let the Establishment astronomers and space scientists – the heathens – continue to downplay the significance of this breathtaking photo, crediting it to a happenstance occurrence called the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is getting to look more and more like the Big Bang BUST every day."

"One honest opinion that an Intelligent Designer -- or Intelligent DesignerS -- definitely had a hand in construction of the universe makes a lot more sense than the nonsense proposed by know-it-all "scientists," the overly educated bureaucratic buffoons with the alphabet soup at the end of their names."

Conrad went on to attack "the false doctrine of evolution," conflating, as so many "Intelligent Design" people do, the creation of the universe and the development of life on earth, two events that occurred at least 13 billion years apart. That’s a long stretch of time. George W. could memorize the entire contents of the Library of Congress in that amount of time, and even understand what he read. A million monkeys banging on a million typewriters could have created all of Fidel Castro’s speeches in that amount of time.

I guess I’m saying it was quite a spell.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t believe in "The Big Bang." Oh, I believe they have the beginning date correct to within an order of magnitude, and I understand the deconstructions used to elegantly explain such things as the presence of gold, lead, and uranium, or the background hiss that is the echo of the beginning of the universe. Where I have a problem is with the opening moment: the notion that the entire mass of the universe was jettisoned out of nothing in a few microseconds and went on to become trillions of galaxies spread across 15 billion light years and that undifferentiated neutrinos became stars, planets, Edsels and cows always struck me as a bit dicey.

The math says that’s what happened, but math sometimes says things that don’t work out in the real world. For example, a quadratic equation always returns two answers. One has a positive value, and the other a negative value. Both, by the standards of math, are equally true and correct. But in real world applications – figuring the area of a frame around a picture, for example – one of the answers is true and correct, and the other – the negative value – must be discarded. Perhaps every time you solve for a quadratic, a bell rings and a new universe in which frames of negative value can exist is created instantly out of nothing.

It’s no sillier than any other creation myth around. Who’da guessed 8^th grade algebra could be so portentous?

So I think they take the math at face value, and assume a "two truths" approach, of which only one might be real and valid. I suspect, too that the fallacy of the hare and the tortoise comes into play, in which an hare can never catch a tortoise because the tortoise remains incrementally ahead. (The tortoise has a 100 foot head start. By the time the hare has covered 100 feet, the tortoise has covered ten. By the time the hare has covered ten, the tortoise has covered one. And so on, to infinitely small increments, and thus the hare never catches the tortoise.) In the case of the big bang, we don’t have enough information to know where the pure math and reality intersect. We don’t know how big the picture is, we don’t know what kind of race the hare and the tortoise are having. So we assume the possibility that the pre-universe permitted the fallacies to be real.

Now, a religious person might say the missing knowledge is God. I’ve heard the deity called "The God of the Missing Pieces" before, and it’s apt. "We don’t understand it, therefore God must have done it." People willing to stop asking questions at that point are free to do so.

The only problem is that as science keeps filling in the missing pieces, the gods keep retreating. Thor didn’t send the lightning. The planets weren’t perfect orbs reflecting the perfection of God’s will. They used to say Man could create gods by the thousands but never created a single mouse, but in this age of cloning, even that isn’t true any more.

Substituting "God" for "I don’t know" has been proven, over and over, to be an unsure bet. Eventually, we DO know, and we don’t find God hiding where there was shadow.

Conrad sees the majesty and scale and complexity of the universe as an expression of God’s will. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you don’t try to pretend that it’s scientific (Conrad, of course, does). Scientists may accept logical fallacies as expressions of incomprehension, but they don’t INVENT logical fallacies.

And the Hubble picture to me is strong evidence that the ancient authors of the Bible had it all wrong. The creation myth in Genesis has God creating the stars on the fourth day, a sort of an afterthought so people who didn’t exist yet could have a handy nighttime calendar so they could time their festivals properly and gauge the passage of the seasons.

The Hubble shot of those hundreds of galaxies contains trillions of suns, thermonuclear events, most of which are larger, brighter and hotter than our own sun. We are seeing down a narrow passageway for some 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, and it covers less than one millionth of one percent of the sky.

The bible assures us this all was just tacked on as a late development in creation just so some goat herders to look up and say, "Oh, look, the sun is in Capricorn, it’s time to bring the goats in for the winter", and to know when to have the blessing of the palm fronds or whatever.

Does that strike anyone as being perhaps just a little bit of overkill?

If you want to say God created the Universe, feel free. God is right at home in the inexplicable. But don’t tell me he created the universe because some goat herders who didn’t exist yet would be too dumb to build a decent clock for another 2,000 years.

The late Douglas Adams, author of "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" postulated that the purpose of the universe was to feed the mice.

Genesis, in effect, says the same thing.

The difference is, Adams was joking.