Creation actually does have a Theory Of Everything...Darwinism, not so much...
No matter what your worldview may be, I am hoping you can stop and for one minute have an open mind. Any quotes I use in this post will be from BrainyQuotes unless otherwise linked.
"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."-C. S. Lewis
The Creationist worldview is actually a soup-to-nuts Theory of Everything. Only the Young Earth Creationist can point to the Bible and say, "My worldview is based on this book" and be telling the truth. Yet, at the same time we can point to the scientific laws and evidence available today and the history of science and say, "My worldview is based on the history and evidence apart from the Bible." Once upon a time the scientific community did not abandon laws in favor of fairy tales. Once upon a time the scientific community respected the concept of "Occam's Razor" and it was intrinsic to science.
The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is:"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." - link
Sometimes I think statements like this simply go in one ear and out the other. The concept that God created the Universe has never been replaced by a more sensible idea or a more logical one. The Big Bang is simply a desperate attempt to avoid the necessity of God as Creator. But naturalists are self-refuting when they contend that there could have been an unexplained singularity that exploded, nor that the explosion had to be contrary to natural laws nor that said explosion would be the first domino in an almost infinite set of dominoes which all need to fall precisely right when there is no source for the dominoes in the first place. Only a Supernatural first cause is a logical cause for the Universe, because the Universe could not have created itself. That is the pagan religion of Pantheism. It is unscientific and illogical. It is the foundation of Darwinism.
With no solid foundation upon which to stand, it is unsurprising that the evolution narrative is continually being re-written and corrected. Boundaries once marked "no trespassing" become moved several miles down the road when the evidence challenge is so strong that evolution must evolve or be destroyed. Funny to think that the only evolution that happens in relation to the hypothesis of evolution is the evolution narrative itself rather than the organisms (and the related assertions about the formation of life and existence) that it supposedly explains.
Creationists began modern science and they have always been involved at the frontiers of scientific discovery. Read David Coppedge's excellent series of biographies about the men who built science:
THE WORLD’S GREATEST CREATION SCIENTISTS From Y1K to Y2K
You also you might wish to check out the index of scientists found at this link. The Greeks established axiomatic science as a normative way of looking at the world - supposing that the ancients had great knowledge and therefore viewed all of the world through the lens of their basic assertions. It was Creation-believers, Christians and Theists, who established investigative science as a way of exploring the world, compiled the scientific method and established the various disciplines of science we take for granted today. But before these men began to change the world, philosophy and, quite frankly, the search for the Philosopher's Stone aka Alchemy was the closest thing to science that existed at that time.
Do we Christians who accept the biblical account of creation know how
blessed we are? We have something (actually many things) that no other
group in the world have, a theory of
everything, something that humanism has long sought. This is not the
same as claiming we know everything, but we do have a framework within
which everything in this universe;
personal, physical and spiritual, fits. Most of us when assembling a
jigsaw puzzle begin with the easy or obvious parts, the corners and
edges with the straight sides. Once this
is done, it just becomes so much easier to fit the other pieces and to
spot pieces that have been mixed in from other puzzles. The Bible is
like this; it gives us an overall
framework of interpretation of the world around us, and allows us to fit
all the pieces that come our way into that framework. All the big
questions (pieces of the overall
puzzle)—Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Why
is the world as it is, socially and physically?—find a comfortable fit
within this framework.
Even other political, economic and scientific facts fit perfectly into
the ‘big picture’ given us by God in the Scriptures.
Of course, most importantly; the works, teachings, beliefs and person
of the One we are called on to believe in for salvation, Jesus Christ;
make perfect sense once we accept the
plain meaning of Genesis. The reason for this cursed world, Christ’s
physical incarnation, life, death, resurrection and future restoration
of all things only make sense
(perfect sense), if Genesis is true history. Genesis is a major part of
the biblical theory of everything; the entire outside frame of our
puzzle if you like, with Christ at the
centre.
The framework makes sense of why the world and universe has the appearance of design; from the clocklike mechanism of our solar system, to the gears, motor and propeller of the bacterial flagellum—because they were made by the Master Designer—‘The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1). The reason that all life arises from incredibly complex specifying information in the DNA molecule is that, ‘In the beginning was the Word (logos) … all things were made by Him’ (John 1:1,3). It makes sense of why all social and political systems based on the idea of the perfectibility of mankind (if only … ) are doomed to fail, ‘for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’, (Rom 3:23). The biblical history of the Flood fits wonderfully a world of sedimentary rock, fossils, mountains and canyons. They are phenomena we should expect to find because the Bible is true.
A substantial biblical worldview is the reason why the West attained
the level of human opportunity, freedoms, rights, privileges and
institutions to which the whole world
has aspired over the past couple of hundred years. GK Chesterton said
that ‘The great and grave changes in our political civilization all
belonged to the early nineteenth
century, not to the later. They belonged to the black and white epoch
when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in
Reform, and not unfrequently in
Revolution.1
A fact that even many non-Christians like the British Jewish
conservative commentator, Melanie Phillips
recognise, ‘Far from minorities being offended, they should acknowledge
that the institutions and values which make Britain so desirable to live
in are rooted in
Christianity.’2 How ironic when people recognise the fruits of Christianity, but deny its roots set firmly in
Genesis. They have a broken worldview.
Little wonder that as the attack on the foundations of Christian
belief intensifies in the West, the wheels are rapidly coming off. Not
that these societies were ever perfect
or free of evil and hypocrisy. But there was enough of a critical mass
of Christian belief at the foundation of many of the great western
countries, to enable a quality and value
of life for the majority of people, unheard of in human history. In a
world deluded by the myth of multi-culturalism (i.e. the
politically-correct ‘multiculturalism’
in vogue in the west), the idea that all cultures and beliefs systems
are equally valid, such assertions are regarded as out of
bounds.3 But this is the truth.
The milestones of Western law like the Magna Carta, Lex Rex and the American Declaration of Independence were overtly Christian in their authorship, ideology and wording and their application by the masses dependent on the degree of Christian permeation of the culture. Most of the greatest schools and universities in the west began as Christian institutions with Christian goals. It is even acknowledged by secular philosophers of science, that modern science itself was born within the context of Christian belief in a rational God and man made in His image with a purpose and ability to seek out His ‘handywork’. How ironic that many of the ‘fathers’ of various fields of science now used to discredit biblical belief, were Christians that accepted the biblical account of creation.4 The West worked because of a pervasive biblical framework amongst the broader populace. This is why democracy cannot just be transplanted into any culture.
Within this framework the world makes sense on a personal level as
well. Even when natural or moral evil, trials ‘common to man’, intrude
into our lives, as
Christians we need never be caught unawares; our faith need never be
demolished. The Bible prepares us for these things firstly by tracing
them to the source, Adam and Eve’s
rebellion against God when tempted by Satan back in Eden. This knowledge
helps us be ‘cast down, but not destroyed’ when trials enter our lives,
no matter how
heart-breaking.
As well as much pain in the world, there is also much beauty. The Bible explains why the beauty of the beheld—whether flower or face, sonnet or sonata—is so fit for the eye and ear of the beholder. It is because we are made in the image of the Creator, who Himself loves beauty and created the universe primarily for the benefit of Man, the federal head of creation.
Meanwhile physicists who believe in an evolutionary origin, have sought to put together an overarching ‘Theory of Everything’ (ToE), e.g., as described in Steven Weinberg’s (1993) book Dreams of a Final Theory. The goal of such a theory would be to fully explain and link together all known physical phenomena, being able to predict the outcome, at least theoretically, of any physics experiment.5
As scientific naturalism, the rule of the game for science today, only recognises matter and natural law, such a quest is a search for a unifying principle that indeed explains all phenomena. Evolutionists often claim or like to believe that they have a ‘theory of everything’, except when they don’t. They proclaim that evolution accounts for everything from the Big Bang to molecular biologists. Evolutionary explanations are given for all observed physical and behavioural phenomena, even phenomena that are the antithesis or contradictory of each other.6 But when challenged about the un-scientific assumption of a-biogenesis, that in their scheme of things, life must have come from non-life, they deny that this is part of the theory of evolution. They are unable to give evidence of how mutations gave rise to the vast amount of genetic information in all organisms; from the humble beginnings of the so-called ‘simple’ organism from which all life is supposed to have arisen to complex organisms such as men and mice. The supple explanation of evolution, far from explaining everything, is a game of smoke and mirrors, an illusion.
And in order to protect their tottering theory from attack, they
resort to bullying and ridicule to try to drive defenders of biblical
creation from the culture and classrooms
of the world. Although dominant, it is an insecure faith today.
Describing his conversion from scepticism to a Christian view of the world, Chesterton wrote— ‘And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection—the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world—it had evidently been meant to go there—and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me.’7
Christians that take God at His word from the very first verse of the Bible, have a sure ‘theory of everything’. We are blessed indeed. No wonder Jesus urged His disciples to ‘abide’8 in Him. It is the safest place to be.
There should be no such thing as Theistic Evolution. It is like hot cold or black white. It is like trying to make opposite poles of two magnets to come together and stay there. To compromise yourself in the attempt to make polar opposite worldviews come together is like self-betrayal. If you cannot sense the dichotomy within your mind, there has to be within your subconscious a terrible sense of distress and unease. To believe in evolution with no God involved is more honest intellectually but it is terribly bankrupt both philosophically and evidentially.
If you have lived your life with the idea that evolution is true and you have any kind of intellect and sense at all, you at one point had to question the point of even being alive at all. Long hours of deep conversation with all kinds of people taught me that most of us are not comfortable with nebulous and uncertain worldviews. We expect to have some kind of value to our lives and some reason to have been born. We expect absolutes, a moral compass, a kind of yardstick against which we measure ourselves and we expect worthwhile goals to strive for that will drive us to succeed and bring us self-satisfaction. Darwinism in it;s pure form denies free will, denies free choices, denies purpose to life, denies any moral absolutes and denies any purpose to life other than to propagate and survive. One would think that the perfect Darwinist would be a sociopath, assuming he truly understood all the implications.
But God is in the world and God is love. God lives within Christian hearts and His magnificent creation, even as it devolves due to the Laws of Thermodynamics, is obvious to us all. No one can investigate the world carefully and walk away unimpressed. The heart and mind long for answers that end with exclamation points and not question marks. You may know happiness and tranquility, you may know quiet and you may even know ecstasy. If you do not know God, I guarantee you that you have never known peace.
"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." - C. S. Lewis
"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."-C. S. Lewis
The Creationist worldview is actually a soup-to-nuts Theory of Everything. Only the Young Earth Creationist can point to the Bible and say, "My worldview is based on this book" and be telling the truth. Yet, at the same time we can point to the scientific laws and evidence available today and the history of science and say, "My worldview is based on the history and evidence apart from the Bible." Once upon a time the scientific community did not abandon laws in favor of fairy tales. Once upon a time the scientific community respected the concept of "Occam's Razor" and it was intrinsic to science.
The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is:"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." - link
Sometimes I think statements like this simply go in one ear and out the other. The concept that God created the Universe has never been replaced by a more sensible idea or a more logical one. The Big Bang is simply a desperate attempt to avoid the necessity of God as Creator. But naturalists are self-refuting when they contend that there could have been an unexplained singularity that exploded, nor that the explosion had to be contrary to natural laws nor that said explosion would be the first domino in an almost infinite set of dominoes which all need to fall precisely right when there is no source for the dominoes in the first place. Only a Supernatural first cause is a logical cause for the Universe, because the Universe could not have created itself. That is the pagan religion of Pantheism. It is unscientific and illogical. It is the foundation of Darwinism.
With no solid foundation upon which to stand, it is unsurprising that the evolution narrative is continually being re-written and corrected. Boundaries once marked "no trespassing" become moved several miles down the road when the evidence challenge is so strong that evolution must evolve or be destroyed. Funny to think that the only evolution that happens in relation to the hypothesis of evolution is the evolution narrative itself rather than the organisms (and the related assertions about the formation of life and existence) that it supposedly explains.
Creationists began modern science and they have always been involved at the frontiers of scientific discovery. Read David Coppedge's excellent series of biographies about the men who built science:
THE WORLD’S GREATEST CREATION SCIENTISTS From Y1K to Y2K
You also you might wish to check out the index of scientists found at this link. The Greeks established axiomatic science as a normative way of looking at the world - supposing that the ancients had great knowledge and therefore viewed all of the world through the lens of their basic assertions. It was Creation-believers, Christians and Theists, who established investigative science as a way of exploring the world, compiled the scientific method and established the various disciplines of science we take for granted today. But before these men began to change the world, philosophy and, quite frankly, the search for the Philosopher's Stone aka Alchemy was the closest thing to science that existed at that time.
Biblical Creation—Truly, a Theory of Everything (ToE)
Why Christians have a better explanation of the world than secular humanists
Published: 14 May 2013 (GMT+10)
NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
The framework makes sense of why the world and universe has the appearance of design.
The framework makes sense of why the world and universe has the appearance of design; from the clocklike mechanism of our solar system, to the gears, motor and propeller of the bacterial flagellum—because they were made by the Master Designer—‘The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1). The reason that all life arises from incredibly complex specifying information in the DNA molecule is that, ‘In the beginning was the Word (logos) … all things were made by Him’ (John 1:1,3). It makes sense of why all social and political systems based on the idea of the perfectibility of mankind (if only … ) are doomed to fail, ‘for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’, (Rom 3:23). The biblical history of the Flood fits wonderfully a world of sedimentary rock, fossils, mountains and canyons. They are phenomena we should expect to find because the Bible is true.
Wikimedia commons/Dschwen
Little wonder that as the attack on the foundations of Christian
belief intensifies in the West, the wheels are rapidly coming off.
The milestones of Western law like the Magna Carta, Lex Rex and the American Declaration of Independence were overtly Christian in their authorship, ideology and wording and their application by the masses dependent on the degree of Christian permeation of the culture. Most of the greatest schools and universities in the west began as Christian institutions with Christian goals. It is even acknowledged by secular philosophers of science, that modern science itself was born within the context of Christian belief in a rational God and man made in His image with a purpose and ability to seek out His ‘handywork’. How ironic that many of the ‘fathers’ of various fields of science now used to discredit biblical belief, were Christians that accepted the biblical account of creation.4 The West worked because of a pervasive biblical framework amongst the broader populace. This is why democracy cannot just be transplanted into any culture.
Wikimedia
John Calvin (1509–1564).
As well as much pain in the world, there is also much beauty. The Bible explains why the beauty of the beheld—whether flower or face, sonnet or sonata—is so fit for the eye and ear of the beholder. It is because we are made in the image of the Creator, who Himself loves beauty and created the universe primarily for the benefit of Man, the federal head of creation.
Meanwhile physicists who believe in an evolutionary origin, have sought to put together an overarching ‘Theory of Everything’ (ToE), e.g., as described in Steven Weinberg’s (1993) book Dreams of a Final Theory. The goal of such a theory would be to fully explain and link together all known physical phenomena, being able to predict the outcome, at least theoretically, of any physics experiment.5
As scientific naturalism, the rule of the game for science today, only recognises matter and natural law, such a quest is a search for a unifying principle that indeed explains all phenomena. Evolutionists often claim or like to believe that they have a ‘theory of everything’, except when they don’t. They proclaim that evolution accounts for everything from the Big Bang to molecular biologists. Evolutionary explanations are given for all observed physical and behavioural phenomena, even phenomena that are the antithesis or contradictory of each other.6 But when challenged about the un-scientific assumption of a-biogenesis, that in their scheme of things, life must have come from non-life, they deny that this is part of the theory of evolution. They are unable to give evidence of how mutations gave rise to the vast amount of genetic information in all organisms; from the humble beginnings of the so-called ‘simple’ organism from which all life is supposed to have arisen to complex organisms such as men and mice. The supple explanation of evolution, far from explaining everything, is a game of smoke and mirrors, an illusion.
Ernest Normand (1859–1923).
King John of England signs Magna Carta.
Describing his conversion from scepticism to a Christian view of the world, Chesterton wrote— ‘And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection—the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world—it had evidently been meant to go there—and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me.’7
Christians that take God at His word from the very first verse of the Bible, have a sure ‘theory of everything’. We are blessed indeed. No wonder Jesus urged His disciples to ‘abide’8 in Him. It is the safest place to be.
Related Articles
References
- Chesterton, G. K. (2009-06-01). Orthodoxy (Moody Classics) (Kindle Locations 1882–1883). Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition. Return to text.
- Don’t let the killjoys ruin this Christmas. Her blog on 24 December 2012. www.melaniephillips.com. Return to text.
- See my article on this subject at creation.com/worldview-supremacy. Return to text.
- The creationist basis for modern science, creation.com/the-creationist-basis-for-modern-science. Return to text.
- Weinberg S., Dreams of a final theory, Random House, New York, 1993. Return to text.
- creation.com/darwinian-explanations-are-too-flexible-to-be-useful. Return to text.
- Chesterton, G. K. (2009-06-01). Orthodoxy (Moody Classics) (Kindle Locations 1402–1412). Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition. Return to text.
- John 15:4–7. Return to text.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." - C. S. Lewis
There should be no such thing as Theistic Evolution. It is like hot cold or black white. It is like trying to make opposite poles of two magnets to come together and stay there. To compromise yourself in the attempt to make polar opposite worldviews come together is like self-betrayal. If you cannot sense the dichotomy within your mind, there has to be within your subconscious a terrible sense of distress and unease. To believe in evolution with no God involved is more honest intellectually but it is terribly bankrupt both philosophically and evidentially.
If you have lived your life with the idea that evolution is true and you have any kind of intellect and sense at all, you at one point had to question the point of even being alive at all. Long hours of deep conversation with all kinds of people taught me that most of us are not comfortable with nebulous and uncertain worldviews. We expect to have some kind of value to our lives and some reason to have been born. We expect absolutes, a moral compass, a kind of yardstick against which we measure ourselves and we expect worthwhile goals to strive for that will drive us to succeed and bring us self-satisfaction. Darwinism in it;s pure form denies free will, denies free choices, denies purpose to life, denies any moral absolutes and denies any purpose to life other than to propagate and survive. One would think that the perfect Darwinist would be a sociopath, assuming he truly understood all the implications.
But God is in the world and God is love. God lives within Christian hearts and His magnificent creation, even as it devolves due to the Laws of Thermodynamics, is obvious to us all. No one can investigate the world carefully and walk away unimpressed. The heart and mind long for answers that end with exclamation points and not question marks. You may know happiness and tranquility, you may know quiet and you may even know ecstasy. If you do not know God, I guarantee you that you have never known peace.
"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." - C. S. Lewis