Dr. Charles Jackson
In the 1990’s Dr. D. Russell Humphreys came out with his theory on the origin of the universe.
Dr. Humphreys is an award-winning physicist retired from the U.S. government installation at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. He is also a biblical young-earth creationist.
He became famous for correctly predicting how strong the magnetic fields would be for the planets Uranus and Neptune before the space probes got there to measure them. By contrast, NASA’s predictions were nearly a million times off! In 2008, Humphreys accurately predicted the weakening of the magnetic field of the planet Mercury from 1975 to then. He is a solid scientist and also a Bible-believing Christian gentleman.
When he was working on his theory of the universe, Dr. Humphreys decided to let the Scriptures guide him in his thinking. He saw that in many places (like in Job 26:7) the Bible talks about God “stretching out the heavens” during the creation week mentioned in the book of Genesis.
Humphreys realized that if this was true, then it could solve one of the greatest problems in astronomy for the creationists. We had always wondered: if the world is only 6000 years old, how is it that we can see stars and galaxies that are thousands, or millions, of light-years away.
Shouldn’t it take thousands or millions of years of time for the light to get from there to here, for us to be able to see it?
Creationist theories on the universe at that time had some pretty difficult problems associated with them. Humphreys discovered what he thought (and now most creationists believe) is the best explanation. God stretched space when he made the universe.
According to the Bible, God didn’t make the sun, the moon, the stars, or the other planets until day four of the creation week. Up to then, the only thing in the whole universe was planet Earth. So there was nothing yet that had very much gravity.
The gravity of Jupiter is more than twice as strong as Earth’s. The sun’s gravity is 25 times stronger. Albert Einstein said that gravity can slow down time, and many years later he was proven right. He also said that anyone who is moving through space at near the speed of light will also experience time being slowed down for them.
Both these proven facts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity can be shown to go hand-in-hand with both the Bible and with Humphreys’ theory on the universe.
Here’s how his theory works.
- At first, there was very little gravity anywhere in space, since Earth was the only thing that had been made yet.
- Time would have gone along quite normally as long as only Earth was there.
- But on Day Four, suddenly God made all of the stars and the galaxies with all of their huge amount of gravity.
Now, according to Einstein, gravity makes a kind of a dent in space, a lot like a bowling ball in the middle of a trampoline. Inside this dent caused by gravity, time will go slower.
Earth would have been like a marble on the trampoline, hardly making a dent in the fabric of space-time at all. Galaxies full of stars would be much heavier and would have much greater gravity.
Think about the example of the trampoline again. All the new gravity sources on day four would pull the fabric of space-time down far more deeply. This would be like putting ten bowling balls on the trampoline all at once.
This next part is not hard to understand; it’s just hard to believe. But the math and the physics and the astronomy all work out correctly.
If the “trampoline” of space is pulled down far enough, then time will slow down so much (because of the gravity) that it will actually stop. So, time stopped everywhere on Day Four of the universe.
Then why do we have time today?
The answer is simple. God kept stretching out the universe.
Let’s go back to the trampoline. If you put ten bowling balls on it, the center might become so heavy it might sag far enough down to touch the ground. This is like time coming to a halt.
But if God is continually “stretching out the heavens,” think of what would happen next. Imagine you got a large group of friends to all gather around the trampoline, and all of them grabbed around the edges, and all of them pulled as hard as they could. They might be able to pull it tight enough that the middle of it, bowling balls and all, would lift up off of the ground. This would represent time being hoisted back into operation on the stretched-out fabric of space in the universe.
Now which part of the trampoline will get back up off the ground first? It will be the areas farthest from the center. Which part will finally come up off the ground last? It will be the very center itself.
Creationists make one unprovable assumption at this point: that our Earth is someplace near the center of the universe. This would mean that time would have started back up again around the edges of the universe first, because of God stretching it from around the edges.
When time started back up at the edges first, the light from all of the galaxies at the edges would have immediately taken off (at the speed of light) in all directions. Meanwhile, Earth is still stuck in the center where time is yet standing still. The light would have had plenty of “time” to get from there to here before time began again at our location, nearer the center of the “trampoline” of space.
So, if true, it really did take millions of years of space-time for the light from the other galaxies to get here to Earth. But meanwhile, no time had passed on Earth, since the stretching had not yet pulled Earth and its neighboring stars up out of the “time dent” yet. All this time would have occurred on Earth’s day four from the vantage point of our place near the center part of the universe.
Thinking Differently About Time Itself
This might seem pretty complicated. The reason for that is that we are not used to thinking about time the way it really must be.
We only experience it from our own point of view.
- What about God’s point of view?
- What about the point of view of the universe?
Which way is the true way? God says in his Word, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” Jesus said, “before Abraham was, I am.” Both these statements are confusing to us. It almost sounds like Jesus made a grammar mistake when he said that!
Time is different for God because he is eternal. He is infinite.
We are not infinite. That is why we have trouble even understanding the meaning of his words in either of these statements.
If time means nothing to God, then Jesus is dying on the cross at Calvary … right now. What does that mean?
Maybe it would be easier to think of time being like a huge history timeline on paper. Then Jesus could be seen dying on the cross “over there” in time, while we are looking at our timeline “over here.”
Big Picture Experience
Here’s another way to think of it. Time for us is like watching a parade through a hole in a wooden fence. Time for God is like watching the parade from a traffic helicopter. He sees the beginning and the ending, both at the same “time.” If we can think of time in this way, then just maybe we can get a tiny part of our thinking right about how God made the universe when he did.
From everything that we can learn from the infallible Scriptures and from the proven sciences, Dr. Humphreys’ explanation has become the best one that goes along with confirming what we see both in Scripture and in science.
In the beginning, God created the earth and it had no form. The earth was a bunch of atoms made of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. The Bible does not say God formed a ball of matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons) and called it Earth. The Bible says the matter had no form. You can try to tell me what you think “the Earth had no form” means, I will accept what the Bible says “It had no form”. Einstein said E=MCC. Where did he come up with such an unbelievable statement as that? It turned out to be true. I know that time for God can be days, weeks, months or years. God’s time is what ever He wants it to be. Before He created the Earth and it had no form, time did not exist. I do not know if the big bang happened, but if it did, science has it’s facts all wrong. I have put together some words that would better explain the big bang, if it did indeed happen. Let me know what you think of the first few paragraphs of “The Genesis Theory of the Big Bang.
The Genesis Theory for the Big Bang
We all agree that in the beginning, there were no protons, neutrons, or electrons. There were no atoms which are made up from protons, neutrons, and electrons. There was no earth which is made up from atoms. These were all made at the beginning of time and is known as the Creation or the Big Bang. If there was a big bang, God created it. For the most part, science tells us the Big Bang initiated in a single spot and energy was changed into protons, neutrons, and electrons with some other tiny particles. Science tells us that atoms were not formed from the protons, neutrons, and electrons until a long time after the Big Bang and then only hydrogen and maybe helium could have been configured. Science teaches that bigger atoms require tremendous energy to configure and this is only possible with super nova exploding stars. Science has not determined where the energy came from or how much energy was transformed into matter at the big bang or how much of the energy was left over and what happened to that energy. Science does indicate there was a tremendous amount of energy at the point of creation. Genesis tells us that in the beginning, the earth was Created, and it had no form. I think this means that the earth consisted of protons, neutrons, and electrons but had no form.
The simplest atom is hydrogen, and its form is one proton and one electron. It has a diameter of about 100 pm (picometers). The one proton at the center of the hydrogen atom has a diameter of about 3.4 fm (femtometers). There are 1000 fm per pm. This means that the volume of the hydrogen atom is about 15,000,000,000,000 times larger than the proton at the nucleus. It would take a lot of room to allow a hydrogen atom to form. Then consider a carbon atom that has 6 protons and 6 neutrons. Science tells us it is common for carbon to exist with only 2 electrons as a (carbon +4) ion with an ionic diameter of about 60 pm. It takes much less space to make carbon ions than to make hydrogen atoms. The bigger the element, the smaller the inner electron shell.
There are 5 forms of matter. We all know solids, liquids, and gases. The other two forms are plasmas (a mixture of ions and electrons) and Bose-Einstein condensates (atom nuclei, void of electrons, clumped together but remaining independent). To learn more about the forms of matter, read: Matter: Definition & the Five States of Matter By Mary Bagley – LiveScience Contributor August 21, 2019, Reference Article: Facts about the states of matter. Perhaps there was a sixth form a matter consisting of random neutrons and protons so tight together and so full of energy that no atoms could form.
In the beginning, were there Bose-Einstein clumps of protons and neutrons taking up a relatively small area in space or something else? Could it be that the neutrons and protons randomly grouped to become stabilized atom nuclei? No matter what is was, it had no form. Neutrons seem to be necessary to form clumps of these particles and generally a clump would contain an equal number of protons and neutrons. Hydrogen, with the largest inner electron shell, would have required the most space to collect its only electron. Hydrogen may have been the last element to form. It would seem to me that as the giant mass of electrons, protons, and neutrons spread out, larger clumps would be the first to form the smaller inner shell of electrons as space became available. Except for hydrogen and helium, these elements would not be atoms yet, but more like super ions until more space became available so more electron shells could be added.
In the Genesis Theory, God created the protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. as a shapeless mass from energy per the Einstein equation M = E/CC. These particles and matter were together as a Bose-Einstein condensate. This state for mater would have been like a liquid and would have taken the shape of its container. Since there was no container, it had no shape. Can particles form stable clumps in a liquid. Yes, they can, based on my observations. I am a metallurgist (a solid-state scientist). I once had
I don’t know why — anyone — or how anyone … could possibly start out any thesis with the “point” the that Bible never says that God made a “ball of atoms” and called it the Earth. Let’s dispense with that first point right now. The very first sentence of the Bible actually does say this. How can you miss it? And why (more importantly) would you — want to.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Hey. There is nothing else this could mean, bro. So … is there anything else that doesn’t hang on the assertion that God never created a ball of atoms and called it Earth? Sincerely, Dr. G. Charles Jackson