Evolution Versus Creationism Controversy
It has been established that in all physical processes, every ordered system tends over time to become more disorganized, and also to lose energy in the form of heat, and to slow down; everything gets old and wears out, or runs down. This increasing randomness, disorder, and cooling is called “Entropy,” and this situation is described in physics by the “Second Law of Thermodynamics.” We see this principle expressed in the Bible (in about one thousand BC), when it says (concerning God): “In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded. But you remain the same, and your years will never end” (Psalm 102:25-27).
We know that if the stars in the heavens get very old, they will all burn out, and they will all undergo “heat death” until everything in the universe cools off to the same temperature. In the first century AD, the apostle Paul brings out the same idea when he writes, “For the creation was subjected to frustration …in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay…” (Romans 8:20-21).
The Bible precisely describes the modern Law of increasing Entropy, as the whole material universe relentlessly runs down and loses available usable energy, in a process of “decay.” The Number of the Stars in the Universe In the years 161-126 BC, the man who is said to have first began the study of astronomy, Hiparchus, counted the number of stars in the heavens, and put the number at one thousand and eighty.
This number was considered to be fairly precise three hundred years later, when Ptolemy announced that the number was more like one thousand and fifty-six. It was not until the invention of the telescope that people realized that the number of the stars was huge in the countless billions.
The Bible did not make the error of declaring that the number was merely a few hundred or thousand, but rather, in about six hundred BC, the prophet Jeremiah says the number is “countless as the stars of the sky and measureless as the sand on the seashore” (Jer. 33:22). Also, from the year fifteen hundred BC, the same concept comes from Genesis 22:17.
And this is correct, because we now estimate the number of stars to be approximately ten to the twenty-sixth (which may also be a fair estimate of the number of the grains of sand on all the earth’s sea-shores), but the actual number is “countless” for us to attempt to accurately count. However, God, who is infinite in knowledge, knows the exact number, as the Bible says, “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name” (Psalm 147:4).
The Immense Size of the Cosmos
The Bible makes it clear that the knowledge of God, and His ways of doing things, are virtually infinite beyond that of mankind, and the size of the starry cosmos is used as an illustration of this, when God says (in seven hundred BC), “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).
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September 15th, 2011 at 12:31 am
Thanks very much.