New Treasures from the Bible

By Robert Gielow

ROBERT L. GIELOW holds a Master of Science degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from MIT. As part of a team at North American Aviation's Space & Information Systems Division in California, he helped compute launch escape trajectories for Project Apollo, NASA's manned lunar landing program. In 1975 he co-founded Airflow Scie

• Language: English
• Publisher: River Birch Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781951561895

Book preview

Chapter 1

Understanding Today’s Universe

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

St. Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian, known for combining theological principles of faith with philosophical principles of reason. Concerning his famous concept of an uncaused cause, he wrote:

Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, leading to a regression that must be terminated by a first cause; namely, God.

Similarly, in a 1959 textbook entitled Thermodynamics by Professor Gordon J. Van Wylen, at the close of a chapter on the subject of entropy, Professor Van Wylen wrote:

A final point to be made is that the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of increase in entropy have great philosophical implications. The question that arises is how did the universe get into the state of reduced entropy in the first place, since all natural processes known to us tend to increase entropy? The author has found that the second law tends to increase his conviction that there is a Creator who has the answer for the future destiny of man and the universe.

His conclusion is another way of acknowledging the fact that regression leads to the God who created all things. As an undergraduate, I had the privilege to have studied under Professor Van Wylen at the University of Illinois.

Beyond Human Understanding

Admittedly, something from nothing is beyond human understanding, so the creative work of God the Father cannot be understood by mere mortals. However, a limited understanding of the follow-on work of the Son of God is presented in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, an attempt has been made to describe the hovering work of the Spirit of God, all of which occurred in the first two verses of the Bible before the first day on earth began.

Anyone who has ever viewed the universe on a cold, clear night from a high and desolate mountaintop cannot help but hear the voice of God. The psalmist wrote:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard (Psalm 19:1-3).

Galaxies, Stars and Planets

Stars are the basic building blocks of the universe that are grouped together inside clusters known as galaxies. A galaxy typically consists of hundreds of billions of stars, with some numbering over one trillion. The universe consists of approximately 100 billion star-containing galaxies.

Figure 1. A NASA-generated Rendering of The Milky Way Galaxy

One example of a galaxy is shown in Figure 1 above. According to NASA, the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy number approximately 300 billion. The Sun is one of those stars whose position in the galaxy is noted. It lies 27,200 light years away from the center of the galaxy (a light year is equal to the distance light travels in a vacuum during one year). All the stars (including the Sun) remained inside the central portion of the galaxy until they began to move outward 23 million years ago (as shown in Figure 7).

As if viewed from a position high above the equatorial plane of the Sun, Figure 1 shows a bright rotating bar at the galaxy’s center. The bar appears to have grown outward from a centralized bulge before rotation began. Toward the end of Chapter 2 under the heading Origin of the Bright Rotating Bar and Spirals of the Milky Way, more is said of the formation of the bar and its spirals.

Although the creation of star-containing galaxies will never be understood, a cursory understanding of their outward movement to their current positions in the universe is based on the pioneering work of scientists such as Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, and Karl Schwarzschild.

The Pioneering Work of Edwin Hubble

Hubble was an American astronomer who has greatly increased our understanding of the universe. In 1920 he began developing a method for measuring the distances and speeds of galaxies using the Hooker Telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California. Hubble hypothesized that the brightness of starlight coming from a galaxy is a measure of its distance from the Earth, and that the color spectrum of its starlight can be used to determine its speed. In 1929, Hubble concluded that the galaxies of the universe appear to be moving away from us at speeds that are proportional to their distances from the Earth. His conclusion is formally known as Hubble’s Law.

Edwin Hubble

The Pioneering Work of Albert Einstein

Einstein is another scientist who has greatly increased our understanding of the universe. His Theory of General Relativity provides scientists with a mathematical tool that can be used to develop a computer simulation of the outwardly moving galaxies. His theory teaches that a Universal Clock exists, one that displays God’s timing of events.

Albert Einstein

For reasons discussed in Chapter 2, there is currently no way to determine when Creation occurred. If there were, one could simply set Einstein’s Universal Clock to zero and compute the current time. To compensate for this difficulty, Universal Time has been set to zero at the beginning of Genesis 1:3 when God said, Let there be light … the first day, so that prior to the first day, Universal Time is shown to be negative.

The Pioneering Work of Karl Schwarzschild

A few months after Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity in 1916, a German physicist by the name of Karl Schwarzschild published a more limited solution to Einstein’s complex equation. Schwarzschild became famous for predicting the existence of black holes in outer space.

Karl Schwarzschild

Schwarzschild predicted that when the mass of a galaxy is sufficiently large, its gravitational attraction prevents light from escaping beyond a certain distance away from its center. A spherical boundary surrounding the galaxy is thus established through which no light can pass. The spherical boundary is known as an event horizon, and its radius is referred to as a Schwarzschild radius.

If the event horizon of a massive galaxy lies far enough away from its central core, irregularities in the distribution of its stars may not affect its spherical shape. However, if any of its stars (or another galaxy) lie in close proximity, its spherical event horizon will become locally distorted. In what follows, the term porous horizon has been coined to describe a distorted event horizon through which both mass and energy can leak.

A Pivotal Assumption

Edwin Hubble’s observation that the galaxies appear to be moving away from us at ever-increasing speed can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first is that the galaxies themselves are moving, and the empty space into which they are flowing is fixed. The second is that space itself is expanding while the galaxies themselves are fixed inside that expanding space.

The first interpretation requires one to believe that the Milky Way Galaxy lies at the center of the universe. Otherwise, at any other location, the universe would appear to be skewed. To most scientists, the odds of mankind residing at the exact center of the universe are 1 in 100 billion. Hence, an acceptance of the first interpretation requires one to believe in a Creator who purposely located mankind at a very special place in his universe. Christians find the idea of a Milky-Way-centered universe to be not only plausible but predictable. They reason that if God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son as a ransom for its people, then why would he not have placed them in a very prominent location?

According to the second interpretation, the universe has no center. No galaxy is any more important than any other. Beginning in the 1920s when Alexander Friedmann, Howard Robinson, Arthur Walker, and Georges Lemaitre developed the mathematics used to describe such a universe, the second interpretation became known as the Standard Model of Modern Cosmology. It is currently taught at virtually every institution of higher learning in the world where Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is taught, even though no evidence has been found to support its claims.

Chapter 2

How It All Came To Be

Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing (Isaiah 40:26).

In the above verse, Isaiah refers to a galaxy as a starry host. The term is used nine times in the Bible. He asks the question, Who brought them out? The Old Testament writer Solomon suggests that someone else was present in the beginning. He wrote:

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be (Proverbs 8:22-23).

But who was this second person? The New Testament writer John, speaking about God’s Son, provided an answer when he wrote:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made (John 1:1-3).

Christians believe that God’s Son was present in the beginning, and that it was he who "brought out each starry host, one by one."

When Time Stood Still

A Black Ball is shown on the left-hand side of Figure 2 below. It symbolizes the center of the universe where God created the heavens and the earth—the place from which 100 billion galaxies were called forth. Inside the Black Ball, the speed of light was zero, and all physiological processes ceased. It was a place where time stood still.

At the center of the Black Ball, God created a ball of hundreds of billions of stars that later became the Milky Way Galaxy, shown in Figure 1 of Chapter 1. It is suggested that the remaining galaxies were also created with stars at their centers, positioned around the Milky Way Galaxy in the same orientation as they appear in the sky today. Other aspects of Figure 2 are described in the paragraphs that follow.

Figure 2 Three Positions of the Midpoint Galaxies

Time Histories Based on a Biblical Creation Model

Like the shells of an onion, the entire universe has been subdivided into galaxy-containing shells (for computational purposes only). This chapter follows the outward movement of one particular shell located halfway between the center of the universe and the outermost shell. Galaxies within the shell are referred to as the Midpoint Galaxies.

A computer program has been written specifically for this book. Referred to as the Biblical Creation Model, it incorporates the Schwarzschild equation as presented in a 2009 textbook by Professor Bernard Schutz entitled A First Course in General Relativity. The model has been used to solve for the Universal Time histories of the Midpoint Galaxies and other shells as they moved outward to the end of their journey. It is noted that the model assumes a uniform distribution of mass throughout the universe.

Outward Movement of the Galaxies

The star-filled galaxies were called forth by the great power and mighty strength of God’s Son. The outermost galaxies were likely called forth first. Eventually, by the time the Midpoint Galaxies were called forth, the mass remaining inside the Black Ball had been seriously depleted. Its own event horizon extended only as far as Position A of Figure 2, the dividing line between the dark-shaded region of the figure (Region I) and the light-shaded region (Region II).

Outward Movement of the Galaxies along Region I

The Universal Time history of the outwardly moving Midpoint Galaxies is presented in two parts, Regions I and II. Figure 3 below shows their movement through Region I at the speed of light along a dashed-line path. As the galaxies drew closer and closer to their own event horizon, their speed (and the speed of light) slowed. Just ahead of the horizon, they asymptotically approached the horizon, never quite reaching it.

Figure 3 Universal Time History of the Midpoint Galaxies along Region I

Motion at the speed of light along Region I poses a problem because Einstein’s theory prohibits mass from travelling at the speed of light. In an attempt to learn more about the subject, Associate Professor Scott A. Hughes was contacted. Professor Hughes specializes in astrophysical relativity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, focusing in particular on black holes and gravitational-wave sources.

Scott Hughes

In his written reply, Hughes states that the behavior inside an event horizon is bizarre, a term seldom heard from specialists in their field. He concluded his reply with the following statement, I should say that in truth we have little-to-no idea about the space-time inside a black hole.

According to the lead-in passage to this chapter, it was God’s Son who called forth the Midpoint Galaxies by his great power, similar to the way Jesus called forth Lazarus from inside a cave where he had been buried:

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, Lazarus, come out! The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, Take off the grave clothes and let him go ( John 11:43-44).

So, just as we cannot understand how Jesus called forth Lazarus from the grave, so too we cannot understand how he called forth the Midpoint Galaxies from the Black Ball, causing them to travel at the speed of light through Region I.

Outward Movement of the Galaxies along Region II

The Universal Time history of the Midpoint Galaxies along Region II is presented in Figure 4 below. Throughout the region, the speed of the galaxies remained below the speed of light.

Beyond Position A, the galaxies are shown to slowly pick up speed before breaking away from the influence of