God and Cosmos

Description:

 * By John Byl
 * 256 page paperback
 * ISBN 851518001

 God and Cosmos: A Christian View of Time, Space, and the Universe is a Christian view of time, space and the universe, emphasizing the superiority of Scripture to all other sources of knowledge and dealing helpfully with the Big Bang theory of origins, extraterrestrial intelligence, the spiritual realm, and much else.

Source

 * Purchase God and Cosmos 

Review
In this review I mainly focus on his critiques of Big-bang cosmology, which concerns theories for the origin of the universe. In chapter 3, Modern Cosmology, he presents numerous fallacies in Big Bang cosmologies.

He summaries: First, big-bang cosmology, even though it is currently the most popular cosmology and even though it is often presented as undoubtedly true, is beset with a number of serious observational and theoretical difficulties.

On the observational side, we recall such observational puzzles as anomalous red shifts, the departure from the linear Hubble law, difficulties in accounting for the observed elemental abundances, huge structures of galaxies and other major inhomogeneities, the large drift of galaxies with respect to the background radiation, the apparent acceleration of galaxies, and mature galaxies with high red shifts.

''On the theoretical side, we recall the lack of energy conservation, the problem of the hypothetical inflation mechanism, the alleged existence of huge amounts of strange, invisible matter, the problem of the cosmological constant, Lambda, the problem of the formation of galaxies and huge structures of galaxies, and so on. Many proposed theoretical explanations are inherently unverifiable.''

He writes that astronomer Halton Arp, in his 1998 book Seeing Red, noted that red shifts tend to cluster about values such as .06, .3, .6, .9, 1.4 and 1.96. This is totally unexpected and seldom mentioned. Also, a more careful computation of red-shifts with distance shows a significant departure from Hubble’s assumed linear expansion rate. I.E. Segal, in 1995, finds a much better match of galactic red shifts with a quadratic relation, not linear. Segal proposes that the red shift is directly proportional to space curvature. Byl writes: ''One major problem for the red-shift is how to account for the loss of energy in red-shifted light. It seems to just disappear, implying non-conservation of energy.'' This flies in the face of one of the most secure of laws of physics!

Byl ends with two chapters with a Biblical view of Cosmology in which he defends a recent six-day creation, and discusses four different models that could account for a young universe: a variable speed of light, time dilation, curved-space models or mature creation.

In his last Chapter: Concluding Remarks, he makes three significant points:
 * Origin science, with its subjective theories and unverifiable conjectures about the distant past, is of questionable value. Scientists should concentrate on operation science, concerned with the practical application of repeatable phenomena, with the prime aim of developing useful technology.


 * The central thesis of this study is that of the severe limitation of human reasoning, particularly scientific theorizing as applied to cosmology. Only direct, confirmed observational data can be accepted as genuine, undoubted ‘facts.’


 * The second prime thesis is that the Bible is God’s Word. As such, it is fully authoritative and must be interpreted accordingly. Consequently, a Christian epistemology must insist that fallible human theorizing is to be evaluated in its light, rather than vice versa.

Review by John Johnson