Here’s a short summary of the key elements of the creation story as related in Genesis 1:
| Item # | Biblical story element |
| 1 | The substance of the Earth and the waters both preexisted before God began the act of creation by saying “Let there be light” |
| 2 | The universe is an ocean of water |
| 3 | The Earth is disk shaped |
| 4 | The creation of the universe began sometime between 4200 BCE and 4000 BCE |
| 5 | The creation of the universe was completed over the course of 6 days, or 144 hours |
| 6 | On Day 1 God created light |
| 7 | On Day 2 God created the Earth’s atmosphere |
| 8 | On Day 3 God created dry land and plants |
| 9 | On Day 4 God created the sun, the moon, and the stars |
| 10 | On Day 5 God created marine life and birds |
| 11 | On Day 6 God created land animals and human beings |
| 12 | Once all species had been created God pronounced everything good, and he neither removed existing species nor added any new species. |
Table 1
I’ll give the Bible partial credit for Item #6, with a few caveats. We might associate Item #6 with the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB), since that is the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. But the CMB would originally have been emitted as gamma radiation, not as visible light, and because of the expansion of the universe it is now only observable as microwave radiation-- also not a form of visible light. Furthermore, that radiation was bottled up in the universe until a phase known as “Recombination,” which happened about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. At that time the universe had cooled sufficiently that electrons could bond to atomic nuclei, forming the first neutral atoms. When that happened electromagnetic radiation could travel freely throughout the universe. The point is that the CMB was not and is not visible light; and it wasn’t able to travel freely through space until about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
But although the Bible gets partial credit for Item #6, the remaining 11 items of the 12 listed in Table 1 are completely wrong in every significant respect. I’ll speak specifically to Items #1 and #12 below. I have plenty to say about the other items as well, but in this posting I’ll just concentrate on the first and last.
To consider Item #1 in detail I need to discuss the Big Bang theory. But first I should take a moment to describe what the word “theory” means in the context of science. In science the word “theory” does
not mean “hypothesis” or “speculation” or “supposition” or “belief.” A scientific theory is:
a broad explanatory framework that is richly supported by an abundance of hard physical evidence.
So is the Big Bang theory a scientific theory by the above definition?
Well, it is certainly a broad explanatory framework since it tells us both how and why the universe has evolved over the past 13.72 billion years.
And it is indeed supported by hard physical evidence. I’ll provide 3 specific examples:
The expansion of the universe. The Big Bang theory predicts that the universe should be expanding-- and indeed it is. In every direction that we look we find that distant galaxies are moving away from us. This has been a core established fact of modern astronomy since the 1920s.
The Cosmic Background Radiation. Two researchers, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, were able to show that the Big Bang model predicted the existence of microwave radiation that would have been the afterglow of the Big Bang, and that it should fill the entire universe. They made every effort to convince astronomers of their time to search for such radiation, but no one wanted to look. So in 1953 they published their last paper on the subject and abandoned further research on it. Then in the early 1960s two Bell Labs researchers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, found that a radio antenna they were working with was receiving microwave radiation from all directions. In 1964 the connection was finally made that the two had accidentally discovered the CMB that Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman had predicted more than a decade earlier. Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize for their work, but Alpher and Herman were largely forgotten.
Big Bang nucleosynthesis. In his 1948 Ph.D. thesis Ralph Alpher presented calculations which showed that the Big Bang model predicts that about 3 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe would have cooled enough to allow protons and neutrons to bond together to produce atomic nuclei. He showed that the nuclei created during those first few seconds would have resulted in about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium, by weight. His calculations have since been confirmed. This phase of the early history of the universe is known as “Big Bang nucleosynthesis.” After this period the universe had cooled too much to support the production of any further nuclei. Therefore all higher atomic numbered elements must have been produced later, in the cores of stars.
So yes, the Big Bang theory is a broad explanatory framework, and it is richly supported by an abundance of hard physical data. It therefore qualifies as a true scientific theory by the definition above. And it therefore stands in the company of the other great theories of modern science, including those of relativity, electricity and magnetism, and quantum mechanics, to name but a few.
Given the general framework of the Big Bang and its supporting evidence, we can now state definitively that Item #1 of Table 1 above simply cannot be true. After the period of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the only elements that would have existed were hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of lithium. None of the elements necessary for the creation of rocky planets existed at that time, so the earth could not have existed. The following table lists the chemical composition of the Earth:
| Element | Percent |
| Iron (Fe) | 33 |
| Oxygen (O) | 31 |
| Silicon (Si) | 19 |
| Magnesium (Mg) | 13 |
| Nickel (Ni) | 1.9 |
| Calcium (Ca) | 0.9 |
| Aluminum (Al) | 0.9 |
| Everything else | 0.3 |
Table 2
(A Brief History of Earth, Andrew H. Knoll, pg. 15)
The only type of physical object that could have existed after Big Bang nucleosynthesis was a star. So stars came first, stars then produced higher atomic numbered elements in their cores, some stars went nova and splattered those higher numbered elements throughout space, and eventually those material substances congealed to form rocky planets. The Bible says that the Earth and the waters existed before God said “Let there be light” and that stars didn’t exist until Day 4. That’s exactly backwards. Stars came first, then rocky planets. So Item #1 of Table 1 is wrong-- and not just a tad off, but completely dead wrong.
What about Item #12? Here’s a list of the major extinction events of the last 600 million years of life of Earth:
Table 3
| Years ago | Event |
| 550 - 540 million | Ediacaran extinction. All species of the Ediacaran epoch became extinct, perhaps because they were out-competed by newer forms of life. |
| 445 - 443 million | Late Ordovician Extinction (Himantian event). Gondwanaland was covered in ice for 1 million years. 85% of all species and 30% of all families of animals went extinct due to plunging temperatures. |
| 372 - 370 million | Late Devonian Extinction part 1 (Kellwasser event). 19% of marine families and 50% of marine genera were wiped out. The cause of this event is still debated. |
| 358 - 357 million | Late Devonian Extinction part 2 (Hangenberg event). 97% of vertebrate species were wiped out, including all of the placoderms (armor plated fishes) and sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fishes). |
| 252 million | Permian Extinction. Up to 95% of all species were wiped out. The lava flows that resulted in the Siberian Traps produced immense amounts of poisonous gasses, as well as massive amounts of carbon dioxide and acid rain with a PH of 2. Global temperatures averaged about 97 degrees F. |
| 201 million | Late Triassic Extinction. 22% of marine families, 53% of genera, and 76 - 84% of marine species went extinct. Many terrestrial plants and animals also went extinct. The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province indicates that about 11 million square kilometers of lava were belched forth at this time. |
| 65 million | Late Cretaceous Extinction. A comet smashed into the Yucatan peninsula and wiped out 30% of all animal families, including all of the dinosaurs except birds. |
As you can see from Table 3, entire
species and
families and
genera of organisms were wiped out, never to be seen again. If God pronounced everything he had created “good,” why would he have found it necessary to eliminate vast numbers of entire species? And not just once, but again and again?
Another important fact to bear in mind about life on Earth is that new species of animals and plants, aquatic and terrestrial, have originated throughout the entire 600 million year history of complex life on Earth. So the idea that the planet wide genome has remained essentially static over that vast stretch of time is utterly, irrevocably wrong.
