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BIBLICAL WORKMAN
Chapter 7
"IN THE BEGINNING, GOD ... "


 
 

Looking at the Source
 

In our Chapter 4, we looked at Romans 1, in which the power and nature of the Creator were presented by Paul,
and that with Enormous Consequences.
Now we shall consider this reality in the context of our contemporary life, a little more, and collate a part of
That Magnificent Rock (TMR)  for convenience,
so that these two streams of meditation may be combined.

  • Genesis 1:1 tells us of the beginning, so that in 2:4 we are advised that the whole generation of heavens and earth has just been over-viewed. THIS is how it occurred.
  • "In the beginning, God created..." The two grammatical units, the phrase, 'in the beginning', and the declaration, God 'created', have a devised echo. Such is the condensation of Hebrew, that the phrase is one word, with (in English transliteration) a BR start; and "created" which is followed by the term for God, begins with the same two letters. It strikes like a trumpet: BR BR.
  • Right throughout Genesis 1, the trumpet continues its staccato note, like the word of command from divinity, over all force and law; and the results accord with statuesque composure, arriving as commanded, and doing what is required. (Cf. TMR, Ch.7, pp. 178ff..)
  • In John 1, there is the same sense of magnificent power and composure; but it is not in creation that we see the issuance, but in the consideration of the world as created in Genesis 1, and developed by the mind of man into amazing disorder. That is the real, the historical development process, and it is nothing to be in the least proud of...
  • John continues to exhibit the mighty craftsmanship of the Word of God, who makes life, being Life and having it in Himself. The darkness in which the light shined is at once brought on like the surging slap of mighty breakers, on the side of a large liner, at night.
  • John proceeds to tell us of the escort for the Word, when He came, John the Baptist, and then to note that this man pointed to the "true light which gives light to every man coming into the world". Though Maker of the world, though coming to the race chosen to glorify Him and surrounded with mercies, yet He was not received by them; yet by anyone who does receive Him, this Life gives the power to become a child of God. Expert in creation, He also is personal in proffering salvation from darkness into light.
  • Thus Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 likewise,
  • tell us of the beginning.

In the beginning, says John, the word was God (the Bible knows only one God, the Creator - Isaiah 45:18,Ephesians 4:4*1, John 8:58, 5:19-23) , and was with God, the word through whom the Father spoke the universe, construed, constructed and invented it (Colossians 1:16-17). The Word of God is the first-born of all creation, we here read, BECAUSE He created it, taking the pre-eminence not through being here first, but by putting it here, and then investing it with Himself, when He called on us to relieve us from the ruin of sin. Thus Paul announces of Him in Colossians 1:16, that He is "the first-born over all creation, BECAUSE by Him all things were created." (Cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 27.)

As to that creation, He is the creator of -

"all things ... visible and invisible" ... "All things were created through Him and by Him".
All things are called into being from nothing, we are told - that is the force of the term used for "creation" here; FROM nothing, but not BY nothing, for it is by GOD, whose difference from nothing is nothing less than infinity. Hebrews 11:1 advises us similarly, that:
 

"the things which are seen were not made of things that are visible", but instead were
"framed by the word of God".

What would you expect ... that they were framed by something that could not frame, or that frames built frames, and order proceeded from that which is not, in that building ex-builder, logic ex-reason extravaganza that masks truth and builds the lie as if it loved it better than a brother; and of that antagonist of the truth, the Satan, did not Christ call him justly, the father of lies ? (John 8:42-44). And what more does Christ say ?

    • Christ too refers to the beginning in precise terms, in relation to the differentiation of man and woman (Matthew 19:4) -
    • "He who made them in the beginning..."
  •  
  • GOD the creator is not limited by systems in that system is His creation, and whatever He has, is not dowered, but eternal, not a constraint, for there was none to constrain it, but an eternal election, eternally His will (cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock - SMR  - pp. 25ff.,ROP 2).


 

  • Many systems however has He created (cf. ROP 7,
  • Excursion 1).
  • Here then we are going to concentrate less on the fact that God created, already repeatedly established*2, than on the implications of that fact, and on the implications of contrary imaginations. To this we shall ally certain considerations relating to the past in general in order to assess what is ludicrous, what is presumptuous and what is merely pathetic science, improperly so-called; and what on the other hand, is systematically realistic or procedurally sound. In our Excursion at the end, we shall look more broadly at the whole concept of dating.
  • What then is the mode of God's creation ?
  • We can see some of the MINIMAL INGREDIENTS so that it could be produced (cf. SMR Chs.1,3,10, That Magnificent Rock, Chs. 1, 8A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.1-9),
  • and we can read in His book, what He did (Repent or Perish, Ch.7, Excursion 1, Part II). As  shown in our last reference, we can compare the many books which relate to His creating and saving activity. In His word, He gives clear attestation of His sole action in the entire gamut of creation, in a style most incisive, explicit and arresting. Thus in Isaiah 45:18-19, we find this:


 

  • "For thus says the Lord,


Who created the heavens
Who formed the earth and made it,
Who has established it,
Who did not create it in vain,
Who formed it to be inhabited,

  • 'I am the Lord, and there is no other.


I have not spoken in secret in the dark places of the earth:
I did not say to the seed of Jacob,

  • 'Seek Me in vain';
  • I, the Lord, speak righteousness,
  • I declare things that are right."


 

  • Again, He declares:


 

  • "I am the Lord, who makes all things,


Who stretches out the heavens all alone,
Who spreads abroad the earth by Myself,
Who frustrates the sings of babblers,
And drives diviners made,
Who turns wise men backward,
And makes their knowledge foolishness;
Who confirms the word of His servant,
And performs the counsel of His messengers..." (excerpted from Isaiah 44:24-26),
 

  • and this,


 

  • "I have made the earth,


And created man on it,
I - My hands - stretched out the heavens,
And all their host I have commanded" - Isaiah 45:12.
 

  • His intense monergism, being alone the operator, activator, institutor, creator, controller, commander, enunciator of those commands which are reflected in formulations of physical law and biological code and logical symbolism in world after world of intricate modelling and speech (cf. Repent or Perish 7, Excursion 1, and SMR Ch.2) is explicit. It is moreover thrust into our minds with just the force with which we now discover them thrust into the world about us, where our own liberties are a summit creation of peculiar magnificence, enabling us to junk the truth, discard the testimony of truth, and consign ourselves to the genuine opiate of obscurantist oblivion. It is a splendid thing, this liberty, but more so than such a result as may thus be achieved.


 

  • That He has created, we have shown from His word and from the evidence many times. We are however exceedingly limited in knowing, beyond the appearance of the requisitioned product, just HOW He created, the precise ingredients of divine dynamic which constituted the result, where unstated. If we do not understand in full how one of our own creates, calling thought, music into being, if we are ignorant in KNOWING HOW and by what MEANS an author of our own stature creates (he may not even be quite sure himself!), by how much more when the question is this: how the Lord created. If it is hard to know to know the creative HOW in our own, it is incomparably harder to KNOW of God, HOW He created. In each case, however, it is easy to see the result, the irruptive power, the precise ordering, the irresistible invasion of invention by Him who "does whatever He pleases" (Psalm 115:3), to recognise what creation is, as distinct from mere labour and endeavour.


 

  • That is to say, creation itself is distinct from moulding, it has especially in the Hebrew, a sense of the direct, of the case where means are not to the point. It is the act, the invocation, the impact of what is created that is looked to. The thing created HAS to happen, is superseded as to obstruction in this, that the creative power to be so called, makes what it has in mind, and it is DONE. This is enhanced to infinity when the creator is explicitly the one to whom such power intimately and uniquely belongs, God Himself. So we find in the tenor of Genesis 1. Things, for example, bear young, or other items after their KIND. This is not an effort; it is a result. THAT is what the creation achieves, licensing reality so to be, and being so, to do so.


 

  • So too in Colossians 1, the term in Greek specifies a creation by Christ which transcends lesser modes of operation. It calls into being from what is not there, what then is so and on call.


 

  • " ... all things were created through Him and for Him" - Col. 1:16

 

      •   Just as this epistle specifies also, and emphatically, our spiritual genesis, its surrounds, circumstances and controlling dynamic, being fortified by Romans and Galatians in this task, so does Genesis make it clear that there is something else to be detailed, explained, accounted for, recounted and realised. It is, after all ... genesis.


 

      • Thus, after its profound declaration, it shows HOW IT ALL CAME TO BE, and then, HOW TIME CAME TO BE, and then, HOW DIVERSITY OF CREATURES came to be, and then HOW MAN CAME TO BE, then HOW SIN arrived on the scene, HOW FAMILIES, then the lead in to the contemporary situation. The first four of these six are already explicit by the end of Genesis 1. The trumpets have blown for Genesis, just as the trump will sound for the coming of the Lord for His people. After Genesis 1, what then ?


 

  • The Genesis 2:4 statement makes it clear that this is the universe's genealogy,


different from all others in this,
that it had to come from the hand of God direct,
since beginnings are like that.
 
 

  • We are not being told how process processed itself into existence, but how God invented the world, the cosmos, the light, the phenomenon of day and night, the phenomenon of night lights, continuity of species, significance of man in relation to Himself ... in a web of increasing complexity, through sin, from a spinning of grand scope and directness, from God. So far from there being even a smidgeon of doubt about what in the world the "days" are, there is an account of how the thing called 'day' came to be, complete with notation of its nomenclature being originated with it - Genesis 1:5. "Before the day was, I am He" - sums it up (Isaiah 43:13, cf. 45:12,18).


 

  • The FORM of God and the
  • INTERNAL MODE OF CREATION
  • Predicability is not Predictability
  • Yet, the internal mode of creation, the deity's disposition of powers and alignment of forces, beyond what we are told, is systematically beyond our appreciation. The FORM of God, which Christ had before the incarnation (Philippians 2:1-10) is infinitely above our own. As to imagining we can picture how the modalities of His creation were in reality invoked, beyond the fact that there can be no resistance, and all aims will assuredly be carried out without adjustment or compromise: we do not and cannot know except He should tell us. It is creation, a calling into being with infinite power, so that the words and the executions do not vary the one from the other; process does not distort, but implements, and implementation does not confuse, but is executive. Creation has its own dynamic, and from the infinite, its own purity, which even our own can in meagre but striking measure, mirror.


 

  • It is not the fact of creation, then that is here our concern, but the way in which time and matter are instructed to exist in the appointed domains, from the mind of God to their subsistence in the new and created reality, that we do not know. Both the book of God and that of history shows one thing: formation without upgrading, and diversification within gradings (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch.1). As to estimates of initial properties however, beyond the declared items, proportions of this or that, modes of instituting space and the like, not being in His book, and being utterly beyond our imagination, except in idle speculation, and that blighted by collision with the infinitude of His powers: such imaginations if presented as ascertained, are scarcely worthy of more than guffaw. It is a mouse describing the construction of a cheese factory by intuition.


 

  • This point is sharply to be distinguished from the PROPERTIES OF WHAT He created; just as the processes of creation, including those of our time dimension itself, are sharply to be discerned apart from the quite other question of the kind of power chosen for the creation from His unlimited arsenal of devices (cf. Proverbs 8:12, and Barbs, Arrows and Balms, Item 27)...


 

  • These facts have important consequences for those who ponder either predestination (Predestination and Freewill, and That Magnificent Rock -TMR, Chapter 7, Section 4), or dating (SMR -see Index, and Excursion at the end of this Chapter). Both have been considered at length before, but amplification on some points may prove beneficial.


 

  • An author is not restricted to the time-frame of the book he invents, does not await release from the prison he imagines, depicts, construes, however vividly and graphically he may with the flourish of a Dickens, make it appear. He has a liberty from the restrictions of the plane of life he creates, and can order, organise and institute it in any way found desirable, without the least regard to what "went before" or might "come afterwards", for the very good reason that this is bound only by the scope and power of his imagination, and is dependent, to the point in view, on his own devices.


 

 

An author may indeed deliberately distance the "world" he creates from the world in which he lives, or strongly relate it; but either way, the constraints if any, on his own world, are only by imagination imported into what he creates. To assume some control of the one over the other, some continuum, is merely to be erratically, bizarrely ignorant.
 

  • This, then, has important results - this simple reality concerning the very nature of creation with which we are daily familiar - when assumptions are being made or considered, which relate to the WAY a creation occurred. Depending on that way, this or that may result; but what was the way! How from the results can you work back to what is not known, and quantify what is unreachable, even in quality! The drama and dynamics of creation are sui generis! To surmise is one thing; it can promote humility by the very scope of the wonder of it all; but to asseverate, to inculcate in such an area, that is another!

 

Some authors may thrust the creation over the weir walls of their minds, like a torrent in flood, some let it fall quietly as if measured, while others again, seem possessed by an earthquake which even reduces any restraining considerations in the mode of creation to rubble! It is a spiritual phenomenon of striking magnitude.

  • Whichever the way, the result, the nature of the thing created, does not have any rectilinear, any predictable relationship to the formative means by which it was created, beyond this, that the latter must be sufficient for it. Much more, however, the WAY the thing created acts, once created, is quite diverse in KIND from the way in which it is instituted. There are quite divergent forces at work, utterly over-ruling dimensions from the source of the creation, compared with the way in which the page of the book, now written, yellows, or the ink blurs over the decades. It is EVEN very different, the way the yellowing ageing components occurs, from the way the paper is created ... THESE processes and THOSE of creation itself at its own ultimate level, and in its various orders and dimensions, are of an order so alien, the one to the other, that the comparison can seem to vary between the simplistic and the infantile. Nor would any of us be likely to consider or conceive of it for one moment.

 

  • The Illusions of Pugnacity
    • When the pugnacity against our own Creator however is aroused, people will sometimes act as if reason were an alien, desire the dominant lord. They will perhaps and indeed often act as if the way things mellow and age, the processes by which their created natures grow old, 'speaks' in some amazing way - which some even have the abysmal intellectual folly of calling 'scientific', of the time it took to create them. They may even assume it relates to the way in which they were rendered existent!


 

    • If they indeed came conveniently from nowhere, and causality could be dismissed as has repeatedly in these works (see 'causality', indexes) been shown systematically impossible: then the sort of world resultant would in any case be unconstruable and signify nothing.


 

    • However, in view of this disparity of creation and operation, of current process and the allied necessity for the creation of all things, in whatever way: the idea that some consonance exists, some parallel between present process and creative performance, between how long it takes for things now to go from stage A to stage B (say in gaining or losing some measurable feature on present rates, assuming they were changeless!), and how long it took to manufacture stage A, becomes facetious. Will God be instructed ? Will the finite construe the creative magnificence of his Creator, and describe by sheer brilliance, HOW He does what He does, when He creates ?

 

 

In fact, in this field, more than this: that the results are what they are, and that they are as His book describes them, and that what He calls for, He gets, and nothing at all contrary in any way - we do not know. The universe is called for, and One in the form of God, does it. WE are able simply to examine how it now proceeds. This we do with part of what He created, along with the simpler and more elementary physical universe, in the universe of the mind, and with the spark and evocative power of our spirits (cf. SMR pp. 348ff.). But let us return to the physical universe and the imagination that its creation parallels its operation.
 

    • The sheer irrelevance of this humorous gaffe of stupendous effrontery to reality does not always appear, since it is a common exercise in bombastic debate. God under the microscope of the eye He made, being examined as to how He made the eye!

 

    • How true it is that man stops at nothing; and how equally untrue, that nothing stops him! Alas, there is the pith of his woe, at the operational level.


 

    • Thus, as to all those methods which assume that a process was always a process, began from a process of some allied kind, though now such items have lost the knack of doing this kind of thing, and the whole domain of this style of creation is now ... lost, these are mere manipulations of anti-causal thought. Observation and causation alike are disregarded, magic is invoked and contumacy replaces causality. It does not however have the same effect!


 

    • Omitted is the requirement that the process, and indeed the realm of the processive, and each processive world , must be accounted for, unless reason is left with results often enough depicted, but not least this, that all debate, logic and contest is abandoned by any such party. Leave reason out, and abolish reason in your field then; omit reason, and omit your presence in debate which uses it. (Cf. Repent or Perish 7, Excursion 1.)


 

    • The source of programmed processes and the basis for organised series is bound neither in Himself nor in His actions and furnishings for events, to the series or to the process. HE is free as creators in general to this degree or that, even on a small scale, are for their creations. It is the product which is less so. Its limitations however are not set like a canvas on the head of Van Gogh, as if they were similar in ageing or creative disposition!


Making a car is not being one; conceiving a building does not depend on bricks in the head; imagination has a freedom of its own, creation a cavorting in its own capacities, which merely confusion would attribute to the nature of the creation, as if the product controlled the producer. Rather is it the contrary.

The concept of the institution of the universe by methods which are of the same order as its running is of this type; the consideration that its maintenance is similar to its creation is of the same order. The thought that the way it ages must or should resemble the modes, rates or methodology of its creation is similarly obtuse, invasive and derelict in logic. It is one invasion that captures no territory, being merely rigid and without evidential basis, while contrary in kind to the nature of creation per se. Not thus do even we create, and we are ourselves in some ways, within an organised system; whereas, as shown in SMR Chs. 1-3, the Creator does not have such limitations, but even if, per impossibile, He were, it still would invade with alien concepts, the very concept of creation.
 

    •  
    • The Achievement of Nil Relevance
    •  
    • All concepts of time, age, dates which depend on, relate to or invoke such confused concepts as if they were bound to occur, have exactly nil relevance. Ageing, maintenance, creation, procedure when created and in creation are diverse to the uttermost, the very capacities of creation being to act beyond, behind and before what is created.


 

From so small... an error, come all dating problems that are based on assumptions about the 'beginning', what was there 'at the first', and so on; for the way in which it was PUT there is crucial, and has the luxury of being entirely, wholly and utterly unknown, except for revelation. The ORDER, even, in which things were 'put there' is itself not the WAY in which it was produced, but merely a notation of sequence; if even this indeed were available without revelation. It is rather like asking an author HOW he produced his chapters, and then trying to make them develop, each from the other, by some process of an internal kind relating to the chapters themselves, rather than to the mind of the author.

  • Worse, it is even like trying to work out from the ordering of letters on the page, the constructive processes of thought, by some kind of statistical method. It is the more strikingly erratic, when the creation is as almost as constant a reality in the mind of man as the searchlight of thought and the aspiration of spirit which works there. Life in man throbs with all of these things, on display without cease. (Cf. TMR Ch.8, pp. 229ff., Ch.7, pp. 139ff..)

 

  • This is by no means to remove the relevance of processes in so far as evidence relates to what they are now doing, or show capacity to do, and how long it might take for them to proceed to where they now are, if they had been the sole source of what they produce; it is just that where things were and how they came to be in the beginning, rather limits the relevance when assumptions are made about this topic. The Creator is not bound to produce in ways which relate to the interactions of what is now produced; to put matter in space in ways which relate to how things move in space when once both are created; indeed it would be almost a contradiction in terms to imagine such a thing. (See TMR, Ch.7, Section 4 as above.)

 

  • Most different in kind are the POWERS and RESOURCES to create, the SEQUENCES in which creation comes, and the power with which what is created, exhibits what it is NOW made of, being created, by what it now does.

 

  • The Current Indications - their limits and their Trend
  •  
  • When, however, even if there had been NONE of some item or element, concentration or compound, in the beginning, and ALL of it were therefore assumed to have been produced since creation, and the time taken would be still short, as happens in many instances as seen in the dating sections of SMR (see Index - dating) and TMR, this has a great significance. It is for this reason. If the most adverse concept for time, that requiring production from zero, for some component, at creation: if this is chosen for a test of maximum apparent time lapsed since creation, the very situation which would require most time to develop, and this is only short, what then ?

Then prima facie attestation of a short time span for the created universe is intense. On the other hand, speculation that a given element, compound or concentration was NOTHING at the first, except for such a testing purpose, is nothing more than that. It demonstrates precisely nothing.


 

  • Much indicates, in this careful way, a short tenure for the created universe; and nothing is even challenging to explain in such a schema, while assumptions to the contrary are buried in the sand of obscurantism, being based on data not only not available, but invasive of the very character of creation. It is not that God MUST have made it in this way, put it there in that: it is just that ANY such assumption is merely imagination.


 

  • This is by no means to evacuate the thought that the Creator may have left some of the means of His creation available for deduction; it is merely that this is an assumption. Robert Humphreys has shown with considerable skill that certain developments may indeed have been of a certain kind, in some of the early phases of creation of the material universe, enabling us to understand some correlations over time, some placements and the like that may have occurred; which in doing so, would attest a specially young earth. See the Excursion to come, and SMR Index Humphreys.


 

  • It would be as foolish to deny the possibility that some phase of material creation COULD have been of such and such a type, as to insist that it MUST have been. Amusingly, the present situation is that a young age for the universe is indicated by numerous measurements of a suggestive kind; an old age depends entirely on assumptions which not merely do not agree with all the evidence, but invade the territory, as shown above, of the irrelevant; but that even if some such approach be embarked on, to some peripheral degree, a young earth is still in view, and this is the case - even if the velocity of light had not decreased, an active topic to this day, despite disclaimers (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 15, "Let there be Light" ).

 

In the end, this is the arena of ignorance; but what can be known, agrees with the whole gamut of evidence in one way only, a young universe, which had indeed a beginning, together with a commencement of serial time in which our sort of patient waiting to get out of prison or through a course must occur. For some, it may be hard to imagine, to realise that this, our present world, is a highly constricted situation, a fashioned, a crafted one of great constraint. However the considerable freedom of thought is one internal manifestation toward the field of the unrestricted, which should remove such a problem from the arena of thought.

Outside such restricted and containing dimensions, the knowledge and foreknowledge of God is as free as a bird freed from a cage, it soars and moves as if hills were a thing of contempt. However, in this case, there was never any imprisonment, except in the mind of man, manhandling if he could, the freedoms of God in a confusion of creation and maintenance, productive means and product characteristics to a degree almost incredible to conceive ... except when one witnesses over time the torturous writhings of man in divorce from God!
 
 
 

Endnotes:


 

  • *1 Cf. SMR Ch.7, Section 4, and Barbs, Arrows and Balms, Item 27, Appendix III, Biblical Blessings, Ch. 13, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 12, Repent or Perish Ch.7, Excursion 1) .
  • *2 See for example, SMR Ch.2, also 1, and 10; A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, and That Magnificent Rock, Chs. 1, 6, 7, 8, with Barbs, Arrows, Balms Items 18, 26, 29, Appendices 1,3,4.


 

 

  • EXCURSION:


 

  • For convenience, Item E, in That Magnificent Rock, Chapter 7 is included here; it allows an integration of the detail and the overview to occur more readily. Item F in the same chapter as E is also relevant, and may be consulted here.

 

E. THE ANTICS OF DATING

Updated Dec. 1999 - see also Ch. 5, esp. pp. 115-132 Answers to Questions.
Some further update, August 2001, and see also Divine Agenda Ch. 1
 

When did it start? How long ago ? When did WHAT start? The world? Its Maker? Matter? Form for energy? Energy for form? It appears a little unusual to be clear on such questions, prejudice being often preferred. However to ask such vague questions is no way to get precise answers.

If FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE, and indeed, as shown in Vol.1 of the Shadow of a Mighty Rock, from a rational perspective, we ask: WHEN DID GOD BEGIN? The answer is: He did not do so. If we ask, How and why did matter begin? The answer is: He made it in a chosen creation in accord with His power and chosen design criteria. If the question be, WHEN did he make it? Then at least we know our parameters.

This preliminary may seem irrelevant to the question, When did IT begin? But it is far from it.

IF you assume uniformitarian ways of going from nothing (also irrational ways, for to go from ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is simply a contradiction in terms), then clearly it will be a different sort of thing from the case of starting (rationally) from something ADEQUATE to produce what you have in mind, to that thing, here matter. Start with nothing, and, if you will forgive the humour, it will take rather a long time. Start with ALMIGHTY GOD and the situation is potentially the EXACT reverse.

Instead (by definition ) of having NO power, you have ALL power. The difference between hand-digging and a steam-shovel is nothing compared with that! And even THAT makes a difference. Ask any manual labourer, and you will find even that difference is profound. It DOES affect quite startlingly the time to elapse for the completion of digging whether you use your hands or a steam-shovel. If you want to make a hole, an atomic bomb is even faster. If God acts, there is no limit.

However maybe the question is not going to be one that involves a self-contradiction at once. Perhaps the question is, How long ago did whatever came before matter act so that matter arose? THAT is a nice question: Could we then clarify? WHAT came before matter, to which you so numerically wish one to refer?

Let us then deal with what we know and acknowledge frankly that depending on the power, intelligence and will that preceded the universe's institution, so are the time parameters for that institution. It is quite useless to say, SINCE you are wrong, how long did it take to found the universe on OUR terms? That would be like asking a Puritan how long it would before he got AIDS from proscribed sexual activity, only much worse. IF, in short, you assume a gradualistic, uniformitarian action on whatever-it-was to make whatever-came next, then you could deal with the entities you imagine and work it all out on the basis of all your varied assumptions. It would be no more or less useful than any other novel.

To be scientific however is quite a another matter. It is not that we despise art forms, it is just that we need to know what genre we have in mind.
 
 

ASSUMING WHAT YOU HAVE TO PROVE MAKES IT EASY

Scientifically, a number of questions relate. Answer them all and you could better answer the first one. COSMOLOGICALLY (*1) the views are diverse, the assumptions monumental and certainties dissipate like morning mist. MODELS can be made with various presuppositions, but these are as sure as the assumptions.
Science by assumption does not prove anything.

Let us merely illustrate. Suppose a series of steps were to occur which would slowly allow some system which had all it took to develop ( that is, aptly and adequately fitted with all the programming etc. required) into something more sophisticated: why then, apart from the oddity of the assumption which is founded on exactly nothing in the way of evidence, it would take just as long as your imaginary parameters for the proto-system which you imagine would require. Another novel.

IF, to take another case, GOD created (as we assert is logically certain), then the time taken, and the methods employed would clearly be ABLE to differ monumentally, infinitely, from the gradualistic, processive, uniformitarian. Thus, to take a minute but parallel case, if I create a story, the TIME depends, not on the rate at which the paper on which it is written deteriorates OR ANY SUCH THING, but on my power and means, and their relationship.

Take light for example: if GOD were creating the universe, then the very concept that the speed of light in its initial and developmental phases (if any) would have to obey what was at length instituted for it, would be simply to ignore the nature of creation, and to ASSUME (wholly illogically and implausibly) that INSTITUTION of light, and events correlative, is IDENTICAL to MAINTENACE or PROCESSION in light, AFTER it is created. The STORY I write comes in ways of its own: they are not nothing. It is not that they lack form and reality; it is just that the very nature of creation is a different form and application of energy and intelligence, from the maintenance of what one creates.

It is of course true that Dr. Russell Humphreys has written some most interesting material, applying the GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY to the sphere of APPARENT time now, relative to creation. He is a mathematician and a research physicist of long standing, and this is rather intriguing. On the assumptions he makes, and the application of the noted theory of Einstein, he comes up with a date for the earth in the area of thousands of years, and the physically discernible possibility of a speed for light vastly in excess of the current rate: because of the MODE of creation which he has in mind. Past all that, however, there is the question of creation as such, getting way past the quite different question of what means like those we see, MIGHT have been employed.

Enough! The cosmological assumptions are all-important in seeking the time answer, for the institution of the universe. Without these, we know NOTHING. That is my own opinion of the date of the institution of the universe FROM THE SCIENTIFIC VIEWPOINT: It is ENTIRELY unknown. We talk of straining at gnats and swallowing camels: if there was ever such a case, this is it. The PRELIMINARY questions determine the whole thing.

But let us proceed to other aspects.

TAKING A PEEK AT... (of all things in this area) FACTS

We have considered:

1) The COSMOLOGICAL.

Now we note:

2) The INITIAL.

Whatever the cosmological view chosen, there will be a time by which the thing is in action - the universe. WHAT however was the concentration of this and that radioactive material (if any), and what the extent to which all processes are set at zero, or all combinations of producer and product are of one (assumed) type? When I create, I may use ANYTHING, something already showing some process, or brand new, in any combination.

When you cease to blind your imagination by thinking poor old 'god' is not very clever, you realise that just as WE can use what we will (to a point) so HE can do so, only incalculably more. The term 'incalculably' is used here advisedly.

You simply, indeed, have no idea of what products are placed at the outset in this or that state, or in what ratios any particular combinations occur, or indeed whether some elements were at given situation or not, or in what amount. You DO NOT KNOW. That is the only cosmologically, rationally honest answer. There is SO MUCH that depends on assumptions, that by this time, to make even more is an exercise in imagination. The cardinal reality is that:

Process does not direct creation: it interprets it.

However, DEPENDING on the initial conditions, ratios, amounts, and so on, is the WHOLE question: HOW LONG did it take to go from that to this, which we now see? If I start my golf drive half-way up the fairway, it will surely make a difference in this question: HOW LONG it will take my ball to land(?) on the green... Initial point, rate and final point are inter-related questions. We do not know the first. Nor do we know the mode of arrival, or the conditions by which it arrived.

This however is not all that is involved in our first little question.

There is also :

3) the RATE

at which the change from the ASSUMED first state in the IMAGINED (or believed) scenario, to the current one has come. This is quite determinative - or one of the determinants. However we do not KNOW

a) what the rate has been, only what is or was a short time ago;

b) what variations there have been, and although there is evidence as Dr. Slusher has shown, of variation under certain conditions (and the conditions WE are considering for this question are obviously as extreme as one could wish, or may be), the extent is not sure, any more than the initial material is sure, or the way it got here. (That is, from a simply scientific point of view).

We also do not KNOW:

4) THE PRECISE FORCES

to which these processes have been subjected, although the work of Professor Tom Barnes (*2) of El Paso University in Texas is a monumental thrust to exhibit very large magnetic forces were at play on our earth, in the early stages. These things are such extremes as to leave questions of rate, along with the evidences of effects from changing conditions on them, UNKNOWN. We may GUESS, on our preferred cosmological view, and assume further that it WORKED ITSELF OUT in this way and not in that: but we do not know. The more we know about what we did not know forty years ago, the more scientifically ridiculous it is to pose as knowledgeable on all such questions even in terms of precise issues; but when these pose cosmological presuppositions, the effort is of small impact.

Nor do we know:

5) HOW MUCH OF THE SUBSTANCE

we use for checking dates has been leached, lost, dissolved, disturbed, polluted and so forth; so that the ELEMENTS of our equations are ALSO in doubt.

It is therefore small wonder that we do not KNOW:

6) why there is such ENORMOUS variation

between different RADIO-dating methods, when they are applied to the same substance, so OFTEN, and why these results - as in the Hawaii   case (SMR p. 241) - can be ludicrous, making millions of years date for something happening hundreds of years go.

An amusing case is given in CREATION magazine, Dec. 1999, Feb. 2000 on pp. 19-21. In this instance, the variation between dating methods is KNOWLEDGE as to when rock was formed, and DATING TECHNIQUE (with potassium argon) as to when it SHOULD have occurred!

Gifted and original geologist, Dr Andrew Snelling, refers to Mt Ngauruhoe as New Zealand's newest volcano - and one of the most active. Rising to some 7500 feet, it erupted in 1948, with a lava flow proceeding thereafter down the north-western slopes, in 1949. About 20 million cubic feet was the estimated volume of lava. In 1954 an eruption hurling blocks with ash, occurred with some 8 million cubic metres of lava. Further activity occurred in 1974, with an ash column soaring into the atmosphere. Blocks of some 1000 tons were hurled hundreds of metres. Then in 1975, a huge violence occurred, with blocks up to 100 ft across catapulted almost 2 miles.

Snelling then notes the conditions of dating, via assumptions: 1) no daughter radiogenic atoms in the extrusion; 2) rock must be a closed system after hardening; 3) radioactive decay rate must be constant. "If," he indicates, "any of these assumptions are violated, then the technique fails and any 'dates' are false."

11 samples were collected from the five recent and conspicuous lava flows during field work in 1996 - from the flows of 1954, 1975 and 1954. All with maps were clearly indentified. Various carefully checked samples were sent to an eminent laboratory for dating. The dates for the age of the ROCKS were of the order of millions of years. The laboratory manager re-checked his equipment and tested again.  The results were similar.

Since the rocks are KNOWN to be of the order of 50 years old, the apparent 'age' is assumed to have come from 'excess' argon, radiogenic inclusion, in the lava, before the rocks formed. This sort of failure is "also known to occur in many other rocks, including both recent volcanics and ancient crustal rocks," Snelling adds, giving references.

Here the INITIAL SITUATION assumptions are wrong, but confidently made (cf. SMR pp. 240), just as the VARIABLE RATE can be merely a theory based on philosophical preference, abstracting from the ages to the present, or to the ages from concepts of choice. As noted, Professor Keith Wanser indicated (CREATION, Sept.-Nov. 1999, p. 40) that - "It's not really widely known that standard quantum electrodynamics predicts that the speed of light (c) is a function of the field strength, thus changeable in