No! Can the big bang cosmology be mixed with the historical account of creation? Again, no. But according to J. Warner Wallace, a Christian speaker for Stand to Reason, it can be.
Now, the big bang view teaches a concept of creation that is completely opposite of Scripture’s account. According to this view, the universe came into existence billions of years ago. The big bang eventually led to the slow origin of the earth and solar system, and the earth was a molten, fiery rock. But Genesis 1 clearly describes liquid water when God created the earth:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1–2)What’s more, evolutionary thinking says that the end of the universe will be accompanied by heat death. The sun will burn out and everything will freeze. But what does God’s Word say about the end of the universe?
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. (2 Peter 3:10)Rather than a heat death, the Bible tells us that the earth one day will be destroyed by fire.
Furthermore, the Bible teaches that the earth was created before the sun (Genesis 1:2-9, 16), but the evolutionary ideas state the opposite. What more needs to be said about the fact that the Scriptures teach against these ideas?
The term “big bang” was coined by Sir Fred Hoyle in 1949. However, Hoyle was not the man who proposed the idea. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest, first suggested in 1927 that the universe expanded, and in 1931 proposed that at one time all matter in the universe was concentrated into a single point. While Hoyle actually advocated a competing idea known as the steady state model, Lemaître’s big bang idea became more widely accepted as time went on.
The big bang idea comes out of explaining the world based on the laws of time and nature—basically, naturalism. Lemaître kept his religious beliefs and what he called his science clearly separated, saying that his big bang idea left the materialist free to deny God’s existence. Of course, the big bang is not operational science (i.e., testable, observable, or repeatable) but historical science (i.e., assumptions about the unobservable past). The big bang is really a religion that is used by most astronomers to explain away God.
In a recent Christian Post article (Big Bang Cosmology is Consistent with Scripture?), Wallace explains his position on the big bang:
It turns out that the primary proposal is absolutely consistent with what we see in Scripture—that God has created everything from nothing and that moment of Creation is something that I see as having good evidence to support such a thing from Big Bang Cosmology.The problem with Wallace’s position is that the big bang view requires billions of years, which contradicts Scripture! Of course, Wallace claims that the issue of millions of years “is a separate argument.”
But if Wallace is truly advocating only “God created”—then why even mention the big bang? Why not simply believe the true account of creation in Genesis, given to us by the One who was there in the beginning?
But this is unsurprising coming from the group Stand to Reason. I wrote a blog post about Stand to Reason’s compromise on Genesis, which you can read at this link: Compromise Being Spread.
Wallace is doing something that has become all too common in the church today—he is attempting to mix man’s word with God’s Word, instead of trusting what God has told us and evaluating the claims of evolutionary scientists in light of Scripture.
What Wallace is doing is compromising man’s ideas with God’s Word and thus undermining the authority of Scripture. Sadly, such compromise has greatly contributed to the increasing exodus of young people from the church. It’s sad that he is a speaker at an apologetics conference. I would say the apologetics he is teaching is really a defense of a secular anti-biblical belief rather than of Scripture. Sadly, this is the state of much of Christendom today.
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken
Steve Golden assisted in the writing of this blog post.
Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.