Did you know that evolution is a story about the supposed past and the future?
When most people think of evolution, they view it as an explanation for how life and the universe came about. But the evolutionary story is also an attempt to explain our future. You see, if the slow and gradual processes of the present can be extrapolated back into the unobserved past to figure out what must’ve happened then, they can also be extrapolated into the future to figure out what will supposedly happen to life and universe.
And in the evolutionary worldview, the future is pretty bleak:
Scientists have long estimated that in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of fuel, first expanding into a red giant and eventually becoming a white dwarf that will continue cooling for tens—if not hundreds—of billions of years. Amid this dramatic sequence of cosmic events, the fate of Earth remains uncertain.
Will it be pulled into the expanding red sun and disappear forever? Or, though long since rendered uninhabitable, will it continue orbiting the white dwarf remnant of the Sun until the universe reaches its eventual heat death?
Apparently, most scientists favor the first scenario: The sun “eats” the earth. Of course, by the time anything like this supposedly happens (an alleged two billion years from now), evolutionists believe humans and all other life will be long extinct, so there would be nothing around, in their own worldview, to observe whatever happens to the earth. But a new study suggests that maybe the “earth gets eaten” prediction isn’t the right one after all.
The new study, based on improved models of tidal dissipation and stellar mass loss during the sun’s transition into a red giant, points to a different conclusion. According to the researchers, tidal dissipation—the process that drains orbital energy and gradually causes elliptical orbits, such as Earth’s, to become more circular—would be less effective than previous models suggested.
At the same time, observations of the red giant L2 Puppis, located about 209 light-years from Earth, indicate that the sun could lose enough mass for this effect to outweigh the influence of tidal forces. If so, Earth’s orbit would gradually move outward, significantly increasing its chances of surviving the red giant phase.
So maybe earth will survive, but then the next paragraph of the story says, well, maybe it won’t because “Earth’s ultimate fate remains far from certain . . . the final stages of a star’s evolution involve many variables that are difficult to predict with precision.” And of course, these “variables” are based on evolutionary assumptions and interpretations about present-day stars and the evolutionary stages they supposedly go through. If those assumptions are wrong (and they are), so is everything about all these studies on our future!
Earth won’t be swallowed by the sun—it will be destroyed by God when He judges mankind’s sin.
But there’s another assumption that’s the foundation of these kinds of studies: There is no Creator God who controls the universe. We don’t have to wonder about how the earth will end; God has already told us that it will end when He returns in judgment to judge earth with fire before creating a new heavens and a new earth. Earth won’t be swallowed by the sun—it will be destroyed by God when He judges mankind’s sin. But the good news is, that’s not the end! There is an eternity of joy in the presence of God on a perfect, renewed creation for all who will put their trust in Him.
You know, this study is yet another reminder that the evolutionary and biblical worldviews are utterly incompatible with each other. Just as evolution is wrong about the future, it’s wrong about the past. Many Christians try to add evolution or millions of years into the Bible, but what they are really doing is taking one religion (evolutionary naturalism) and adding it into the Bible. It’s making man, and his interpretations of the world around him, the authority rather than God.
Evolution tries to explain everything because it’s part of the religion of naturalism. Without an explanation for life and the universe apart from God, there is no naturalism, so they must have evolution and must use it to explain everything. But it’s the wrong worldview—and it’s hopeless, purposeless, and meaningless, ending in nothing but death.
Hope for humanity and this fallen creation is only found in the biblical worldview and the true history—and future—found in God’s Word.
Oh, and two other points to consider:
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken
This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.
Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.