Creation\Evolution Academy Discussion

[Eternal Unity]

I have attended a very interesting seminar while in university. I managed to get a bit of the recording of a Creation\Evolution discussion. It's a dialogue between the lecturer who is a physicist and a student who majors in philosophy.

Feel free to comment.

Greg.

Lecturer: I’m all for starting at the beginning, but I’m not sure what there is to unravel. There are only two schools of thought on where we came from—the religious notion that God created humans fully formed, and the Darwinian model in which we crawled out of the primordial ooze and eventually evolved into humans. Darwin’s theory of evolution is extremely well established, because it is based on scientifically observable fact, and clearly illustrates how organisms evolve and adapt to their environments over time. The theory of evolution is universally accepted by the sharpest minds in science.

Student: I’ve seen books that argue Darwin was entirely wrong.

Lecturer: What you say is true, more than fifty titles were published over the past two decades alone. They made me curious, and so I asked a Harvard biology professor for his opinion of the books. He explained his view with an mental illustration. It goes like this: imagine yourself walking down a long hallway - a corridor so long that it’s impossible to see where you came from or where you’re going. Then, behind you in the distance, you hear the sound of a bouncing ball. Sure enough, when you turn, you see a ball bouncing toward you. It is bouncing closer and closer, until it finally bounces past you, and just keeps going, bouncing into the distance and out of sight.

Student: The question is not: Is the ball bouncing? Because clearly, the ball is bouncing. We can observe it. The question is: WHY is it bouncing? How did it START bouncing? Did someone kick it? Is it a special ball that simply enjoys bouncing? Are the laws of physics in this hallway such that the ball has no choice but to bounce forever?”

Lecturer: My point is that just as with evolution, we cannot see far enough into the past to know how the process began.

Student: Exactly. All we can do is observe that it is happening.

Lecturer: This was similar, of course, to the challenge of understanding the Big Bang. Cosmologists have devised elegant formulas to describe the expanding universe for any given Time — 'T' — in the past or future. However, when they try to look back to the instant when the Big Bang occurred - where T equals zero - the mathematics all goes mad, describing what seems to be a mystical speck of infinite heat and infinite density.

Student: Correct again, and because the human mind is not equipped to handle 'infinity' very well, most scientists now discuss the universe only in terms of moments after the Big Bang — where T is greater than zero — which ensures that the MATHEMATICAL does not turn MYSTICAL.”

Lecturer: [joking] I sometimes become so fed up with philosophy majors attending my Origins of the Universe seminar that I finally posted a sign on my classroom door:

In my classroom, T > 0.

For all inquiries where T = 0,

Please visit the Religion Department.