Big Bang

[TBC: One of the questions that skeptics love to pose to "young earth" adherents is, "If the universe is less than 10,000 years old, then how can we see light from galaxies that are (X number) of light years away? It seems, however, that evolutionists have the same problem as recent research demonstrates, while simultaenously giving hints of how limited our understanding is of Creation.]

Big bang can't explain

Most evolutionists and progressive creationists believe that the big bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago. So how big would we expect the universe to be? Even if the universe expanded at the speed of light, then the radius of the universe should be 13.7 billion light-years as an upper limit, so the width of the universe is 27.4 billion light-years, right?

Wrong!

From new data collected from a space probe examining the Cosmic Background Radiation, astronomers estimate the universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide. Actually, it's long been known that the universe was a lot wider than 27.4 billion light-years; this latest research tells us how much wider.

According to researchers writing in the journal Physics Review Letters, the universe must have expanded much faster than light in its early stage. An atheistic physicist, Alan Guth, proposed this over 20 years ago -- the "inflation" model.

It's no wonder that 33 leading scientists have published an "Open Letter to the Scientific Community" rejecting the big bang. They refer to "fudge factors" such as the "hypothetical" inflation idea, which needs a cosmic density 20 times larger than that required for the big bang to make the light elements.

BBC News, <news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3753115.stm>, 31 May 2004.

"New Scientist," 22 May 2004, p. 20.

Skeptics often challenge creationists to answer how the light could have travelled from distant stars to earth in 6,000 years. But light-travel time is just as much a difficulty for the big-bangers, called the 'horizon problem' -- see "Creation" 25 (4): 48–49 . And if secular scientists finally throw out the big bang, what will happen to the Christian apologists who reinterpret the Bible to fit into this theory? They will have to reinterpret their reinterpretations! ("Creation" 26 (4):7–9, September 2004).