Widowed Thaorizers
From a booklet, Origin of the Solar System by John C. Whitcomb, we present the following quotation:
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In the light of the failure of naturalistic evolution to explain the origin of the elements, the stars, and the planets, it is very disappointing to find leading evangelical exponents of the double—revelation theory appealing to Gamows big- bang hypothesis of an expanding universe as support for the Biblical doctrine of creation! In the first of a series of articles on The Story of Creation, Christian Life magazine invited J. Laurence Kulp, Karl Turekian, and Donald R. Carr of Columbia Universitys Lamont Geological Observatory, and Russell Mixter and Howard Claasen of Wheaton College to discuss The Origin of the Universe. These writers concluded:
A simple calculation shows that about five billion years ago all matter was in one spot. An explosion occurred at that time and fragments have been flying apart since, to give us an expanding universe....
How did the creative act take place? An increasing number of evangelical Christian scientists and theologians can now be said to take the following position. . . . All the elements of the universe must have been created within a half hour. Within less than 400 million years, the gas composed of 90 percent hydrogen had drifted apart to a great extent and the temperature had dropped down to that of a comfortably warm room. None of the sparkling stars of today were there at that time — only a gigantic dark ball of gas at low pressure.... Some 500 million years after the universe was started (about 1/10 of universe history) the earth came into being.
It is significant that just eighteen months after this article appeared in Christian Life, Gamow himself frankly admitted that the big- bang theory could not explain the origin of most of the elements!
We know that hydrogen and helium do in fact make up about 99 per cent of the matter of the universe. This leaves us with the problem of building the heavier elements. I hold to the opinion that some of them were built by capture of neutrons. However since the absence of any stable nucleus of atomic weight 5 makes it improbable that the heavier elements could have been produced in the first half hour in the abundance now observed, I would agree that the lions share of the heavy elements may well have been formed later in the hot interior of stars.
This is not an isolated instance. Time and time again, Christians have been pressured into adopting some popular scientific theory only to discover, to their sorrow and embarrassment, that they had succeeded in Harmonizing Scripture to a scientific concept that was proven to be erroneous after all. As someone has well said, the person who becomes wedded to the scientific cosmology of one generation will find himself widowed in the next.