The Boomerang Effect

Anyone who has watched Crocodile Dundee will remember the part where his friend took an object from a car and threw it like a boomerang at a villain who was running away.  A boomerang, which is an Australian hunting device turned kids toy, is an L-Shaped wooden apparatus that is designed to return to the one who throws it.  Someone can throw a boomerang with all his might in an arch that would cause a different object to land hundreds of feet away, but the boomerang, in its unique configuration, will hit a point where it does a 180° turn and comes back to him.

Many a preacher has spoken on the “Boomerang Effect” that God seems to have on things.  He has a knack for taking things that are self-consciously against Him and making them His greatest proponents.  One remembers the city of Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 5 where the Jebusites were so confident in their fortifications that they declared that even if only the “blind and the lame” showed up to defend against David and his army that they would still be victorious.  The city of course was taken by Israel and became their stronghold.  The Roman Empire is similar in that it persecuted the Christian faith for around 300 years – a period of time greater than the history of the American Republic – but it eventually caved to the Gospel and turned into the headquarters of the Christian faith for over a thousand years.  The apostle Paul also comes to mind, who as a young man was adamantly against Christianity and even put to death those who followed the faith, but he was radically changed when Jesus knocked him off his horse and opened his eyes to what he was really doing (Acts 9:1-19).  And it was Paul who wrote a phrase in the book of Romans that I didn’t understand until just recently.  In Romans 1:21 he writes,

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their senseless hearts were darkened.

 - Romans 1:21

I have always loved this verse and found the part about how “they did not honor Him as God or give thanks” to be an important insight about how worship is a key to keeping our faith.  If we neglect to honor and worship God for a season in our lives, then we are in danger of our heart being darkened and eventually turning away from the Lord even if we loved Him when we were younger.  But what always confounded me was the part about “futile speculations”.  What did the Holy Spirit mean as He was inspiring Paul to write this?

At first, I thought it was meant to be a withering rebuke of attempts to explain the world apart from Him.  A kind of Divine disparagement – saying that such attempts at speculation are futile – where in adding this adjective God was bringing a little extra “dig” to the reality that unbelief was always based in non-verifiable conjecture.  But more recently I’ve come to realize that the speculations are “futile” because they ultimately fail in their attempt to move away from God and like a boomerang, and to the shock of those who postulated them, end up turning around and pointing to Him.

The reason for why all arguments posited against God ultimately betray those who concoct them and end up being proofs for Him is a very deep subject that will have to be discussed another time.  But the way this mutiny occurred in the naturalistic attempt to explain the origin of the universe has been the subject of this book.  In the prior post I spoke about this shift and explained how due to the recent discoveries of the Finely Tuned Universe and how the Universe is Expanding, that even when someone assumes a materialistic perspective on the development of the world that even this seems to point to something or Someone outside the Laws of Science who kicked off the Big Bang and specifically calibrated it so that the universe would develop in the way that it has.

Should one accept an approach to the origin of the cosmos that limits itself only to known natural laws, then the theorized history of the universe can be reconciled verse by verse with Genesis 1 in an astonishing way.  This is likely a novel idea to the reader, and I can summarize this by stating that I believe that 3 concepts in this seminal chapter of the Bible have been misunderstood.  The first is the idea of time – which I think is mysterious in Genesis 1 due to the fact that our measure for time, which hinges on the earth’s relation to the sun, wasn’t even an option in the first 4 days – even though the Lord testifies that days did occur.  This means that the days in Genesis 1 are a mystery.  How long did they take, or can we even know how long they took?  I go into this in my post Moses Knew about the Theory of Relativity.

The second is the means by which God created life.  In Genesis 1 the Lord uses the phrase “Let the Earth bring forth animals”.  What does that phrase actually mean?  If taken literally it seems that God used the Earth as a middleman for creating living organisms, which would mean it could be reconciled with the theory of evolution.  Should it be taken literally or figuratively (as if to signal that such organisms appear in the distant horizon, like they would in a movie to indicate that they came into being but by mysterious origin)?  Do we really have a way of knowing how such a statement should be taken?  I go into this in my post Let the Earth Bring Forth Animals.

The third is the question of what God meant by “water”. Did He mean literal hydrogen dioxide or was He more generically referring to a liquid (or liquid-like) substance. I think one can reasonably believe that He could have been referring to a liquid-like substance (which would include plasma) that comprised the early universe.  Which if that’s the case then God’s testimony of the early universe could be read in a way that parallels the take that modern physicists have of it, a view that has been coined the “Big Bang Theory.”  I go into this in my post Let There be an Expanse.

For many who have taken an interest in science, and who see the theories of the scientific community as bearing a weight that should be taken with deep consideration, then perhaps knowing that Scripture can be reconciled with the current consensus of the scientific community will be encouraging to you.  And perhaps that may be the big takeaway that you get from this.

We Don’t Really Know What Happened

But I must state that I am skeptical of the idea that we can observe the universe as it is today and then trace that backwards into the distant past as a means of knowing its history.  I am resistant to the idea of Radiometric Dating for this reason and due to this am also skeptical of the Big Bang as a definitive theory.

I am wary of scientific approaches to map out the distant past for 2 main reasons:

1) Taking the physical principles of the world that we know to be at play now and then tracing them back into the distant past would be reliable if we knew everything there is to know about the universe.  No scientist worth his salt would ever say that we know everything and yet everybody seems to be content with taking our limited knowledge and still doing this.  How do we know that there isn’t some massive discovery to still be had, that when having it would upend all of the models we currently possess?  Also how do we know that there isn’t some kind of physical law that only applies in certain conditions that are no longer at work now?  I speculated in The Lost Glory of the Earth that the earth seems to have displayed different properties in Genesis 1 than it exhibits today and that this could be explained by God cursing the earth due to mankind’s sin (Genesis 3:17, Romans 8:20).  One wonders if some physical principle that was at work in the earth then has been “shut off” and is now undiscoverable.  If that were the case then we would have no way of knowing this through naturalistic means.

2) The second reason (which in a way is similar to the first) is that it’s possible that in the distant past that supernatural acts occurred in a process as the universe was being shaped into what it is today.  Some people balk at this, but I would simply ask how would we ever be able to prove that something like this did not happen?

Anyone with an honest mind would admit that whatever it was that brought the universe to the point, whether by an extraordinary supernatural explosion or an extraordinary supernatural process, that it is today is incredible and outside our ability to recreate and therefore outside the scope of science’s ability to indutibly know by experiment.

In short you don’t know what you don’t know, and I just think it’s wise to be willing to admit that we don’t know every facet of the distant past.  And it is for this reason that – though I’m fascinated by them – I can’t bring myself to accept naturalistic explanations of the origin of the universe.

The reality that the universe is expanding, which was the impetus for the development of the Big Bang theory, could be understood to have been set in place by a supernatural process and doesn’t necessarily need to be the result of an explosion from an infinitesimally small point. God could have stretched out the universe at an accelerated rate on Day 2 and then afterwards set the rate of expansion to its current state.  So, while the fact that the universe is expanding is observable and indisputable, the rate (or varying rates) of expansion over the history of the cosmos is unknowable and therefore doesn’t have to conform to the Big Bang Theory.  Due to this I reject the idea that the universe is 13.8 billion earth-years old.  This isn’t to say that it couldn’t be that old, but simply that we don’t know definitively that it is in fact that age.

Similarly, the reality that the world has been Finely Tuned to foster living creatures, remarkable in its own right, doesn’t need to be explained as having been put in place all from some kind of primordial explosion.  Like the fact that the universe is expanding, so all of the properties that have been uniquely configured to allow for life on earth could have been set in place during a supernatural process and didn’t have to happen as the result of a perfectly planned explosion.

We shouldn’t think that we can come up with theories that provide conclusive explanations of the distant past. Like I said earlier, to do so would require knowing everything there is to know about the physical world.  Which would be remarkably arrogant on our part to believe.  Additionally, even if we knew everything about the physical world, we would still not be able to account for something supernatural happening in the remote past.

How Many Holes Does it Take for a Boat to Sink?

This would be true even if naturalist theory seemed airtight and coherent, but such isn’t the case at all. The entire materialistic project is beset with holes. Following the Big Bang, it is postulated that inanimate chemicals came together to produce the first living cell in a process that is named Abiogenesis. Though the idea of God using the earth as a “middle man” to create living organisms could be reconciled with Scripture and would be a fascinating read should anyone ever be able to explain how this could have happened, there isn’t even a working theory as how this took place.  Those who embrace a purely naturalistic explanation of the origin of life just simply say that “we are getting closer”, but they’ve been saying that for a long time.  I go into this in more detail in my post Abiogenesis – or more appropriately – Its Time to Stop Pretending and I think that atheists have been trying to hide this from the world for years and I consider the whole thing to be deeply dishonest. Due to this I reject the theory of Abiogenesis.

Following along in the supposed development of the universe we come to Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. My rejection of Darwinism is on similar grounds in that I also think the theory of evolution can be reconciled with Scripture.  This is largely because the phrase that the Lord used when He spoke animals into existence, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” (Genesis 1:24), could be interpreted as God using an intermediary material process as the means for creating plants, animals and people. It also should be noted that even if Abiogenesis and Evolution were true, that they would only have taken place because God had perfectly set the universe up to allow for life to develop, and as such wouldn’t be the reason to not believe in God that some people think them to be.  Though I group them together when talking about how they reconcile with Scripture, there is a big difference between Abiogenesis and Evolution.  The former doesn’t have a theory as to how it even took place and therefore there is no acceptance of this in the field of science.  The latter has been accepted and is considered the consensus of the scientific community. 

But I personally see Darwin’s theory as having many holes, about which I have written extensively and plan to write even more one day.  It purports to trace the development of all the plants, animals and people on the earth to a single common ancestor.  And it was this ancestor that, due to variations in genetics and external forces, eventually gave birth to all the living organisms that we know today.  The biggest problem with this theory are the missing fossils of the supposed transitional animal forms from the perceived lower to higher animals.  Darwin predicted that we would find these fossils in the ground.  It’s been over 150 years with massive amounts of time and money spent excavating and examining fossils from all over the earth and we still haven’t found them.  At some point there has got to be some kind of cognitive dissonance as a result of this that causes people to start looking for a different explanation, but at least as of 2024, we are not there yet.

I have explained earlier that I think Scripture could be read in such a way as seeing God using an intermediary material process for the creation of plants, animals and people but that this doesn’t have to be Darwinian Evolution.  It’s very possible that if He chose to use the earth as a “middle man” that it could have been a material process that we haven’t discovered yet (and is perhaps undiscoverable due to the reality that He has cursed the earth - Genesis 3:17, Romans 8:20). It’s also very possible that the phrase “Let the Earth bring forth living creatures” should be interpreted figuratively in a way that would imply that God did it supernaturally and that, within the narrative of Genesis 1, they appeared on the distant landscape of the earth like the entrance of a mysterious figure in a movie.

We Need to be Content Living with Mystery

However God chose to do it I don’t think we have the ability now to look into the distant past and say that it happened in a certain way.  Naturalism has to exclude both the supernatural and physical principles that we currently don’t know, in order to make any sort of statement at all about the history of the universe. I think such assumptions are deeply flawed and as a result are reason to reject materialism entirely.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t think that theories like the Big Bang aren’t interesting or worth people’s time and effort but rather that we should recognize that they are theories that exist within a specific set of assumptions that make it so they are just fascinating ideas and not conclusive explanations of the origins of our world.

We need to accept something that seems difficult to the modern mind – that we don’t, and actually can’t, know everything there is to know about everything.  We need to accept our humble position in this universe with a heart of gratitude.  Thankful that we are here, that we have been given a place that fosters our ability to live in relative health and peace.  Where in this marvelous universe, we have been given a planet in which we can live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).