The Soft Pillow of Science

I was channel surfing the other night and as I did I came across a program on the Discovery Channel called Miracle Planet: The Evolution of Our World. The channel guide that describes what the program is about read, “Earth was born out of chaos, disaster and completely by chance. Travel back into the violent past to discover how the fragile conditions of life were created.”

Did you get that? This show will explain how the earth and even life itself were created by chance. Created BY chance? What IS chance? How can anything be created BY chance? Don’t get me wrong; chance is a perfectly good word to describe mathematical probabilities. For example we listen to the weather in order to find out if there will be a chance of rain. The weather guesser tells us that tomorrow there will be a 30% chance. Or if I ask you what the chances are, when I flip a coin, that it will come up tails? The answer is that there is a 50% chance it will come up tails. But tell me, when I flip the coin how does chance influence the outcome? What force does chance exert on the coin which causes it to come up tails? None! It can’t! It isn’t possible because chance is not a thing. It’s nothing! It’s simply a word used to describe mathematical possibilities. Yet some scientists, many scientists, have given chance magical powers; even the power to create.

I’ve read it and heard it so many times, Space+Time+Chance=The Universe. What is time? How much does it weigh? When I see that formula, which is the formula ascribed to by all believers in the big bang theory, I see this: nothing+nothing+nothing=everything; =me. This to me is logically untenable, yet these otherwise brilliant people use the term chance as a soft pillow to explain affects for things that they simply have not, or can not, find a cause for. I would respect them if they would just say that. Just say we haven’t found the cause yet, but with more experimentation and study we hope to discover what the causes are.

The day after I saw that program description I came into work and flipped the page on my “Bible Verse a Day” calendar and here is what the scripture was: Hebrews 11:3

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”