Evolution versus Creation revisited

Evolution versus Creation revisited
We were discussing evolution, the beginning of the universe, how long the universe has been in existence. Phillip Collins in his talk a week or so ago mentioned 15.7 billions years as the age of the universe. He stated it categorically as if that date is set in stone. It's as if we had always known this.

In fact as few as ten years ago I know for a fact a different number was being used. Back then that number was the fact according to some.

I recall that God demanded of Job that Job tell him how he made the universe (Job 38+). He asked Job if he was there. Of course the answer is no. We were not there. We cannot ever understand how God made matter out of nothing. We have no idea how God did it. Even if we accept the idea that the universe began 15.7 billion years ago in a big bang, we don't know why. We cannot really know how. It is a unique, unrepeatable event.

Job 38 is interesting. In a parable like way God asks him if he knows why he set gravity the way he did. Why is Avogadro's number such as it is? And so on ... These are questions that scientists cannot begin to answer so mostly they pretend that these questions do not exist.

Science does best when it observes physical events that can be controlled and repeated. Science is at a loss when it dabbles in origin theories. Origins by their very nature are unrepeatable events. We can only hypothesize, guess as it were.

So what we have in the Bible in Genesis is an origin account. Several unrepeatable events are revealed. Most Christians think these things were revealed by God. He explained them to man in a way that he could understand. And don't think we, in our sophistication, are much different than the original readers of these stories. We can take God's word for it or not. If we do not then we have lost some faith.

Someone else, it may have been Colson again, mentioned something else that is interesting. Blind evolutionary forces is such a large universe over such long time periods should have created other worlds with other life forms. Life forms with self-consciousness such as we have. There have been many millions of dollars spent trying to find and contact such life forms. SETI and such endeavors have been absolutely unsuccessful at finding anything remotely likely. In fact I am not aware of anything like our solar system anywhere on any of the stars they have examined. I think they closest thing to planets found to date are some seemingly dead stars rotating around another star. These dead stars are usually pretty big. Now it could be that at such long distances it is hard to see something as small as a planet the size of earth. But it not for lack of trying that they have not found direct or indirect evidence of planetary systems. Most theories of solar system development would as a corollary theorize that lots of stars would have planets around them. But this does not seem to be the case.

It would seem that if blind evolution could product complex life forms like ourselves in one little corner of the universe it could do so in many places. Perhaps they are just too far away to be contacted but so far nothing at all hopeful has come to light. Science fiction likes to ponder many worlds with advanced civilizations and ways to communicate and travel to a fro. But so far reality has proved very different.