“Where do we come from” is perhaps the most important question we can ask or answer. The answer we give influences how we value human life, the natural world, God, and even our own selves. If we get the answer wrong, life will be very confusing and difficult. Get it right, and we've made a good start to building a realistic, and useful, view of the world.
Creation Science has done a good job over the years of demonstrating the inability of evolutionary theory to answer where we, as human beings, come from. More recently, concepts like irreducible complexity1 and the idea of Intelligent Design have taken the arguments against biological evolution into the mainstream. And yet Christians still struggle to trust those first few chapters of Genesis. Why?
The problem is the idea of the Big Bang. Or more importantly, the billions of years of “cosmic time” that is apparently indicated by astronomers' discoveries in space. These are issues, not of biology, but cosmology. Not only does Dismantling the Big Bang fulfill the aim of its title, exposing the weaknesses of Big Bang theory, but it also delivers on its subtitle: God's Universe Rediscovered, by delivering a powerful Christian cosmology. Hartnett and Williams systematically test the Big Bang against Occams Razor (which they helpfully define as favouring the theory with the fewest number of assumptions needed), and compare it with Hartnett'ss own Young Solar System (YSS) model.
This book delves into every part of the Big Bang model, and is relentlessly demanding of the theory, refusing to accept the “just so†answer.
That might sound like an overly technical book, but the writing style is breezy and light. Concepts are carefully defined, and it has a structure designed to place everything in context. The book starts with a quick history of cosmology. It looks at how people down through the ages have explained the origin of the universe (which includes the stars, the sun and moon, the earth, and us human beings). It shows how this has led to the latest idea – the Big Bang. It then examines how philosophical assumptions always underly any explanation of origins. Since we cannot experimentally test our assumptions about history, we simply carry them into our theories. This is followed by a quick overview of the tools used to describe the universe – theories of gravity, relativity, and the like – and then on to the main course: a careful dissection of the Big Bang model.
Unlike most literature on this topic, this book delves into every part of the Big Bang model, and is relentlessly demanding of the theory, refusing to accept the “just so” answers or equivocation that is so common. After reading to the end of the Big Bang chapter, you will wonder how anyone could ever believe in this theory, with its lack of an explanation for Population III stars,2 the lack of black holes, planets, comets, dark matter, dark energy, and so on.
But it's not enough to point out the deficiencies of Big Bang theory, so the book forges on with the material relating to its subtitle: God's Universe Rediscovered. The authors give a careful analysis of the time scales indicated by our observations of deep space, and point out how the apparently enormous time scales have been a real stumbling block to people accepting Genesis's 6000 year time-scale. In the next chapter, they work through Genesis 1, developing a scientific model based on this record. Hartnett's Young Solar System model is a variant of Russell Humphries' ground-breaking whitehole cosmology. That theory proposed using the time dilation feature of Einstein's general relativity to explain how the Earth could see six days of creation while the distant stars experienced millions or billions of years. Hartnett explains how his variant of this model explains all of the current observations we have.
Wrapping up, the book scores the Big Bang model against Hartnett's YSS model (in which YSS overwhelmingly wins). It then looks at some future trends with their possible impacts and summarises the choice we face in believing God's word or fallible scientific theories. Finally, it presents some very useful appendices on other cosmological models and the theological ramifications of Big Bang theory. There is also an excellent index, making the book a great reference work.
So, for a Christian concerned with being able to defend their faith in the marketplace of ideas making up Western culture, this book is vital reading. Not only does it give good, solid reasons for questioning Big Bang theory, it gives a viable, Biblical alternative. And it does all this while carefully placing the whole question in its proper historical and philosophical context, without overwhelming the reader with incomprehensible jargon.
This is, perhaps, the first book for a lay audience that properly grapples with the area of cosmology. As such, it is a breakthrough effort, and presents its ideas with such forceful clarity that it should serve as the standard reference on this issue for many years.
