This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
A PDF version or hardbound print version may be ordered.
Copyright © 1995–2008, Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound print edition of this online book.
Two Perspectives
A Creation Perspective. The instant matter was created, a burst of light emanated from every particle in the universe. Light from one point on earth would reach other points in a tiny fraction of a second. The farther matter was from earth, the longer it would have taken for that light to reach earth. Just how long would depend on the velocity of light and how far matter extended from earth.
Visualize an observer sitting in a rowboat on a very large, glassy-smooth lake. At one instant, pebbles fall uniformly onto the entire lake. Assume that only one wave ripples out from each pebble’s splash. Waves that began nearest the rowboat strike the boat first. As time passes, waves that began farther and farther out strike the boat. For the observer in the boat, the waves hitting the boat at any instant appear to have begun from an imaginary ring centered on the boat, a ring that expands over time at “wave velocity.”
Now imagine a similar situation, but in three dimensions. An observer in the vacuum of outer space sees a constant stream of light coming from all directions—all emitted at the instant matter was created. It will appear to the observer that the light originated from an imaginary spherical shell with the observer at its center. The sphere’s radius increases at the speed of light, but the observer receives the same amount of radiation—from all directions and at all times. This is because the expanding sphere’s increasing area exactly balances the reduction in the radiation’s intensity due to the increasing distance the light has traveled.
If, before space was stretched out, matter was created with positive and negative charges accelerating toward each other, we would see almost identical blackbody radiation coming from all directions. Such radiation was discovered in 1965 and is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation. Its temperature today corresponds to a very cold 2.73 kelvins (-454.76°F). [Stretched out space is discussed on page 325: “Why Does the Universe Seem To Be Expanding?”]
What would this light have looked like before the Sun, Moon, and stars were made on Day 4 and before the heavens were stretched out? The initial burst of light from matter comprising the “formless” earth would disappear in less than a second. However, light would then reach earth from the surrounding sphere that expanded from earth at the velocity of light. Seconds or minutes later, light would arrive from the newly created matter from which the Sun would be made on Day 4. Hours later—and before the heavens were stretched out—light would begin arriving from matter that would form the bulk of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.
This bright, temporary source of light, from matter that would become our galaxy, would be concentrated in a particular portion of the sky. Earth, rotating since its creation on Day 1, would experience day-night cycles even before the Sun was created on Day 4. Today, thousands of years after that first day when matter was created throughout the universe, the CMB reaching earth is uniformly spread out over the entire sky. This is because blackbody radiation uniformly filled otherwise empty space on Days 1–3, before the heavens were stretched out. Since Day 4, the Sun has been earth’s dominant light source.
The Big Bang Perspective. The big bang theory, whose popularity is largely due to its explanation for the CMB, provides another explanation. Within a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was about the size of a basketball and was expanding trillions of billions of times faster than the speed of light today. Minutes later, matter and energy came together to form hydrogen nuclei.
Matter, during that time, was so compressed and temperatures were so hot that most nuclei would have merged to form heavier nuclei such as carbon, iron, and uranium. However, because hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in the universe today, something must have prevented this nuclear fusion. Intense background radiation would do the job, as Nobel prize winner Steven Weinberg explains:
[Before CMB was discovered, James Peebles, an early big bang researcher] noted that if there had not been an intense background of radiation present during the first few minutes of the universe, nuclear reactions would have proceeded so rapidly that a large fraction of the hydrogen present would have been “cooked” into heavier elements, in contradiction with the fact that about three-quarters of the present universe is hydrogen. This rapid nuclear cooking could have been prevented only if the universe was filled with radiation having an enormous equivalent temperature at very short wavelengths, which could blast nuclei apart as fast as they could be formed.2
Notice: CMB was needed to make the big bang theory work—as were “dark matter” and “dark energy.” [See “Dark Thoughts” on page 29.]