My wife wanted me to watch The Incredible Hulk with her. I am not one to watch fictional movies. But I did want to please my wife so I agreed to watch it with her. This led to her getting mad at me. At a certain point in the movie, when Bruce Banner “hulked out,” I told my wife to pause the movie. I am an engineer. So of course, as an engineer, I was compelled to explain to my wife how this “violates the first law of thermodynamics.”¹ When Bruce Banner hulks out, where does all of that additional mass come from? The air? And then when Bruce Banner goes back to normal, where does all of that mass go? It just does not work! It is no better than the Roadrunner running through a tunnel painted on the side of a mountain. My wife was not happy about me stopping the movie to explain to her the first law of thermodynamics. Then she did not accept my explanation that I was just doing what engineers do.

Philosophical materialists have this same problem with the big bang.   As I have explained before, philosophical materialism is the belief that matter and energy are all that exist. Philosophical materialism is synonymous with atheism, and is the basis for secular humanism – man makes the rules because there is no higher authority. The big bang theory and the General Theory of Evolution are products of philosophical materialism because they are an attempt to explain things without God. So like the Hulk, where did all of the matter and energy for the big bang come from?

I believe the Bible. I believe that God spoke the universe into existence. Now of course my atheist friends will ask me “Where did God come from?” Well, I believe God always existed, and is outside of space and time.   In Exodus 3, when God spoke to Moses at the burning bush, He referred to Himself as “I Am.”² Then in John 8:58 Jesus said ““I tell you the truth, before Abraham was even born, I Am!”³ The people wanted to stone Jesus because they understood what Jesus was saying.

Now does this explain the presence of God or how God always existed? Of course not! I cannot explain God. But the point I want to make is that at least my thinking is consistent. I am saying that there is more than just matter and energy. There is this incredible being that I do not understand that spoke and matter and energy came into existence. The philosophical materialists are saying that matter and energy are all that exist and there is a naturalistic explanation for everything. But somehow, out of nothing, for no particular reason, all of the matter and energy that comprise the universe came into existence. It was initially a singularity of infinite density and heat and this singularity expanded into what became the universe.^{4, 5}

     But then you have to ask yourself, what basis do the philosophical materialists have for even doing science? Science is based on experimentation, observation, repeatability, and falsifiability. If you do an experiment today, then repeat the experiment tomorrow and duplicate the conditions, you will get the same result. So even to do science:

a.  the universe must be governed by laws.

b.  the laws of the universe must be unchanging.

In other words, if gravity worked yesterday, gravity has to work today in the same way and then it has to work tomorrow in the same way. What basis does a philosophical materialist have for accepting this? Just the fact that it always has? If the universe could just come into existence from nothing then what would keep gravity or electromagnetism from changing?

The book of Job may be one of the older books in the Old Testament. At the end of the book of Job, God is questioning Job. Job 38:33 tells us that the universe is governed by laws.⁶ Jeremiah prophesized before the fall of the southern kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians. Jeremiah 33:25 tells us that God will not change these laws.⁷ So unlike my atheist friends, I actually have a basis for knowing that we can do science. The Bible teaches me that the universe is governed by laws and God will not change these laws.

So the next time someone states that Bible believing Christians (often times referred to as the “religious right”) are anti-scientific, remember that it is Bible believing Christians that have a worldview that is consistent with doing science, not philosophical materialists.

Terry Read

1. http://www.allaboutscience.org/first-law-of-thermodynamics-faq.htm

2. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+3:14

3. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8%3A58&version=NLT

4. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/story/2012-02-04/lawrence-krauss-universe/52951768/1

5. http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

6. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38%3A33&version=NLT

7. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+33%3A25&version=NLT