The Big Bang as a creationist theory

Recently, I learned that a well-known philosopher, on hearing about the serious difficulties for any origin of life theory, suggested that maybe creationism should be taught in schools.

I gather he meant only that the genuine difficulties with materialism should be admitted in schools, so get your shirt out of that knot, materialist boy.

Anyway, in response, I wrote this to some friends:

One key – and very successful – Darwinist media strategy is to make “creationism” sound like an educational meltdown.

[As Mark Steyn would probably have it, hillbillies who are too closely involved with their sisters would be bending spoons in science class. Yeah, really. ]

In reality, as I have often pointed out, the Big Bang theory is a creationist theory!

That is precisely why many scientists did not originally like it, but were finally forced to accept it on evidence. For example, as we explain at The Design of Life blog,

In 1917, Einstein developed equations to describe the universe using the general relativity laws that he had published two years earlier. But he didn't like his equations because they seemed to show that the universe was "dynamic." He thought it should be static and eternal.

Still, Vesto Slipher's astronomical measurements at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which depended on Einstein's own relativity laws, implied that our universe is expanding.

But Einstein so much needed to believe that the universe was static and eternal that he actually changed his equations to include the famous cosmological constant he later so deeply regretted.

Physicist Gerald Schroeder reflects,

"Why the biggest blunder? Einstein realized that if day by day the universe was expanding, getting ever larger, then what about yesterday, a year ago, a millennium ago, and ever backward until billions of years ago there was only a point, a point that marked the beginning. Einstein could have followed his own discoveries and predicted the most important statement every made relative to man and the universe: there was a creation. And he blew it. He could not give up his opinion in favor of his facts."

Einstein was a great scientist and he went on from there, wiser.

Now, if we want a model for how to address design in the universe, we might begin by looking at hw the Big Bang (an obviously creationist theory) is addressed:

It is quite easy to espouse the Big Bang theory on the evidence, without concerning oneself in a science class about “Is there a God?” or “Why did God create the universe?”

These are inevitable questions eventually, but they are not the stuff of science teaching. The science teacher should talk about the cosmic background radiation and the order of the formation of elements.

It makes no more sense to refuse to talk about design in nature because it implies that there is a God than to refuse to talk about the Big Bang because it implies that there is a God.