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Author Topic:   Man's Search for God
R. Cuaresma
Inactive Member


Message 1 of 2 (289950)
02-24-2006 4:09 AM


Creation vs. Evolution
The Theory of Evolution: Hundreds or even thousands of books have been published since the Darwinian Theory of Evolutions, purporting that life came from a non-life form and evolved to a so-called organics molecules. A more complex form of these organic molecules developed into simple living organisms, thus the first stage of life. But how or where did everything in nature came to existence? And how does the universe evolved and reached the stage until it became suitable for life? The Regents of the University of Michigan had published an article entitled, Five Ages of the Universe describing how the universe evolved, and what will be its fate in the course of times. They assigned specific age for each era of evolution. I present here the first three (3) ages: the Primordial Era, the Stelliferous Era, and the Degenerate Era, to describe how the universe evolved and came to its present condition.
Primordial Era. The first age of the universe is what we call the Primordial Era, which is really the Big Bang Theory. In the beginning, there was no real space or time, because space and time had not yet separated. Also, in this Primordial Age, quantum theory and general relativity have to be incorporated in a theory of quantum gravity to describe the universe. At this moment, the universe is roughly 10 to-the-minus 43 (10-43) seconds old, and out of this quantum gravity epoch, some type of nucleation event leads to the production of our universe. What this means in practice is that some small region of space-time bursts into existence, and "into existence" means, in this context, that space and time became defined in that tiny region. From that moment onward, our universe, as a universe, exists, and it is the goal and job of cosmologists to how that evolves.
Here’s the story.
The first thing that happens in the universe's existence is that it starts inflating incredibly rapidly. This early phase of extremely fast expansion explains many of the properties that we see in our universe today, such as why it’s homogeneous and isotropic (in other words, why the universe is the same everywhere in space and why it looks the same in all directions that we look in the sky). This early burst of rapid expansion also explains why the universe is as old and as flat as it is.
This inflationary stage occurs when the universe is about 10-37 seconds old. In the early stages of the universe, everything is in the form of radiation. Particles and anti-particles come in and out of existence on a regular basis. Between that time and the one-microsecond mark, perhaps the most important event in the early universe happens. Matter is created. Now, most of the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to matter and anti-matter. And the physics experiments that we've done so far support the theory that when you create matter, you also create an equal amount of anti-matter (that can annihilate with matter).
But we don't live in an anti-matter world. If you touch the person next to you, you don't explode. When we landed people on the moon, the astronauts didn't explode in a matter-anti-matter reaction. What that means is that everything in this room or on the moon is made of matter and not anti-matter. Through more indirect methods, astronomers have successfully done this experiment across the universe, almost all the way to our cosmological horizon today. In that whole volume, as best we know, all material is made of regular matter and not anti-matter. This is very important. What this means is that during the first microsecond of cosmic history, some process set up an asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, producing a little bit of extra matter.
The amount of excess matter that was produced in the earliest existence of the universe was tiny. If you had 30 million anti-matter quarks, it would annihilate 30 million matter quarks, with one quark left over made of regular matter. That one extra matter quark in 30 million is just like a contaminated residue, but that’s the only thing that survives the early universe to become everything that you would call ordinary matter in our universe today. After the microsecond mark, those excess quarks condense and make protons and neutrons for the first time.
This event has profound implications for the future of the universe. Namely, if there is a process that can prefer matter over anti-matter, or the other way around, such a physical process is still around. If we know that there's a process that can be asymmetric with respect to matter and anti-matter, then every proton in the universe is eventually doomed. We think that protons live longer than 1033 years, but somehow, some way, in the far future all of the protons will decay. So matter is not forever. It lives from the microsecond mark in the universe, and it only lives until protons decay, sometime later in our story.
By the time the universe is one second old, it has cooled enough that protons and neutrons can get together and form large nuclei like helium. The amount of helium that is produced in this early burst of nucleo - synthesis - that starts when the universe is a second old and ends when the universe is about three minutes old - is the vast majority of all the helium in our universe. Stars produce helium today, but this early burst of nucleo-synthesis generated more helium than all the stars that have ever lived anywhere in our universe. Similarly, this early interaction produced more energy than has been generated by all the stars in the universe today. This is an enormously energetic event. It is the smoking gun of Big Bang Theory. Without this theory, there's no other way to account for the helium that we see today in our universe.
We also feel that the Big Bang Theory is on solid footing because if the universe did go through such an early hot dense phase, there should be some residual radiation left over, which can be called the afterglow of the "Big Bang." And we can see this radiation in the sky. The whole universe is filled with a pervasive sea of microwaves. In fact, the universe is similar to a really low-power microwave oven. What's more, if the universe were hot and dense in its earliest phases, then the distribution of the energy in this background should have a certain blackbody shape. This shape indicates that there's almost no way that this radiation could come from anything other than an early, hot, dense "big bang."
What's more, although the universe is very homogeneous in that the temperature in this microwave background is the same everywhere in the sky, it's not quite the same. It's only the same to one part in a hundred thousand. And this departure of one part in a hundred thousand is very significant. First of all, it's a heroic effort to measure; it wasn't measured until the very early 1990s. Most importantly, these small fluctuations eventually form the galaxies. They condense through gravitational contraction, and eventually condense into galaxies, clusters of galaxies and larger-scale structures.
The Stelliferous Era. The Primordial Era ends when the universe is about a million (106) years old and generates its first stars. We then enter into the current era, called the Stelliferous Era, which extends from cosmological decade six to about fourteen (106-1014), ending when the universe is about 100 trillion years old. This is where our era progresses.
Right now, stars are the most important objects in the universe, in a sense, because the stars are the source of most of the energy that is generated in our universe today. The sun is a star, and the number of stars in the universe is about the same as the number of sand grains in a big sand dune, about 1023 if you want to put a number on it. Most energy in the Stelliferous Era is generated through the process of nuclear fusion - the fusion of hydrogen into helium - which releases energy. This process powers the sun now and will continue to do so for about 7 billion years. At that time, the sun will turn into a red giant, with its outer surface expanding from its current small position to about the radius of the Earth's orbit. Now, you don't have to worry about that event 7 billion years from now, because long before, in about 3.5 billion years, life on Earth will already be gone. As the sun gets older, it gets brighter, heating the Earth, creating a catastrophic, runaway greenhouse effect that will make global warming seem like a walk in the park. It will boil the oceans and completely scald the entire biosphere.
You might have heard that our sun is an ordinary star. Well, you've been lied to. If you look at the 50 nearest stars, the sun is actually the fourth largest. The typical star has a mass about a quarter of that of our sun. If you look at the population of stars in the galaxy as a whole, most stars are actually smaller-mass stars. These red dwarfs live much longer than our sun, typically trillions of years. The smallest star that can burn hydrogen is about 8 percent of the sun's mass and about a thousand times dimmer. When it dies, a star like the sun becomes a red giant, growing about a hundred thousand times brighter than its current luminosity. But these little stars never become red giants; they just stay at about the same small size, then turn around and become white dwarfs when they die.
Let's take inventory of the stellar population of the universe. About half of the stellar bodies are brown dwarfs, which are failed stars. They are objects with a mass of less than about 8 percent of the sun and are too small to sustain hydrogen burning. Brown dwarfs sit around for trillions of years and do essentially nothing. That's very important in the future because all of the accessible unburned hydrogen in the universe will be wrapped up in these brown dwarfs. Half the stars that exist really are stars in the sense that they burn their hydrogen into helium. The vast majority of these are red dwarfs, stars much smaller than the sun. There are a small number of sun-like stars and an even smaller number of massive stars that burn themselves out more rapidly.
We can determine how long stars continue to burn to burn their hydrogen into helium. Most of the stars that are hydrogen-burning stars (every star from about 8 percent of the solar mass all the way up to eight solar masses, which is 997 out of 1000 stars) become white dwarfs when they die. Our sun will do this after its red giant phase. The sun will shed about half of its mass, and the core at its middle will shrink to about the size of our Earth. This future sun will have a density about a million times denser than the current sun, and it will be a degenerately supported object called the white dwarf. A red dwarf star also becomes a white dwarf but preserves most of its mass. Becoming a white dwarf is the fate of the vast majority of all hydrogen-burning stars.
About three out of a thousand true stars have a more dramatic end in store for them. At the end of their lifetimes, they blow up in a supernova explosion. When a super nova explodes, two possible things are left behind--a neutron star and a black hole. A neutron star is what you get when you take something the mass of the sun and compress it down to about the size of Ann Arbor, about 10 kilometers in radius. It's almost one big atomic nucleus, and that object is supported by the degeneracy pressure of its neutrons. If you then take that object and compress it another three or four times smaller in terms of radius, it will become a black hole.
When you take all of the relevant processes into account, the longest that a galaxy like our Milky Way can sustain star formation is about 10 trillion years, close to the lifetime of the longest-lived star. This tells you that the universe will undergo a fairly sharp transition between a universe with stars and a universe without stars. During the thirteenth cosmological decade (1013 years), when the universe is 10 trillion years old, the stars will still be shining brightly. Because the stars get brighter as they get older, the galaxy won't be much dimmer than it is today even though most of the stars will be small stars. But when the universe is 10 times older, in the fourteenth cosmological decade (1014 years), all of the stars will have burned out, or exhausted their hydrogen. The galaxy will have run out of gas to make new stars, so the process of star formation will also shut down.
The Degenerate Era. When stellar evolution comes to an end, we enter the Degenerate Era. Most ordinary stars will be done with the business of nucleosynthesis as stellar bodies. In our inventory of stars, we have about equal numbers of brown dwarfs and white dwarfs, and about three in a thousand black holes and neutron stars. Since the white dwarfs are quite a bit larger than the brown dwarfs (by about a factor of 10 in mass), the vast majority of the actual (baryonic) mass - the protons - are embedded in these white dwarfs. Although a lot of gas is also left behind in this future universe, it's very diffuse and wispy.
In sum, what are left in the Degenerate Era are degenerate stellar remnants (degenerate here refers to a quantum mechanical property of dense matter, not to a moral statement about the universe). From cosmological decade 15 to perhaps 37 (1015-1037 years), these degenerate objects are the most important stellar objects in the universe.
At this point the brown dwarfs - the failed stars - start to come into play because they can collide. In our universe today, astronomers never worry about stars colliding, and the reason is simple. The amount of space that is filled by stars is phenomenally small. Populating the universe with stars is like taking little tiny sand grains and putting them miles and miles apart. With that much space between the stars, collision is very rare. However, if you wait long enough, sometimes things that are unlikely do, in fact, happen. And if you wait long enough, stars are going to collide in our galaxy. When two brown dwarfs collide at a sufficiently head-on angle, then the merged product can have enough mass to sustain hydrogen fusion. The result is a star with enough mass to turn on and become a red dwarf just over the hydrogen-burning limit. It will then burn up the hydrogen it has previously hoarded. This star won't be large like our sun; it will be another one of these typical little red stars that lives for trillions of years.
Since we know how many brown dwarfs there are, and we know the galaxy they live in, and we know the collision rate of these stars, and we know how long the merged products will live, you can add all these things up and calculate how many such stars should be shining in a large galaxy like our Milky Way at any given time in the Degenerate Era. And the answer is two or three such stars. Today, as Carl Sagan has told us, there are billions and billions of stars in every galaxy, and they are bright. In this dark galaxy of the future Degenerate Era, there will be two or three stars from these merged brown dwarfs, and they will be about 10,000 times dimmer than the sun.
Every once in a while the white dwarfs will also collide. But most white dwarfs are small, so when they collide they will just form weird stars and will not do anything interesting. But, occasionally, when the big white dwarfs collide, the merged product can be large and fat enough that it will explode in a different kind of super nova explosion. So every once in a while this dark galaxy of the future will be punctuated by a spectacular super nova.
White dwarfs also sweep up dark matter particles. Over time, inside the white dwarf, these particles annihilate each other, turn into radiation, and become the dominant energy source in the universe. The power generated by such a white dwarf is about quadrillion watts, which is quite small compared to the sun, but that's a healthy fraction of the energy that our earth intercepts from the sun.
Over longer times, the galaxy itself changes its structure by evaporating its stars out into the intergalactic void. We would have a continual hierarchy of these dynamic processes, but protons will eventually decay. For purposes here, let's say that 37 cosmological decades (1037 years) is the typical proton lifetime. Most of the protons that we care about at this late stage in history will be embedded in white dwarfs, which is a very dense medium. Not only will there be protons, but also there will be the corresponding electrons around. When a proton decays into a positron, this positron will very quickly find an electron to annihilate with. The net result of a proton decay event inside a white dwarf star is thus to turn all of the mass energy into radiation. In particular, you get four photons. Those photons then interact with the other things in the star and transform into more and more low-energy photons as the energy works its way out of the stellar surface. The star surrenders its mass in the process.
With that picture in place, we can know, for the first time, the complete evolution of the sun, which will become a red giant and then a white dwarf once it cools and becomes smaller. In the long run, the proton decay process is the most important mechanism driving stellar structure. As the white dwarf radiates its mass and energy away, it grows larger even as it loses mass because degenerate objects work backwards. A white dwarf star undergoing proton decay will generate something like 400 watts of power--about as much as you can do on a rowing machine if you're working pretty hard. This process of degeneration will continue until the mass of the object has decreased from about the mass of the sun down to something close to the mass of Jupiter. At that point the object loses its degenerate properties, but the protons keep decaying. The star is now much like a block of hydrogen ice, with a dwindling store of mass and internal radiation escaping out of the body. Eventually, the block of hydrogen ice no longer exists and stellar evolution comes to an end. That is the long-term fate of our sun, and most other stars.
We began the Degenerate Era with an inventory of brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. We've seen that stars continue to form through these brown dwarf collisions. Dark matter gets captured in white dwarfs and endows the white dwarfs with a luminosity source, a power source that they wouldn't otherwise have. Against this backdrop, the galaxy rearranges its structure over time scales of 1020 years or so, relaxes dynamically, and evaporates most of its stars out into inter-galactic space. All the while, black holes that capture stars and gas and anything that they can get into their event horizons grow somewhat larger during this time. The Degenerate Era ends rather cleanly after the protons decay. For the numbers we're using here, this era ends after 1040 years, or cosmological decade 40.
With this information we are able to view that the universe came from nothing and nowhere. It just came out to the limelight like the end scenario of a “big bang” and continuously moves as we are experiencing right now. The next thing we do now is to trace how life evolved in this vastness of the universe.
First Life on Earth. The Earth might have been formed around 4.5 billion years ago - along with the other celestial bodies, and life could have started the next 1 billion years, which is approximately 300 million years after the time when the Earth was heavily bombarded by a shower of small asteroids or comets (Bubble Genesis of Life, Lynn Yarris, July 9, 1993). It means that life has emerged on Earth during the Stelliferous Era, when almost everything in the universe is on status quo. Shortly after life appeared here a group of blue-green bacteria or “cyanos” developed Earth's first solar powered energy system, breaking down carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and creating oxygen. (Microbial Diversity, Rolf Schauder and David Graham, 1997). Numerous organisms, born from this basic form of life, passed down the necessary information for survival, and continued to evolve through the ages. (Kentucky Geological Survey, September 13, 2005). The recorded first known earliest human ancestor is the Australopithecus who lived between 4 - 2.75 million years ago, and the evolution of Homo sapiens commenced approximately 200,000 - 300,000 years ago (Wicander and Monroe, 1993).
Based on the facts presented, we can have the following conclusions:
1. In the beginning, there was no real space or time, because space and
time xhave not yet been separated;
2. the universe had evolved immediately after the Big Bang;
3. the stars first were formed when the universe was about a million
(106) years old;
4. the Earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago;
5. the first organisms evolved in the sea as blue-green bacteria, the
first photo-synthesizers creating oxygen;
6. the first organisms passed down the necessary information for
survival, and continued to evolved through ages;
7. a more complex life-form developed until a diversified ecosystem
emerged;
8. Homo sapiens, the specie of man, first evolved around 200,000 -
300,000 years ago; and,
9. the successive patterns of evolution, from the universe to human
being, is similar to the pattern of creation.
The Days of Creation: All God’s creations were based on plans, which were designed to be successive or progressive in execution. These plans cannot be done in unison and require enough time to be fully-grown, for evaluation.
When God created the “light” at the center of the universe that was the cosmic era, when everything in the universe was centered to a spectacular, gigantic ball of light called the energy source. This energy source was made of the four elements that are essential to sustain a material life: soil (solid), water (liquid), air (gas) and fire (light). After the execution of this first plan, everything stopped there. Then evolution worked on it because of the natural forces (Natural Law) that eventually became operational upon the appearance of this first creation. For thousands of years the universe was nothing but an empty space of darkness with the aura of light gloriously shining on its center.
From the first plan God carried out the second plan, which was the continuation of the first. Then there was the “big bang,” when the light source was fragmented and dispersed out to give light to all directions of the universe. But the great explosion was not the same as a result of an atomic reaction but in a way as smooth as designed by God. From this explosion different galaxies were formed, and the phenomenon of day and night begun. Thus, on the first day of creation there has no specific period of time on how it actually lasted because the day and night phenomenon (24-hour Earth rotation) was not yet operational. It may be happened in a single moment which may equivalent to thousands of years in our present day time calculation. These were the second, the third, and the forth days of creation, when the Earth was formed and ruled by the sun (greater light) during day time and by the moon (lesser light) during night time.
The appearance of the Earth during those days was far different from its present appearance. The empty space that was being referred to as firmament (atmosphere) was made first of cloud-like gas called deuterium, a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen which are the primary elements of water. Greater concentrations of this cloud-like gas formed the bodies of water which were accumulated on Earth’s basins called oceans. Lesser concentrations evaporated to the sky. In fact, the primary element that gives life to the sun and other stars is hydrogen which is very abundant on Earth.
Genesis 1:1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and empty and there was darkness upon the surface of water. And the Spirit of God hovers on the surface of water.
The air then was not suitable to sustain life due to unfavorable conditions. It must be purified. The separation of pure water (formation of water from the cloud-like gas) from the ground took place for thousands of years, and the long exposure of the Earth to the still yet evolving sun caused reactions to the ground and atmosphere resulting to the formations of possible life-supporting elements (methane, enzyme, and nucleic acid). With this appearance of elements God created the first form of life which will be benefiting from it. This first form of life replenished the Earth resulting to the first progression of air cycle called photosynthesis, when the green coloring pigment of this plant-like life consumed the pollution in the atmosphere and released oxygen as by-product. From this single-celled plant-like life, He designed a more complex form, from algae to trees, creating the vegetation all over the land. This was the third day of creation.
The characteristics of each classification of plants were copied from the previous simple form and added to each succeeding creations one after another until a more complex form appeared. However it is impossible to maintain a balanced nature, especially air cycle, without the aid of animals. There must be a healthy and balanced ecosystem because the Law of Nature provided the rule. So, it is very logical that the creation of the first plant-like life form was immediately followed by the single-celled animal-like life form until a more complex one also appeared.
God’s plan was to create a material living entity that would be His “living temple,” an abode of His Holy Spirit where He can manifest His divinity and love. So He created man being the pattern for the establishment of His kingdom on Earth.
(there is a continuation)

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by AdminPhat, posted 02-24-2006 7:56 AM R. Cuaresma has not replied

AdminPhat
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Message 2 of 2 (289999)
02-24-2006 7:56 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by R. Cuaresma
02-24-2006 4:09 AM


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