Sometimes, the theories and postulations of scientists require a great leap of faith to swallow them. Sometimes, they are simply unbelievable.

               Astrophysics, for example, has enjoyed a splendid run on television “infomentaries” (Discovery, History, PBS, etc.), presenting theories about the origin of the universe as if they were gospel. Night after night, there is a constant drumbeat about how the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago, how our own sun lit up a few billion years later, and how Earth came into being 4.68732807 billion years ago, give or take a few million.

               They tell us that all the elements around (and in) us were spat out by exploding mega-stars umpteen billion years ago and, in fact, Earth wouldn’t exist at all were it not for such explosions. Gold deposits around the world and the huge lithium deposits recently found in Afghanistan are here today, compliments of super-novae a long, long time ago and far, far away.

               We are constantly reminded that Earth was once nothing more than a vast cloud of dust and gas. These dust and gas particles eventually started to clump together, by Gravity, and remain inseparable forever, or at least until some outside force split them apart. Over eons of time, more and more particles joined the group until a rock was formed, which clumped together with another rock forming a bigger rock, which…You get the point. Eventually, enough of these rocks were brought together and morphed into a sphere around a core of liquid, molten iron and, Voila!, Earth.

               At some point, the comets arrived bringing the seeds of life and precious, life-sustaining water. (Where the comets got the water from is still a mystery.) From these gifts and the other elements generously sent to us by the stars, Gravity bless them, has evolved all the life forms that have ever existed.

               I am not making this up. I’ve seen it on television and we all know that if it’s on television, it must be true. But wait, as the pitch goes, there’s more. Oh, yes, much more!

               What really blows my mind is the “pinnacle of understanding” as I heard it directly from Stephen Hawking one day. Hawking is a demi-god who is worshipped in the astro-physical universe and, like E.F. Hutton, when he speaks, everyone listens. Anyway, he made the claim that there was a point in time (if time existed at all) where the entire, material universe was condensed, by Gravity, into a spot smaller than the smallest part of an atom. Everything was crammed in. Every constellation, galaxy, star, black hole, planet, gas cloud, was squeezed so small as to become non-existent.

               What really makes this interesting is that the material in the universe we can see and know about makes up only 5-10% of the whole universe, with the balance being made up of so-called dark matter, which we can’t see and know hardly anything about. Hawking believes that this dark matter was also included in the original mix and everything, both the matter we see and the matter we don’t, became one infinitely small amount of 100% pure energy, which simply exploded at the Big Bang and has been expanding, evolving, and creating ever since.

               Imagine, if you will, trying to compress one single tiny grain of sand into a state of virtual non-physicality, pure energy and nothing else. Imagine a force so large that Earth itself could be put into this position. The earth is 7, 926 miles in diameter (at the equator) and the sun is 865, 000 miles in diameter, give or take. Many stars are hundreds or thousands of times larger than our sun. Arcturus, for example, is supposed to have a diameter of 44 million miles.

               We live in a small galaxy called the Milky Way. There are an estimated 100 to 250 billion stars in our galaxy alone, yet there are galaxies out there which are far, far larger. Furthermore, it is estimated that the number of galaxies in the universe total in the hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions. We cannot even comprehend the number of stars this would make, let alone all the planets, black holes, quasars, dust and gas clouds, etc., which comprise the “known” galaxy.

               Multiply this phenomenal, stupendous mass by nine to ascertain the size of the dark matter that we don’t know about and you come up with an incredibly large, unfathomable amount which Hawking expects us to believe was once smaller than the smallest part of an atom.

Hunhhh??? They expect us to believe this????

Evidently they do, because all this is told with a straight face as if it were indisputable fact. Yet, the vast majority of astro-physicists, including Hawking, will tell you they don’t believe in God. How ridiculous is that? On the one hand they promote a theory which completely boggles the mind, which is so grandiose that the average person simply tunes it out, but they ridicule and demean anyone who claims that the universe was created by God and is sustained by His Spirit and rule.

It is, I suppose, theoretically possible that Hawking is right about the physical part of the universe, but he is dead wrong about its origin. I find Hawking’s hypothesis totally unbelievable, simply because I cannot wrap my mind around the logistics of the matter. I cannot comprehend the universe being squeezed so much that it virtually disappears into nothing but energy. This raises the question of where did this energy come from in the first place, but that’s another matter. The universe did not originate from a (non)spot of pure energy.

Scientists of all ilk vehemently defend this theory, but it takes an incredible amount of faith to believe something like this. Truthfully, it is so much easier to believe that God simply spoke—and it was. The Bible tells us that God spoke it into existence. God didn’t start from a spot of energy, He started from nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. This is what I believe. Who is going to tell me my faith is misplaced?

[Note: The above article was written four or five years ago, but never published. Since then, Stephen Hawking has died. Nothing else, as relates to this article, has changed.]