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Jaki is asserting that, since bara in Joshua 17:15-18 and Ezekiel 23:47 means "to split," this eliminates the idea of ex nihilo creation and connotes something akin to an evolutionary process, apparently because matter is "splitting" from matter and undergoing some kind of subsequent development, as opposed to being created whole with no subsequent modification. Ironically, in the same vicinity, Jaki recognizes that the majority opinion among scholars is that bara means creation "out of nothing," even citing P. Heinisch's cataloguing of bara in the Qal and Nifil stems as evidence against his view.(68)

So what, in the face of all the scholarly evidence against him, leads Jaki to conclude that bara "means basically 'to split' and 'to slash'" if it occurs with that specific meaning only in three instances out of forty? A hint to Jaki's reasoning is found in the beginning of the paragraph:

It should seem significant that both in the book of Ezechiel, certainly a post-exilic product, and in the book of Joshua, a product quite possibly some seven hundred years older, one is confronted with a very human connotation of bara...uses of it that span more than half a millennium.

So Jaki's main argument is that we should accept the meaning of bara as "to split" or "to slash" simply because the Piel stem was used early in Hebrew literature and retained its meaning 700 years later.

As an aside, let me alert the reader to my previous critique of Jaki's dating of biblical texts that appeared in my second essay for CFN. I pointed out that Jaki holds Genesis 1 as being written after the Babylonian captivity, circa 500 BC, and thus 700+ years after the writing of Joshua. In a similar vein, the reason Jaki can refer above to Ezekiel as being a "post-exilic product" is that the same historical-critical approach to Scripture which concluded that Genesis is "post-exilic" also claims that Ezekiel's prophecies of the Babylonian captivity are merely reminisces of the past, not visions of the future. In other words, Jaki thinks Ezekiel was fabricated to makes its words look like Ezekiel was predicting the future.

Thus, if someone were to counter Jaki's thesis by claiming that a sufficient amount of years separates the use of bara in Genesis from, say, the use of bara by contemporaries of Ezekiel, namely Isaiah 40:26 and Jeremiah 31:22 where bara means created "out of nothing," Jaki would tell us that the comparison has no merit because Genesis is not separated by a sufficient amount of years since it is "post-exilic" and thus very close in chronological proximity to Isaiah and Jeremiah. In other words, to Jaki, the meaning for bara as "created out of nothing" is only a late development in the vocabulary of the Jews, especially when compared to the indigenous meaning of bara as "to split" appearing during the conquest of Canaan 700 years prior. Again, this is so because Jaki believes Joshua was written long before Genesis. This, of course, is at best speculation and at worst another indication of the overly-enthusiastic conclusions of historical-criticism to which Jaki and many of his colleagues have fallen victim. In essence, they won't allow you to trust anything Scripture says about history and chronology.

The important thing to notice in Jaki's long-winded attempt to eliminate the concept of ex nihilo creation from the days of Genesis is the picayune literal interpretation he utilizes to prove his point. In fact, I don't know anyone who has gone to such lengths to parse the meaning of bara to prove such a point. But rest assured, if a "fundamentalist" had extracted the same kind of lexical minutia to prove a point for a six day creation, Jaki would have a cow over it, hurling the most derogatory epithets, as he does quite often in his writings.

Be that as it may, the ironic fact about Jaki's literal interpretation of bara is that it is totally without merit. Laying aside his reliance on the historical-critical hermeneutic, no Hebrew scholar worth his salt would determine the "basic" meaning of a Hebrew word from its Piel stem, unless, in a preponderance of cases in the Hebrew bible, the word in question appeared in the Piel stem. The Piel is an intensive form, and one of the more rare in Hebrew due to that intensity. When a Hebrew verb is put in the Piel it dramatically changes the meaning of the verb. In the three instances Jaki cites (Joshua 17:15; 17:18; Ezekiel 23:47) the Piel denotes "splitting" only because that is what the writer wanted to depict when trees are hewn down - one splits wood with an axe. The "basic" meaning of a Hebrew word, however, comes from the Qal stem. It just so happens that 71% of the uses of bara in the Hebrew Bible are in the Qal stem.(69) Another 19% are in the Nifil stem (but which doesn't change the meaning of the Qal, only its subject). That leaves the Piel stem with less than 10% of the appearances in the Hebrew bible, which is hardly determinative of the "basic" meaning of bara. Moreover, if a "splitting" or a "division" of matter were in view in Genesis 1:1, the Hebrew could have easily used the verb badal, as it does in Genesis 1:4 when God "divides" the light from the darkness.(70) As it stands, bara means "creation out of nothing," and Jaki has no way of disproving it.

Again, the point of the above exercise was to show how theistic evolutionists, such as Jaki and Mullan, who castigate and even name-call those who side with a literal reading of Genesis, can suddenly develop an acute affinity for literal interpretation if they find that it suits their cause.

Since we are critiquing Mullan's essay in the New Oxford Review in chronological order, we will come back to Mullan's attempts at biblical exegesis a little later. For now, the next topic he speaks about is his work as an astrophysicist. He writes:

Why do I find the young-Earth development troubling? Because it flies in the face of reason. In my profession as an astronomer, I am familiar with abundant evidence from the physical world indicating that the Earth and the Sun and the Universe have ages that are measured in billions of years. The evidence for these ages comes from at least five distinct and independent areas of research in astrophysics: expansion of the universe, stellar structure, isotope dating, white dwarf cooling, and properties of the cosmic microwave radiation.

It is beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that, if the Universe were actually no older than a few thousand years...many hundreds of researchers from diverse countries and all religious backgrounds would discover five completely different methods which all yield multi-billion-year ages.(71)

Interestingly enough, Mullan does not explain how his "five distinct...areas of research in astrophysics" prove that the earth is old, nor does he direct the reader to any sources where his so-called proofs can be studied and scrutinized. Apparently, the reader is supposed to accept this assertion simply because Mullan says so. So let's analyze his claims.

First, the nature, cause and meaning of each of the five "areas of research" are by no means settled issues in astronomy. I was a physics major in college with an emphasis on astronomy, and I have kept up with much of the literature since then. I can tell you in all honesty that, although scientists have accumulated more information about the universe over the last few decades, they are more confused now than they ever were as to its nature and function. Ironically, the more they discover, the more they find out how much they don't know. Information is not the issue. Anyone can look through a telescope and record what he sees. It is the interpretation of that information which is key.

Let's take one of Mullan's more popular assertions, the so-called "expansion of the universe." This novel concept was the result of Albert Einstein's work. When he formulated Relativity theory, he was surprised to find that the mathematics required either a contracting or expanding universe. In order to compensate for this, Einstein added his infamous fudge factor - the "cosmological constant" - a mathematical equation which kept the universe stable.(72) But in 1929, Edwin Hubble (from which the Hubble Space Telescope is named), who interpreted the "red shift" of star light as the stretching of it's wavelength (which I spoke about in my last essay for CFN), formulated an equation to calculate the speed at which galaxies receded from the earth. The more "red shift" in the star light, the further away the galaxy was said to be from us, and the faster it was receding compared to a galaxy closer to us. The calculation of its recession speed became known as Hubble's Law.(73)

Needless to say, Hubble's Law supported the idea that the universe was expanding. Moreover, if it was expanding, then it must have been much smaller billions of years ago. If we could imagine the expansion being reversed until the universe went back to its original form, Hubble calculated that the present expansion had been transpiring 3-4 billion years, at least according to how far telescopes could peer into the universe in 1929.

You can imagine what sort of welcome Hubble received from the science community, and particularly from evolutionists. This was the key ingredient to their theory of a multi-billion year universe, which they desperately needed in order to give enough time for things to "evolve." Hence, the connection between Einstein's Relativity and Darwin's Evolution was cemented. Hubble's work was immediately pressed into service for evolution in his famous 1953 "Darwin lecture" in which he states:

"...the law will represent approximately a linear relation between red-shifts and distance. When recession factors are included, the distance relation is...accelerated expansion...[If no recession factor is included]..the age of the universe is likely to be between 3000 and 4000 million years, and thus comparable with the age of rock in the crust of the Earth."(74)

Those astrophysicists who challenged Hubble's work, and there were a good many of them, were eventually ostracized by the scientific community. In fact, a well known astronomer by the name of Halton Arp, who was the protege of Edwin Hubble, was systematically marginalized because his extensive work on quasar and galaxy red shifts indicated that the universe was not expanding. As astrophysicist Jayant Marlikar writes:

The ludicrous climax came about ten years ago when Arp was denied the use of telescopes in major observatories. The reason given was that his findings "did not make sense" and were therefore a "waste of time." In other words, telescopes are meant only to confirm the established ideas and not turn up anomalous data.(75)

Astrophysicist Paul Marmet concurs:

Science is said to be about searching for truth, but the harsh reality is that those whose views clash with established theories often find themselves ridiculed and denied funds and publications.(76)

With the addition of Hubble's Law, all the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. In the mid 1800s Charles Lyell convinced the world that the layers of sediment we saw on elevated plains were the result of strata being deposited in sequences of millions of years. His contemporary, Charles Darwin, told us that the fossils found in those layers were deposited chronologically, from the simplest organisms at the bottom to the very complex at the top. As noted, Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble gave science the billions of years they needed to mesmerize the adoring public into thinking that given enough time anything could happen, including evolution. Sigmund Freud dispensed with Genesis 3's explanation for evil (Original Sin) and replaced it with a "scientific" reason (i.e., repressed memories in the "id" from a tormented childhood that could not be overcome by the "ego"). Julius Wellhausen and Rudolph Bultmann convinced us that Genesis 1's Creation story was merely a rehash of old Babylonian myths and legends. Shake all this up and bake it in the pan and you have the main ingredients for our modern society that has practically lost sight of God having anything to do with the universe. Added to this are the multitudes of Catholic religious who, not wanting to be embarrassed by another Galileo-type episode, try their best to incorporate each of the above theories into their beliefs, and one of the best examples of this is theistic evolution.

But as you might suspect, there is more to this than meets the eye. To put it bluntly, the above theories have created the illusion of intelligence and certainty. They are passed off as fact but with little, if any, evidence to support their claims. To perpetuate the illusion, modern science needs only point to a few of its accomplishments (e.g., the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wireless phones, antibiotics) and suddenly the populace is filled with awe and wonder and dare not ask any questions. Or to put it more bluntly, the Goliath of scientism only need brandish his ten-foot sword and all the Christians go scurrying away in fright. But when all is said and done, it will only take a well-placed blow to bring down the whole edifice.

Let's start with the real story behind the "expanding universe" idea. Edwin Hubble worked with M. L. Humason, but only Hubble's name survives. The reason is that Humason did not succumb to the pressure being put on the two men from the scientific community to provide evidence for a multi-billion year expanding universe. The scientific community, based on the work of Einstein, had already decided that the universe was expanding and they were more than ready to interpret the "red shift" as a Doppler shift wherein galaxies were said to be moving away at great speeds from the observer.(77) Mind you, there is no proof for a connection between receding galaxies and red shift, or that galaxies are indeed receding at all, or that red shift is to be interpreted as a Doppler shift. In fact, in a paper published in 1931 Humason wrote:

It is not at all certain that the large redshifts observed in the spectra are to be interpreted as a Doppler effect but, for convenience, they are interpreted in terms of velocity and referred to as apparent velocities.(78)

Humason paid a dear price for his non-conformance. Whereas in the early going, the discovery of the redshift/distance ratio was attributed to "Hubble-Humason," later, when it was clear that Humason would not capitulate, his name was eventually dropped from the credits, which is why the public only knows it as "Hubble's Law."

To fit the data he observed in 1929, Hubble figured that his "H" constant, which was the proportion between the speed of the galaxy compared to its distance away from us, would have to be 100 kilometers per second per megaparsec.(79) Thus, if a galaxy was said to be 10 megaparsecs away from us, Hubble's Law said it must recede with a velocity of 1000 kilometers per second. If the galaxy were a gigaparsec from us (which is 1000 megaparsecs), it must recede with a velocity of 100,000 kilometers per second.

Lo and behold, as more powerful telescopes were built, one of them, ironically, being the Hubble Space telescope, the universe Hubble saw in 1929 was dwarfed by what men were discovering in the 1970s through 1990s (at least with the formulas they currently use to measure astral distances). The universe was no longer measured in megaparsecs but gigaparsecs. The first estimates came in at 50 gigaparsecs.(80) But if one enforced the Dopplerian interpretation of redshifts on a universe of 50+ gigaparsecs in size, Hubble's Law would be forced to say that the outer galaxies were receding from earth faster than the speed of light! What a kettle of fish this was! The very Einsteinian theory that gave them the expanding universe was now faced with a universe that was, as it were, too big for its britches, and which ends up contradicting Einstein's most cherished fact of life - that nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

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