Earthquakes happen when the elephants who are holding up the earth shake themselves. That is what the Hindus once believed! But thousands of years ago, the Bible said what scientists now know to be true. “He hangeth the earth upon nothing.”

In fact, the Bible told of many things that scientists have only discovered in recent history.

Long ago, when the Bible said that the earth was suspended in space, it was probably difficult for the people of that time to imagine. What held it up?

The Hindus thought the earth was held up by four elephants standing on the back of a tortoise, which was on a huge, coiled serpent, which was swimming in a sea. When the elephants shook, it made an earthquake.

The Egyptians thought that the earth was held up by five pillars, and the Greeks thought it rested on the back of a giant named Atlas.

We know that there are laws that control our physical universe, such as gravity. Another important law of science is called the First Law of Thermodynamics.

The following is a simple explanation of this law from All About Science:

In its simplest form, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed. The amount of energy in the universe is constant – energy can be changed, moved, controlled, stored, or dissipated. However, this energy cannot be created from nothing or reduced to nothing. Every natural process transforms energy and moves energy, but cannot create or eliminate it. This principle forms a foundation for many of the physical sciences.

This is the same as what we read in the first book of the Bible. God finished creating everything. It is done.Things are no longer being created:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.                                                                    – Genesis 2:1 ESV

The Hebrew word that is translated in this verse to the English word ‘finished‘ is the following:

were completed
וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ (way·ḵul·lū)
Conjunctive waw | Verb – Pual – Consecutive imperfect – third person masculine plural
Strong’s Hebrew 3615: To be complete, at an end, finished, accomplished, or spent

The First Law of Thermodynamics is in agreement with the Bible. Creation is finished, completed. Energy can be converted from one form to another, but nothing new can be created.

Then there is The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Basically, it says that everything is running down, much like an old-fashioned wind-up clock. Fred Hoyle, a famous scientist, said in his book, ‘The Nature of the Universe,’ that the sun is slowly running down, and in a long time from now, perhaps ten billion years, it will burn itself out and explode. This agrees with what was written long ago in the Bible.

“They (the heavens) will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment.”                                                               – Psalm 102:26

Now if the universe is running down and will someday grind to a halt, we know it must have had a beginning. Many scientists used to argue that the universe had always existed. But now astronomers know that the universe is exploding outward at terrific speeds, and that this explosion must have had a start at some point in time. They believe galaxies are traveling away from us at up to 100 million miles an hour! They can tell all of this by measuring the distance between stars. As the stars move farther away from us, they also move farther away from each other.

Picture – Attribution: Design Alex Mittelmann, Coldcreation

An easy way to understand this would be to imagine holding a limp balloon with 4 or 5 dots on it. If you were to blow it up, you would see the dots move farther and farther away from each other as the balloon gets bigger. This is what scientists have discovered about the stars. In much the same way, they move farther away from each other as the universe explodes outward.

For thousands of years, Christians have believed that there was a beginning, as told in the very first verse in the Bible:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”   – Genesis 1:1

                                   ‘Pillars of Creation’

This is a photograph that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula…some 6,500–7,000 light years from Earth!

Another thing that we understand from the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that in time, the universe tends toward disorder or confusion. So, in the beginning, things must have been more orderly, but are now running down, wearing out, and getting worse or more disorderly.

“…You, Lord, in the beginning created the earth, and with your own hands you made the heavens. They will disappear, but you will remain; they will all wear out like clothes.”                                           – Hebrews 1:10, 11

Did you know that this is the opposite of what the Theory of Evolution says? It teaches that everything started out with less order and is getting better and more advanced – a contradiction to the laws of science.

We live in a vast universe, full of marvels. In April of 2018, astronomers told of finding the most distant ‘ordinary’ star, named Icarus, and said that it is 9 billion light years away!    (A light year is how far from earth light travels in one year.)  One light year is about 6 trillion miles!  That is: 6,000,000,000,000.

Long ago, people attempted to count the stars. Ptolemy was a Greek mathematician who lived from approximately 100 to 168 AD, during the Roman Empire. He counted 1,056 stars.

Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer who was born in 1546 cataloged 777.

Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer and mathematician who was born in 1571 counted 1,005.

How many stars does the Bible say there are?

And as the stars of the sky cannot be counted and the sand on the seashore cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of my servant David and the Levites who minister before me.”     – Jeremiah 33:22

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said that there are more stars in our Universe than grains of sand on the beaches of earth.

Sir James Jeans, an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician who lived from 1877-1946 said: ‘Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.’  He also said: ‘The stream of human knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm.’

The heavens truly do ‘declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’ – Psalms 19:1.

Albert Einstein could see the harmony in nature, and said there must be an intelligent force behind it all.

Robert Jastrow, (who died in 2008) was an American astronomer, planetary physicist, and a NASA scientist. His views on creation were that although he was an agnostic, it seemed to him that “the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future” due to “the circumstances of the Big Bang – the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past”. With the discovery of the Big Bang, he began to believe that if there was a beginning to the universe, there was also a Creator.

In an interview with Christianity Today, Robert Jastro said the following: “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”

If you are familiar with the story of Robinson Crusoe, perhaps you remember his startled reaction when he found a footprint in the sand. He did not actually see the person who left it, nevertheless, he did see the obvious evidence left behind that someone had indeed  been there.  There are plenty of people who see the evidence of God, but don’t believe because they just do not want to.

Footprint in the sand