National Geographic is a well-oiled, money-making machine.

And an exceptionally profitable one, at that. NatGeo markets everything from books and magazines to DVDs and even genetic testing.

They're especially known for their award-winning photography and documentaries. The wildlife documentaries, especially, are pretty cool.

Now they even have their own television network.

I'd say NatGeo is on a roll.

Another thing they have is a Darwinian worldview. They use spectacular, breathtaking photos of far-flung regions of the universe to advance the standard Darwinian explanation for its history and origins.

I'm not a scientist, of course, so I've learned to be guarded in my pronouncements about scientific matters. We have working scientists on our mailing list who are also committed believers. In fact, one of them was a colleague of Edwin Hubble (for whom the Hubble Telescope was named) many years ago. (You may have read his story in our 2004–05 Messianic Jewish Home Calendar.) Occasionally, one of these scientists steps in to correct something I've said or written about some point of science that wasn't exactly right. They know I don't mind; in fact, I appreciate their help—and also their patience.

However, I do understand enough about these matters to know that there should be no contradiction or antagonism between the Bible and science when both are correctly interpreted. After all, God is the Author of true science. He established all of the scientific disciplines—like biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics (which has been called "the language of the universe"), and even astronomy. He created the universe with all of its seemingly infinite variety and complexity, and ordained the laws according to which it functions.

His Creation includes the micro-universe (molecules, atoms, particles, DNA, and other itty-bitty things we can't see with the naked eye) and the macro-universe (planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, and the like—most of which are also invisible from earth without magnification). In many ways, God's Creation is an expression of His personality (Psalm 19:1-3; Rom. 1:20). It reflects the things that He values, like endless variety and individuality, beauty, creativity, purity, consistency, and order.

This is why it bothers me when I hear comments like, "I don't trust science; I just believe the Bible."

A statement like this, while well-intentioned, plays right into the hands of Darwinists because it creates a dichotomy between the Bible and science. This is exactly what they want. They want us to think that we have to make a choice between science and the Bible. They want us to think that if something is scientific, it's not biblical; and vice versa.

That dichotomy doesn't make sense to me. It's a little like saying we have to make a choice between the Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci. Why can't we embrace both the creator and his creation?

Nonetheless, this is the sort of Neanderthalian thinking that goes on in some obscure corners of the Christian world: science bad, Bible good—ugh. Little wonder, then, that in pop culture, creationism is widely ridiculed as silly and empty-headed:

NatGeo reflects the scientific establishment's predominant worldview, which is Darwinism. As hard as Darwinists try to maintain a respectably objective persona, what they've actually done is set up a sort of anti-religion. It assumes that our world as we see it today is the byproduct of many aeons of random, natural processes with no divine guidance or intervention. It's a naturalistic, non-supernatural (and I would also say naive) way of looking at the world and its history. Darwin himself readily acknowledged that he had turned away from his former religious views and devised a system that essentially made God unnecessary.

Like other religions, the Darwinian anti-religion has its own priesthood (including anti-Christian fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins), seminaries (Yale and Harvard divinity schools, among others), and holy books (like Origin of Species). It even has its own dogma (materialism and natural selection), heresies (doubting the validity of materialism and natural selection), and more recently, its own eschatology prophesying how the world will end.

Furthermore, Darwinism must be accepted by faith. Facts that militate against it are simply ignored—or worse, suppressed.

The discussion about the "early universe" has been heating up (no pun intended) lately because astronomers are getting closer to seeing what they believe is the edge of our space-time universe—at a distance of roughly 15 billion light years in the Hubble Deep Field. That means (based on the assumption that everything started with a Big Bang about 15 billion years ago) we can actually "see" the aftermath of (and background radiation from) that infamous primordial explosion.

So if it's really true that we can detect light that's traveled 15 or so billion light years to reach earth, shouldn't that mean the universe is at least 15 billion years old? Well, that's the old-school Darwinian view—but let's not chisel it in concrete quite yet. Recent cosmological theories and ongoing research have opened up a whole vista of alternatives. For instance, check out “Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem” by Jason Lisle (PhD, Astrophysics), in Answers Research Journal 3 (2010), pp. 191-207. In the abstract, Dr. Lisle writes, “In particular, we find that an observer-centric anisotropic synchrony convention eliminates the distant starlight problem by reducing radially inward-directed light travel-time in the reference frame of the observer to zero. Such a convention implies that everything in the universe has an age of a few thousand years as we currently see it.”

Even more light might be shed on this by Einstein's concept of gravitational time dilation (that is, the idea that time isn't necessarily a constant because it can flow at different rates in different environments).

There are other possibilities, as well. The theoretical Einstein Rosen Bridge (dramatized in Carl Sagan’s best-selling novel Contact and later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) suggests that hours, days, or even millions of earth-years might elapse in far-flung regions of the expanding universe (accessed through a "wormhole" in space-time) while only moments pass on earth.

Especially curious is the recent discovery that distant regions of the universe are moving outwardly much more quickly than had previously been thought. It's like we're on play but the outer regions of the universe are on fast-forward. The expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down.

Maybe some people shouldn't have been in such a hurry to throw out the Genesis Creation account after all. As it turns out, there are special circumstances where millions or billions of "years" might pass in far-flung regions of the universe while only hundreds or thousands of years elapse here on earth.

Who knew?

Why are we so anxious to cow-tow to unbelieving scientists whose conclusions may be tainted by unbiblical assumptions (like closed-system naturalism and uniformitarianism, for instance)? Modern science was pioneered by God-fearing people like Isaac Newton, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Copernicus, just to name a few.

So who died and left the skeptics and unbelievers in charge of the scientific domain? I say it's time we took it back.

The more we learn about our time-space universe, the more "old school" Darwinism looks like it's just that: old and outdated.

Even now, in the 21st Century, the most profound words ever written are still these:

"In the beginning God ..." (Gen. 1:1).