Book Excerpt - The Blind Man's Elephant

Updated: Creation In Six Days, But Who’s Counting? The Blind Man’s Elephant

[Ed. Note: Quite a while ago now, the new version of the series COSMOS aired, hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who stirred up a bit of controversy with his comment, “If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems.” His statement appears to be made from a position of utter ignorance,¹ most likely based on his observations of Churchianity, rather than an intelligent study of the Biblical text. Therefore, we thought it appropriate to highlight an excerpt showing that while the Biblical record may not be a science text, it certainly has scientific facts in it that were made known thousands of years before current day scientists discovered the work of God. See the Feature article, Is Genesis 1 A Jolly Good Myth?].

Einstein and other scientists have discovered the space-time continuum within the past one hundred years [1915]. Perhaps startlingly, the space-time continuum was mentioned in the Biblical record 3000 years ago. While this may seem a bit astounding, let’s read what the Biblical record states: “That which has been is now, and that which is to be has already been; and God requires that which is past.” [Ecc. 3:15].

The Biblical record is discussing an aspect of the nature of time as created by God. We are told that which has been, the past, is now or the present. And that which is to be, the future, already has been or is the past. This is saying, the past is the present and the future is the past. The past, present and future are all one when it comes to the nature of time as God created it. What this verse in the Biblical record is describing is a singularity. It is the same point made by Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University cosmologist, when he says, “The beginning of real time, would have been a singularity ….”

Time at the quantum level remains a singularity. That is, the past, present and the future exist simultaneously as do our three dimensions of space in our everyday macroscopic world. In quantum theory, we can move in any direction in 3-D time, just as we can in our 3-D space. There are no psychological or other arrows of time to restrict us. How can it be like that? We don’t know. But this is the way it works as God, the Creator of our science, made it. At our level of experience in daily life, time appears in a linear fashion going in a direction from the past to that which we call the future. In other words, tomorrow never gets here.

The concept of time being a singularity is a relatively new scientific discovery of an aspect of the universe as created by God and written down in the Biblical record three millennia ago. [Note: Isaac Newton in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica introduced the concepts of absolute time and space]. It may be a bit difficult to understand how the fundamental nature of time is that the past, the present and the future all exist at once on the quantum level, but this is the basic fabric construction of our universe. Space and time are interwoven. At the beginning of the universe, at the last instant just preceding the Big Bang, time was a singularity.

Think of a balloon that isn’t inflated. Take a felt tip marking pen and put a dot on it. The dot represents time as a singularity. Now stretch that balloon out to one side. What happens to the dot? It stretches to become a line. Time as we experience it at the macroscopic level in our universe is like that dot stretched on the balloon. Time is linear. It goes in one direction for us. In our case, time moves in the direction of the expansion of our universe just like the dot moves to become a line in the direction of the stretching balloon. We aren’t told why it is this way just that this is the way it was created. It has created a reality unique to our experience of physical life in the universe.

If time, the past, the present, and the future are a singularity, why is it we can only remember the past and not the future? Again, how can it be like that? That’s the way our universe was created. Or as we read in Ecclesiastes, “God requires that which is past.” The word requires here is baqash [baw-kash’], a primitive root meaning to search out, but also can be translated as requires. The word past is radaph [raw-daf’], a primitive root meaning to run after, figuratively, of time gone by. So the Creator, by implication, “requires” us to run after and search out the past, but we aren’t allowed to do the same with the future even though, according to the laws of quantum physics, time is equally accessible in both directions. Maybe it’s another way to tell us we should learn from the past. [See 1 Cor. 10:11; the word world in v.11 is aion and means age or era].

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist said in regards to only knowing the past while attempting to understand time as a singularity, “It may prove useful in physics to consider events in all of time at once, and to imagine that we at each instant are only aware of those that lie behind us.” This is not unlike watching a movie for the first time. While the entire movie is a singularity, that is, it’s on a single disk, our dot, yet at each instant of the movie we are only aware of the events in the movie that we have already seen or that lie behind us. The entire movie, by comparison as it exists on the disk, is in its microscopic state. We can move from any point on the disk into the movie’s future or into the movie’s past with equal ease using the remote control. When we watch it on a screen, it expands into its macroscopic state. [Hawking’s real time].

In both cases it is bound by the speed of light. The entire movie may be burned onto the single disk within seconds, yet it may take us two hours to watch it relative to our “normal” frame of time. So how long is the movie, two hours or just a few seconds? It depends on the observer. If we could watch the movie there in the disk in its microscopic state, then we’d have to answers in seconds not hours. In our normal experience here with time, we’d have to answer two hours.

When we look at time’s relativity, and it being a singularity, Einstein, Feynman, Hawking and our Biblical non-physicist 3000 years ago have reached the same conclusion about the construction of our universe, but from two different, though complimentary routes.

Now what gets a bit more interesting is the Hebrew word used for the “past is the present,” the “future is the past” is kbar [keb-awr’] and can be defined as an extent of time. It is derived from the primitive root Hebrew word, as found in easily accessible Hebrew lexicons, kabar [kaw-bar’]. Kabar means to bind together; or to be great, to be long and continual or length of space, continuance of time. Hmm, does this sound anything like our English phrase space-time continuum? Bind together an extent of time. Bind it with what? Time and space are bound together? How can it be that in the pages of the Biblical record we find the concept of the space-time continuum and that time is a singularity written thousands of Earth years ago when physicists have only recently discovered these same principles? Hmm, just maybe, God did create the universe. But just maybe it wasn't created the way we thought it was. He created the Earth. It just isn’t flat. God created time. It just isn’t absolute.”


¹ This footnote does not appear in the book, hence the update. But it goes to the point of people who are Biblically ignorant trying to create doubt about the Biblical record's authenticity as the word of God. It's another lame attack on Christianity meant to create doubt in the minds of the casual lay person. It's somewhat like a blind person attempting to cast doubt that the aurora borealis exists, "it could be moonlight bouncing off a weather balloon" sort of thing ... as you sit there watching the aurora borealis dancing in the northern sky.

A 2021 program of the television show Unexplained, had a fellow with an alleged Ph.D., at least those were the letters after his name on the screen, which made what he had to say even more ludicrous, and I would think, a bit embarrassing. He used an absurd argument that maybe the many authors of the Biblical record, and the many translations got our modern day understanding wrong. Therefore, we can't be sure or know what it really is saying. And so, it can't be trusted to be the word of God.

His example was an attempt one would assign to third grader logic rather than someone with a Ph.D. after his name. His claim was that with the many authors and translations of the Biblical record, how do we know what is written there really is the word of God? [See 1 John 2:18-23]. He used, as his example, the words now here could be nowhere in the original text. So therefore, or perhaps there fore, meaning that position in the front part of something rather than consequently, an easy mistake he reasoned(?), it would give an entirely different meaning to what is meant. How then could we take the Biblical record seriously or with any real certainty?

His logic was a bit like alleging that the sign down at the corner of our street that has Stop written on really means Pots, a warning to watch out for potholes? With so many workers, and over the years, someone at the roads department surely could have mistranslated the word Pots. And then we'd try to pass off our conclusion, "Yeah, that makes sense."

To find out if his absurd logic has any foundation in reality, a little Biblical research was in order. About ten minutes later, we had our answer. So let's take a look about his unfounded conjecture that now here could be mistaken for nowhere or vice versa in the Biblical record. Keep in mind, his choice of words may make superficial sense in English, but this is hardly the case in German, Russian or Italian. This is why it's always a good idea to go to the source document.

The English word nowhere is found four times in the Biblical record. There are two uses in the New Testament and two in the Old Testament. The two examples in the New Testament are found in Mat. 8:20, and Luke 9:58. The verses are identical. They read, "And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” This is the New King James Version. The Kings James Version reads, "but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." Here it is two words, as it is in the original Greek. The context correctly shows that the modern English translation nowhere would be correct, as "the Son of Man has now here to lay His head” would make very little or no sense, even to a third grader.

The absurdity of this argument is even more clear in the Old Testament. The two uses of the English translated word nowhere are two entirely different words in Hebrew. The first one is in 1 Sam. 10:14. In the NKJV it reads, "Then Saul’s uncle said to him and his servant, “Where did you go?” So he said, “To look for the donkeys. When we saw that they were nowhere to be found, we went to Samuel.” The context is clear, Saul didn't find the donkeys, thus translating the Hebrew ʼayin, meaning to be nothing, or to not exist as now here in English would find that translator out looking for another job.

The other use of the English translation for nowhere is found in Job 6:18. It is the Hebrew word tôhûw meaning to lie in waste, desolation. In the NKJV it reads, "The paths of their way turn aside, they go nowhere and perish." One hardly could interpret now here to mean lying in waste or desolate. Or that somehow, the word tôhûw could be split into two separate words to mean now here. Yet, that's what this Ph.D. is suggesting with his greatly suspect reasoning. This is especially ridiculous when one considers what the fastidious, meticulous, "one jot and tittle" orthodox rabbinical scribes have delivered since the days of Ezra and Nehemiah.

If we take the reverse of nowhere and search for now here in the Biblical record, it's even worse for this Ph.D. fellow. The words now and here appear 22 times in the KJV Biblical record, one each in 11 verses. The one major issue that even a cursory look would give us that now here could be mistranslated as nowhere is the fact that they are two entirely different words and they never, as in never, appear side by side in either the Old or New Testaments.

The NKJV does have five verses with the English words, now here side by side. But one quick example will show that now here is not nowhere. We'll use the first mention in the Biblical record as our example. "When we cried out to the LORD, He heard our voice and sent the Angel and brought us up out of Egypt; now here we are in Kadesh, a city on the edge of your border." First the words now here are not in the Hebrew text, only the word Qadesh, קָדֵשׁ. Now here has been added to the English text for space-time clarity, which is why it is important to always go to the source text. Also, replacing now here with nowhere is completely contradictory. "When we cried out to the LORD, He heard our voice and sent the Angel and brought us up out of Egypt; nowhere we are in Kadesh, a city on the edge of your border." Nowhere, we are in Kadesh. Being in Kadesh hardly could be considered being nowhere.

Thus, the bogus hypothesis put forth that these words could be combined or separated into English from the Hebrew or Greek to reportedly show a different meaning is appalling for someone who is alleged to have a higher education. Either that or it would be a deliberate attempt to lead astray the casual lay person.

To paraphrase Neil DeGrasse Tyson at the top of this article,  “If you start using your secular education, your anti-God, anti-Christian texts as a source of your passing judgement on the authenticity of the Biblical record, that’s where you run into problems.”

By his actions, and the show's producers, it appears that they have outed themselves. "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world." [1 John 4:1]. It is amazing what less than ten minutes of testing will turn up.


The above is excerpted from chapter four, Creation In Six Days, But Who’s Counting?, The Blind Man’s Elephant. Again see the Feature article, Is Genesis 1 A Jolly Good Myth?

Also, the footnote is a Sneakers article, Do Not Believe Every Spirit.

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