People in general live their lives by the clock. We set our clock to wake us up in the morning. We watch our clocks to tell us when to eat lunch and dinner. Our clocks and calendars tell us what time and what day our favorite television shows are on. We plan weddings a year in advance. We even time how long it takes to run a race, travel from one place to another, and the interval between labor pains.
What makes it possible for us to measure time, and use it as such a reliable yardstick in all our daily affairs, is its amazing quality of exactness. Our universe is arranged in a fantastic, orderly manner. So orderly is our entire universe that time measurement becomes a reality to us as a by-product of this orderliness. The movements of our universe provide us with our concepts of time.
The two principal time markers, the year and the day, are universally accepted and used throughout our world. The year is the duration of one orbital revolution of the earth about the sun and is 365.26 days in length. The day is the duration of one rotation of the earth on its axis and is equal to twenty-four hours. These movements of our earth are so constant and exacting that they give us the ability to map time out in a perfect and precise fashion.
Our earth’s orbit is so certain and unchanging that we can predict exactly where our planet will be in our solar system at any given time. In relation to the sun, we know that in 365.26 days our planet will be exactly where it is now. The reason for this precise accuracy and consistency is that our universe is governed by physical laws that never change. Without this orderliness, time could not be what we know of today, but something quite different.
To further illustrate how our universe is so amazing, consider the following: Our moon is constantly revolving around our earth day after day, year after year, century after century in an exact orbit. Our earth in turn, along with its moon, is orbiting our sun year after year, century after century also in a perfect orbit. Our sun, scientists tells us, along with all of its planets and their respective moons, is traveling at a speed of 600,000 miles per hour in a gigantic orbit through its galaxy, an orbit that requires over 2 million centuries to complete. Scientists also believe that our entire Milky Way Galaxy is also moving with respect to other galaxies; and on it goes.
What we have is trillions upon trillions of heavenly bodies, weighing trillions upon trillions of tons moving at very high velocities (eighteen miles per second and faster) in exact orbits in relation to one another and never colliding. This orderliness defies human comprehension. We as human beings, with such rational, orderly and ingenious minds, have trouble walking a straight line, yet these heavenly hosts can move through our universe with such exquisite grace and perfect form that they appear to have minds of their own.
How is this possible? We only have two choices to explain these movements. One choice is the so-called scientific explanation. Briefly, this option states that one day there existed absolutely nothing in the universe. Then, in the course of time, out of this nothingness an incredible amount of matter came into existence (all the matter that is in our universe today). Its form was originally some type of singularity of materials that somehow, by itself, either exploded or gradually broke up into the incredible, complex and orderly universe we have today. To sum up: we started with nothing, and nothing by itself became everything. In turn everything, by itself, developed into perfection; and all of this was guided by blind chance.
The second choice is from the Bible. (Genesis 1:1) states, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And (Genesis 1:16) declares, “And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.” God created the universe and established its order.
Neither of the above choices can be proved in the normal scientific way, which is through observable, repeatable experimentation. Since this is a question of origins, by its very nature, one of the above two choices must be accepted by faith. It would seem that the first choice would require a far greater degree of faith then the second one. When you place your trust in the first option you are faced with the inevitable conclusion that you came from nothing and that when you die you are going back to nothing. In between, you, on the average, will experience seventy or eighty perfectly accurate and constant units of time called years to find some kind of meaning. The latter choice has a book—the Bible—containing over 750,000 words explaining why there just might be a better way.
It’s all absolutely amazing!