by Henry Morris, Ph.D. *
Evolutionists have frequently criticized creationism as unscientific because of its basic commitment to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo —that is, "creation out of nothing." The idea that God simply called the universe into existence by His own power, without using any pre-existing materials, is rejected out of hand by evolutionists, since this would involve supernatural action, which is unscientific by definition (that is, by their definition).
Yet now we hear evolutionary cosmogonists maintaining that the universe evolved itself out of nothing! Creationists at least postulate an adequate Cause to produce the universe—that is, an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent, self-existing, personal, Creator God. For those who believe in God, creation ex nihilo is plausible and reasonable. But even if people refuse to acknowledge a real Creator, they should realize that a universe evolving out of nothing would contradict the law of cause-and-effect, the principle of conservation of mass/energy, the law of increasing entropy, and the very nature of reason itself. How can they say such things?
Yet, listen, for example, to Edward P. Tryon, Professor of Physics at the City University of New York, one of the first to propound this idea:
"In 1973, I proposed that our Universe had been created spontaneously from nothing (ex nihilo), as a result of established principles of physics. This proposal variously struck people as preposterous, enchanting, or both."1
Naturally it would! But a decade later it has become semi-official "scientific" doctrine, and cosmogonists are taking it quite seriously.
For many years, the accepted evolutionary cosmogony has been the so-called big-bang theory. However, there have always been many difficulties with this concept, one of which is to explain how the primeval explosion could be the cause of the complexity and organization of the vast cosmos, and another of which is to explain how a uniform explosion could generate a heterogeneous universe. Creationists have been stressing these problems for years, but now evolutionists themselves are beginning to recognize them.
"There is no mechanism known as yet that would allow the Universe to begin in an arbitrary state and then evolve to its present highly ordered state."2
"The cosmological question arises from cosmologists' habit of assuming that the universe is homogeneous. Homogeneity is known to be violated on the small scale by such things as galaxies and ordinary clusters, but cosmologists held out for a large-scale over-all homogeneity. Now if a supercluster can extend halfway around the sky, there doesn't seem too much room left to look for homogeneity."3