[Darris McNeely] You're looking at a map of a cosmic microwave background. It's the afterglow of the big bang that formed in the universe scientists say over 13 billion years ago. It's based on observations that have been taken from a large sky telescope that's been in outer space, the Planck telescope. There's an article in today's Financial Times that talks about this and it says that with that map the implications are, as man's understanding of the universe now goes and is, that the newborn universe inflated by trillions and trillions and trillions of times within the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger,  and that today's universe it says, "Will go on growing forever, ending up eventually as a cold, dark, unimaginably vast nothingness." Encouraging words.

[Steve Myers] That's fatalistic isn't it?

[Darris McNeely] If that's all you have, very fatalistic that you look at a map of what it was like back at that moment as they have conjectured it and the end is nothingness.

[Steve Myers] I think it certainly points to the fact what man comes up with on his own. They don't see God's hand in it. They don't see that God made these things. In the beginning God created things, and you see the difference between the hopefulness that lies in God's plan and what man can come up with on his own as the end being just nothingness.

[Darris McNeely] It's amazing the technology that allows scientists to peer almost all the way back to the beginnings of what they can imagine the universe to have been like, but then to come up with a conclusion that all of it means that we're headed to nothing is pretty depression if that's all you have to go on. But scripture shows us otherwise.

[Steve Myers] So different. In fact, there's a passage in Hebrews chapter 2 that's a quote from Psalm 8. Verse 6 it says, "What is man that You are mindful of him?" So first of all we see God is mindful of man. It just wasn't happenstance. It just wasn't some big bang that just will end up to meaninglessness. He says, "Or what is the son of man that You take care of him?" So God has a hand in our lives. He says, "You have made him a little lower than the angels. You've crowned him with glory and honor and set him over the works of Your hands, and You have put all things in subjection under his feet" (Hebrews 2:6-8; Psalm 8:4-6).So, does that sound like nothingness? I think it's quite a different story.

[Darris McNeely] No, I think that when you look at the Bible, there's a different story. This article concludes and says, "It's possible that we could track our universe back through the big bang to some earlier phase." My answer to that is Genesis 1 and verse 1 that, "In the beginning God…"(Genesis 1:1). That's what we track back to. Now you have a choice. You can reject the Bible, rely only on what's observable and understandable from science, and come up with such a conclusion, or you can certainly look at what is learned through science and technology, such as what we have with this map, and then you can couple that with God's revealed word, and come to a far greater understanding than science alone will give you.

[Steve Myers] That's BT Daily. We'll see you next time.