[AndyTheBear]

Many Christians are tempted to accept that the Big Bang was the means God used to create the universe. But the Big Bang flatly contradicts Scripture and is riddled with serious scientific difficulties, some of which have been highlighted by this recent spat among leading theorists.9 Furthermore, where would it leave Christians if secular scientists should ultimately abandon the Big Bang? Christians should resist the temptation to accommodate Genesis to the fallible, ever-changing ideas of secular scientists.

OK, first of all the "where would it leave us if..." argument is open to the same kind of sentimental charge the article made against the number of papers argument for those defending inflation.

Secondly, Rejecting inflation is not the same thing as rejecting the Big Bang model, much less fitting the creation of the universe into the ~6000 year time frame that is inferred by many from the Genesis narratives.

Thirdly, the Big Bang model was in its origins a Christian idea, not a secular one--in so far as it was first proposed by a Christian Theist who was initially accused by many of tainting science with religious ideas. For philosophically speaking, if it were true, it would be a death blow to the fundamental prediction of Atheism and Materialism--that the universe was eternal into the past. The attempt to reframe it by people like Kraus and Hawking and like minds in a Materialist system did not start until decades of Atheists and Materliasts trying to find alternative theories that tried to keep this fundamental prediction alive--in short the ideas of multi-verses and something coming from nothing are only entertained as last resorts to salvage what is left of the credibility of Atheism after every attempt to avoid having to embrace possibilities so absurd had failed.

Fourthly, the inference of a ~6000 year old universe was not universal in Christianity before modern times. And even Christians who argue for such a young universe are rather selective by their own rules of taking the early Genesis narratives literally. I know of nobody who maintains that Satan is literally a snake. And I know of nobody who maintains that somewhere on Earth there is the western gate to the Garden of Eden which we would be able to get to except for a flaming sword darting back and forth wielded by a Cherubim.

[HLPhat]

>>And I know of nobody who maintains that somewhere on Earth there is the western gate to the Garden of Eden

The King of Tyre evidently must have know where it was... since Ezekiel LITERALLY says he was there....

Ezek 28:11-13

11 The word of the Lord came to me: 12 "Son of man, take up a lament concerning the king of Tyre and say to him: 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says:

"'You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

13 You were in Eden, the garden of God;

NIV

...which is contradictory in the context of a literal Genesis:

Gen 3:23-24

23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east sidee of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

NIV