(ברא), I had a couple of comments that seemed to say that no knowledgable person would ever argue that Bara' (ברא) demands creation ex nihilo . However, listen to the apologist Hugh Ross, in an article entitled: Big Bang - The Bible Taught It First!: The Hebrew verb translated “created” in Isaiah 42:5 is bara’ which has as its primary definition “bringing into existence something new, something that did not exist before.”7 His footnote cites: 7. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, and Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament 1 (Chicago: Moody, 1980), 127.
Ross argues:
The first direct scientific evidence for a big bang universe dates back to 1916. . . . All these scientists, however, were upstaged by 2500 years and more by Job, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other Bible authors. The Bible’s prophets and apostles stated explicitly and repeatedly the two most fundamental properties of the big bang, a transcendent cosmic beginning a finite time period ago and a universe undergoing a general, continual expansion. In Isaiah 42:5 both properties were declared, “This is what the Lord says—He who created the heavens and stretched them out.”
Many other Christian apologists, who accept an old earth creation view (OEC), argue similarly, including William Craig in the Reasonable Faith, pp. 111ff. Interestingly enough, there is an Orthodox Jewish scholar Gerald Schroeder who uses the same type of arguments as Hugh Ross and William Craig. Schroeder, who has a Ph.D. from MIT in nuclear physics, has written, Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery Of Harmony Between Modern Science And The Bible and The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom .
So, the notion that only some proof-texting uneducated person holds these views is simply mistaken.
