Tag: cosmology

Our Amazing Moon

In studying Picture1and familiarizing myself with more “Goldilocks” factors, or factors necessary for life to exist on this planet, I am reminded of some basics, considerations I was amazed and entertained by in my youth, but have since forgotten or dismissed. I remember leafing through science books about oceans, and volcanoes, and animals, endlessly looking at pictures and enjoying all the wonders of nature. One of my favorite science books was the one on our solar system; our sun, our nine planets (Pluto wasn’t under the scrutiny it faces these days), and our amazing moon.

Genesis 1:14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16 Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. 17 God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

There are so many studies we could do on Genesis chapter 1, but one interesting thing to note is that many critics of the bible levy a charge against it that it simply borrowed creation accounts from other ancient cultures, such as Babylonian. I recommend studying that charge, as it is pretty easy to debunk. But note that those other stories from other peoples use terms for the sun and moon.

Babylon names them Shamash (sun) and Sin (moon). If we go farther back, to the Sumerians, their references to the moon-god are Sin, and Nanna. The sun was Utu, and Venus was Iananna, and since these were moon worshipping cultures, the writings say that these two objects were the children of our moon.

Clearly these ideas could not have given rise to our Genesis account, and any attempt to accuse such can be dismissed with a simple reading of the text. But note that at this point in history, these objects in our sky had already been named. It is intriguing to me that in our account, it simply states, “a greater light” (maor gadol) and “a lesser light” (maor qaton). It states they are there, made, and simply describes them. Genesis does not name either the sun, or the moon, because when that portion of Genesis was written, they had not yet been given names!

The names of these celestial bodies were given long after, by the Sumerians post-flood. The bible does not use names for them until Genesis 15 -Shemesh, the Babylonian name- and Genesis 37 – Yareah, a Canaanite name. This is great literary evidence that the first chapter of Genesis was written long before the myths of pagan cultures.

Our moon is a compass, a clock, a calendar, and a nightlight. Its distance and size is designed perfectly to provide a gravity that interacts with Earth’s, and regulates her tilt. It also keeps our oceans healthy, and regulates biorhythms. It is easy to understand how such a wonderful creation could be misunderstood and idolized by primitive peoples. But as Romans 1:25 tells us, mankind still falls into this trap today:

“Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the created things more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”

The moon is 238,900 miles from Earth, a particular distance that allows it, on its particular Picture2orbit to do something extraordinary, create eclipses. I say particular because typically satellites orbit around their planet’s equator. Since our earth is tilted at approximately 23.4 degrees, this would send the moon up and down rather than along the same plane as the sun. Instead, God had it orbit in perfect alignment with the earth’s orbit around the sun, regardless of the earth’s tilt.

It also has a particular size. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon, while the sun is exactly 400 times farther away! The result is that from Earth, they appear to be the same size. And when its orbit around Earth takes the Moon directly between Earth and the Sun, the Moon blocks our view of the Sun in what we call a solar eclipse. Considering the enormity of these bodies, and trying to fathom their perfect timing, size, and placement, that allows us on earth to appreciate their splendor that much more, I would be a fool as a cosmologist to not believe in an all-powerful creator God.

Psalms 19:1
The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands

Unfortunately though, that is precisely what many cosmologists are doing. The evolutionary mindset of many sciences has blinded them into thinking that despite all this perfect order, what they see is nothing more than blind chance, accidental, coincidental luck.

They cling to the dying theory of molecules-to-man evolution so faithfully that it forces the prevailing theories on the moon’s origin to be laughable. This is NASA’s theory as it stands today. This is literally what they believe, or try to believe, and condone teaching to students. This is what hoping there is no God looks like:

“The leading theory of the moon’s origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global “magma ocean” had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust. ” – NASA, (http://moon.nasa.gov/about.cfm)

Did you get that? A planet sized body collided with ours and formed a molten moon from the accumulating debris of an impact, in its perfect position, a perfect distance away, and didn’t destroy the earth in the process. And people laugh at my biblical beliefs!

Aside from the insurmountable ridiculousness of our leading cosmology theory, we run into another problem called lunar regression. It has been ascertained that the moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year. Now, if we consider this drift from the presupposition that the bible’s chronology is accurate, after 6000 years or so this equates to moving the moon only 250 meters. Not a big deal.

However if, like NASA is declaring, the moon was blasted out of the Earth and somehow ended up in orbit 4 billion years ago, was it drifting the whole time? If we reverse the 1.5 inch drift over a period of  only 1.5 billion years (I say only, due to the vast ages applied to evolutionary theory) we reach what scientists refer to as “Roche’s Limit”. This puts the moon only 11,500 miles from the Earth, at which point, Roche calculated that the gravity of the two bodies would rip each other apart. This does not bode well for the theory that the moon could survive being blasted off the side of our planet. It also does not bode well for the moon’s age, which is purported to be 4 billion years old. This limiting factor of 1.5 billion years continues to baffle those who hope our beautifully arranged solar system has come about by mere chance.

In addition to this Roche Limit, it was also calculated (to further complicate the scenario) that the closer the moon was to the Earth, the faster the lunar regression would be, due to the Earth’s gravitational pull and spin ‘flinging’ the moon away faster. This means that we now have to account for even more regression in the past, and two bodies that cannot be too close.

And one final consideration. If Lunar regression puts the moon insanely close to the Earth a billion years ago -95% closer! –  and somehow scientists can bypass the reality of Roche’s Limit, what would gravity do to the tides of the oceans? Would the moon’s gravity flood the earth twice a day via global catastrophic flooding in a constant, destructive, never-ending, muddy, violent, perpetual water event? We already know evolutionists don’t believe in a global flood, right? (snicker snicker). But we would somehow have to explain how life not only came about and survived in this harsh environment, but also how it continued to thrive and evolve into more and more complexity.

I am glad it is not my challenge to solve, as I comfortably rest on the truth of God’s word. I can look up at the night sky, and feel blessed to look upon the heavens, and our amazing moon, and know that despite my sin, He loved me anyways.

Romans 8:37 Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. 38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Goodnight Moon.

 

Advertisement

Faith in the Big Bang; Part 4

We will examine the failures of the big bang theory as a viable option in a 5 part series of articles. This is delivered with the understanding that the Big Bang’s shortcomings could be made into a longer series, or even a semester long class, but this will hopefully highlight what you must believe in for it to occur. We will specifically look at how it fails in each of its stages.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

We continue to delve into the issue of matter organizing itself by natural processes in the vacuum of space. The second law of thermodynamics states that in any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same. In layperson’s terms, this means disorder will increase in a closed system. This bit is important so I will underline it. All of evolution is dependent upon the violation of this law. We see proof of entropy increasing all around us. Energy is added to house shingles or the hood of a car via direct sunlight, or weather, and what happens? Disorder. The breaking down of matter. Decay. This is as natural as can be, and without intelligence acting upon a system, complexity or additional information is never observed to occur. Yet, this is exactly what we are taught, and expected to believe happened over and over and over for 13 billion years in order to to bring about our existence.

If the Big Bang happened, imagining the explosion, and inertia, and vectors in frictionless space. What would the result be? If we pretend that it wasn’t a theory, and asked scientists to assume an explosion happened in a vacuum, how would they illustrate it?

There would be an outer rim of fast moving matter. With no matter ahead of it to collide with, the initial explosion would never slow.
Now, to produce a star, gas would have to: stop flowing outward,
then begin moving in circles, then rotating gas would have to contract or move close together – one would have to explain how linear motion required for the expanse that exists somehow changed into angular momentum.

A quantity of gas in frictionless space moving forward is way too stable for any of this to happen.

Gas in space which was circling would fly apart. Evolutionist Hawit’s research disproves the possibility of gas clumping. Density of matter in space is too low, and there is nothing to make them stick together. Harwit’s research was devastating to steller evolution. He was not a creationist. He wrote a book called Astrophysical Concepts. In it he surmises the mathematical likelihood of hydrogen atoms sticking together. Eventually forced to use most favorable conditions, and figuring for the maximun possible sticking ability, he determined that a clump that is one-hundred-thousandth of a centimeter would take approximately 3 billion years to form. When converted to a more normative environment, mathematically it would now take 20 billion years. This is for a tiny spec of matter. This means that in our natural universe, a star cannot simply form. It is scientifically impossible.

Another evolutionist, Novotny researched gas in a vacuum and proved gas in a vacuum expands, and does not contract. Given any amount of time, gas cannot contract and turn itself into a star, or a planet. This opinion agrees with observable science. If you agree, you are agreeing with science, and not with evolution, just to make a point. This means stellar evolution is not science.

We must consider another if-then question. It is quite simple. If stars cannot form naturally, then why are there trillions of them? Does God not become more obvious, and not less, once we examine real science? If so, then why are they teaching our kids that 13 billion year old stellar evolution is a fact? The answer… what would they replace it with? God? Certainly not.

List compiled and arranged from: Chapter 2 of The Evolution Cruncher, Vance Ferrell.

Faith in the Big Bang; Part 3

We will examine the failures of the big bang theory as a viable option in a 5 part series of articles. This is delivered with the understanding that the Big Bang’s shortcomings could be made into a longer series, or even a semester long class, but this will hopefully highlight what you must believe in for it to occur. We will specifically look at how it fails in each of its stages.

Click here for part 1.

Click here for part 2.

Part three must now begin with the assumptions that an initial singularity explosion has taken place, and created outward racing particles. And as illustrated in part 2 of our series, we must assume that these outward racing particles have somehow violated the laws of physics, and have begun to change direction and swirl into gas clouds, so that they may develop into stars. These clouds must grow in density in the vacuum of space,  but simultaneously must be hurling through space to account for the vast expansion needed to explain seemingly infinite galaxies. We have learned that both of these prior situations are impossible based on reason and logic, regardless of the time variable, and furthermore require faith in something akin to the opposite of natural law. But in order to follow the process of the Big Bang theory, and consider what comes next, we will assume these steps somehow have taken place.

1. At this stage, there are a couple things to note:

a. Gas in outerspace is so rare, that it is more of a vacuum than any laboratory vacuum on earth.
b. There is no gas on the periodic table that clumps together! So, neither helium nor hydrogen would clump together. Gas always expands, pushes apart. Always.
c. This means the gas from the big bang would have been even less likely to clump together in outer-space. It is the universe’s great vacuum, and as such, provides the worst possible environment for gas clouds to gain any sort of density at all.

I can say with certainty, that the idea of gas pushing itself together in outer space to form a star is science fiction. It is like fog forming itself into tight patterns, except exceedingly more problematic. As an experiment, place a drop of food coloring in water. stir it up (or wait a minute, as it will disperse on its own),  to simulate the entropy of an outward explosion. Now wait, and stare at that glass of water, and time how long it takes for the food coloring dye to clump back together into a tight ball or drop again.

When that happens, try and imagine the same experiment in a vacuum… with air. You will then have some idea of how probable star formation is.

An existing star does have gravity, and can pull in other gases. However, forming one is the difficulty, not the fact that it exists. Natural processes cannot do this. Gas cannot build up enough mutual gravity to bring it together in any amount, much less those vast amounts needed for star formation. For perspective, keep in mind scientists think first generation stars were 800 to 1000 times larger than our sun.

2. Careful analysis reveals there is not enough matter within a gas cloud to produce a star. Again, me must respect how utterly massive stars are. Mass is key here, and clouds verses stars are like apples and oranges.

3. A more complex notion is that there isn’t enough time proposed. Evolutionists often scrutinize the creationist timeline as an impossibility, which never bothered us seeing as how our model includes the creator of the heavens and the earth, the only logical explanation for what we see. But they don’t often publicly admit that their model contains its own time crunch, which calls into question everything about how to date the stars.  We have stars that based on a 400% red shift and a calculated distance from earth, should be approximately 15 billion years old. The theory calls for stars to form after the first 5 billion years. This means that the singularity and first explosion must have happened 5 billion before this, or our methods for dating stars is far off the mark. This is problematic in a 15 billion year timetable. This issue,  in conjunction with the need for random chance to cause order, is why the age of the universe continues to grow, as if the magic element of time will eventually solve the puzzle. The math is wrong, or the technique for dating is wrong.

This is not the only evolutionist time crunch problem. 1st generation stars are supposed to be big, burn bright, and die fast, creating new stars and new elements when going supernova. This theory is the supposed catalyst for chemical evolution, where we try to convince the world that the rest of the elements on the periodic table were formed from these supernova explosions from only hydrogen and helium. But we see supposed 1st generation stars still today. Evolutionists tout it as proof they were right about their existence, however, we must ask if they should be there at all?

But they are made new all the time, right? Good question, and I will answer by reminding or teaching the reader that we have never witnessed a star form. They do try to teach how it happens, again because they must push a theory. Consider these quotes: “The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form.”—*Martin Harwit, “Books Reviews,” Science, March 1986, pp. 1201-1202.

“There is no reasonable astronomical scenario in which mineral grains in space gas clouds can condense.”—*Fred Hoyle and *Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Where Microbes Boldly Went,” in New Scientist (1981), pp. 412-413.

“Basically there does not appear to be enough matter in any of the hydrogen clouds in the Milky Way that would allow them to contract [into stars] and be stable. Apparently our attempt to explain the first stages in star evolution has failed.”—*Garrit Verschuur, Starscapes (1973), p. 102.

4. Observation of gas clouds in space show them expanding. Gas clouds in space expand. They do not contract. With not enough matter, and expansion as a factor, this is not a recipe for success. Hence the devastating and truthful quotes above about the science of cosmology.

We will discuss more on stars later, but any one of these points would discredit the idea of stellar evolution. I will summarize the problem this way: The core of a star, in this case the first star, must generate a temperature to 10 million Kelvin degrees, to create nuclear fusion, at which point it can become stable. So,  from nothing a group of sub atomic particles must explode out, then coalesce, despite a tenancy to repel, and somehow clump to gain such heat and density as to generate nuclear fusion, so it can supernova, and create more stars as well as all elements in the periodic table. Tell me again how this is science and not faith?

Is it arrogance to think you’re special?

PaleBlueDot
Pale Blue Dot

Let me start by saying I don’t believe interpretation of facts will bring people to the Lord. I think that is a Holy Spirit thing. My hope is to grow a ministry that affords people the ability to stand fast in what I consider authoritative scripture. Today, we will address the chances of other earth like planets supporting life, as a follow up to my UFO’s and God article.

https://jrcooper.org/2016/01/20/ufos-and-god/

Several years back NASA published a famous picture of earth from space (shown here) showing just how not-special we were, a distant spec among millions of others. It was named ‘the pale blue dot’. Promoter of anti-creation sentiment Carl Sagan famously commented, “Consider again that dot [Earth]. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Well, of course the creationist community was in a scramble, trying to prove that this little blue marble wasn’t so matter-of-fact, and insignificant. After all, our bibles tell us we are a special creation, made in His image. Despite the many problems with the big bang, and the several brands of evolution that must exist to generate life

[Cosmic evolution: the origin of time, space, and matter from nothing in the “big bang”,
Chemical evolution: all elements “evolved” from hydrogen
Stellar evolution: stars and planets formed from gas clouds,
and  Organic evolution: life begins from inanimate matter]

the crux of Sagan’s criticism was that the odds of other planets like ours existing goes up exponentially with our understanding of the vastness of the universe. This would seem like reasonable logic, but I don’t mind telling you, this has been debunked, and very soundly at that.

Consider odds, since that is all this is based on, conjecture that it simply must be. First science began to determine what factors were needed to have a planet capable of supporting the diversity of life we find here. Abundant factors were apparent: We must be within a galactic habitable zone, be around the right type of star, protected by gas giants, distance from sun, nearly circular orbit, oxygen atmosphere, a terrestrial planet, large amounts of water, one moon the correct size (I could do an amazing write up on the extraordinary moon alone),correct mass, iron core for magnetism, proper thickness of earth’s crust, plate tectonics, heat within its interior, and on and on, and furthermore they are all factors that must be met at one place and at one time, or the possibility of life fails. Just to extrapolate a bit on one factor alone, we can consider the sun. It is technically classified as a spectral type G-2 dwarf main sequence star. If it were less massive, like 90% of the stars in our galaxy, the habitable zone would be smaller, and we’d have to be closer to remain within livable boundaries, but increased gravity would lock our planets rotation into synchronization to its orbit, forcing one side of the earth to continually face the sun, exposed to radiation and heat, while the other side would lay in a frozen state of perpetual ice. To say we existed within a delicate balance would be the scientific understatement of the century.

Of course, as one considers this, one could still say, “Yes it would be rare, but hey, we are talking about the whole universe here. Billions and billions of stars, right?” So we will consider actual odds. In an attempt to estimate the probability of attaining this perfect combination of factors, a conservative 1 in 10 chance was applied to each. Once you multiply the probabilities of 20 factors needed, you get 10 to the -15, or one one thousandth of one one trillionth. Some estimate there may be as many as 200 separate factors, but  I’ll let you do the math. Once those odds were overcome, we would have to then consider odds of random chance creating the order necessary to produce a complex living cell, which are even more tumultuous odds for evolutionists, as it is mathematically impossible. If you wish to read a short article to provide insight on that, here is a link by Dr. Henry Morris, an author and apologist.
http://www.icr.org/article/probability-order-versus-evolution/

The bible says God stretched out the heavens, and further states, “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” Psalms 147:4. Space is vast, to be sure, which naturally fills us with awe and wonder. But depending on perspective, some look up at the night sky, and feel insignificant, like Mr. Sagan. Others look up and and feel blessed at how special they are, and can be nothing but grateful that the Lord placed us under all that glory, one of many ways He chose to love us.

%d bloggers like this: