Current Events in Creationist Astronomy

well we're back to some can there be current events in creation I mean creation goes way back to the book of Genesis that's old but there are current events and we're just gonna look at some questions that you might have wondered about and kind of fun to look at there's lots of questions we don't have all the answers but we'll have a go at it just to get started on this maybe it's quiz time here this time of the afternoon I got a few space pictures can you identify them what are we looking at well I think I hear the answer here this is Sputnik 1957 the very first artificial satellite time goes by the beginning of the Space Age this thing frightened Americans because the Russians beat us into space and there was a cold war going on back then and you could see this thing go right over the country and we couldn't do anything about it but soon enough we started to put up our own satellites and the race was on how about another unknown what are we looking at the International Space Station there it is they keep building on this thing larger and larger it's up in space right now there are people on board I'm not sure what they're doing trying to stay alive I guess kind of controversial people in space but it's part of our whole progress and there it is you can google the space station and see when it's going to go overhead and you can you know go out at night and watch it it's just like a looks like an airplane but it doesn't blink it's collecting the sunlight as it goes by hey we're doing just a little identification in this space area my goodness that's too complicated for a Saturday afternoon what are we looking at this is kind of a big setup can you can you find the person in this picture I think there's somebody there here he is right here he's actually in a tunnel that's deep underground and this is the biggest experiment in the world right now it's over in Europe and what they're searching for is called the god particle you might have seen this in the news I'm not sure I like that title but in this experiment they get protons going real fast in two different directions and a big circular tunnel deep underground protons almost up the speed of light and then they bang them into each other and they're gonna see what kind of shredded materials come off and what they're looking for is the basic building block of matter is pretty fundamental research and it takes a big experiment like this to do it this employs 10,000 scientists it's multi billions of dollars all to find out what matters made out of and they kind of name the basic one that they're looking for the god particle now I don't know if they'll find it or not but if they do I have a prediction it's not the end because if you could build a bigger atom smasher you could crack that thing in half and see what's inside of it you know you can split an atom and get protons you can split a proton and maybe get something else it's like taking the layers off an onion it just goes down and down creation is like that there are probably endless layers inside an atom things we have never seen just like space goes on and on so does the internals of an atom we were talking this morning about design you know in nature I wonder about all the design on that deep deep level that we can't even see it's just there if we ever get there well you did well on that little quiz there some unknowns what we're gonna do is look at a few questions that you might have wondered about in this whole arena of space I think I got about 12 questions if we got time for them so we'll take the first one here and why not just start with a fundamental one how about it was there a big bang we've all kind of grown up with this theory you know it's just been around and what is this story that long ago the whole universe was just this big no it was smaller than that it was a mathematical point the whole universe some sort of little nugget and one day it became unstable and started to expand and move outward and from that gas formed and then dust and then galaxies and stars and planets and people all spinning out of this expansion it's quite a story isn't it you believe all that that I just said the Big Bang Theory well it does make a good story and actually a lot of people who are in the Christian faith they think that must be true somehow we need to fit that into the book of Genesis but thinking about creation it's far different in fact here's a creation verse over in Psalm 33 9 for God spoke and it was done he commanded and it stood fast that does not sound like some sort of slow gradual spontaneous accidental expansion it sounds supernatural that when God spoke it was done and it happened quickly I can't match that up with a big bang we're not sure how God did it I mean the creation week is holy ground but any of our man-made theories like the Big Bang got to be wrong by definition because we can't explain the supernatural and thinking about this by the way yeah that's a little bit of Latin at the bottom there ex nihilo which means from nothing when God created he just it was the work of his fingers he just spoke things into existence some of you guys are creative you can do photography landscaping or whatever but we always use some kind of beginning materials God just started nada with nothing and there it was only God really creates so that's kind of where I stand at least there was not a big bang as usually described if you want to say God spoke and bang there it was okay but that's more you know the whole creation week and if you look more closely the order in scripture that we take very seriously the earth is here before the Sun Moon and stars earth on day one the Sun and stars till day phwoar the Big Bang doesn't do that the Big Bang puts the earth off to the very end I'm sticking with creation it makes good sense it's a refreshing alternative to this Big Bang stuff I've noticed something about these theories they don't last very long before the Big Bang it was the steady state theory after the big bang it'll probably be multiple universes or some other choice scripture is so refreshing not changing and it's our guide we're looking at a few questions in this whole area of astronomy in space let's go onto another one here is the universe getting larger and larger does it take you longer to get to work now really is it expanding it seems like it now this is often taken you know is that evidence for the the Big Bang to say well the universe was smaller a year ago smaller yet a thousand years ago and if you go far enough back you're back to that nugget again but let me answer this question as far as we can tell yes the universe is expanding and getting larger every day not the earth not the solar system not even the Milky Way this is deep space stuff that distant galaxies seem to be spreading out we get this by studying the light from these far-off objects something called the redshift and there are other interpretations but it seems to be the the one that makes the most sense I would suggest that this universe was made large and getting larger that it was created in an expanding mode and to extrapolate that way back to a beginning nugget I think that's an unfair extrapolation it was made big and getting bigger and I think there's reasons for that what if the creator made this whole universe and took all of these galaxies and everything and just parked them out there static so they were sitting still well you know what would happen gravity is everywhere and it would take over and everything would start to fall in together we would get the Big Crunch I guess that wouldn't be good it would be an unstable universe realizing that it's all going to crash together this expanding situation gives stability to the universe I'm just suggesting that maybe of why why God set put it together that way actually there are lots of motions in space you know right now we're moving here on earth we're on a merry-go-round turning and here at this latitude we're moving at about 800 miles our right now you say I am not I'm sitting in this chair I can't feel the wind that's a good thing because the atmosphere the birds everything goes right with us you don't notice that turning motion and space due to our orbit around the Sun we're moving faster about 60,000 miles an hour right now there's more because the whole solar system is moving in fact the whole galaxy is turning and you get up to be over a million miles per hour that we're moving right now I can see you're skeptical and it's a good thing we don't even notice that it's just in God's care but you have to have all these motions for a stable universe I mean if we're not orbiting the Sun at high speed we'll fall into it because gravity just keeps acting so anyway that was my quick answer there I think the universe may well be expanding not at all a proof of the Big Bang but of a stable universe that was made for us we're looking at some questions in this whole area of space and astronomy and after the Big Bang and this thing let's go on trying to get some basic ones here you might have wondered about now do you notice who's in the saucer there by the way are there aliens is there life in space what a question that is I know they make movies about all this kind of thing and we seem to keep reading about looking for other planets and life in space and let's just explore this for a minute you know a few centuries ago it wasn't realized how complex life is it was thought that if you had some mud that maybe those molecules have come together and life would develop it was just thought rather simple in fact them I found a early formula for how you can make mice here it is out of the recipe file it was thought take some grain and moist rags put him in the corner of your room for a weekend my sweat will appear now now I should say kids don't try this at home it might work you know mice they always have scouts around looking for a nesting area and if they can get in if you have rags and food they'll show up but you know this was disproved this idea by Louis Pasteur who took the materials and he put them in a sealed container and if no mice could get at them then the material breaks down it just spoils deteriorates don't we know that mice come from mice and so it has ever been interesting formula from the past now they've done lots of experiments trying to get life to originate in the lab and you know some of these experiments like with Stanley Miller and such and they all fall flat the origin of life remains a mystery and because of that in the science world they're looking elsewhere in space like we've been sending all these probes to Mars no people on Mars or or Venus or elsewhere but a lot of remote craft and on Mars there's several up there right now it's part of our space program I enjoy all the neat pictures they get but what are they doing up there they have these robotic craft on Mars and they are rolling around they're like the size of a golf cart and they're taking pictures and drilling holes in the rocks what are they looking for up there right they're looking for Martians there's this assumption that life will evolve and if it happened on Earth it should happen elsewhere and they just keep looking and they don't seem to find it now that formula for mice I got right there I'm thinking I'm still seeing that formula in our modern day if you read the articles in the newspaper often these articles end up talking about life and here's the assumption that if you can find another planet and they are finding new planets going around other stars and hopefully then maybe there's some water there and if there's some sort of sunshine energy and you let enough time go by then life will show up that always seems to be the end of these articles and I want to say nice try but this formula just doesn't work life is not that simple you don't just add water to get it you've you've seen before the idea of a living cell and how complex it is there's a whole world in there and it goes on and on we don't know the half of it the formulas haven't changed much hopeful but it doesn't go in fact you know what astronomers are saying these days where is everybody it looks more and more like we're unique and that answer to that question as far as we know there's no life in space after 50 years of this space age not a shred of evidence of life anywhere else it appears that gods put lots of life on the earth but chose not to do it elsewhere and so the days go by a little bit more on this life of space that's kind of interesting this might be a little technical for our Saturday afternoon but there's a guy by the name of Frank Drake and he's an astronomer he had a whole career at Cornell he worked with Carl Sagan he's retired but he's still around and he thought well if we can't find life I'll just calculate how much life there is in space and so he's got the Drake Equation and let me just kind of walk through this with you in the number of planets in our Milky Way galaxy that have evolved life on them he's written a whole book on this I mean quite imaginative there's a bunch of little letters there that kind of spell things out here let me just do those myself boy if you want these notes I can give you this sheet later that has all these but here's this calculation little n is going to be the number of stars in the Milky Way we can estimate that F sub P is the fraction of those stars that have planets that's a very active area looking for other planets these days they're up to about a thousand new planets going around other stars fraction of stars with planets the next F is another fraction the fraction of those planets that would be earth-like because it's got to be a planet that's solid that you can walk on it's got to have some oxygen it's got to have some water so like earth-like and the last fraction is the the fraction of those earth-like planets where life has evolved now he's got a few more terms but this is a simplified form let's try this out let's put some numbers in this formula and let's calculate how many planets have evolved life on them in the Milky Way what do you think the answer is going to be let me show you the numbers they typically come up with little n the number of stars in the Milky Way a hundred billion that's ten to the eleventh that's clearly rounded off it's an estimate the Sun is just one of those but who's going to argue with that that's a typical galaxy 100 billion stars the fraction of those stars that have planets just to be conservative take 10% point one one out of ten of those stars have planets a plant is just an object circling a star the fraction of those planets that are earth-like you know small enough to have some gravity so something could survive let's put in point one again now comes the tough one the fraction of all this where life is evolved they're very optimistic and they typically put in unity the number one because if things are set up the assumption life is going to show up give enough time and so here's our answer 1 billion inhabited planets in the Milky Way a rather lofty number and that's where they write the books on this kind of thing without a lot of data but using their numbers now again it is kind of you know afternoon and all this but can anybody challenge this do you see anything that looks a little suspicious what would you go after can someone help us out here anyone want to correct this yes what do you say you don't like the billion I don't either which one of those assumptions do you kind of challenge yes that last number evolve life that does sound a little suspicious and that's what you're gonna say as well right let me modify this a minute here it might be a biased or what all of our research shows that the probability of things evolving on itself is not a zero so I'm gonna change that to a zero and then the other numbers don't even matter because if you put a zero in this multiplication thing you end up with nothing and I think this is closer to the truth even though Frank Drake wouldn't go with it that's how it comes out these are planets with evolved life we don't find any even though they're so hopeful with this now whether the Lord has chosen to put some other life way out there or not I don't think so but if there is at least it didn't evolve scripture is very clear you know that God treated the earth special the Lord walked here scripture says the earth was made to be inhabited where's all the stars show God's glory it looks more and more like we are unique anyway that's where that equation went I think it's closer to zero at least we're evolved life the Drake Equation interesting hey we're looking at some areas of a space study so let's do some more here and in fact let me get closer to home let's think about the moon for a while that is our nearest neighbor and we all get a good look at it as it goes through its phases and there's several things about the moon we could react to first of all have we been able to figure out from a natural viewpoint how the moon got to be circling our earth now I think scripture says God put it there but this is our modern scientific age and we need to have our own explanations so um do we know the origin of the moon over the years there's been different theories and this was one of the reasons for all the moon research in the Apollo program let me survey some of these with you what do we have here what do you see in that picture a bowling pin a chicken drumstick what is this now back in the 1960s the 60s this was the theory the origin theory that was in all the books now this is pre-internet so it was in the Astronomy books and the suggestion was that a long time ago before anybody was on the earth yet the earth was young and it was molten and it was spinning a lot faster than today instead of 24 hours it was like two hours and it was going so fast that a bunch of material kind of stretched out and broke off to make the moon visioned off they'd be exciting to stand back and watch that happen now fission theory well this idea went away in 1969 that's one of those points in history Neil Armstrong and friends walked on the moon and by the way we did go to the moon they brought rocks back to the earth that are still being studied today and the minerals and moon rocks they're different than Earth rocks I mean the ratios the quantities just enough that it does not look like the moon came from here and it was such a neat theory in fact there's other problems with this fission theory if the if the moon broke off from the earth on the way out it would have been close to the earth and our gravity would have just fractured it into pieces they call that within the Roche limit and we wouldn't have a moon meet it would have a ring like Saturn has just mentioned two problems with fission the rocks are different and it wouldn't have survived the trip anyway after the fission theory the next one came along and it was called the capture theory the 1970s and this was in all the books and the story was that long ago the moon just came here from somewhere else so live with it and it came swooping in close to the earth and we reached out with our gravity and captured it and it's been circling us ever since we it's not really an origin theory but we'll give them that so um there's the picture as before there's two problems this time there's always these fatal flaws with these theories one trouble with this one and if you can imagine if the moon would come close to the earth it would feel our gravity they would go around that outside curve but after about a half a trip it would pick up speed and just take off out of there like crack the whip now to get it to stay in orbit you'd have to slow it down put on the brakes insert it into orbit and how do you do that with these natural origin theories so that was a tough one and it just didn't go very very well at all so the capture theory was on hard times another trouble this theory if the moon would do that even if would get captured it would be kind of a lopsided orbit but actually the moon's orbit is almost perfectly circular it does a pretty nice job moves in and out a little bit but not all that much it looks just too good to be captured by chance we had vision we had capture there's more because the next decade comes along and the nebula theory was in popular newspapers now the thought this time is that the earth and the moon started as two smudges you see them there those are supposed to be clouds of dust and gas that's what a nebula is in fact there's still a lot of that stuff in space we can look at it with telescopes we couldn't last night there were just too many parking lot lights but they're up there and you know what almost all of these um clouds of gas are doing if I could just picture a cloud they're getting bigger they're expanding because there's outward gas forces you know a balloon wants to pop now if you get them small enough like the Sun which is gases it'll stay small but how do you kind of squeeze these things down to a solid earth and moon it doesn't work that's the trouble with a nebula Theory the forces are in the wrong direction so there went another one and that's the main problem it just gases expand let me move on to the moon origin theory that you'd look if you would Google this today and it's in all the books since nothing else works they're really thinking catastrophes so the president view is that something came down and smashed into the earth looks like a big asteroid or the nucleus of a comet this thing is said to be the size of Mars and it strikes the earth so hard that it breaks the earth into pieces and some of the fragments fly up into the sky and they coalesce together to make the moon and the rest of the earth tumbles back together they don't have those details figured out yet I'm just telling you what they say and so there it was now this theory is relatively new and the problems need yet to be figured out but I've seen the trend that it won't last too long actually two things have happened with this theory to shoot it down some of the models of this say that we should end up with two wounds the fragments would go two different ways but note we've only got one moon and just last month NASA studies have shown that there are some water molecules on the moon not lakes and rivers but just stray water molecules in the rocks and there's too many if you would have this kind of collision it would have burned off all the water on the moon and there is some there so that goes away as well well what's coming next after these origin theories I've been in this for a while watching this stuff and the trend is these theories roll on by each one lasts about ten years give or take and then the next one comes along and that makes a person humbly want to speak up sometimes and say maybe we can't explain the moon maybe somebody put it there maybe it was created now I don't know if that sounds scientific but it makes as much sense as these temporary fallible theories do and so I'm thinking of a created moon and one thing I like about this whole creation viewpoint that we're pushing this weekend together as soon as you say God put the moon in the sky there's reasons for it it's not a chance or an accident so thinking about the moon what's it good for does it do anything for you would you miss the moon if it was gone now really you think of the tides you think of moonlight but that turns out to be just the beginning actually I was giving this talk somewhere and I mentioned the moonlight and a critic said we don't need that moonlight we've got flashlights that's what he said and I thought tension do any better than that yes we have streetlights and flashlights but for a lot of people on this planet that moonlight is important and it may be more important to agriculture to germination and things that we that we realize but anyway I started a trial list here of things that the moon does for us by the way even though this collision thing is kind of temporary they draw these neat pictures that's supposed to be the object hitting the earth that's some kind of explosion but anyway under the moon and its purposes again I this list would I think just be kind of a beginning the moon does this and more it is a night light some nights a full moon some nights a crescent moon you can tell time by the moon if you get into these phases you can tell the season you can tell the direction the moon is so faithful we've learned in just the last 20 years that the moon is why we have our seasons now of course the earth is tilted remember that 23 and 1/2 degrees like a globe in the classroom that's really what does our seasons studies have shown that without the moon the Earth's axis would wobble we might go from summer to hotter summer you never know what was coming next thank you Lord for these faithful seasons there's the tides that's gravity not too well understood but back and forth the water goes worldwide scrubbing the shorelines and then I put one more word at the end life and by that I mean your life and mine because those tides keep the ocean healthy and there's incredible life in the ocean since this planet is 3/4 covered with water there's lots of critters in the ocean there's lots of plants aren't there there are floating plants there are kelp forests in the shallow areas lots of plants now remember what plants do how they breathe the opposite of us they take in co2 and they give off oxygen current estimates are that sea plants make half of our oxygen in our atmosphere what if there was no moon no tides which are a major component of the ocean currents without the tide computer programs show that the ocean would die it would become stagnant you wouldn't want to go to the shoreline anymore and all the plants would die no moon no tides no plants no oxygen no us I think our very breath is dependent on the health of this whole situation now this world is no longer perfect we've had the fall the curse and you can still see in a way how this is put together for our survival and well-being I look at this list and I think how much do we not know about the moon yet this gets very intricate and there's things we're still learning the moon is precious there's still more we could say about the moon we're going through I think I have like 12 little questions all together to answer when it comes to space some of these get a little technical but let me try this one because you might have heard of it before is lunar recession an age indicator and where am I getting questions like this from now this is the idea that the moon is actually getting further away from the earth every year have you noticed that getting smaller in the sky you say I don't think so too young no it only changes by about two inches a year at present but it's called recession this is a tied connection actually it's slowing down the earth and the moon is being slung further and further out and a very slow scale a couple inches a year but that means in ten years twenty inches in a hundred years and a thousand years this adds up furthermore this recession which is part of gravity and it goes on and we can measure it it's not linear it's not always two inches a year in fact if you're into math this next one kind of shows how dependent it is it depends on the sixth power of the distance which is a huge multiplication another way to say this if the moon was only half as far away from us as it is this recession would be sixty four times greater two to the sixth power anyway if you do all the math on this you find out that if you go back in time the moon would have been very close to the earth in about 1.5 billion years in fact it'd be right here it'd be right up against your nose hello moon because you see it's moving out from us right now well now that's interesting and it's not obvious from the math you'd have to do this the way it's increased in the past what did I say yeah 1.5 billion years you see it can't do that because if the moon is anywhere near the earth it would be broken up into pieces and yet how old did they say the moon is 4.6 billion years the same as the earth there's some fundamental problem here with deep time the moon can't even be 1 billion years old let alone 4.6 I think this recession is some kind of an argument that the there's there are problems with deep time with evolutionary time now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that the moon is a billion years old I'm just saying it can't be anywhere near that let alone four times that I have not heard a good refutation of this idea because we all can measure from the things that were left up there the way the moon is moving out from us there's a whole technical article on this by the way and I could get you the reference if you want to do more looking at that we're thinking about the moon right now and let me do something else with a moon after all it is our nearest neighbor and it's kind of important to us our question number six are there in people time historic time records of large craters forming on the moon now you've looked at the moon perhaps before with binoculars or a telescope and you got all those craters up there and it just seems so quiet the moon always kind of looks like a museum you know just is there so this is an interesting question and from the pictures going along the answer here is yes there are historic impacts in fact if I could just read about one here um now this is a while back it's about 800 years ago if you look at the ad year and there are records from back then and this is from Europe where some people noticed something interesting on the moon here's what they wrote it must have been a crescent moon this night in June ad 1178 we saw the upper Horn of the oonh split and from the division fire and hot coals and sparks spewed out the phenomena was repeated a dozen times or more the moon took on a blackish appearance boy how'd you like to be looking at the moon when it seems to be blowing up that's pretty exciting stuff and this is in diaries of people back then what they were looking at our great clouds of gas and dust which we're rising from the surface of the Moon and kind of hiding its light you might call this fire on the moon what they were witnessing was a large impact on the moon that they still do happen now here's how I can tie this with our creation weekend the common view for the moon is that all the craters we see are ancient that they happen early in history at least four billion years ago it's thought that nothing happens on the moon anymore and if you ask an astronomer about this they would estimate well maybe you'd get a new crater every million years I keep hearing that number which means you know about never but you see here if this is true a record of an impact a crater only eight hundred years ago I'd see a million years 800 years very unlikely and astronomers just can't accept this idea that somebody saw this it's like in a thousand years instead of a million years it's one chance in a thousand you can't see it but they did see it and they recorded this they happen to be looking at that very time and even though astronomers don't believe this you can see it up there now here's a hole here's a full moon and you'll recognize some of the markings there's those sees those lava flows and I marked what I called mark Crisium maybe we call seeing this just with the unaided eye and it's right that little patch in the upper right actually where we think this explosion was seen is just around the backside it wasn't on the front but just around the edge just to the right of mer Crisium and some of our spacecraft like the Clementine have gone around the other side and taken pictures and you can fight that see this very fresh blemish and we think that's the one that these people saw back in medieval times that does look like a fresh crater they call it crater Bruno named after a theologian from the past and when they look at this thing close they can even see them where landslides have occurred recently there is some activity on the moon it hasn't been dead and quiet for a million years things are still happening so there it is this craters about 13 miles in diameter so there are some bigger some smaller but that's still going on I think I have a creationist prediction I don't get into all these millions of years and this was seen here by people I would predict that maybe in the next couple hundred years we'll see another major impact on the moon this stuff isn't all swept under the rug and a million years ago it's still going on there still is some debris somehow left over from the creation and it still smacks the moon now and then I don't know if you followed all that but I'm going on I'm still on the moon so here's another question these eclipses that occur you know when the moon gets in front of the Sun or vice-versa they're kind of neat and we've all seen one before and so the thought here just to kind of get practical for a minute when's the next one now here's a lunar eclipse when the moon moves through the Earth's shadow and it doesn't disappear but it kind of turns that red brown color this lasts for a couple of hours it happens once or twice a year when there's a full moon that ought to happen in October you know to go along with things I forget when the next one is but it's not all that rare but the other kind of eclipse when the moon covers up the Sun that's a little more interesting because that happens during the daytime and didn't show that too clear through the palm trees but that's the Sun with a bite out of it because the moon is in the way and the moon doesn't have any light so you don't see it but there's part of the the Sun that's gone and even more dramatic is like on occasion where that where the Sun gets completely covered a total eclipse of the Sun that's kind of rare I've never seen one but just to be the first ones to know here there are some interesting times coming up these blue paths show total eclipses that are going to sweep across North America over the following decades in fact we got a big one coming up in 2017 what is that six years from now and that's if that's just one of those blue lines Oh it's missing Washington but it's just south of us there and it goes right across the country and if you're on that path a total eclipse dark in the middle of the day the stars will come out and it'll last for you know just a few minutes when that happens and when it does happen they come in pairs so there's another one in 2020 for some of us some of us are just going to try to hang on here for a while so we can see this before we leave this planet and we're at a given place on the average about once every four hundred years so this is a special time we have coming up where we're going to have these coming across North America you'll hear a lot more about this people are going to be buying telescopes and you'll be the first ones to know now it can be cloudy when that happens and then you miss it so then you have to charter an airplane to get above the clouds but we got some neat times coming for these total eclipses now well the whole thing is kind of strange how is it that the moon can cover the Sun completely I mean the moon is a lot smaller than the Sun 400 times smaller but as you know it's also 400 times closer and so that the moon and the Sun appear to be the same size in the sky what are they the size of a quarter and they can just cover each other up and I think God did that just so we can enjoy eclipses in fact there's nothing else in the solar system that has this perfect match and distance and size to make these eclipses possible so there we go let's make sure we get together for another conference in 2017 and we'll take a look at that the eclipse together fun times coming well again I'm just going through a few questions in astronomy and I hope this is of interest to us it's a grand part of creation last night Chris gave us a great show on the depth of space and kind of some neat graphics let me look at that again and but even make it a little simpler in case those numbers are too much for me let me get real basic here for a minute and this thing called a Lightyear I mean what is it yeah there's Buzz Lightyear we need something like that on a Saturday afternoon but this term it's it's not very well named because it sounds like a time but as you know it's a distance it's kind of like a measurement stick called a Lightyear and it's a big distance it's defined as the distance that light would travel in a year and if you want to get the numbers for it it's like six followed by 1206 trillion miles let's round it off a little bit but that's about how far light would go in a whole year if it doesn't bump into anything a light year and that's one of the basic measurements that we use in astronomy and then we talk about give or take lots of light years and it's kind of handy that way space does have those kind of distances and just to kind of compare that for a minute I was picking out a few different objects the moon not a whole light year away in fact 1.3 light seconds away the Sun about eight light minutes away that means when a little puff of light leaves the Sun it takes about eight minutes to get here traveling lickety-split like it does the Big Dipper stars average about a hundred light years away some a little more some a little less so you go out at night and you look at the Big Dipper and just think that light's been traveling since 1911 and it gets here in 2011 within reason there's some history to looking back in time when it comes to the space and then the distant stars actually galaxies that they're part of is where you get into the thousands of light years and billions and billions and on and on it goes and this again was what Chris was telling us about last night I have the feeling that this universe is much larger than anybody's dreamed not just billions of light years but endless trillions of light years I don't think we've seen anything that fourth day when God made the Sun Moon and stars that was one grand day and that's what creation is like well it didn't tire God out he just flung it out there from his infinite energy supply but we are just beginning to explore this whole thing and by the way talking about all these numbers we got to have one more big one here um well I guess we'll go right to this one which is a basic question in this whole topic of Bible in science if those stars really are that far away and the universe is not all that old we've kind of been suggested that this weekend how can we see those stars how do you see distant starlight this question just comes up and we all think about it there are different approaches to this different possibilities so in case you are wondering about this let me just kind of go through a few possibilities the first one I'm going to X out some have suggested that maybe those stars are not as far away as we think that they're like little Christmas lights they're not that up far up there and the light can get here in a hurry I'm sorry that one's disqualified their stars really are a long ways away and like I just suggested some of them are probably further away than we have imagined some have suggested that light speed has changed that it's been sort of an exponential decay and let's say back in Old Testament times it could travel faster and it kind of slowed down to the current speed so that's how far away light could get here can you follow that one I gave that a question mark there's not good data for that but then again we don't know what the speed of light was a thousand years or four longer ago so um I don't I doubt it but I put a question mark on it it's still being studied by some creation scientists could it be that there are different clocks now these are ideas popularized by Russ Humphries and John Hartnett modern-day creationist astronomers and there are deep thinkers and they write technical books they're out there in the book table they say things like while six days are going on on planet earth there are billions of years going on in space and time is somewhat flexible we've been studying time and it's somewhat stretchable time can be stretched like a rubber band or compressed together don't some hours seem longer than others be careful because that's not really what I mean here it's not in your mind but within reason time is an interesting variable and it's not as rigid as we think and so what these gentlemen are proposing is that due to relativity in cosmology in gravity while six literal creation days are going on earth lots of time in space so there was time for that light to get here that's still being work done it's interesting Jason Lisle from AIG proposes up what's this a privileged reference frame he suggests that any light coming toward us travels instant it has infinite speed from a star to here takes no time at all and you can do that mathematically I think it's kind of artificial and there's really no good way to I don't think you can check these ideas but I've been watching this stuff and every year there's the next idea they seem to come and go can I propose a last one here and maybe this is showing my age but the idea that God just made it that way that when he made the Stars he made them with their light thoroughly spread out the idea of a fully functioning mature creation now there are challenges with that so then if you look at those distant stars are they really there or are you just looking at light that was made in transit I don't know but any one of these theories has unanswered questions and I just watched those technical ideas there's a new one every year and they're fun to study and they kept capture the interest of us but the mature creation idea it it stays around and these things get revived and the more I think about this the more I favor that you know when sunlight comes to us we think that Sun is made in the core of the Sun those are photons and by our present understanding it takes those photons about 20,000 years to get out of the Sun just because of all the collisions well we get sunlight this light that we had yesterday is that coming from the core of the Sun or was it made halfway out here again I think creation was made fully functioning mature with that light on the way here I'm gonna leave that topic but anyway there are some choices and I don't know what they'll come up with next but I get a little bit I feel a little uncertain of these ideas where we try to explain seeing distant starlight with our present-day physics and we know so very little so I'm sorry I didn't do the greatest job on that question but I'm moving on how many stars are there that we have actually photographed well there's a whole bunch of them shall we count them and those colors have to do with the different temperatures that the stars have and it kind of makes a neat picture well let me just give you the number in case you're taking notes it's one followed by 22 zeros the number of known stars and it's probably the first drop in the bucket but that's what we have just that goes on and on we could divide those up one for you one for me one for everybody on earth you'd have over a trillion stars we'd all be wealthy but they're not ours what a story that is I am running out of questions here that's a good thing I don't know if you've heard about this this is kind of making the rounds that it's gonna be all over next December I mean someone said I guess I'll maxed out my credit card then there was a movie about this and I think maybe the the kids really wonder about this you know people kind of trying to scare them let me simply say that from the science there's nothing to this there's a story going around that there's a new planet and it's going to come crashing into the earth there is no such planet there's a story that the Mayan calendar runs out next December and that's the end of the world well like any calendar it just turns over and starts again that's not the end of things there's a theory that the planets are gonna line up and the gravity will pull us all out of shape they're not gonna line up next year there's a theory that the Earth's axis is going to shift next year and the whole planets going to turn upside down that's not going to happen either who's making up all these stories who's trying to rewrite the future now of course it's in God's hand and the world may end next year or the next minute but we don't know and those ideas are just kind of crazy so I think kids need to be assured that science is not going to end it but on and on the movie goes I guess I had one last one here and to get real basic gravity now that holds us on the ground and keeps the earth going around the Sun it's invisible but it's kind of interesting and it remains kind of a mystery let me just give you the latest view because we were talking current events imagine that you have a trampoline and you put a bowling ball in the middle that's the yellow thing see how it sinks down and then toss a tennis ball onto this trampoline and that might be that red line no it won't go in that dotted line it'll kind of make a curve can you imagine on a surface like that well the current view is gravity is a curving of space and instead of a bowling ball that's the Sun which actually makes a depression in space and the earth is kind of caught on the side of this hill and goes round and round it doesn't fall in toward the middle because there's no friction but we are just kind of caught in our orbit on this slope and so are the other planets in that interesting our latest view of gravity and they do all the math to this thing and I think that there could well be some truth to this as we're learning more about gravity and so everything curves space somewhat oh you're saying I don't know what you're talking about I can imagine a trampoline but how do you do this in 3d space it's all mathematical but it's almost like space can be compressed or stretched like time was so there's some planets and there's the Sun and even you make a curvature in space because gravity acts everywhere now this is not explaining how it happens it's just saying space needs to be curved and maybe we're catching a little glimpse of of what creation is like what God does with gravity one last thought with gravity by the way and this is a basic problem basic problem with astronomy astronomers don't like to talk about it but it seems like 90% of the universe is missing I mean that is kind of embarrassing because these galaxies like the Milky Way are in dromeda or whatever one you're looking at they are the way they're turning it doesn't seem like they have enough gravity it seems like all those stars should be flinging off to the side that these things should disintegrate these gravities galaxies they're like a merry-go-round going too fast they should be flying to pieces but they don't they stay very secure and so astronomers are saying there must be some material some mass that we can't see that gravity is holding these things in place they call it dark matter they call it missing matter hidden matter they've been looking for it for years and can't find it and they say it's 90% of everything what a way to end our talk here with this predicament let me put a positive spin on it over in the New Testament in the book of Colossians there's a comment that says the Lord holds everything together and by him all things consist that verse tells me that in some way the physical world interfaces with the spirit world maybe they can't find this hidden matter because it's not there maybe it's God's hand that makes gravity work and is holding these galaxies in place want to be careful because they keep making new discoveries but they've really been looking for this missing matter and can't seem to find it an interesting verse maybe that's the secret to the missing mass well by the way if you going to do some more work on this one of the books out there in the table is called astronomy in the Bible I put that together last year and it's got some star charts in it that you can use the year goes by you

Channel: Northwest Creation Network

Views: 32,276

Rating: 4.0515466 out of 5

Keywords: Astronomy (Professional Field), Creationism (Religion), creation science, creation apologetics, creation worldview

Id: JTA30Nb298o

Length: 50min 37sec (3037 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2013