Astronomy
Astronomy is a wonderful science to study. Johannes Kepler, who by the way was a devout creationist and Christian, once said that doing Astronomy was like “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” I think that is a perfect description of what it is like. Astronomy is the study of space. Evolutionists tell us that it is about 14.5 billion years old. But there are many problems with this.
Comets and Asteroids
Evolutionists like to say that the universe is millions or even billions of years old. But comets and asteroids, kind of like massive rocks in the Solar System, can only go around the sun a certain number of times before the Sun’s heat boils them to the point of non-existence. But what are these objects and where do they come from? Furthermore, what are the evolutionary explanations for the problems that asteroids and comets bring to their models? The image on the left is Kalypso, an asteroid, and the one on the right is Halley’s Comet, a comet.
Comets are very similar to asteroids, but they are usually made of ice as opposed to rock in asteroids. Comets, thus, are easily melted by the heat of the Sun, since they revolve around it almost like miniature planets just made of ice. Comets are found mostly in the outer regions of the solar system, and nobody knows whether or not the Solar System somehow creates new comets, and, if so, where. Evolutionists have two main theories about how new comets form. First, they present the Oort Cloud Model. This model says that there is a cloud that we can’t see, but that does exist, somewhere in space, that somehow creates new comets.
Then, there’s the Kuiper Belt Model. This model says that there is a belt of asteroids out in space, and that somehow they are released from the belt and start revolving around the sun. Neither one of these sources, however, are visible to humans. When secular scientists can’t find real evidence for a new model, they push it out to the unknown and say that we can’t see it, but that they are positive that it is real.
Asteroids are made of rock, but, like comets, orbit the sun, or, in some rare occasions, planets. An asteroid will sometimes venture so near to the sun that it collides with it and is destroyed. Sometimes it will come too close to a nearby planet and strike it, sometimes destroying only itself, sometimes causing destruction to itself and the planet. Evolutionists say that this is how the planets got their moons—from getting bashed up by asteroids which tore off pieces which themselves started orbiting the planet. While it is possible that this might be the source of at least a few moons, it is very unlikely that it would have been the means of formation of the hundreds of moons that we observe in the Solar System.
So we see that comets and asteroids do not allow the solar system to be any older than about 10 million years old, and that’s being generous with the time. And they are not the only proof that the universe is not billions of years old; if the solar system truly were billions of years old, the Sun would be long dead, and the earth’s oceans would freeze and everything would die.
The Bible tells us that the universe was created by God about 6,000 years ago, and what we’re finding seems to support this young-earth model. As we discover more and more, the more clear it becomes that the universe is much, much younger than we have been taught by secular science teachers. The Bible is true, and science confirms it again and again.
But those are not the only problems with the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt. No, they have never been observed, but if all of those comets were really out there, then they would break each other up as they orbit the Sun. So even if the comets could exist in these areas, then they would be broken to pieces and destroyed by each other before they would have a chance to become normal, short-period comets.
Also, these new comets are supposedly called “comet nuclei”, but evolutionists were not completely sure that they were there. So, the Hubble Space Telescope was recently involved in a huge search for these comet nuclei, to confirm that they are actually there. Evolutionists expected to find about 85 of these comet nuclei. How many did they actually find? Only 3. This search result proved that they do not exist in numbers as large as what evolution predicts, and it also seriously calls into question whether or not the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt exist at all, either.
Blue stars
Blue stars (classes O, B and A) are the hottest, brightest stars in the sky. Unlike most stars, they expend their fuel exceptionally quickly. Here’s a quote from an astronomy program:
Blue stars shine brightly not because of their size, but because of their intense heat. Their high surface temperature of 25,000 degrees Celsius (45,000 degrees Fahrenheit)—compared to a mere 3,500 degrees Celsius (6,300 degrees Fahrenheit) for a red giant—gives them a luminosity 10,000 times or greater than that of the sun.
If they were really billions of years old like the evolutionists say they are, then we shouldn’t see them anymore. They would have expended all of their fuel and would no longer be visible since they can’t shine anymore. But we still see them, and that means that hey can’t be that old after all.
Earth’s Magnetic Field
Earth, like all the other planets (minus Venus and Mercury) has a magnetic field, and the strength of that field is fading fast. How fast? Our magnetic field loses about half its strength every 1400 years or so
At this rate, the maximum age for the Earth is about 60,000 years. You might think, “60,000 years! Wow, that’s old!” Well, in a sense it is, but it is still far less than the 4.5 billion years it has supposedly been around. Anyway, if we go beyond 60,000 years, the magnetic field becomes stronger than that of a neutron star, which is enough to rip the atoms of your body apart. So, since that hasn’t happened yet, the Earth can’t be that old, and that is still a rather low upper limit. Yet another reason why the universe can’t be as old as the evolutionists say it is.
Origin of Our Galaxy
Evolutionists, since they do not accept the biblical account, have a different view of how our galaxy got here. What do they believe instead? The same astronomy program said this about the origin of our galaxy:
The Milky Way probably first formed in much the same way as our solar system. An enormous cloud of gas—mostly hydrogen—began to collapse under its own gravity 10 to 15 billion years ago. In the more densely packed central region of this cloud, the first stars turned on. Today, these are the old stars in globular clusters found in the galactic bulge and the halo.
The gravity of stars and gas and dust attracted more stars and gas and dust, a rotational direction emerged from the twist of the cloud, and the central region began to flatten out into the galactic disk.
That galactic disk became the new region of star formation, drawing raw material in and leaving a vacuum in the halo so that few new stars could form there. Today, we see only older stars and globular clusters in the halo.
By the time the Milky Way started to coalesce as a galaxy, about twelve billion years ago, many stars had already grown old enough to exhaust their supplies of hydrogen fuel, and the very largest began to die the spectacular deaths we call supernovas.
But in every death there is birth, and the supernovas explosively seeded their surroundings with new elements they’d cooked up deep within their fusion furnaces. Each new generation of stars came together out of a richer interstellar medium. And as new stars spawned planets, these worlds could be more and more complex.
As it says, the solar system supposedly formed the same way. So first, they talk about how the first stars turned on. But there is a problem here, which they aren’t telling you about. Star formation has serious problems, and has never been observed. Also, notice the time scale. If the Milky Way formed 10-15 billion years ago, then they have their ages coming in at 1.7-2.5 million times as old as the creation account does!
Origin of Our Solar System
The same program that I have been quoting also said this about the origin of our solar system:
Many ideas have been put forward to explain how the solar system came to be. Despite the great variety of objects in the solar system, the sun, the planets and their moons, the asteroids, and the comets are not a random collection of bodies but a family with a common origin. We have no evidence that anything in our solar system came from outside except starlight and other kinds of radiation.
The most compelling theories speak of a great cloud of gas and dust that connects the formation of the planets, the asteroids, and the comets with the formation of the sun itself some 4.5 billion years ago.
As the gas and dust began to collapse under the force of gravity, the sun began to form in the dense central region. Smaller collapsing balls of gas formed at various distances away from this central region, giving birth to the planets.
The Asteroid Belt can be thought of as the heap of raw material of a planet that never came to be. It might have formed, if not for the gravitational tug of Jupiter. Jupiter’s hefty influence also explains why Mars is quite a bit smaller than Earth and Venus.
The connection between star and planet formation, as well as observations of other stars with disks of matter surrounding them, hints that billions of other stars in our galaxy might have planets. An international planet hunt is underway and since the first discovery, evidence of over 1000 so-called exoplanets has been found. Taken together, these two lines of thought give credence to the idea that collapsing gas and dust form both stars and their associated kingdoms at the same time.
I want you to notice several things in that quote. First, they say that many ideas have been put forward. What does that mean? If you have multiple different of the story, then that is a clue that what you’re saying probably isn’t true.
Next, they say that the gas cloud collapsed under the influence of gravity. But this idea has the same problem as star formation. Gravity cannot compress. Gas pressure spreads out the gas, and it is stronger than gravity, which is overcome by the gas pressure. In other words, the cloud would have stayed a cloud, not turned into the sun and all that orbits it.
But what about the Sun itself? Where did it supposedly come from? Well, they have an answer for that one, too:
The sun first ignited about 4.6 billion years ago. It burns about 3.6 million tonnes of hydrogen every second! But don’t worry, it has enough gas to burn for another five billion years or so.
Eventually, as its fuel supply runs out, it will swell into a red giant and swallow Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. It will likely boil off much of Jupiter’s atmosphere and perhaps Saturn’s too; and then, finally, shrink to become a white dwarf.
But how do they know all that? How can they predict what will happen? Well, they can’t. Star evolution has never been observed, and nobody believes that any more. But yet, here they are, presenting star evolution as a “proof” for their model.
But that’s not the only problem with the origin of the Sun. Like we have talked about before, stars cannot form on their own. So, the evolutionists are forced to find ways to avoid gas pressure, and they have five of them. Here they are:
- Compression from supernovae
- Cooling from injected interstellar dust grains
- Collisions from stars or galaxies
- Compression from black holes
- Radiation from newborn stars
But there is something in common with those five options: they all require stars to already exist before more stars can be made. Here’s why.
(1)Supernovae occur when old stars explode.(2)According to the Big Bang model, interstellar dust grains have to come from stars, too. (3)Stars are stars, and galaxies are collections of many stars. That requires many stars, too. (4)Black holes are thought to form when massive stars run out of fuel, or have certain other things happen to them. (5)Finally, newborn stars are still stars.
In other words, they have no way of explaining star formation. And that is huge problem. As we saw before, evolution cannot account for anything in our solar system. Neither can it stars, or star clusters, or galaxies, or clusters of galaxies. And that is the contents of the whole universe, which means that evolution cannot account for anything.
Origin of the Moon
Evolutionists have many views on the origin of the moon, and yet they all have major problems. Here’s what they say about the issue:
The moon is so big that for a long time scientists could not explain its origin; however, recent research has led us to the “Big Splash” theory.
This theory purports that four and a half billion years ago, a planet as large as Mars ran into the young Earth at high speed. The core of the unlucky planet merged with the Earth’s own core, while its outer layers were shredded and escaped into Earth’s orbit, where they eventually coalesced and formed our moon.
For more than 25 years, scientists have pondered a theory that the moon was created some 4.6 billion years ago, when an object the size of Mars crashed into Earth while our planet was still forming and less than 100 million years after the sun first turned on.
The general idea has been run through its paces and massaged into shape and is now the favored explanation; however, attempts to build computer models on this theory and its variations have in the past generated some inexplicable side effects.
In one of the two leading models, Earth was hit while it was still gathering mass and was only half its current size. All the rocky inner planets are thought to have formed this way, a method of rapid matter-accumulation called runaway growth. But if the moon was created during Earth’s growth phase, then it would have been around while the Earth continued bulking up by swallowing tremendous numbers of large asteroids. Some of these iron-rich rocks would have hit the moon, too; and yet the iron is not there.
In the other model, the aggressor was three times as massive as Mars and created an excess of rotation in the Earth-moon system that simply does not exist today.
In 2001, however, researchers harnessed some powerful computing power to provide the most detailed model ever made of the cosmic moon-making scenario. The result—a three-dimensional animation of the blast and the subsequent chaos—finally produced the effects they’d been looking for, and showed that the moon could have formed when a Mars-sized object hit a fully formed Earth. The collision would have given Earth its spin, defined what we now call the equator, and put enough material into orbit at the right distance from Earth to allow the formation of a satellite under which generations of humans would later swoon.
Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute has been modeling the moon’s formation for years. In previous studies, she has worked with William Ward and Alastair Cameron, who represent one of the two separate research groups that developed the original impact theory back in the mid-1970s. William K. Hartmann and Donald R. Davis were on the other team.
All ideas about how the moon formed must contend with one important fact: The moon contains very little iron. Earth, on the other hand, is loaded with iron, the bulk of it contained in the planet’s core. So the moon is thought to have been pieced together by the bits that got blown off the upper layers of the planet, as well as the outer portions of the object that hit Earth.
Canup’s 2001 effort, produced with the help of Erik Asphaug of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is like a small scene in a blockbuster disaster movie—the first 24 hours of the epic calamity that made the moon. The results were published in the August 16, 2001 issue of the journal Nature and remain accepted as the most likely scenario.
The model treats the debris created by the collision as more than 20,000 independent computational lumps, or particles, each with its own gravity, each interacting with the other objects as the cataclysm unfolds.
Canup describes the day the moon was made: A dark, lifeless object less than half as massive as Earth careens around a newborn sun. It is one of many planet-sized bodies hoping for a long career. But its orbit is shaky, its future grim. It is a character actor on the grand stage of the solar system, a player of great ultimate consequence but one that is destined to never see its name in lights.
This doomed protoplanet travels a path that crosses the orbits of similar objects and so, ultimately, cannot last long. Eventually, it meets up with a fledgling Earth.
It is not a head-on collision, but rather a glancing blow. The impact imparts what astronomers call angular momentum into the system. It sets Earth spinning on its axis and creates a moon that will go round and round the host planet for billions of years.
The shock of the impact strips material from both the outer layers of Earth and the impacting object. The mostly iron cores of both bodies meld together into the Earth’s core. It is as if a compact car merged onto the highway and collided with a large S.U.V.—glass, trim, and hubcaps fly everywhere, but the two chassis remain hopelessly tangled.
All told, about two percent of the combined mass of the objects—mostly rocky stuff that’s largely bereft of iron—begins to orbit the Earth. About half of this eventually becomes the moon.
Some of the stripped material is heated so fantastically that it vaporizes and expands into the surrounding vacuum of space. “The material that was vaporized expands into a cloud that envelops the whole planet,” Canup explains.
Meanwhile, a long arm of solid matter is winging its way around Earth. Some of it develops into a clump that slams back into the planet. The rest is flung into orbit, all pretty much along a plane that matches the path of the incoming object. This plane coincides with what is now Earth’s equator, and it is roughly the same plane along which the moon now orbits.
The model assumes Earth was not spinning before the impact, although it might have been; but the model is flexible enough to account for this fact and still yield similar results.
And so, for the first time, it was demonstrated through computer simulations that a single impact could give us an iron-poor moon of the correct mass, the current mass of the Earth, and the current angular momentum of the Earth-moon system.
Although the model covers only a single day, it is postulated that shortly thereafter the material in the outer reaches of the system began to cool, and that, gradually, small clumps would have formed, collided with one another, and grown. Based on other models, it would have taken between one and one hundred years after the impact to build the moon in this way.
Do they have any evidence for this view? Yes. The moon is deficient in iron, so they speculate that the iron from both bodies involved in the collision went to the Earth, and that is why the moon has so little iron, while the Earth is full of iron. But even if this collision had occurred, which it didn’t, then you would have to have it coming in at just the right speed, just the right angle and just the right time and force for this to be even possible, and there is still lots of debate on whether or not it could work even within these narrow parameters.
The Constellations
The constellations are shapes in the sky that we have defined by how they appear. For instance, the constellation of Orion looks like a hunter with a bow and a sword, so that is what we depict it as. Here is how evolutionists explain constellations:
Our brains evolved long ago to see patterns in nature—which turned out to be good way to find food and avoid being eaten—and down through history, humans have defined patterns of stars as a way of providing some order to the chaos of the night sky.
Several problems there. First, our brains did not evolve. They were created by and intelligent God about 6,000 years ago. Yes we do see patterns in nature, and yes, that is a good way to find food and not get eaten, but the sky is not chaotic. The sky is very precise and beautiful. Yes, we do see defined patterns of stars, but that does not prove that our brains evolved.
Hypothetical Entities
If you’re wondering what hypothetical means, it means something that has not been observed and that is not known to science. In other words, something fake.
Evolution has a lot of these hypothetical entities. As one secular scientist said, “…Big Bang theory relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities…” Indeed, the Big Bang theory relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities. But what are these “hypothetical entities?” Well, there are more than one of them.
The first is inflation. Before we go into detail regarding the fact that it is anti-scientific, we need to clarify what it is and what it supposedly does for the Big Bang model.
The Big Bang model had three major predictions that had failed. Then, in 1980, a cosmologist named Alan Guth proposed a radical new idea, inflation. Inflation says that the universe grew explosively for a very short time, and that it supposedly solves all three of these fatal problems. Actually “grew” isn’t the right word. We’re talking about the universe exploding in size at multiple times the speed of light. At this rate of inflation, “…a region of space the size of a pea would stretched larger than the observable universe in a time interval so short that the blink of an eye would over estimate it by a factor of more than a million billion billion billion.” That’s fast.
But now the question arrises, what drives inflation? Secular scientists say that inflation is driven by a particle called an inflaton. But has anyone ever seen an inflaton? No. Is there any room within particle physics for an inflaton? No. Is there any good reason for believing in the inflaton, or inflation overall, other than the fact that the Big Bang needs it? No. Actually, the inflaton, and thus inflation itself as well, is not scientific, which means that it is one of those hypothetical entities we’ve been talking about. But it’s not the only one.
Along with having major problems with the scientific evidence, evolution also can’t explain what is in the universe, as we saw already. For example, many galaxies don’t appear to have enough matter in them to hold themselves together gravitationally.
So, evolutionists invoke something called Cold Dark Matter. Cold, because it’s moving at slow speeds, matter, because it’s physical stuff, and dark, not because it’s something that looks dark, but because it’s invisible. It emits no light, no x-rays, no gamma rays, no infrared radiation, no anything. In fact, it doesn’t interact with light at all. It does not refract any light or reflect any light. It is unlike anything known to science. And it is not made up of atoms either.
So in other words, in order to explain away the huge errors in their models, evolutionists are invoking things that are unknown to science, and, thus, another of those hypothetical entities.
In addition to inflation and dark matter, there is the possibility that there is some energy out there that we can’t detect either. But where do we get this idea?
Scientists were studying some faraway supernovae, and they calculated the distance to these events based on their brightnesses. Then they calculated the distances to them based on the Big Bang’s predictions. And the distances were slightly different.
So, they were forced to invoke some new kind of anti-gravity energy called dark energy, not because it is something that looks dark, but because it is similar in some ways to the concept of dark matter. The model requires a tremendous amount of this energy, filling the entire universe, and growing as the universe itself expands, which the universe is actually doing. It is not just a secular idea. It’s a fact. But just how much of the dark matter and dark energy does the model require. Well, here are the percentages of the universe according to the Big Bang model:
- Observable Stuff: 5%
- Dark Matter: 27%
- Dark Energy: 68%
One huge problem with those percentages is that they claim to have a theory of everything. But if your model only attempts to explain 5% of everything (and we still only have a tiny understanding of the universe and its contents), then do you really have a theory of everything? The answer is clear: No.
Evolutions Problems with the Solar System
As we have seen before, the evolutionary model cannot account for the sun or the solar system. But since the solar system is so fascinating and so full of challenges for evolution, I thought that it deserved its own chapter. Let’s go through the objects it contains in order. But before that, we need to talk about what the solar system is.
The solar system is composed of the sun, the eight planets, their moons and the asteroids, comets and other objects. To give you an appreciation for how big some of the other planets are, Jupiter, the largest planet, is 11 times the diameter of the Earth. Saturn is a close second, at 9 times the diameter of the Earth. But that is nothing compared to the sun, which is 1,000 times the diameter of the Earth. And you might think, “Well, maybe our planet is not very big, but at least we do have a very big star.” That’s true—until you consider that one star, VY Canis Majoris, is so large that in order to see on a screen the sun as about the size of a pea, then you really have to look hard to see any curvature in VY Canis Majoris when it is placed beside the sun.
Okay, we’ll learn more about stars in a future article. For now, let’s learn about the solar system in more detail and see what problems it has in store for evolution.
The first planet out form the sun isMercury. Mercury is tiny, at about ⅓ the size of Earth, but it is also 3 times closer to the sun than Earth, which makes it easy to remember. Mercury has no atmosphere, but all the other planets do. Mercury has no moon; Venus, the next planet out, doesn’t either. The rest of the planets have 1 or more moons.
Mercury has its major challenge for evolution in that it has a magnetic field. Evolution says it shouldn’t. As we saw earlier, they have problems with Earth’s magnetic field. Well, Mercury is no different. Mercury is so small, it should have frozen solid long ago. So, evolutionists say that Mercury might have a dynamo inside its core. This requires a liquid metal core. As the liquid moves, it generates an electrical current, and this produces a magnetic field.
Ghost Craters
Ghosts craters on the moon also baffle evolutionists. Ghost craters are craters that are barely visible above the Maria. The image on the right is of a part of the moon, showing some shallow ghost craters. These apparently already existed when something collided with the moon and cracked the surface, causing lava to ooze out of the cracks. But how much time passed between the collision and the lava coming out. The answer is obvious: a few hours, a few days, maybe as long as a week or two. But evolutionists tell us that a good 500,000,000 years (a half billion years) passed between these events. But by that time, the lava would have dried up and the crack would probably have healed.