Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
I remember in my first year science classes at high school and back in the late 1950s, we had to learn the order of the planets. And we learnt the theory that the solar system formed when there was a swirling cloud of hot dust, and it condensed and collapsed and formed the planets. And, of course, this theory, although it was proposed a long time ago by Laplace, the very clever mathematician who lived in the second half of the 17 hundreds and the early 18 hundreds, he's a French mathematician. And we have Laplace transforms and so forth in mathematics. And he was one of the pioneers of this idea, which is now called the nebula hypothesis. And it's probably the most widely accepted model used to explain the formation of our solar system by some process of astronomical type evolution.
As such, the theory, however, has some huge problems, really huge problems. And one of the issues is how can this collapsing cloud of dust explain the origin of the star? So, to form the sun or any star, a cloud must be dense enough to collapse on itself due to gravity and compress the interior so that it becomes hot enough for nuclear fusion to start. And the problem is, of course, that if you have to have a really massive cloud in order to, so that gravity can overcome the tendency for the gas just to expand. And so, according to the Big Bang theory, of course, when the first stars formed, the temperatures were so high that the mass required for them to condense is calculated to be equivalent to about 100,000 suns.
And so there's a massive problem here with the theories of star formation.And this is one of the things. All the theories of star formation have problems.
And it's interesting, a textbook that was published, “Accretion Processes in Star Formation”, by L. Hartmann, Cambridge University Press, that was published back in 2008. There's a very brief discussion of this on pages 57 to 58.
There's major, major problems with how you can have enough mass to collapse into a star and form the sun in the first place. The other thing is that if the sun and the plants were formed by a collapsing sort of cloud of dust, and the sun should be spinning in the same plane as the planets. However, if we define the earth's orbit as being the sort of the primary orbit, then we find that the sun itself is spinning on its axis at about seven degrees different.
And so, again, this is a problem. What caused this deviation in the spin in the plane of spin? Of course, most of the theory that the planets formed is that they arose from the collisions of these dust particles, which heated and stuck together to form larger particles of welded rock. And then these blobs further accumulated to form larger blobs and so forth. And eventually the planets formed.
So this is the theory. But research is showing that the rocks simply wouldn't stick together.
They'd most likely zoom past each other. And this was discussed, really, in just a brief article called the “Earth was a Freak”, which was published in New Scientist in March 2003 by H Muir.
So there's a lot of problems with our solar system. And the other thing is, too, that according to the evolutionary models, the huge planets like Jupiter and Saturn, which are gas giants, could have formed only if they were far enough away from the sun so that the ice could not condense. And this would produce additional mass.
This would provide the additional mass to draw in gas from the nebula, and the ice would help the rocks to bond. And Jupiter's core would need to be about 20 Earth masses to do this. But models of Jupiter indicate that its core is actually only about five Earth masses at most, even if they exist.
There was an interesting article, again, on this, published in New Scientist in July 2004. And a leading planetary theorist, Alan Boss, was quoted as saying, “The leading theory for giant planet formation”, and that's like Saturn and Jupiter, “has encountered a mortal blow”.
So, again, and this is the fascinating thing we read in the Bible, that God created the sun, that God created the moon, that God created the earth and the planets, the stars. It's amazing how the evidence is just so clear that there's no theory that we know of using just the laws of physics that can explain the structure. For example, Venus rotates in the opposite direction, so it's called a retrograde.
So there's all these problems with theories trying to explain our solar system. However, one of the things that I think is causing a lot of doubt in the Bible, again, is this long ages, the claim that the solar system is billions of years old. But, again, there's major problems when we assume these ages for the stars and the planets.
And we talked about some of the issues with Mercury just in one of the recent programmes. But when we look at what we know now about all the different planets, there are so many unique properties that these planets have that many point to a very, very young age. And so it's interesting that when we think about our sun there and all the light, it was proposed back in 1939 by Hans Bethe that stars, including our sun, are powered by nuclear fusion.
And he actually won the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics for his theory. And so in the fusion reaction, extremely fast moving hydrogen nuclei join to form helium, and this requires temperatures of millions of degrees.
Now, some mass is lost and converted into a huge amount of energy, as per Einstein's equation e, of course, mc2 squared. And so you can think of it as the sun as like a gigantic hydrogen bomb. And it's fascinating.
According to some of the statistics that scientists have measured, it would seem that there's about 4 million tonnes of matter converted into energy every second. The enormity of the sun is huge. Of course, one of the factors, of course, is that the fusion produces a vast number of extremely low mass particles called neutrinos, that travel nearly as fast as light.
And the sun, of course, is claimed to be about four and a half billion years old. That's when our solar system is deemed to have formed and the earth and so forth. However, it's quite fascinating, of course, that this rate at which the energy is being used up and so forth poses a problem for the billions of years.
And one of the reasons is this. All living things on Earth, we obtain our energy essentially from the sun and the wind and the water cycles. And we know that the sun is powered by this nuclear fusion.
And the thing is that as nuclear fusion takes place, the sun's core should shrink. And so this would make further fusion reactions occur more readily and therefore the sun should shine more brightly as it ages. But this means that if billions of years were true, the sun would have been much fainter in the past.
However, there's no evidence that the sun was fainter in any time in Earth's history. Now, astronomers actually refer to this as the faint sun paradox. But, of course, if the earth is only 6,000 years old and the sun only 6000 years old, which the Bible says, we don't have a problem.
So, if we look at the evolution theory, of course, we've got that life appeared on Earth, they're claiming now, about 3.8 billion years ago, or somewhere between 2,000,000,000 and 3.8. But if that timescale were true, the sun would be 25% brighter today than it was back then.
So that implies that back then, with a cooler sun, the earth actually would have been frozen at an average temperature of about minus three degrees. However, it's interesting that palaeontologists believe that, if anything, the earth was warmer in the past. So the only way around them for the evolutionary palaeontologists is to make arbitrary and unrealistic assumptions of far greater greenhouse effect than exists today.
In fact, they want about up to about 1,000 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's interesting that analyses of algal microfossils that are dated about one and a half billion years old, when the sun would have been only 88% as bright as it is today, provide evidence for only ten to 200 times today's level of carbon dioxide. But still, the researchers hope that that might have compensated for the fainter sun.
And it's quite interesting. There was people interested in reading up on this. There is an article published in Nature back on the 18 September 2003 looking at the carbon dioxide levels at that time.
So we can see that again when people try to, scientists try to accommodate these really, really long ages into the evolution theory, they come into major problems, and you end up, as I said, with the need for unrealistically high carbon dioxide levels.
And this is something, again, when people take into account evolutionary theory and they forget about the problems, such as the fact that if the sun was really that much older, it wouldn't be as bright back then, because suns get brighter as they age, which is, I guess, counterintuitive to a lot of people. So it's interesting, too, when we look at the sunspots, of course, we see, and there are some giant sunspots that are on the sun that can be observed.
It's interesting that Galileo did quite a bit of research on these. And there are some sunspots, really, that are almost the equivalent of the diameter of the earth. And it's interesting that the Encyclopaedia Botanica talks about the problems that Galileo had.
And a lot of people think that Galileo was struggling against the church, and the church had got everything wrong. But what had happened, of course, was that some members of the church had adopted the current secular scientific view at the time, rather than the biblical view. And it's interesting that there was a book published called, “The Crime of Galileo”. It's published by University of Chicago Press some time ago now, back in 1955 by G. D. Santillana.
And it's interesting in the introduction on page twelve, Santillana, who was a professor of history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time, points out, and is quoted as “It has been known for a long time that a major part of the Church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular ideas”. And so, again, we see that there's so much misinformation as circulated in attempts to discredit the Bible and the Bible account. One of the fascinating things that we can observe here on Earth is a solar eclipse.
And a total eclipse is possible because the moon is almost exactly the same angular size, or half a degree in the sky as the sun. That is, both. The moon is 400 times smaller in diameter than the sun and it's 400 times closer than the sun.
And again, this looks like a special design feature for us to enjoy. A creationist, astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner, has shown that solar eclipses, as we say on Earth, are probably unique to the solar system.
And so at the present time, there's no other sort of planet moon combination that comes close. So it's another fascinating aspect that, again, points to the design of our solar system.
Now, another thing, and I've talked about this in earlier Faith and Science talks, when there's a total eclipse of the sun, you see the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is visible.
And this is an extremely thin layer of ionised gas, which is very, very hot. It's about 2 million degrees and parts of it can get up to 20 million degrees. It's actually about 350 times hotter than the sun's surface.
And this has been a major mystery for scientists, because heat normally flows from hot objects to cooler ones. How can this outer layer of the sun be so much hotter than the inner temperature of the sun? So, of course, there's a theory that involves the sun's strong magnetic field and that the connection of the magnetic flux lines theoretically could release large amounts of energy into the corona. And, of course, this is being studied as possible application in fusion power research.
So there's a few theories where scientists are looking at trying to explain this. One of the fascinating things, of course, is when you're doing a drawing at school and you're asked to colour in the sun, we generally colour it in yellow. We don't colour it in yellow, we don't colour it in white, but in actual fact, it is white.
The sun loses some of that colour, of course, as the light passes through the atmosphere. And that's because the shorter wavelength colours, such as the blue, green, indigo, violet sort of end, are scattered by the Earth's atmosphere. And it's mainly the red orange yellow that get through to us.
There's some fascinating aspects of our sun, but I think one of the things that we think about it is, again, that if it was really billions of years old, this is a major problem in terms of the amount of heat, the Earth would have been much colder at that particular time. And, of course, if the Earth's atmosphere, if the carbon dioxide content was so much higher, then that would again affect any carbon 14 dating as well. But, of course, when we look at carbon 14 dating, this is other evidence for a young Earth, because after about 100,000 years, we'd have no detectable carbon 14.
But we find carbon 14 in wood that's trapped in lava, dated millions of years old, and in dinosaur remains and all these sort of things. So we can see that there's a whole massive problem when we look at trying to explain life on Earth through the big Bang theory that has the whole universe and evolving over about 13, 14 billion years, and then our star system, solar system, forming after four and a half billion years ago, all this sort of thing, we have major, major problems. When you look at all the implications for what these long scales mean and the fact that you've got planets like Venus spinning the opposite direction, you've got the planets aren't in the same plane, they're off on different planes.
We've got the magnetic field effects that I spoke about, for example, and Mercury that point to a young ages. There's so much that points either directly to young ages for our solar system or can only be explained satisfactory in terms of life on Earth with our young solar system. And this is so important that we get this understanding when we look at our education system today.
It's just totally enamoured with long ages and it just goes through the whole concept of people's everyday lives. Now, we think in terms of the surface of the earth being millions of years old, even though, again, as I've pointed out on a number of times, if we look at erosion rates that we can go out and measure now, the continents would erode away in less than 10 million years. And we've seen just massive erosion occurring on our beaches and our coastline lately, where sand has been washed away to bedrock and so forth.
And so we can see how, in just a few years, things can change dramatically, I suppose. I grew up when I was a little boy, I lived my parents on the beachside suburb of Stockton. And there was two sports ovals between our place on the esplanade and the beach itself.
Well, now there's just barely a bit of park in front. The beach has been eroded so far that the width of one and three quarter sports ovals have gone in the past 60 years or so. And so when we consider these things, there's so much evidence that points to the biblical scenario.
I know people claim all these long ages for civilizations and this sort of thing, but when I was doing my research, looking at the chronologies that have been preserved, they all only go back about 2,000 BC and then it just all stops. But we have quite well developed civilizations then, and suddenly this technology, buildings and so forth just suddenly appear. But again, it fits the scenario that highly intelligent people that were created by God, that then evil abounded, God had to destroy the world and it started again.
But so much of that knowledge, particularly in building, mathematics, astronomy and this sort of thing was preserved. The Bible picture so much fits what we observe. It fits also in describing human nature and evil and human behaviour.
And it also though, points to the hope that we can have that because there was an intelligent designer who's non material, he can, after we die, preserve us and recreate us again, resurrect us, as the Bible talks about, to live eternally for him. In other words, death, physical death, is not the end of life. There is life that God promises for us through the Son, through himself, Jesus who came, God who came to earth and manifested himself as a person to teach us firsthand how to live.
And it's a wonderful message. It fits in so many ways. It fits logically in so many ways.
And that's why great scholars like C. S Lewis have written books about this, explaining how it fits so logically.
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I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
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