Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
I think for many people, one of the challenges to believe the Bible account of creation being only 6000 years ago or so, is the concept that the universe is very old. And we read in Genesis chapter one, on the fourth day, the stars and the sun and the moon were created. And so it seems, well, people think, well, they must have been there and they must be the billions of years old that science claims and fits in with the big Bang theory and so forth.
But I think one of the things is that they haven't really considered and drilled down into the evidence. And it's quite interesting that recently, for example, in 2018, there are a number of discoveries that pointed to our solar system being young, very young, and only in the order of thousands, tens of thousands of years old, according to the day that we're seeing. And what I'm seeing in the literature, as we make more and more discoveries in outer space, as our ability to gather information about the properties of our solar system, the properties of the planets, the properties of other stars and so forth, as we're accumulating information, what is happening is that we're creating more and more problems for astronomers to explain in terms of the standard Big Bang theories and the standard nebulized sort of theory for the origin of our solar system and so forth.
And to me, this is really fascinating in that the more we delve into astronomy, the more we're learning that the data just doesn't fit any known logical physical explanation according to the known laws of physics. In other words, what we're seeing is evidence of supernatural creation. And it's sort of like the more we discover the biochemistry of living organisms, we realise how impossible it is for evolution to have occurred.
But of course, scientists have no other option than either teaching pretty well the big Bang theory or some sophisticated, similar mathematical theory and the theory of darwinian type evolution to explain the origin of the universe and how we got here, because the alternative, which is best fitting the data, is creation by a supernatural God. And even in the area of we'll look at geology, more and more data as we understand about the structure of the surface of our Earth. It's all pointing to Noah's flood was a real event and again, only thousands of years ago, when we look at consider erosion rates and so forth.
But what I want to talk about today was, and focus in more was the evidence that we're now accumulating that our solar system is pretty young, it's not millions of years old. And I think this is very important because, as I mentioned earlier, I think this whole concept that our solar system and everything is very old tends to have the effect that it weakens people's faith in the Bible, whereas really we need to have that confidence to trust the Bible account as a real account. It's making sense.
Science isn't disproving the Bible. Now, there were quite, as I mentioned earlier, a few bits of information, for example, that were published back in 2018. And so on the Carnegie Science website, there was an article by S Shepherd titled “A Dozen New Moons of Jupiter Discovered, Including One “Oddball”. So this was published on the 16 July 2018.
And so the massive planet Jupiter, so Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, and it was found to have an additional twelve moons, bringing the total to 79 moons. And that's a lot of moons when you think, but it's a very big planet. Most of the moons order their host planet in the same direction as the planet rotates.
And so that's a prograde orbit. But it's interesting with Jupiter, it has a band of outer moons that go around the opposite way called retrograde orbit. And so this poses a challenge for the conventional naturalistic explanation of planetary formation, which is called the nebula hypothesis.
And so you may have remember learning this at school. I can remember learning this in this supposed that a swirling cloud of dust and gas accretes to form the planets and moons of our Solar system. But of course, if this were true, then all the planets and moons should rotate and orbit in the same direction, but they don't.
And among the newly discovered moons, also there was an odball moon dubbed valetudo, which, while it's a prograde moon, in other words, orbiting in the same direction as Jupiter is rotating, it's actually flying around in the opposite direction to its immediate neighbours and therefore risking a head on collision. So this is quite interesting. And again, the astronomers think that it's a pretty unstable situation.
And it seems that if this moon had been orbiting for millions or billions of years, it couldn't have been orbiting for that long. The observable evidence is that consistent, that in actual fact, this moon system is quite young. I think it's something to do with the calculations of the risk of collisions and so forth.
So that was interesting that we've got the interesting problem of the fact trying to explain that you've got some moons going one way and some moons going the other way, the opposite way, and how you've got a moon flying around in amongst these other moons that clearly hasn't collided. And so, again, this suggests that the system is actually quite young.
Another surprise find that was also published in 2018. And this was an article published in skyintelescope.com. It's by D. Dickinson. And it was talking about studies that they were doing using the NASA's dawn spacecraft of the dwarf planet series. And there was also an article in the same year, 2018, that can be found on astronomy.com by Jay Wentz called volcanoes of mud erupt from the dwarf planet series.
So series is the largest sort of body in the solar system's asteroid build, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter. And so the NASA's dawn spacecraft made a fly past. And again, we have this very small planet. Well, it's sort of called a planet. It's really a dwarf planet. It's quite small. It's only about one point, let me see, 1.28% of the mass of our moon. So it's in the order of about one 70th or one 80th of the size of the moon.
So it's quite a small little planet, but yet it shows clear signs of being very geologically active. And so this is really another major problem, because how can a planet that small, if it was really billions of years old or millions of years old, still have active volcanoes? It would have cooled down ages ago. It wouldn't still be active now.
What scientists found was that these were actually coal volcanoes, where the volatiles under the surface, such as water, ammonia, and methane, are heated by volcanic activity and erupt into space, where they quickly freeze due to the intense cold. And so the material that is ejected is called cryovolcanic ejector. And so the science were able to photograph the areas where this mud was being ejected from the interior.
And so the mystery for evolutionists is how Ceres, which they believe to be very old, can still be so hot inside, because such a small body, such a small planet, should have cooled down long, long ago. Now, also adding to the conundrum for the secular scientists is that given the tiny size of the dwarf planet and its alleged long age of billions of years and the amount of material that's escaping into space, all the water and other volatile should have been used up long.
So, and again, Ceres is too far away from the large planets to receive an influx of energy from any gravitational tidal type heating on this sort of thing. And so here we have major evidence for a very, very young planet.
Scientists believe that all the planetary bodies were originally molten and gradually cooled.
And here we have this series, a miniature world floating around in the coldness of space, it's believed to be the same age as the solar system. And so here again, once we do some basic calculations, it appears a tiny series with its lively, hot interior is no more than a few thousand years old. And, of course, again, this would be consistent with the biblical account.
So these are pretty exciting findings. And again, they were published fairly recently, just back in 2018. But, you know, there's more.
There's so much more. And I think the planet Mercury, which is the smallest planet of what we consider the major planets in our solar system, actually provides quite strong evidence, again, for creation on young Earth. So it's one of the eight planets in our solar system.
When I was a boy, we used to learn that there was nine planets. They counted Pluto, which they don't count now, but Mercury is the smallest. It's about one 20th of the volume of the Earth.
It's actually just a little bigger than our moon. And it was only Pluto that was considered small. But, of course, now it's denigrated to a dwarf planet now.
And so there's a moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, and a moon of Saturn, Titan, that are bigger than Mercury. But yet Mercury gives us quite a lot of clues about our solar system.
Of course, being so close to the sun, it's the first planet out from the sun. It's a planet of extremes. It's subject to a lot of weathering from the heat from the sun and also from many meteorite bombardments and also the interaction of solar winds and so forth.
Now, Mercury slowly rotates, and as it faces the sun, the surface temperature is measured to be around about 427 degrees celsius. And so that would easily melt lead, for example. But on the other side, it's -173 degrees centigrade.
So it's very, very cold and there's virtually no atmosphere, so there's little to scatter the sun's rays and this sort of thing. So the sky over Mercury would always be black. So it's virtually a pretty inhospitable planet.
There's no seasons or anything there. It orbits the sun fairly rapidly, being a lot closer, about 88 Earth days. But it takes 58.66
Earth days to rotate just once. So again, it would be pretty inhospitable to life. So the gravity on Mercury is actually only about a third of the Earth's gravity.
So you could jump quite a bit higher on Mercury than you can here. But even though it's less gravity, of course, because of the lower mass, it is in fact quite dense. In fact, Mercury has the highest density of all the planets other than Earth.
Now, to explain this, Mercury is believed to have an iron core occupying around 75% of its diameter. However, this high density has created quite a lot of problems for evolutionary models, because the evolutionary models don't allow for Mercury to be near as dense as it is. So they used to try to explain Mercury's density with a large impact, that some large object crashed into Mercury, knocking out its lower density material and leaving high density material in its place.
But, of course, there's no evidence for that collision on the planet. And the only reason they stick to this is that Mercury actually disproves the nebula hypothesis for the solar system's origin. Again, it just points clearly to unique creation.
In 2011, the messenger spacecraft began orbiting Mercury and studying a lot of its chemistry and particularly magnetism and so forth. So the other fascinating thing that came out of this was that evolutionists and long ages had thought that Mercury would be an old, burned out cinder because it's so close to the sun and it's so hot. So a lot of volatile that is easily vaporised.
Elements such as sulphur and potassium should have been removed by now if it was really billions of years old. But these elements are there and detected. And again, if there had been a collision, it should have vaporised all these volatiles and they would have escaped in the place into space.
And so again, the presence of these volatile materials still there on Mercury as powerful evidence that Mercury is very young. The fascinating thing is that not only is Mercury very hot, but it appears to be covered in brimstone or sulphur. And again, the volatile elements like sulphur, as I just mentioned, would have easily vaporised.
So another thing is that the calculations that they do on the interior again points to Mercury having much higher content of these volatile materials. And so there's a whole lot of facts about, or data that we've got now about Mercury's chemistry that are totally inconsistent with the old theories. So what we've actually measured on the planet's surface doesn't fit with the old fashioned chemical theories for the origin of mercury.
I guess one of the really important aspects was that when the mariner ten spacecraft back in the 19, mid 1970s flew past, Mercury detected that Mercury had a magnetic field. And that was very unexpected. It really contradicted the evolutionary expectations, because if a small planet like Mercury were billions of years old, the secular model says that it should no longer have a magnetic field.
It would have died away, just like, for example, our earth's magnetic field is declining. It's declined about 10% over the last 150 years or thereabouts, and where we've been able to do quite accurate measurements. And it's decaying, sort of part of an exponential decay.
And this is, again, powerful evidence that the Earth is not that old, because if we extrapolate back the strength of the Earth's magnetic field, and we've got a lot of data in between the mid 18 hundreds, and now a lot of accurate measurements of the earth's magnetic field have been made. So we can actually plot the trajectory. We can use mathematics to look at the curve and estimate what the shape of the curve was in the past.
And that gives us extremely high values for the earth's magnetic field, which would generate very high temperatures on the surface of the earth if it were really millions of years old. And this is the sort of data where evolutionists and anthropologists and this sort of thing seems not speaking to one another. We have this clear evidence that the Earth can't be millions of years old from the earth's magnetic field data, which is something we can measure now.
We can plot it and so forth, and it just blows away again, this old, real long ages for Earth, just like the carbon 14 data does, where we find carbon 14 in diamonds that are supposed to be billions of years old, they shouldn't have any detectable carbon 14. And yet the carbon 14 that we measure in diamonds is well above the detection levels of the mass spectrometers and so forth. So there's no doubt about it being there.
And again, with the half life being only five and a half thousand years, again, this points to a very young age, only thousands of years for the age of the Earth, or tens of thousands of years max. And so, again, this is another classic problem, that with Mercury having this quite strong magnetic field, that, again, it can't be the billion years old. So they've suggested.
The evolutionists have attempted to get round this problem by proposing that Mercury's core must also contain sulphur that would allow to stay unfrozen and supposedly remain to generate a magnetic field. However, this solution to one problem created another even larger problem. As mentioned earlier, the new nebula hypothesis says that mercury can't contain volatile elements like sulphur.
So in trying to explain Mercury's magnetic field with sulphur inside, the evolutionists were discrediting the nebula hypothesis itself anyway, the very idea they were trying to protect. It's quite fascinating. When messenger flew past mercury in 2829, the field seemed to have decreased in strength by a few percent.
So here again we have several percent, well a few percent decline in the Earth's magnetic field between 1975 and two nine. And so there we're looking at about 34 years or thereabout a few percent. So it'd be three or so percent decline.
So this is totally incompatible with a multiple millions of years scenario. And so they were concerned about this because again, these measurements are powerfully pointing to Mercury being very young. So they checked it again.
In 2011, more measurements were made that revealed a huge 7.8 decrease in the strength since 1975. And so this decrease is astonishing fast for something as big as the planet's magnetic field and shows that the magnetic field, and hence Mercury itself, cannot possibly be billions of years old.
It's interesting that quite a few decades ago, creationist physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys developed a planetary magnetic field model based on the biblical assumption that God created the planets about 6000 years ago and that they began as spheres of water. And he further supposed that God created hydrogen atoms from every water molecule of nucleus spin aligned, forming a massive magnet and therefore this decayed.
And in 1984 he used this model to predict the magnetic field strengths of Uranus, Neptune and Mercury. His Uranus and Neptune predictions, radically different from the evolutionary base ones, were demonstrated to be astonishingly accurate when Voyager 2 visited these planets in 1986. And 1986 Humphreys had predicted a decrease in field strength of 1.8% by 1990 compared to the measured field strength, and that would equate to a four to six decrease in 2011. So it turned out that Mercury's field was decreasing even faster than Humphreys had predicted. But it was very close.
So it's interesting that the creationist theories can be used to explain a lot of the properties of these theories, of these planets and definitely the young age scenario. So when we consider this, when we consider the best data that we have now out there, we can see that it fits the biblical account. So here from astronomy we have this first class evidence from the satellites that fits a young solar system.
I find this really, really assuring, really, really assuring. And I'd like to encourage listeners too to tell others, your friends and other listeners about this programme, Faith and Science. Remember you can google the programme by googling 3abnaustralia.org.au
That's all one word and click on the radio button and then look for the Faith and Science menu and you can scroll down and see lots of the programmes. And I've tried to, wherever possible, read out the references so that again you can relisten to the programme and go and cheque out those references. But it's important to, if you can, to put these links up on your social media pages.
Tell other people about, so other people can have the assurance that we can really believe the Bible because it has that important account of how we are to be saved for eternity through Jesus Christ our Saviour.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
