THE BEAT GOES ON
Thursday, July 22, 2010
The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky displays his handiwork. Day after day it speaks out; night after night it reveals his greatness. There is no actual speech or word, nor is its voice literally heard. Yet its voice echoes throughout the earth; its words carry to the distant horizon.
Psalm 19:1-4 NET
It’s the mantra, the herd instinct (or the nerd instinct), following the crowd, peer pressure, the Pied Piper, and similar. Naturalism pervades the culture and through slick media presentation, clever accents, and letters after someone’s name (PhD, etc.), people are indoctrinated with bizarre, non-scientific (as in unobservable, non-repeatable) beliefs. It all stem’s from man’s innate sinful nature, hostile to God and thus prone to lying.
I have chosen to share more from Mike Psarris, an astronomer who believes in creation. These matters are highly relevant because they reach near the core of why our national media and educational system are so highly arrogant and godless. What we believe about our origins greatly affects our world view. All three of the following entries help defend the Faith of our great God, Savior, and Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ.
BLACK HOLES AND “ALTERNATE REALITIES”
Imagine you just sat down to watch a movie.
As the screen shows a field of stars, a deep narrator voice starts to intone:
"Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe . . .
"In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe - from the microscopic to the supermassive - may be doorways into alternate realities."
Would you think you were about to watch a science documentary? Or would you groan instead, realizing you were about to suffer through a really bad science fiction show?
Well, in this example, the answer is both. Those lines are the beginning of an article in National Geographic:
http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BtLpV&m=1g6nKLYet2R1Rr&b=UaI9tCwJO5K_f8MSb2UI5g
. . . and they're meant to be serious statements about science, though they have little relation to reality.
The article talks about a new theory that black holes - which are weird enough in themselves - are actually "tunnels between universes."
According to this idea, matter can fall into a black hole and get spewed out elsewhere, in a different universe.
It goes on how to explain how this might clear up certain mysteries associated with the Big Bang, especially the question of how the Big Bang could have started in the first place.
To their credit, a few scientists in the article questioned the new idea:
"By saying our universe was created by a gush of matter from a parent universe, the theory simply shifts the original creation event into an alternate reality. In other words, it doesn't explain how the parent universe came to be or why it has the properties it has . . . 'There are really some pressing problems we're trying to solve, and it's not clear that any of this is offering a way forward with that'."
Nevertheless, the article presented this idea as a viable hypothesis.
Question of the day: when you talk about "alternate realities" or "other universes," are you talking about science?
Answer: No. Science is concerned with things that are observable and measurable. By definition, anything outside our universe is beyond our perception. Thus it can't be observed. Thus, it's outside of science by definition.
Speculations about "alternate realities" belong in science fiction novels, not in science articles. Yet here they are in National Geographic - the same publication that trashes Biblical history every chance it gets.
Do you suppose there's a connection?
NEW PLANETS DENY EVOLUTIONARY MODELS
In this article:
http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BtLpV&m=1g6nKLYet2R1Rr&b=xOQb7prD_WVk_jDrAoFi6w
. . . a surprising discovery is announced about a survey of 27 “exoplanets” (planets orbiting other stars instead of our Sun).
Most secular astronomers believe planets form from gas disks around stars. Since these disks rotate in the same direction as the stars, the planets should too. Plus, the planets should all rotate the stars in more or less the same plane, aligned with the stars' rotations.
But now we're finding they don't.
Of the 27 exoplanets surveyed, more than half of them are misaligned with their parent stars' rotations.
And six of them are retrograde - they orbit their stars in the “wrong” direction.
As one of the researchers commented, “This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets.”
The more we've learned about exoplanets, the more problems they've caused for evolutionary theories. For example, it's been known for over a decade that lots of Jupiter-sized exoplanets orbit their stars *very* closely.
However, evolutionary models say these planets can't have formed anywhere this close to the stars.
This has forced secular astronomers to invent stories about the planets forming farther out, but then moving in closer, and then stopping for some reason before crashing into the stars.
Now the evolutionary model has even more problems to overcome.
When exoplanets were first announced, some anti-creationists gloated over this "evidence" for naturalism. Planets forming from dust disks are 'inevitable', or so they claimed. Just as our Solar System formed by itself, so did these other planets.
Now, instead of looking typical, our Solar System is looking pretty special. And that's really inconvenient for the solar nebula model, because that model was constructed on the assumption that our Solar System was a typical example.
Plus, it has philosophical implications as well. We've discovered 452 exoplanets so far. Yet only a handful are in the “habitable” zone of their system (where moderate Earth-like conditions are possible), and most of these are Jupiter-size and presumably gas planets rather than terrestrial.
Evolutionists insist that there are no special places in the Universe. But of the hundreds of planets we've discovered, only our Earth is so beautifully designed to support life. Every other place is bleakly desolate at best, and instantly deadly to life at worst.
The more of our Universe we explore, the more we see a Universe that's consistent with Biblical revelation instead of evolutionary naturalism.
ASTRONOMY, SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, AND CREATION
A recent article in New Scientist confirms some points I made in my Solar System DVD. It also provides an (unintentionally) entertaining look at how you must distort your thinking in order to believe in the standard evolutionary model.
(The article is here: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=BtLpV&m=1g6nKLYet2R1Rr&b=gX3sjTE27Mo1h7QCF_Q0mw)
As I explained in my video, if the standard Solar Nebula model were true, neither Uranus nor Neptune would exist. The giant ice planets are too far from the Sun.
(According to the model, at this remote distance, the alleged dust disk that formed all the planets was too thin to form much of anything.)
Nevertheless, despite all its problems, the Solar Nebula model is the standard model today.
(Why? Because all the alternatives have even worse problems.)
Anyway, if you want to believe in a non-Creationary origin of our Solar System, you must solve this problem: How can Uranus and Neptune exist?
Solution: you assume that these planets formed closer in towards the Sun, where there was enough dust to make them.
New problem: why didn't they stay where they were formed?
Solution: they must have migrated outwards.
New problem: that means they moved out *against* the Sun's gravity. How did they do that?
Solution: they must have been thrown out there by interactions with Jupiter and Saturn.
New problem: Jupiter and Saturn can't do that from their current orbits.
Solution: OK, Jupiter and Saturn must have been in different orbits too.
New problem: what happened once Uranus and Neptune arrived in their new (current) locations? What happened to the smaller planet that the model predicts would have formed in their absence?
Solution: “Neptune may have engulfed” the planet that used to occupy its current neighborhood. In other words, Neptune ate it.
Or, it might have been flung away, after Neptune stole its moon, which then became Neptune's moon Triton as we see it today.
And on it goes. How plausible does this string of stories sound to you?
Note that the Solar System *as we see it today* denies the Solar Nebula model. In other words, the actual data (the things we can measure today) are *against* the evolutionist model.
Nevertheless, secular astronomers want to believe in the model anyway. So they have to believe that all the planets used to be in different places, they moved each other around (against the Sun's gravity), they traded moons, they ate each other, and so on.
Is this science? No. This is story-telling.
Unfortunately, the media often present the stories to the public as truth. When the person telling the stories has a Ph.D., the reporter figures he must know what he's talking about. And so the fables get reported as facts, or at least as respectable theories.
This shows an important aspect of the creation/evolution debate.
When I first became a creationist, I tended to focus on the scientific evidence. And if you've seen my Solar System DVD, you'll know that it spends most of its time talking about evidence.
Nevertheless, the evidence itself isn't the most important issue. As we've seen here, even when the evidence denies their model, evolutionists create just-so stories to justify their beliefs.
No, the most important issue is the assumptions you make when interpreting the evidence.
If you assume the Bible is true, you will interpret the evidence one way. If you assume the Bible is not true, you will interpret the evidence a different way.
The same evidence will produce different conclusions, depending on the assumption you choose. And make no mistake - you have to choose, whether you realize it or not. (The lack of a choice is itself a choice.)
One of the differences between creationists and evolutionists is that (well-informed) creationists are aware of this issue, while (most) evolutionists are not.
We understand that certain foundational assumptions have to be made before any science can be done. Unfortunately, most evolutionists seem to be blind to this.