Dr. Jason Lisle Astrophysicist Astronomy in a Young Universe

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Okay, so I get to introduce our speaker tonight, Dr. Jason Lyle is an astrophysicist who double majored in physics and astronomy with a minor in mathematics at Ohio Wesleyan University.

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He then went on to earn his master's degree and PhD in astrophysics from the

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University of Colorado in Boulder. And I think that the creation apologetics community by far we're very grateful for him because clearly

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God has equipped him with a great mind and then in turn he has chosen to honor the

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Lord by giving back to him and serving him. And most of us here know that Dr.

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Lyle has spent time contributing to the ministries of both Answers in Genesis and ICR.

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But there's a few things that you might not know about him that I'm going to share. For example, did you know that he's discovered a planet?

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He also plays the piano, he repairs his own telescopes, and he does calculus problems just for fun.

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One of the bravest things he's done, however, was about three years ago when he stepped out in faith to start his own ministry, the

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Biblical Science Institute. Dr. Lyle believes that science is a tool that the Lord has given us that and that the appropriate response to scientific discovery is to worship the

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Lord who has constructed the universe in such an amazing fashion. So with that in mind, his goals for the

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BSI are to make available articles and forums so that people can learn the science that is made possible through a creator who upholds the universe in a consistent fashion and also for Christians to be able to learn to take every thought captive by studying the topics of logic and presuppositional apologetics.

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So throughout his presentation tonight, if you have questions, feel free to use the chat room to put your questions and at the end, we'll do a

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Q &A time, I'll ask him the questions that you guys have entered. Dr.

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Lyle presents on a variety of topics, including math and patterns, physics, logic, the

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Bethlehem Star, foundational presentations on the age of the earth, but tonight

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I asked him if he would come and share with us, remind us of some of the special features of our incredible night sky so that we can have an opportunity to tell those things to our friends and family and point them to the creator.

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So we are blessed to hear one of his hallmark presentations on astronomy and a young universe.

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Go ahead, Dr. Lyle. Well, thank you very much. It's good to be with you this evening. And of course,

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I do a number of different presentations and most of those I've done for what seems like millions of years.

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I've done them over and over and they become polished hopefully over time. But I imagine because I know a lot of you and I figured we get some creation groupies here and I thought you might appreciate a little different take on some things.

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So I thought I'd rather than give a canned presentation, I thought I would go into a little more depth this evening than I normally would for folks that I know are very passionate about creation.

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And I wanted to talk about astronomy and a young universe and in particular, some of the latest research on this issue, some things that I normally would not necessarily bring up in a sort of a maybe a

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Sunday morning service or something like that, where you kind of have to keep the cookies on the bottom shelf because not everybody cares.

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So anyway, so I want to present to you some some of the scientific evidence for a young universe.

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But I want to start by investigating what is the nature of scientific evidence in terms of age estimates?

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Because when you're asking about the age of something that really isn't a science question, it's a history question.

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You're asking how long ago did something come into existence? And the best way to answer a history question is with a history book if one is available.

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And of course, as it so happens, we do have the history book of the universe. The Bible is it's more than a history book, but it is a history book.

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And it records the origin of the universe and of life on Earth as well. That being said, the

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Bible doesn't give us an exhaustive knowledge of all things that have happened in history. And I think it's perfectly fine for when we don't have a history book available to try and make an estimate of something's age.

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And we do that sort of in our mind all the time. Maybe we look at people and they look a certain age and so on.

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So we're practiced at this. But how do we do this in terms of estimating the age of something that that was around before human beings, at least before we existed?

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What about the universe? What about Earth and so on? And generally, when you make one of these scientific estimates, what you're doing is you're observing the rate of change of some process in the present.

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And then you're extrapolating that observed rate of change, assuming that it applies in the past and or the future.

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And so you're applying an observed rate of change, assuming that it was the same in the unobserved past to make an age estimate.

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Or if you want to predict what will happen in the future, you're assuming that that rate of change will continue in the future as it is now.

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And so one example of this would be the rate at which a candle burns. You might have a candle and you measure that in an hour it burns, say, one inch.

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And assuming that the candle has sort of a uniform composition and maybe it's linear, it's the same size everywhere, it would be reasonable to think, well, in the next hour it'll go down another inch and another inch until it's nowhere.

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And you could you could go back in time, too. And you can say, well, an hour ago it would have been an inch higher, an hour before that it would have been an inch higher and so on.

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And that is, in a sense, a uniformitarian assumption. The uniformitarian assumption is that the rate of change is either constant or it changes in a constant way, that there's not a sudden change in the rate that's unpredictable.

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And virtually all age estimates, whether they're of the young universe variety or the old universe variety, they assume some degree of uniformitarianism.

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And that's a little surprising to people, perhaps. But I want to point out that, first of all, that's not necessarily wrong.

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Those of us who would say, well, I'm not a uniformitarianist, what we mean by that is we believe that the major features on Earth did not come about in the slow, gradual way that we see today, but they were introduced catastrophically, for example, during the worldwide flood.

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And that's what separates us from the uniformitarianist. I'm a catastrophist. I believe that catastrophes have shaped most of Earth's geology, not slow and gradual processes.

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But my point is, there's nothing wrong with uniformitarianism over a very short period of time.

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It tends to work. And so that's my second point, is that uniformitarianism often gives good age estimates for short extrapolations.

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And so, yes, indeed, if the candle's burning one inch an hour, it is reasonable, though not certain, that an hour ago it was an inch higher.

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And an hour before that, an inch higher and so on. But here's the problem. Eventually the rate changes and it doesn't matter what the process is, eventually the rate changes.

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And so at some point somebody lit that candle. And if you go back beyond that time, then you're going to have a wildly incorrect age estimate.

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So, for example, you might say, well, you know, one inch per hour. And that means decades ago it was taller than Mount Everest.

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And that would be totally unreasonable, of course, because at some point somebody lit that candle. And at that point, that rate of change was different before that.

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There was effectively no rate of change before that. So you can't really predict the age. You really can't calculate the age of a candle.

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You really can't, because you can only figure out how long ago somebody lit it, assuming you knew the original size, which is something we don't really know anyway.

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And so how long can we extrapolate? That's the question. And the answer is, you don't know, because you don't know, ultimately, when the rate changed.

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You don't know when somebody lit the candle. And it's the same way with processes on Earth. How long has the

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Grand Canyon been eroding? And you can't just assume that it's always been eroding at the same rate today.

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Uniformitarianists do that. But my point is, we know from history that there was a worldwide flood that would have affected that rate rather drastically.

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So how far back can you extrapolate? It'll work until it doesn't. And we often don't know what it is.

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But the punchline is, the bottom line of this, is that the more the farther back you extrapolate, the more likely your age estimate will be wrong.

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And that's just inevitable. That's the way we do these calculations. There are some sometimes you can argue that the conditions were very likely comparable to today.

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And so the way the planets orbit, for example, conditions, there's no reason to think that the conditions have changed that much.

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And so I can use the present rate at which planets orbit and I can calculate where they were 100 years ago or a thousand years ago with incredible precision until I get back to creation.

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And then you can't, because at that point, when God introduced the planets, there is no before that. There's no before time where that process continued.

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And likewise, for the future, I can tell you where the planets will be tomorrow or next year or 100 years from now, unless the

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Lord comes back in between and then all bets are off. So again, we can this extrapolation works well in both directions until the conditions change.

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And sometimes we don't know when those conditions change. And that's the point. And so my. My third point is that all old earth or old universe arguments ultimately beg the question, they commit the fallacy of begging the question because they implicitly deny a change in conditions that the

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Bible records. And so it's effectively they're arguing, you know, well, yeah, this this candle's been burning for millions of years and it must have been as tall as Mount Everest when it started.

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No, that's not correct. One of obviously one of the conditions that they deny would be the worldwide flood.

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A secularist deny that there was a worldwide flood, and that obviously is going to change the rate at which canyons are eroded because all the water on the planet, you know, funneling into the

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Grand Canyon or or at least a large area into the Grand Canyon and so on. But you see, that begs the question, because the uniformitarianists has already assumed that the

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Bible's wrong, that there was no global flood. So they've said the Bible's wrong. Rates and conditions are constant and therefore they conclude that the canyons millions years old, therefore the

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Bible's wrong. But that's the very assumption that they started with. And so you see, it does no good to assume your own position for the sake of proving your own position.

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That's arbitrary. And that's the fallacy of begging the question. How many old earth arguments beg the question?

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I say all of them. I have yet to hear a logical argument for an old earth or old universe, one that does not already assume at the outset that things like supernatural creation and the catastrophe of the flood that deny those things that the

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Bible teaches, they're all based on the assumption that those things did not happen. And so it begs the question. Fourth, I do need to point out that uniformitarianism is not necessarily linear.

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The candle analogy I gave was linear, one inch per hour, and it stays one inch per hour. But there are other types of change where the change is uniform, but it's not linear.

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And so, for example, the rate at which radioactive elements decay, if you have an element with a half -life of one hour and you wait one hour, half of it will be gone.

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It'll have converted into the other element. But then in the next hour, it's not all of it will be gone. It's half again will be gone and half again after that and so on.

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So the amount of material that changes itself changes, but it changes in a predictable way.

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And so in the case of exponential decay, the uniformitarian assumption would be that it's always been an exponential decay and that the decay constant is the same.

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And so that basically the same equation that calculates that decay has been in the past as it is today and will be in the future.

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And of course, we now know with some radioactive elements, we know that's not the case. We know that that radioactive decay rate can be changed, the decay constant can be changed.

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But the uniformitarian assumption in that case would be it's always been an exponential decay, not linear. And that'll be important when we talk about lunar recession, which we'll get to here in a moment.

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So all secular age estimates assume uniformitarianism and naturalism. They assume uniformitarianism because any age estimate has to assume that to some extent.

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But our problem with the secularists is that they ignore historical events that would have changed that rate and rather drastically, such as the global flood.

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And of course, you can't go back beyond creation because that was a rather catastrophic change in conditions when

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God spoke the universe into existence. The universe had no previous existence, and obviously that was an enormous change and one that was very sudden and cannot be described in a in a uniform fashion.

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Another example of something that's considered to be uniform, but not linear, is the expansion rate of the universe.

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There's a what's called the Hubble constant, which describes the rate at which the universe is being expanded. And I think there's good evidence it's it's being expanded or stretched out.

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But secularists do not assume that that expansion rate has always been constant because it's affected by gravity.

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Gravity tends, the gravity of the galaxies tends to slow the expansion with time. So it had been quicker in the past. And they include that in their calculation when they want to figure out when the

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Big Bang allegedly happened. But you see, my point is, you can't go back beyond 6 ,000 years because that's when the universe was created.

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And so by ignoring that and extrapolating back to where where they think the universe has zero size, and you can't get less size than zero size, so they figure that's the beginning and that's where the 13 .8

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billion years comes from. But they're not assuming a constant rate, they're assuming a uniform rate in the sense that it changes, but in a uniform fashion, one that can be predicted mathematically.

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So fifth, I want to point out that most of the age estimates used by young Earth creationists are upper limits.

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And that's really important, because sometimes we'll point out that there's some system that can't last more than, say, a million years.

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And people will say, there you go, it's at least a million years old. No, it can't last more than a million years. And so that disallows the secular view, for example, of the

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Earth being 4 .5 billion years old. It can't be that old if it has to be less than a million years old. Most estimates are upper limits.

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And the reason we can do that is because there are certain processes that cannot go back beyond a certain initial condition.

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And one example would be salt, the rate at which salt flows into the ocean. Even freshwater has a little bit of salt in it.

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It picks it up from the continents and dumps it into the ocean. The water evaporates, but it just leaves the salt.

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And so the oceans are actually getting saltier every year. 450 million tons of salt is deposited into the ocean every year, so the oceans are getting saltier and saltier.

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You run the movie backwards, the oceans would have been less salty in the past. And you run it back 62 million years, and they would have had zero salt.

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And so you say that's an upper limit on the age of the ocean. It's not to say the ocean really is 62 million years old, but it can't be older than that, because you can't have less salt than no salt.

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So it's an absolute upper limit, as you see. And most of the arguments, there'll be one exception that I'll do here in a little bit, most of the arguments that are for a young universe are in the form of an upper limit that is much less than the secular view would allow.

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And the reason we do it that way is because that's what we're doing is called a reductio ad absurdum. A reductio ad absurdum is the way you refute somebody who has a different worldview from yours.

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Somebody who interprets the same evidence but interprets it according to different rules. The only way to refute a worldview is to temporarily assume the worldview and show that it leads to an absurd or inconsistent result.

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And so, and I think we need to be clear about this because there's some confusion on this issue. When I make an argument on the basis of science, that the world has to be much less than the secular claim, what

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I do is I assume for the sake of argument, uniformitarianism and naturalism. And I show that even under those assumptions, there are certain processes that can't have been going on for billions of years.

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Because again, you can't have less salt than no salt and so on. And we'll talk when we talk about the recession of the moon, the moon's moving away from the earth, the upper limit, you run the movie backwards, the upper limit would be when it's in the same place as the earth, you can't get closer than zero.

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So that's going to be an upper limit there. And some people will will are bothered by that.

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They'll say, but Lyle, you're assuming uniformitarianism. Yes, that's the point. It's not that I actually believe uniformitarianism.

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I'm assuming it for the sake of hypothesis, to show that it leads to an inconsistent result.

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And that'll be really important, because that's the only way you could cogently argue for a for the for the age of something on the basis of science in terms of arguing with your opponent.

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So what we what we as biblical creationists do is temporarily assume the worldview of our opponent, somebody who believes in either naturalism or uniformitarianism, or generally both, and show that even given those conditions, there are certain processes that indicate that their view is wrong, that the that the universe cannot be as old as they claim.

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Now, if they were logically consistent, that's what they would try to do. When arguing with us, they would say, well,

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I'm going to assume that catastrophism is true, and that the universe was supernaturally created and show you that there are some processes that can't be as young as 6000 years.

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But the problem is nobody does that, because there are no such processes. And so it's really interesting, the the only people who, in my view, are arguing rationally in this debate are the biblical creationists, because we're doing a reductio ad absurdum.

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The secularists or the old earth creationists are assuming their own starting assumptions of naturalism and uniformitarianism, and then showing that in some cases, it gives a consistent result.

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But that doesn't prove anything. The fact that it gives an inconsistent result, in many cases, speaks volumes.

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So let's get into some of these lines of evidence now. One that I like, because it's something I've studied quite a bit, is the lunar recession argument.

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You've probably heard it before, but I thought maybe we'd go into some details on it. The moon is actually moving away from the earth due to tidal forces.

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The moon's gravity pulls on the earth's oceans, and gravity is such that the closer you are to something, the more, the greater the force of gravity.

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And so the the ocean that's closer to the moon gets pulled more toward the moon than the rest of the earth, and the rest of the earth gets pulled more than the ocean that's on the opposite side.

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And so what that does is it stretches out the earth. It makes the earth like an ellipse. It's a slight ellipse, but that's what causes tides.

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So you get one on the moon side, you get one on the other side, and you get those, that's why you get high tides twice a day.

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If you live on the coast, you know that. So that's, that's caused by the moon, but the earth rotates, and the earth rotates faster than the moon orbits.

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And what that means is the tidal bulges are always ahead of the moon a little bit. The moon makes them, but then they get ahead of the moon, because the earth rotates faster.

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And when those tidal bulges pull forward on the moon, because they're ahead of it, they cause it to move out.

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It's a little bit counterintuitive, but if you've ever played with a gyroscope, you know that when things are spinning, it's not always intuitive what they will do.

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So the moon is actually moving away from the earth due to tides, which it itself induces on the earth.

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And it's stealing a little bit of the earth's energy that causes the earth to slow down very slightly. It's been less than one second since creation that it's slowed, so it's not a, it's not a huge effect.

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But the moon, the moon's effect is that it moves, today the rate is about an inch and a half a year.

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That's how much the moon moves away from the earth every year. Now this is an example of a, of a process that is, that secularists will assume is uniform, but not linear.

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In other words, you can't assume that the rate has always been an inch and a half a year, because, because when the moon in the past was closer to the earth, the distance was less, and so the gravity would be greater.

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The tidal effects would be much stronger. And it turns out that the, the height of the tides is proportional to the inverse of the cube of the distance to the moon.

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What goes, is one over r cubed. What does that mean? It means if you move the moon twice as close to the earth, the tides don't get twice as big.

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They get two to the power of three. They get eight times as big. So it's a huge effect.

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And the, the interesting thing, too, is those tides are now pulling back on the moon. They're pulling more strongly on the moon, because they're bigger.

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And they also have a one over r cubed effect on the moon. And so the combined, the combined rate is one over r to the sixth.

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And so what does that mean? It means that when the, in, in the secular view, when the moon was half the current distance that it is to the earth, the rate at which it was moving away was not an inch and a half a year.

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And it wasn't just twice that. It was two to the sixth power, which is 64.

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It was 64 times faster, just based on physics. And so that means it would have been moving at 96 inches per year instead of an inch, inch and a half.

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And so the point is, when you move, when you run the movie backwards, it gets faster and faster and faster and faster. And it dives into the earth at 1 .45

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billion years in a hypothetical past. And of course, that's a problem for the secular view, because the secularists believe the earth and moon are 4 .5

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billion years old. But the upper limit, just based on the rate at which the moon is receding, under the uniformitarian assumption that the tidal breaking constant's always been the same, that, that, that same, not that the rate's been the same, but the rate of change of the rate's been the same, puts it at, puts a maximum age at 1 .45

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billion years. So that's an example of a reductive absurdum. The moon and earth cannot be that old, because even if uniformitarianism were true, they couldn't be that old.

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And so that is a problem. Now, the secularist could try to alleviate this problem, but how would he do it?

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He could say, well, the, for some reason, the tidal breaking constant really was different in the past. And so even though you'd think it would be 64 times faster when it was half the distance, maybe because the configuration of the continent's not really, it wasn't that much different.

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It was just slightly faster. But when they do that, what are they doing? They're giving up uniformitarianism, which is the very assumption upon which the billions of years is based anyway.

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And so they could, they could resolve the problem by giving up the very thing that motivates their belief in the billions of years in the first place.

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And if they did that, there'd be no real reason to believe in billions of years in the first place. And so that's why I see a belief in billions of years as fundamentally irrational.

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It's not something you can support logically. And by the way, last time

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I, I've read a couple different papers on this topic, the problem of the recession of the, the moon, from a secular perspective.

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Them trying to solve it, and they agree that it is an issue. And the way they usually try to solve it is by giving up uniformitarianism, in some sense, by saying, well, the tidal breaking constant must have, must have been different in the past.

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But there isn't any evidence for that, and there's no physical reason to think that that would be the case. Another example would be the decay of Earth's magnetic field, that the

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Earth's surrounded by this invisible magnetic force. It's what causes your compass to point north.

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And a lot of cars, I have a, my car's got it built into the little rear view mirror, it's kind of neat. It senses the

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Earth's magnetic field and tells me what direction I'm going. And that, but that, that magnetic field is decaying.

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And we'd expect that because magnetic fields are caused by electrical current. So there's electrical current in Earth's core, it's spinning around like that.

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And that induces a magnetic field. And we'd expect, because elect, you know, electricity encounters resistance.

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Batteries run down with time, they do. And so that magnetic field is decaying. And so that's something that that's something that we need to consider, because that's, that's a rate of change that we could use to estimate the, the age of things like, like the

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Earth, for example. Yeah, I do have to point out, too, there's a difference, because some, I've had one person ask me, or actually more than one have asked me, well, are we going to float away when the magnetic field decays?

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No, that's gravity. Gravity's what keeps you on the planet. That's a different force. It's not decaying. But your compass eventually won't work, because the magnetic field is decaying.

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And we get, nothing to worry about in your lifetime, but at some point in the future, that's something that people of the future will need to consider.

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So, in any case, we'd expect that. And electrical current, because it's, it's an electrical resistance, that, we would expect that would be an exponential decay.

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So an exponential decay, it's like radioactive decay. It's stronger in the past, and then it, it kind of, you know, gets shallower and shallower.

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It never quite goes to zero, but, so we'll always have a little bit of a magnetic field, but not very much. So that's an exponential decay, is what we'd expect.

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The uniformitarian assumption would be that it's always been an exponential decay with the same decay constant.

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That would be the uniformitarian assumption in this case. And it turns out, if you make that assumption, and you go back in time, basically, you know, we know what the magnetic field is today.

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We know it's dropping. We've been able to measure the magnetic field for well over a century, century and a half. We've been able to measure Earth's magnetic field.

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It is dropping. It appears to be an exponential decay, as we would expect. You run the movie backwards, and you find that 6 ,000 years ago, the

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Earth's magnetic field would have been 20 times stronger than it is today. So your compass would work really well. And that's, it, it's helpful for other things, too, because our magnetic field deflects cosmic rays, which are harmful to our

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DNA, so less disease and so on. It would have been very nice. But if you run that exponential decay back 60 ,000 years, just 60 ,000 years, nothing compared to the billions of years, the magnetic field, because it's an exponential decay, it gets so strong, it would actually be stronger than that of a neutron star, which is enough to rip the atoms of your body apart, because your atoms are made of parts that are charged, and they respond to magnetic fields.

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So the point is, the Earth can't even be 60 ,000 years old, based on the decay of the magnetic field.

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Really interesting. And my secular colleagues say, well, there's this magnetic dynamo that somehow recharges the magnetic field over time.

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Well, again, that's not what we're seeing today. What we're seeing today is just an exponential decay. There's no evidence for a recharging mechanism that I've found.

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And and there are problems with generating that anyway. There, there, it is possible to take mechanical energy and turn it into electrical or magnetic energy.

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The alternator in your car does that. But it takes a pretty sophisticated piece of machinery to do that.

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It's not something that would just sort of happen by itself. And there really isn't any evidence of a magnetic dynamo on the

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Earth that would, that would somehow recharge the field over time. As far as I can tell, it's just decaying. And that's what we'd expect on the basis of physics principles.

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And the interesting thing is, it's not even a, it's not limited to the

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Earth. The other planets of our solar system have, well, not all of them, but some of them have very strong magnetic fields.

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The outer planets all have magnetic fields. Jupiter's is enormous. It would be too strong even today, it would be dangerous for life to be too close to Jupiter because of that magnetic field that would induce currents in your body and so on.

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So all the outer ones, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, they all have magnetic fields. Mercury, little Mercury has a magnetic field.

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It's not as strong as the Earth, but we wouldn't expect it to be. Now this makes sense in a creation worldview, because in a creation worldview, in 6 ,000 years, there has not been enough time for the magnetic fields to decay completely, at least for the big planets.

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And Earth's in the middle, right? So you've got the little planets, you've got

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Mercury, Venus, and Mars are smaller than the Earth, and you get the big planets that are larger, Earth's somewhere in between.

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And so the larger planet, the longer it can maintain that magnetic field, right?

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Remember the old D -cell batteries? I guess they still make them, but they lasted a lot longer than your little AAA batteries.

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They can store more electrical potential energy. So the big planet, like Jupiter, has got the most powerful magnetic field of all the planets.

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We'd expect that. But Mercury, the fact that it, Mercury is only a third the size of the Earth, and it still has a magnetic field.

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And we'd expect that if it's 6 ,000 years old, but if it's billions of years old, it should have decayed a long time ago.

29:00

It's really mysterious from a secular perspective. So and again, these, you know, these numbers that I'm throwing at you, like the 60 ,000 years for the

29:08

Earth, that's an upper limit. And it's a ridiculous upper limit. Obviously, the true age of the

29:13

Earth would have to be less than that, because if you're gonna have life on Earth, you can't have a magnetic field that's so strong it rips the atoms of your body apart.

29:21

So that's, that's not gonna work. Again, that's an example of an upper limit. But interestingly, if you look at Dr.

29:30

Humphrey's model of planetary magnetic fields, which is pretty clever, he basically says, we know the

29:37

Earth was started as a ball of water. The Bible teaches that the Earth was made from water. It was initially water, and apparently

29:43

God transformed it and brought forth the continents and so on. But water has a magnetic moment to it, because it's, it's made of charged particles.

29:51

And if you assume that those are all lined up at the beginning, then you can actually calculate what the initial field strength of the

29:58

Earth was. And you can do that for all the planets, too. Humphrey's thinks that maybe they were all made of water. We don't know that biblically, but it could be that God supernaturally transformed them.

30:07

And it turns out that if you assume that, and you take into consideration the current size and the current electric, electrical conductivity of these planets, based on 6 ,000 years, you get their current magnetic strength for all the planets.

30:20

It's really neat. And so this is an example, this is the one exception of where, if you hold the Humphrey's model, you can actually get not just an upper limit for the age, but you can actually get the age.

30:29

And it turns out to be about 6 ,000 years for all the planets of our solar system, including some of the moons. There's some moons that have little bits of magnetism left that suggest that they were, once had a dipole field that's decayed down in the 6 ,000 years since creation.

30:42

So it's really pretty neat. Now this relates to another topic that I think is really powerful evidence of the biblical timescale, and that's carbon dating.

30:55

A lot of people have the impression that carbon dating is what the secularists used to give the millions of years. It isn't. They use other methods like uranium lead, potassium argon, and so on.

31:04

Carbon dating tends to give answers that are pretty consistent with the biblical worldview. And so, for example,

31:10

C -14, most carbon is C -12, but there's a variety C -14, which is unstable and decays into nitrogen, and it does so with a half -life of 5 ,700 years.

31:20

And for a secularist, that's not very long. So the bottom line is, if you had a chunk of C -14 and you waited a million years, there would not be a single atom left.

31:31

In fact, if the entire Earth were nothing but C -14 and you waited a million years, all of that would have decayed into nitrogen.

31:40

And we know the rate at which that happens. And again, I'm assuming for the sake of argument, the secular assumptions of uniformitarianism, that the rate's always been constant.

31:48

Although, I think for carbon dating, that's probably a pretty decent assumption. There's no reason we would think we can think of that.

31:55

It would change, at least not drastically. In any case, when you carbon date something, you inevitably will get hundreds or thousands of years.

32:03

You'd never get millions of years for something. If something were really, genuinely millions of years old, it should have zero

32:08

C -14 in it. And yet, we routinely find C -14 in fossils.

32:15

If there's sufficient carbon left in the fossil, there'll be C -14 in it as well. Just about everyone we've checked.

32:20

In fact, I'm not aware of any exceptions of fossils that have been carbon dated that have ended up where there's no

32:26

C -14 in them. Or chunks of coal. You can take a chunk of coal, in the secular view, coal beds are supposed to be hundreds of millions of years old.

32:33

There should not be a single atom of C -14 in them. But we find that every chunk of coal we've ever examined has

32:38

C -14 in it. And that would not be the case if they were millions of years old, because C -14 doesn't last that long.

32:45

Really compelling. Now, what does this have to do with the magnetic field? Well, even when we carbon date things, we're making some assumptions of uniformitarianism, and we would do better if we had better estimates of whether or not conditions really have been constant.

33:00

You see, carbon dating, at least the uncalibrated carbon dates, assume that the C -14 in the atmosphere has always been the same as it is today.

33:09

And so, C -14 is produced in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays bombard nitrogen atoms, and they convert some of them into C -14.

33:17

Now, the C -14 wants to decay back to nitrogen, which it will eventually do. So, it's produced in the upper atmosphere, and then it eventually decays.

33:25

But in the meantime, it settles down, and you eat food, or plants take in some of that carbon dioxide, some of that carbon dioxide is

33:32

C -14, and they convert it into oxygen. And then we eat the plants, and we eat some of the C -14.

33:39

And so, a small fraction of you is unstable right now. You're all, you'll have a little bit of C -14 in you. And that's okay, it's decaying into nitrogen, but you're eating new food, you're bringing new, you're replacing it.

33:48

But then when you die, the C -14 just decays away. Now, when we carbon date something in the past, one of the assumptions that is made is that the amount of C -14 in the atmosphere was about the same as it is today.

34:01

So, when that organism died, it had this about the same C -14 to C -12 ratio as I have in my body.

34:08

But the thing is, if creation is true, that we wouldn't expect that. Because that C -14 is created by cosmic rays, there may not have been any

34:15

C -14 at creation. And it takes it a while for it to build up in the atmosphere. And the other thing to keep in mind is the magnetic field.

34:24

This makes things a little more complicated, because you see, Earth's magnetic field deflects cosmic rays.

34:30

Earth's magnetic field acts like an invisible shield, and it deflects some fraction of cosmic rays.

34:37

And the fraction that it deflects will depend on its field strength, and on the energy of the particle, and so on.

34:42

And I actually, I was kind of curious about this. How would this affect carbon dating? Because not only, first of all, we would expect there would be less

34:50

C -14 in the atmosphere in the past, because the Earth's thousands years old. If, we don't know what

34:55

C -14 God started with, but let's assume for the sake of hypothesis, that there was no C -14 initially.

35:02

And that's certainly plausible. Then, you know, organisms that died very shortly after the fall, they would have very little

35:09

C -14 in their body to begin with. And if you carbon date them, and you'd say, well there's very little

35:16

C -14, they must be really old. No. The point is, you get an age that's about 10 times older than the true age.

35:23

And so if you're wondering, why is it that we sometimes get carbon dates of 50 ,000 years, instead of 5 ,000? That's why.

35:29

It's because the C -14 in the atmosphere was less. And so I started thinking about, you know, how much less would it be?

35:36

And it's complicated by the fact that not only does it build up over time as cosmic rays strike those nitrogen atoms, but the

35:43

Earth's magnetic field has decayed since creation. So in other words, in the past, the Earth's magnetic field was stronger, it would have deflected more cosmic rays, which means there would be less

35:52

C -14 production in the past than there is today. And that's going to affect carbon ages.

35:59

And so a colleague of mine, Dr. Nathaniel Jensen, actually asked me to look into this a little bit, because he was looking at wanting to calibrate carbon dating.

36:08

And he was asking, can we theoretically predict what the C -14 in the atmosphere would be at some time in the past?

36:16

It's not a prediction, it's a postdiction. What it was, can we estimate what the C -14 in the atmosphere was at some time in the past, given the decay of Earth's magnetic field, and the rate of cosmic ray production, which we assume is the same, because we don't know any reason why that would change.

36:32

And it turns out, you can estimate it, but it's tricky, because there's a lot of complicating factors. And so what

36:38

I did was I wrote a computer simulation that mathematically calculates how cosmic rays are deflected.

36:44

It's kind of neat, you can watch them come in and they get shot back out. A few of them make it through. And it turns out that the two factors that determine whether or not a cosmic ray makes it to the

36:55

Earth's atmosphere, where it can potentially produce C -14, is the energy of the cosmic ray, and the latitude, the latitude on Earth.

37:03

So if you live in Alaska, you're getting a greater dose of cosmic rays than if you live in Hawaii. That's the way it is, because that's the way the magnetic field works.

37:12

Near the poles, it's easier for the cosmic rays to come in. But if a cosmic ray has enough energy, it'll come in anyway.

37:18

It'll be able to get through that today. But in the past, the magnetic field was stronger, so that deflects cosmic rays of higher energy.

37:26

The bottom line is, I wrote a simulation that showed if the Earth's magnetic field decays in the fashion that we think it does, how much

37:33

C -14 would be in the atmosphere, assuming that we started with zero? And do we get the correct age estimates when we date things?

37:41

And if you assume just a simple, a simple decay like that, then it turns out you don't get the right answer.

37:48

But I wasn't really expecting that. I just wanted to try it to see if it worked, because my creation geologist colleagues tell me that there is evidence that at the flood, at the time of the flood, because of the rapid plate tectonics that disturbed the occurrence in Earth's core and caused the magnetic field to rapidly flip, and some of that would continue a little bit after the flood, and then it would sort of peter out, and then it would go back to a simple exponential decay.

38:11

The energy probably has always just been decaying, but the field strength, we know it flips. There's good evidence of that.

38:17

And in fact, lava flows, when lava hardens, it locks in the magnetic field of the

38:22

Earth at the time it forms. And so if you know the age of the lava flow, say historically or by some other method, you can tell what the

38:30

Earth's magnetic field was at that time. There's good evidence that it's flipped. And so I added that to the simulation.

38:36

I said, okay, we'll just assume a simple decay up until the flood year, and then we'll let the magnetic field oscillate like that. And it turns out if you do that, the amount of C -14 that is produced in 6 ,000 years matches the amount of C -14 that is currently in our atmosphere.

38:52

And so that tells me I'm on to something here. We got a good approach here. And it turns out that if you do that, you'll find that the percentage of carbon at the time of the flood would have been about 5 % what it is today, which would cause the age estimates, if you didn't include for that, to be about 10 times the true age, which is exactly what we find.

39:15

And so that tells me I'm on to something. But I haven't published it yet because there's still some nuances I haven't figured out.

39:21

For one thing, I've allowed the magnetic field to continue to oscillate to the present, but there's good evidence, the geologists tell me that that's not the case, that the oscillations petered out shortly after the flood.

39:31

And I haven't been able to, I haven't been able to get all of the details yet. But I think it's interesting that basically, if the

39:38

Earth's 6 ,000 years old, which it is, and if you let the magnetic field decay the way we think it has, then you get the current amount of C -14 in the atmosphere and you get the age estimates that you would expect for flood fossils.

39:50

So it's kind of interesting. This is sort of new research. I haven't published it yet. I just thought you might find that kind of interesting, that it's just neat.

39:58

I expect it to happen. I expect the science to line up with the biblical model, but it's always neat to see it anyway.

40:06

Another indication we have of a young universe is internal heat of planets.

40:12

Some planets, not all of them, but a lot of them, give off more energy than they get from the

40:17

Sun. And Jupiter is the example that I like to use. Jupiter gives off about twice as much energy as it gets from the

40:22

Sun. Taking in one unit gives off two. Taking in one unit gives off two. We call that heat, internal heat. And if you think about that, that means that Jupiter is constantly losing energy.

40:32

After all, if it's giving off more than it's taking in, eventually it's going to run out. And Jupiter is a pretty big planet.

40:39

It's over ten times the diameter of the Earth, and so it's got a lot of energy to begin with.

40:45

It can run for 6 ,000 years, no problem. It's like a drop in the bucket. But if you run it for 4 .5 billion years, it should have run out of heat a long time ago.

40:53

It should have exhausted all that energy into space. The problem is even worse with Neptune.

40:58

Neptune gives off 2 .6 times as much energy as it receives from the Sun. And so it would have, again, it's far away.

41:06

It's further away from the Sun. It's, you know, what, three billion miles away, something like that. So it's a problem in the secular worldview.

41:13

They should have run out of heat billions of years ago. And by the way, Earth does this too. But in the case of Earth, they think there might be a mechanism to produce the heat, namely radioactive decay.

41:24

And radioactive decay does produce a small amount of heat. And so if you have, and certain kinds of radioactive decay have a half -life of billions of years, so they potentially could last long enough.

41:34

And so that's why I don't use the internal heat from the Earth as a definitive argument for a young universe.

41:41

Although it might be, because as far as I can tell, no one's done the calculation to see if the

41:46

Earth has a sufficient amount of radioactive materials to maintain its internal heat for 4 .5

41:52

billion years. I don't think that calculation has been done. It may not be possible. We may not know exactly how many radioactive elements are in the

41:59

Earth anyway. We only have access to just the crust and maybe just a little bit of the mantle.

42:05

But that's about it. That's about all the far we can penetrate in terms of actually getting samples. So in any case, so a lot of these planets do have external or internal heat.

42:16

The exception is Uranus, and it's a wonderful exception, because Uranus is a near twin of Neptune.

42:22

They're almost identical. They have almost identical composition. They're about the same size. They're about the same mass.

42:29

They're the same color because they have the same composition. And yet Neptune has internal heat and Uranus doesn't.

42:36

And Uranus is the one that's closer to the Sun. So you think if anything ought to have at least absorbed more heat in the past, it would be

42:41

Uranus. But this is just an example of God's creativity, and it makes it very difficult for these secularists to try and account for how you have all this internal heat in a universe that they believe to be billions of years old, or a solar system that they believe to be 4 .5

42:58

billion years old. So really interesting. We've also seen heat in moons, which

43:04

I think is pretty interesting. And let me see if I can switch over here. Is that gonna work?

43:14

Move the zoom out of the way. There we go. So you should be seeing, this is

43:20

Io. This is a moon of Jupiter, and it has all those little pockmarks that you see on that.

43:26

Those are volcanoes, and Io is one of the most volcanically active, it is the most volcanically active world in the solar system, way more than Earth.

43:37

When Voyager 2 flew past Io back in the 80s, it found nine volcanoes going off at the same time.

43:45

And the reason that, that's why it looks so weird, is it's been completely resurfaced by volcanic outflow, and it has a lot of sulfur compounds built into it.

43:55

So if you've been to that, like the Yellowstone Park, and you've been to the geyser areas, and you see those kind of same kind of colors, similar materials, and so that's the way, that's the reason why it looks the way that it does.

44:06

Now the standard thinking for how is it that this moon, which is about the same size as Earth's moon, how could it still have internal heat if it's 4 .5

44:15

billion years old? And the answer that most secularists will say is, well, because it's tidally pumped by Jupiter.

44:22

So Io actually orbits, it's the nearest of the large moons of Jupiter, so it orbits pretty close to Jupiter, which means there are large tidal effects, and every second orbit it lines up.

44:35

Let me center it on Jupiter here. So there's Io and Europa, and if you watch them orbit, every two orbits

44:43

Io and Europa line up, and Io gets a little bit of a gravitational tug when that happens.

44:50

It gets stretched by the tidal force between Europa and Jupiter. And so the idea is tidal flexing will generate heat, and that's true, it does.

45:00

And so the, but again, the question is, is it enough? And I don't think that that calculation has been done, but I leave that as an open question.

45:07

So I haven't really used Io as a indicator of recent creation, but it very well could be.

45:14

It very well could be. The next moon out, Europa, has indications of youth as well. Europa is well known, it's an icy moon, different types of ices.

45:23

And if you look at one side of it, there are these incredible scratch marks, looks like a cosmic cat came and just swiped the side of the moon there.

45:32

Really amazing. And the current thinking is that those are actually eruption sites for geysers of water vapor.

45:40

And we don't know that for sure with Europa, but we do know it for sure with one of Saturn's moons, so let's go there next.

45:46

Saturn's moon Enceladus, we'll see if we can pin this down here.

45:52

Saturn has a lot of moons, by the way. I think 82 is the latest count. Let's go to Enceladus, and you can see when we rotate it around, it has the same kind of scratch marks that Europa has.

46:09

And we know in this case that those are water geysers, because the Cassini spacecraft actually saw one of them erupting, and it measured the water vapor being spewed out into space.

46:19

Now that's significant, because that means this little moon has internal heat. It has enough heat that it's able to spew water out in these little geysers.

46:29

And yet Enceladus is a small moon. It's much smaller than Earth's moon. And so the idea that it could still retain that internal heat after billions of years, well, it's really pretty absurd.

46:41

It's really pretty absurd. And even the secularists are perplexed by this one, because there is no tidal flexing, or there's not much on Enceladus, because it doesn't orbit in between Jupiter and a large moon.

46:54

It does orbit Saturn, but the next moon out is a pretty good distance away. So these are indications that the solar system really isn't anywhere near billions of years old, because there's no way these moons could maintain that heat, especially these small ones.

47:08

It's just not going to happen. Another moon that's perplexing to the secularists is Titan. And that's the...

47:15

By the way, you can see Titan in binoculars. If you find Saturn, you'll see this little orange star next to it. That's Titan.

47:20

It's the largest moon of Saturn, the second largest moon in the solar system. And it is distinctly orange, because it has these compounds in the atmosphere, tholins, that are produced when methane is destroyed by ultraviolet light.

47:35

And that's the interesting thing about Titan, is it's got all kinds of methane in its atmosphere and on its surface.

47:42

Because of the cold temperatures of Titan, methane acts a lot like water does on Earth. And so Earth has a water cycle, right, where you have evaporation and rain and so on.

47:53

Titan does that with methane. It rains methane, it collects into rivers, and they form lakes.

47:58

And then it evaporates back up into the atmosphere again. Of course, we can penetrate the surface of Titan now using radar.

48:05

And there are indeed lake beds full of methane. And that's interesting, because methane is destroyed by the ultraviolet light of the

48:11

Sun. There's no known source for it that can produce new methane, not on Titan. On Earth, we have a source of methane, because animals produce methane, but not on Titan.

48:21

It should have run out of methane literally billions of years ago, if it were really billions of years old. But in 6 ,000 years, there's still plenty of methane left.

48:29

And so it was really quite shocking when the secularists found that there are lakes of liquid methane, combined with methane, on this little moon.

48:39

Pretty amazing. And when we go to Pluto, it just gets even better, because Pluto really blew the secularist predictions, and it's quite satisfying to the creationist predictions.

48:55

There's Pluto and Charon. Pluto is orbited by a moon half its size called Charon, and Charon's so big that both

49:03

Pluto and Charon orbit around their common axis, as you can see there. But I feel so blessed and so privileged that we now have detailed images of Pluto, because, you know,

49:15

I grew up in the 80s, and we had what we call the Grand Tour, where you had the outer planets of the solar system visited.

49:23

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, but we didn't have any images of Pluto. And back in the 80s,

49:29

Pluto was still a planet, so that was really bumming. Really quite a bummer. And there it is today.

49:34

There's what the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in July of 2015. The craft was launched, by the way, in 2006, so it took nine years to get to Pluto.

49:45

It's about as fast as we can make a spacecraft, so it's pretty interesting. So here we go.

49:50

There's Pluto. And it was surprising, because the secularists were expecting Pluto to be just pockmarked with craters.

49:57

Why? Because Pluto is a tiny world. It's only two -thirds the size of Earth's moon, so there can't be any internal heat left on Pluto.

50:05

It would have been gone, you know, billions of years ago. And Pluto only gets about a thousandth, one -one -thousandth the energy from the

50:12

Sun that the Earth gets, because it's so far away. So, you know, there's nothing to heat up anything on Pluto, and so there should be no geology, because geology is powered by heat.

50:21

And instead, they were expecting to see a world, a dead, cratered world. Heavily, heavily cratered, because there's lots of other stuff out there at the distance of Pluto that's orbiting it about that distance, and Pluto should have been impacted by a lot of those trans -Neptunian objects.

50:36

But what we find instead, there are a few craters. You can see them there. There are a few, but not many.

50:42

And there's this one region here called Sputnik Planitia, where there are no craters at all. And that was absolutely mind -blowing to the secularists, because can you imagine this world orbiting out there among all these other objects, and nothing hits it for 4 .5

50:57

billion years? It makes no sense whatsoever. And even the secularists don't conclude that. They would say, obviously, this section of Pluto must be young.

51:04

And I would argue, well, yeah, the whole dwarf planet's young. There's no doubt about that. But this section right here, you see these,

51:12

I don't know if you can see them. I hope it's transmitting sufficiently clear. But there, it looks like a jigsaw puzzle, like there's little pieces that have been put together.

51:19

There's this tessellation pattern, and that apparently is due to convection cells that are now frozen in place.

51:26

But at one time, that was molten material. It was liquid. And you're seeing the tops of the convection cells there, a lot like the granulation that occurs on the

51:35

Sun. So really remarkable. And not only that, but we have mountain ranges. There's the, somewhere over here, is the

51:42

Hillary Mountain Range. And then below that, there's another mountain range down here. And those might look tiny, but those are about the size of the

51:49

Rocky Mountains, just to give you a feel for it. So they're big. And again, that would be impossible if Pluto was just a cold, dead world.

51:57

It shouldn't have any geology at all, because there would be no internal heat left after 4 .5

52:02

billion years. It should be just pockmarked with craters. But instead, you find mountains. You find chasms. You can see some of these channels here.

52:10

Really rather remarkable. Charon has some of those, too. We go to Pluto's largest moon, Charon, just there in the background.

52:19

Charon. And again, you see a few craters. There's some, but not many, compared to what was expected.

52:24

They were expecting craters upon craters upon craters. And instead, you find geology. You find mountain ranges.

52:30

You find chasms, some of them very deep. A mysterious dark North Pole, which

52:36

I don't think anybody knows quite what to make of that. But the Lord certainly has his ways of impressing us and being creative, really.

52:44

So quite lovely. But yeah, Pluto, you wouldn't expect, you wouldn't expect what we found if it were really a cold dead world 4 .5

52:52

billion years old. That's just not what you'd expect. And so, go back to Pluto here.

52:58

The other thing that they, recently there was a paper that was published, it was in the secular literature, that pointed out that another way that Pluto is mystified to the secularists is that there are very few small -scale craters on Pluto.

53:10

There's a few big ones, but normally you'd expect to find, for every one big crater, you'd expect to find, you know, a thousand small ones.

53:17

And that's not what we find. And that really is very devastating to the secular perspective, because in the secular view, and this goes out, this goes back to comets.

53:30

Let me switch back over here. That's all I have for show -and -tell. There we go.

53:40

You've probably heard of argument, the argument that comets are a good indication of a young solar system, and it's true.

53:47

And that's because comets can't last billions of years. Comets are made up of ice and dirt, and they orbit elliptical paths.

53:53

They go far out, and they swing close to the Sun, and are whiplashed back out. When they're far away from the Sun, that ice remains frozen, no problem.

53:59

But when they come close to the Sun, some of that material gets vaporized and blasted into space. That's what forms a comet's tail.

54:06

Every time you see a comet, it's getting smaller. And we know the rate at which the material is being depleted.

54:11

We can measure that, and we know how big comets are. They're only a few miles across, in terms of the source. And so, you can calculate that a comet can't last more than about 100 ,000 years, maximum.

54:21

And so, why do we still have a solar system full of comets? And my secular colleagues have proposed two sources for comets, what they call an

54:30

Oort cloud for the long -period comets, and a, what they call a Kuiper belt for the short -period comets. And when we started finding objects out near Pluto, they said, oh, those must be, those must be

54:40

Kuiper belt objects. And some people even call them that. I prefer trans -Neptunian objects, because they're beyond, they're beyond Neptune.

54:47

That's more descriptive. But these trans -Neptunian objects that we found tend to be much larger than comets.

54:54

Much, much larger than comets. Some of them are almost as big as Pluto. One's bigger. No, it was thought to be bigger, and they re -estimated it recently.

55:02

It's slightly smaller. So, Pluto's the biggest of the TNOs. But in any case, there are lots of, lots of massive ones.

55:07

And the assumption was, well, okay, but there are probably trillions of smaller ones that, that are the actual comets that are produced.

55:14

But the fact that you don't find any evidence of those in the cratering on Pluto suggests that there are not a lot of small -scale trans -Neptunian objects.

55:22

Certainly not enough to explain that, why we have short -period comets in our own solar system.

55:28

So I find that, I find that pretty compelling. That it really disrupts the secular perspective.

55:35

Other arguments that I could do, let me just mention a couple that are outside the solar system, because we focused primarily on the solar system because we have the easiest access to the solar system.

55:47

I have no doubt that planets orbiting other stars have strong, some of them will have strong magnetic fields, some of them will have internal heat that can't last billions of years.

55:56

The problem is, we don't have the technology yet to be able to measure that. And so, when it comes to young universe indicators beyond the solar system, the science isn't there yet.

56:08

We have some. And one that I think is impressive is the spiral galaxy wind -up time.

56:15

Spiral galaxies, they rotate faster on the insides than on the outsides in terms of their angular velocity.

56:21

A star near the core of a galaxy will make a loop in less time than a star near the perimeter. And if you think about what that means, if it's a spiral galaxy and you have this structure, that means that structure has to be constantly twisting itself tighter and tighter.

56:34

And I actually ran some computer simulations to see how long does it take before the spiral shape is unrecognizable.

56:41

And it's well less than 100 million years before it's wrapped up like in one of those old phonograph records. But that's not what we see in the actual universe.

56:50

The actual universe we see spiral galaxies, some of them very loose, where the spiral arms look like they're only one time wrapped.

56:57

And in the secular view, galaxies are supposed to be 10 billion years old. But again, based on the spiral winding, they can't be more than 100 million years old.

57:06

And by the way, my secular colleagues are well aware of this conundrum. I didn't invent this. I just ran a simulation to see how bad it was.

57:14

And it turns out it's pretty bad. So the 100 million years is an upper limit. And it's kind of a loose upper limit because even before that, it's twisted tighter than we see any galaxy actually twisted.

57:25

So the galaxies are not millions or billions of years old. They're much younger than that. And my secular colleagues have said, well, maybe there's density waves that create new spiral arms as the old ones wrap up and so on.

57:35

And those, we can talk about some of those maybe in the Q &A, but those models have their problems as well. And they presuppose star formation.

57:42

I'm skeptical of star formation. Because in order for a star, for a star to exist, it's not a problem because it's in such a small space that the gravity balances the outward gas pressure and the energy that's released and produced from from nuclear fusion.

58:01

Once you make a star, it'll still stay like that. But to get us but to take a nebula, which is spread out over a vast region of space and compress it into a star is trickier than a lot of people are led to believe.

58:13

We're told, well, gravity just pulls it in. But the problem is, the gas pressure in a typical nebula is orders of magnitude greater than gravity, much, much greater than gravity.

58:21

And so the gas pressure is outward. And so all the nebulae that we're aware of, are expanding.

58:27

We don't see any that are contracting. And it's not just that. It's not just the gas pressure that you'd have to overcome.

58:33

But even if you could compress it and get it into a something that's small enough that eventually gravity would take over.

58:41

There are other forces that would tend to prevent it as well, including magnetic fields. Stars tend to have magnetic fields and nebulae have magnetic fields.

58:48

And when you compress it, it strengthens the magnetic field. And so it actually resists further compression, like trying to put north magnets together.

58:56

It resists that. And also there's the problem of angular momentum, because nebulae have a little bit of spin to them.

59:03

And you compress that in, and it'll speed up the same way that a skater, when she pulls her arms in and she spins up like that, due to conservation of angular momentum.

59:11

And that would tend to prevent the star from collapsing any further. So you have to find a way to dump the angular momentum, maybe magnetic braking or whatever.

59:18

And there are, you know, there are speculations on how this happens. But we've never seen a star form. I'm very skeptical that they do.

59:25

So that becomes a young universe argument, because we find stars that are incredibly luminous.

59:32

The blue stars are the hottest, most luminous stars out there. Red stars tend to be not as, well, red star, there's a range, you can have fairly bright red stars, but the blue ones are bright.

59:44

They're bright, and they use a lot of energy. They tend to be the most massive kinds of stars. So they have the most fuel available, but they use it up at an incredible rate.

59:53

And therefore, blue stars cannot last billions of years. And I'm not aware of anyone who disagrees with that.

59:58

It's just my secular colleagues say, well, the new blue stars have formed recently. But since they're the most massive, they're the hardest kind of star to form, even if stars can form.

01:00:06

And by the way, I'll grant there's nothing in the Bible that says stars can't form. It's not like they're a living organism, which has lots of complex parts that are designed to work together.

01:00:17

No, stars are big balls of gas. And so, you know, I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that the conditions under which a star could form seem to perhaps not exist anywhere in the actual universe.

01:00:29

Running, I remember running some numbers with Russ Humphreys one time, and we looked at just to overcome the magnetic field pressure, it would take four simultaneous supernovae to compress the gas to a point where that would be sort of sensible.

01:00:40

So I'm very skeptical that that happens. And if that's the case, then even if they do form, blue stars would be the least likely to form because they are the most massive.

01:00:48

You'd have to get all that material, which is resisting compression due to gas pressure and your momentum, and so on.

01:00:57

So anyway, I could go on, but we're near the time, my time limit, so maybe we want to do some

01:01:02

Q &A now. Hope that's been a blessing to you, and hopefully maybe something you hadn't heard before.

01:01:09

Yeah, I think that was great. I think that that was really interesting.

01:01:16

And boy, do we have a lot of Q &A for you. So let's start. The first question is, what is your take on Dr.

01:01:24

Hugh Ross's beliefs on the age of the universe? Well, I think he's mistaken. He obviously believes in the

01:01:31

Big Bang and the billions of years. And the interesting thing, too, if you read his testimony, he was believing that stuff long before he ever read a

01:01:41

Bible. So he grew up learning that the Big Bang was scientific fact. Now, I disagree with that.

01:01:47

But then he reads the Bible, and he says, I think I can make this line up with the Big Bang. Well, I don't think he can, because the

01:01:53

Bible is contrary to the Big Bang. The Bible teaches God created in six days. The Big Bang teaches billions of years, even if, of course,

01:02:01

Ross tries to make the days long periods of time. But there's really no basis in Hebrew for doing that.

01:02:11

The question of it means a literal day. It doesn't mean a long period of time. It can't in that context. But even if you made the days long, the order is different.

01:02:18

In the Big Bang view, you have the universe, you have the stars forming billions of years before the earth.

01:02:27

According to the scripture, earth's made on day one, stars are made on day four. So the order of events is different. In the secular narrative, or the secular timescale, which

01:02:34

Hugh Ross accepts, the fish evolve long before fruit trees. But according to the

01:02:39

Bible, fruit trees are made on day three, fish are made on day five. So the order of events is different. You can't reconcile the two.

01:02:45

So I think Hugh Ross is very badly mistaken. He's not following what we call a proper hermeneutic. He doesn't really know how to read the

01:02:51

Bible. He tends to think that he knows the Big Bang is true, and then he reads the Bible in such a way as to accommodate that particular view.

01:02:59

And in his weaker moments, he's as much as said that. He says, you can think of nature like a 67th book of the

01:03:05

Bible, and you have to make all the books agree. And so you have to read Genesis in such a way as to accommodate what he calls the 67th book of the

01:03:11

Bible, which I would say, no, there's just the 66th. Those are the ones that God inspired.

01:03:17

God did create nature, but it's not a book. It's not meant to be read in a literal fashion. You can't do that with nature.

01:03:23

So yeah, I disagree with him. And I've written about hermeneutics in a book called Understanding Genesis.

01:03:30

And in that book, I actually have three chapters where I deal with Hugh Ross's claims. So you might have a look at that book, Understanding Genesis.

01:03:37

Okay, next question is, what will happen when the magnetic field wears down?

01:03:45

We'll have more cosmic rays, but it's a very gradual decay. And so with more cosmic rays, more mutations, more disease.

01:03:54

On the other hand, if technology improves, we might be able to correct some of those mutations. So that's a possibility as well. There are certain birds, certain creatures that navigate by the magnetic field.

01:04:04

They'll be in trouble. But again, it's a very slow decay. So it's not something you're gonna have to worry about in the next hundred years or a thousand years maybe.

01:04:12

So take your vitamins. But it's not a huge problem. I think life could probably survive without it, but it might need a little help from technology to counter the mutations that would increase due to cosmic rays.

01:04:26

Okay, somebody asked, since Mercury is moving through the magnetic field of the Sun, can we use its proximity to the

01:04:33

Sun to induce its magnetic field? That's a good question. I don't think so.

01:04:40

When you consider the magnetic field of the Sun, Mercury is pretty far away. I mean, you see these illustrations of the solar system.

01:04:47

You have Mercury and they're comparing the size of the planets. But when you actually look at the distance of Mercury, it's really pretty far away from the

01:04:53

Sun. It's three times closer than we are, but it's still 30 million miles. So yeah, I don't think you can argue that it's induced.

01:05:01

And frankly, the Sun's magnetic field flips and Mercury's doesn't. So it really can't be an induced magnetic field. It's a good question though, because you can induce.

01:05:09

Io has a little bit of a magnetic field that's probably induced by Jupiter. So that kind of thing can happen.

01:05:14

It just probably doesn't happen with Mercury. Okay, the next question is a little more of a personal nature.

01:05:21

Was there a memorable precipitating event that drew you into studying the universe?

01:05:27

And what age did that happen? I was so young, I can't say that there was any one instance, because I wouldn't have remembered it.

01:05:36

But I do remember that when I was very young, I just loved astronomy. And we had our local library there, because that's what you did back before the internet.

01:05:45

You went to the library to learn stuff before you could ask your phone. And I wasn't even remotely concerned with any book other than astronomy.

01:05:53

Those are the ones I would get. And all the ones that were appropriate to my age level. And once I'd read all those, then

01:05:59

I started moving on to other science things. But I'm sure I've read every book in the Guernsey County Library on astronomy.

01:06:07

At least, again, appropriate for that age level. So when I was young, I loved it. And it was when

01:06:13

I was in, it was probably when in high school. I'm trying to think if it was junior high or high school.

01:06:20

Let's say high school, I would, my dad had a six inch telescope. And I would get that out.

01:06:28

And that's when I really started getting into it, in terms of observation. Because I guess when

01:06:33

I was a kid, it never occurred to me that yeah, you can actually see some of these things with a telescope. And you can if you know where to look.

01:06:41

And so I still enjoy that to this day. And I have better telescopes today. So yeah. Okay. How do they explain the inconsistencies with what they see and what they expected on planets and moons in particular?

01:06:59

Well, I think it's just mysterious to them, really, as to why Pluto looks the way it looks. And why does

01:07:05

Titan have all this methane? It's just another mystery. I mean, you know, none of us have complete knowledge of the universe.

01:07:14

And so we're all willing to tolerate some mysteries within our worldview. It's just that in the secular worldview, you have a lot more to deal with.

01:07:20

You have a lot of things that don't make sense. You have a lot more failed predictions, I think, than in the creationist worldview.

01:07:28

But we, you know, we have our mysteries, too. We have things that we don't fully understand. It's just that there aren't as many of them because we have a correct starting plate, starting foundation.

01:07:38

We start with God's Word. But yeah, my secular colleagues, they would admit that a lot of these things are issues.

01:07:43

And in some cases, they'll say, well, we think we've solved that. We have a particular model for that. Fair enough. You're welcome to propose that.

01:07:50

But they're generally not provable. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a model anymore. It would be established. Well, and so that goes into the next question of what are some of the rescuing devices that secular scientists will try to use?

01:08:03

Or do they just leave these problems as questions we need to gain information on in the future? Combination of the two.

01:08:11

With the magnetic fields, they appeal to the magnetic dynamo, 100 % of the time.

01:08:17

They'll say there's some kind of recharging mechanism, even though every magnetic field that we've been able to measure twice is decaying, at least with Earth and with Mercury, certainly.

01:08:27

Even though all the planets have a magnetic field much larger than you'd expect, there must be some kind of recharging mechanism. And they've invented the magnetic dynamo to account for that.

01:08:36

The magnetic dynamo is supposed to take the rotational energy of the planet and convert some of it into electrical, the magnetic field basically.

01:08:45

And that model requires the magnetic field to be well aligned with the rotation axis. For Earth, it's pretty close.

01:08:51

It's 11 degrees different. But with Uranus and Neptune, it's not even remotely close. Not even close.

01:08:56

You know, Uranus's rotation axis is like that, and the magnetic field's like that. They're not even close.

01:09:02

And Neptune's similar. It's tilted like that, and the magnetic field doesn't even go through the middle. So both of those are contrary to the magnetic dynamo model.

01:09:10

So that would be the rescuing device that they would use. And I would point out it's got incredible flaws with it. And its theoretical justification is really iffy as well.

01:09:18

You really need differential rotation to get anything like a dynamo going. And you don't have that, certainly not in planets like Earth.

01:09:25

You don't have differential rotation there. So that's not going to work for the Earth. For the other one, for internal heat,

01:09:32

I have seen, well, you have the four giant planets, and three of them have the internal heat, right?

01:09:40

Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. And Uranus is the odd man out. And the last paper

01:09:46

I read on that, which, and I forget exactly what the rescuing device was, but they had a different rescuing device for Jupiter than for Saturn and for Neptune.

01:09:53

And so that's generally considered pretty weak when you have to have three different models to explain three data points.

01:09:59

It's best if you had one model that can kind of explain them all. With Saturn, they would say that its internal heat is produced by helium settling into the planet.

01:10:10

And that converts some of the gravitational potential energy of the helium into heat. And that is possible.

01:10:18

And when we look at Saturn's atmosphere, it is very slightly depleted in helium. Perhaps some of it's settled in.

01:10:24

So that's why I don't tend to use Saturn as a young solar system argument, because their rescuing device for that one actually kind of makes sense.

01:10:33

So I'm like, okay, I'll give you that. Not that it means that it's millions of years old, but it means that it doesn't prove that it's much younger than that.

01:10:42

So yeah, for the other ones, I mean, there's always a rescuing device. There's always a rescuing device. For star formation, supernovas are the latest ones, that there's another star nearby that explodes and that compresses the material together.

01:10:55

But where did that star come from? Well, a previous star, and so on. And you get a chicken and egg kind of problem when you deal with that.

01:11:02

Or dust helps the nebulas to cool to the point where the gas pressure is less.

01:11:07

Because the cooler a nebula is, the less the gas pressure is for a given density. And so, but dust is formed, in the secular view, it's formed by stars that have exploded.

01:11:17

So again, you have a chicken and egg problem. There's always rescuing devices, and they generally are not provable by their nature, or they wouldn't be rescuing devices.

01:11:26

But a lot of them are pretty weak, and I think it really shows the power of the creationists' consistent

01:11:34

Christian worldview. Okay, Robin said that she's heard an astronomer before say that we're seeing stars forming all the time.

01:11:45

So how do they justify being able to make that claim? Here's what happens. What they do is they'll see a region of space that has hot blue stars in it.

01:11:59

And there are regions of space that have, the Pleiades, a lot of hot blue stars in the Pleiades, or Orion's Belt.

01:12:05

And there are others where there's still some nebulosity. Even in the Pleiades, there's still, there's a little bit of nebula there, too, a reflection of it.

01:12:11

It's lovely in time exposure photographs, quite beautiful. What they'll say is, hey, these are blue stars.

01:12:18

Blue stars can't last billions of years, so these must have formed recently, which means this must be a star -forming region, so there are probably still stars forming there.

01:12:26

That's the argument. They do not see stars in the process of formation. No one has seen a star in the process of formation.

01:12:33

And I would challenge anyone to demonstrate that. If you can actually see a gas that you can measure is collapsing in on itself.

01:12:39

That's never been, that's never been measured. Okay, this question comes from Mark.

01:12:46

How can scientists assert that all the universe has a constant uniform cosmic microwave background radiation of, was it 2 .7

01:12:55

thousand, or K? 2 .7 degrees. 2 .7 degrees above absolute zero. And how do they measure it everywhere?

01:13:03

Oh, it would be better to say, they don't know it's the same everywhere. They know it's roughly the same in all directions, as measured from Earth.

01:13:11

And there are instruments that can measure that, that can detect microwaves. And you point it there, and you see microwaves, and you point it there, and you see microwaves, you point there and see microwaves.

01:13:19

There are other instruments they've used that only detect differences. They measure it, so it measures two spots and compares the differences in the intensities of the microwaves.

01:13:28

And they're all, all those regions are around 2 .7 degrees above absolute zero. That's the, that's the wavelength of the microwave that would be produced if something had that temperature.

01:13:39

So that's where that comes from. There are hot spots and cold spots, but they're, they're very small.

01:13:46

They're just slightly above or below that 2 .7 degree average. But there they are. Okay, and what software do you use for the preliminary, or for the planetary displays that you used, that you showed us?

01:14:02

It's called Celestia. Like Celestial, but without the L. Celestia. It's free, amazingly.

01:14:09

It's modifiable, which I love. You can, and it's, and they made it easy to modify. You can add in objects, you can, as new data come in, new data maps for planets and so on.

01:14:20

And so my, if you download it, and you should, it's a wonderful program, and it is free. It used to be on Shatters .net,

01:14:28

if you go to Shatters .net. But if you just look up Celestia on the internet, you can download it. But the, the vanilla version that you'll get will not be quite as pretty as mine.

01:14:38

I've touched mine up a little bit, and including Pluto, I added, because it didn't come with a good detailed map of Pluto, because they hadn't mapped it yet, when

01:14:45

I downloaded it anyway. So as soon as I got the New Horizons data of the world map of Pluto, I was able to reconstruct that, and then, and then add it in.

01:14:54

So I've made some little modifications there. But, and then there's other places where other people have made modifications and posted them publicly for free download.

01:15:02

There's a website called Celestia Motherload, where you can find higher resolution maps.

01:15:08

But frankly, even the vanilla version of the program is just wonderful. It's a really nice piece of software, and God bless them for making it free.

01:15:14

I just think that's wonderful. Well, that seems to be the last question that people have put out.

01:15:21

Are there, are there any more questions, guys? Maybe, Dr. Lyle, you could tell us a little bit more about BSI, and about what you're working on over there?

01:15:31

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Biblical Science Institute, that's our website, biblicalscienceinstitute .com,

01:15:38

and a lot of free articles on that website. Everything on it's free, except we have a forum. I do have to eat, so I need to make a little bit of money somehow.

01:15:46

So some of our supporters, then, will, by giving $20 a month, they have access to a forum where they can interact with me, and with others directly, and I'll try to answer their questions to the best of my ability.

01:15:58

And I've found the forum to be a real blessing, and not all of our partners use it, but it's a neat resource.

01:16:04

But the rest of the website's free, you can check out all kinds of articles on there. I've, I'm very close to finishing a series of articles

01:16:11

I've been doing called The Worlds of Creation, which is a tour of the solar system, basically, from a biblical perspective.

01:16:18

And I've had a lot of fun with it. I hope people have enjoyed it, because we have these amazing images of some of these worlds that the

01:16:25

Lord created, ultimately for His glory, and perhaps for our enjoyment as well. But we, thanks to the technology, the technological advancements, we've been able to send spacecraft out to things, so we have these wonderful images of Pluto, and so on.

01:16:39

The article that'll go up tomorrow morning will be on asteroids, and how they confirm biblical creations.

01:16:46

That's fun, too. And we've actually sent spacecraft to certain asteroids, so we know what they look like, and they're, it's, it's amazing, it's mind -blowing.

01:16:52

So that's a great resource, and we have, there's a web store on there as well. You go to the web store, you can get any of the books that I've written, or the

01:17:00

DVDs that we've done. So I have, I have a couple of DVDs on astronomy that you might want to get, or maybe just one.

01:17:07

Another one's in production. We'll see when that happens. And then books,

01:17:13

Understanding Genesis, Ultimate Proof of Creation, Taking Back Astronomy, those are some of the highlights there.

01:17:21

So I'd encourage you to check it out. So biblicalscienceinstitute .com. Okay, and a question came up, do you do live presentations on your website?

01:17:32

Oh yeah, we do, and I just started doing that, so it's something I need to get in the habit of mentioning, actually. Well, they're not, they're not, they're not live presentations,

01:17:39

I should say, but they are video presentations that we do, that I've recorded. I'm not quite brave enough to go live yet, because I make a lot of mistakes when

01:17:48

I do these things, so I, I have to get in there and edit out all my goofs, but I'm getting, I'm getting a little better at it, so maybe eventually they'll be live.

01:17:55

But yeah, if you, if you go to our website, you go to the top, there's a videos tab. There are several podcasts that I've done on a variety of topics.

01:18:04

This is just recent, so we don't have a whole lot yet, but more will be coming. I'm hoping to have another one up Monday, if I can get all the editing done tomorrow or over the weekend.

01:18:12

So yeah, our podcast is Discerning Truth, and that's really what it's about, discerning truth in an age of error.

01:18:21

Yeah, I've watched them, and they're really good. So does anybody else have any questions? There we go.

01:18:34

Can we unmute and let everybody think, Dr. Jason? Yeah, if we're, if we're done with questions, then

01:18:39

I say let's do that. I'll rely on you or Joyce to do that. Okay, I think everybody,

01:18:47

I think everybody was. It's so nice, man. I'm cold right now. Stacy, Stacy, you're on the air.

01:18:57

Okay, we got that one taken care of. So no, that was really great, and that was awesome.

01:19:12

Thank you for taking the time. I know it's late. Well, it's not that late where you are. Oh, we should have signed up.

01:19:18

One hour difference. Oh, we could have signed you up for another hour. Jason, I found out if you, if you record on Zoom, you can stop the recording, and then you can start a new one if you mess up.