Let's Talk About the Shape of the Earth: An Interview with Dr. Danny Faulkner and an ISS Astronaut

Let's have a real serious, mind -to -mind, heart -to -heart, and biblical discussion about the shape of the earth.

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today.

I want to thank you so much for joining me. So a week or so ago, I put up a short little 10 -minute video on my

YouTube channel with one easy way to refute the flat earth position.

I knew there were a lot of flat earthers out there, but I kind of thought the position was on the wane.

It wasn't as popular as it used to be, say, five or six years ago. But apparently not, because I had tremendous blowback on that video.

I was quite honestly shocked at the vitriol by many people. Now, granted, there were some who who disagreed with me, believed the earth is flat, but they were cordial in their disagreement.

Others, however, not so much. There were a lot of people calling me a false teacher, a deceiver, someone who hates

God. I'm a liar. I'm calling God a liar. I don't believe the Bible.

I'm a vessel of Satan. One of the comments. So when

I saw the incredible blowback, and probably 90 % of the comments were in support of the flat earth.

And that did surprise me. And so when I saw those comments, I thought, you know, I need to give a more comprehensive treatment to this because that little video was never intended to be that.

It was never intended to be comprehensive. Just one little kind of easy thing. So I employed the assistance of Dr.

Danny Faulkner. Dr. Faulkner is a physicist and he is employed at Answers in Genesis.

And he has written a book on the flat earth position called Falling Flat. We'll talk about that.

But he is an expert on this issue. He's done the research. He's attended a number of flat earth conventions and has met and talked with a number of the more prominent names in the flat earth movement.

So he knows his stuff. And so we do about a two hour long interview here and we engage some of the more popular arguments for the flat earth position.

Not all of them because I mean, there's just too many to put in one video, but we hit some of the more popular ones.

We talk about long distance photography. We talk about the Van Allen belts. We talk about the belief that planes, if the earth was round, would need to constantly dip their nose to follow the curvature of the earth.

We talk about the Antarctic Treaty. We talk about the International Space Station.

And we also most importantly talk about the Bible. What does the Bible actually say?

Does the Bible teach that the earth is flat? And so we're going to look at all of that.

And there are time stamps down below in the description to help you navigate this interview because it is quite lengthy and you may have already noticed.

Well, it looks like it's about four hours long. This is a four hour plus long video because I have also included two other interviews that I did a couple of years ago on my

YouTube channel that many of you probably have not seen. So I put these in there, but they're pertinent to this discussion.

And one of the interviews I did with Colonel Jeff Williams, he is a Christian astronaut who had four tours on the

International Space Station. And so I put that in there and I also put in an interview that I did with Dr.

Jason Lyle, who is a Christian astrophysicist. And we also talked about the shape of the earth in that interview.

So all the time stamps down below in the description to help you navigate this. This is a very important issue because I've talked to some folks just in the last few days.

Some people hold to this, some Christians, at least professing Christians, hold to this so stridently that it's actually causing marriages to break apart and families to break apart.

For example, some husbands who have bought into the flat earth deception, but they believe that and their wives now, they've alienated themselves from their wives because a wife doesn't believe it or vice versa.

And it's causing strain. I mean real strain in marriages and causing families to break up.

This isn't just a laughable thing. This is actually quite serious because a lot of people have bought into this deception.

And so I am wanting to reach the reasonable people. If you're one of those and you are a

Christian, but you have been persuaded at least to some degree by the arguments of flat earthers,

I want you to, I'm trying to reach you because I think a lot of you are reasonable and you are open to discussion.

So that's what this long video is for, who it's for. There are some others, however,

I think that are so entrenched in it that it really doesn't matter the amount of evidence that you provide.

It doesn't even matter what you talk about from scripture. There's nothing that will convince them.

Some people I think are so beholden to this that you could actually put them on a

SpaceX rocket or a blue origin rocket and send them up, put them in orbit around the earth, even dock with the international space station, come back down safely, and they still wouldn't believe the earth is a sphere.

Those kinds of folks, there's just no reasoning with, but some folks you can be reasoned with.

And so those are the ones I'm really trying to reach. We're really, honestly, we're trying to help people.

I hope that this video will be helpful for you. Now, I want to offer you a word of caution, particularly dealing with the interview that I'm included here that I did with Colonel Jeff Williams.

If you are a Christian and you believe the earth is flat, then you're going to have a decision to make because Colonel Jeff Williams, a

Christian astronaut, now retired, but Christian astronaut who holds to a high view of scripture, holds to inerrancy, holds to a young earth six literal day creation, as do

I, this is a man who had four tours on the international space station, the ISS.

If the earth is flat, if the earth really is flat, Colonel Jeff Williams is a liar.

But if the earth is a sphere, he's telling you the truth. You're going to have to make a decision.

And I would think long and hard before you come out and you call this man a liar.

If you're lost, whatever. Lost people do what lost people do. But if you're a Christian, you need to think long and hard before you're willing to call this man and these other men liars, but especially

Colonel Williams because he's been on the international space station. Slander is a very serious sin listed amongst the sins of Romans chapter one that mark the lives of unbelievers.

And so you need to think long and hard before you're willing to do that. We're going to give you an awful lot of scientific refutation of the flat earth.

We're going to show you that the Bible does not teach that the earth is flat. And I'm going to give you this interview with Colonel Williams.

And so if you're willing to hold on to the flat earth after all of this, then

I'm not sure that much of anything will persuade you. But you need to think long and hard before you call

Jeff Williams a liar. All right, dear ones. With that out of the way, let us get into this.

My interview with Dr. Faulkner. Again, all the time stamps down below there in the description.

All the links to all the resources down below in the description. I hope that this will be helpful for you.

Share it with your friends. Share it with your family members. Share it with people that you know who are into the flat earth.

And please watch it. Watch it. Cannot watch it all in one time. I don't imagine because it's too long, but work your way through this.

I think it'll be helpful. All right, here we go. Well, Danny, brother, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us.

How are you? Pretty good. How are you doing? Doing well, doing well. Well, Danny, I wanted to have you come on the program because as you know,

I did this short little video on the flat earth. 10 minute or so video that was not at all intended as a comprehensive treatment of the issue, but man alive, did it garner a lot of feedback.

And so I wanted to have you on. You are an expert. You have written a book entitled

Falling Flat, A Refutation of Flat Earth Claims. Do you have a copy there?

There we go. Right there, yeah. Falling Flat. And I have it on Kindle. I didn't know about this book until a few days ago, but I've ordered it on Kindle.

I'm going to order a physical copy as well. So I'll have all the pertinent links down below in the description.

So Dr. Faulkner, Danny, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I'm an astronomer. I went to college at Bob Jones University where I majored in math. I have a master's degree from Clemson University in physics, and I have a master's and a

PhD in astronomy from Indiana University. As I was finishing up my education, I took a job as a professor at the

University of South Carolina Lancaster. I taught astronomy and physics there for more than a quarter century.

About a dozen years ago, I had an opportunity to retire a little bit early and that allowed me to come up here in northern

Kentucky where I live now. I'm on staff at Answers in Genesis. I'm on the research department.

I'm the astronomer. I oversee our astronomy and related activities, our outreaches.

We have their educational programs, but I do a lot of writing. I do some speaking. Since I've been here,

I've published I think about five or six books, and I've also write a lot of stuff for our website.

I stay pretty busy. The flat earth is one of those things I've been looking into for quite a while. Let me ask you this first, because theologically

I want everyone to know exactly where you and I stand. I would imagine most would assume since you're working at Answers in Genesis.

You are a born -again believer. You have a high view of the word of God, an inerrantist, correct?

You believe in inerrancy? Correct. All three correct, yes. Okay, so far so good. Young earth, six literal day creation, correct?

Correct. All right. You wouldn't have a job at Answers in Genesis. That's right. I would not.

That's right. So you and I are no theological liberals. We believe in inerrancy.

We believe in a literal reading and understanding of the record of creation in Genesis.

Are you a Mason? I am not, nor have I ever been a

Freemason. I thought a flat earther was heckling us there.

I'm sorry, what? I said I thought a flat earther was heckling my answer. Oh, sorry, that's my little dog,

Mia, and we have some folks working out in the backyard. I'm starting to suspect she might be a Mason. Let me state again,

I am not, nor have I ever been a Freemason. I get asked that from time to time, and I get accused of that all the time.

A lot of flat earthers think that I am, but I'm not. Yes. Okay. All right.

Nor am I. I'm not a Mason. I'm not a Freemason. I'm not any other kind of Mason. And to my knowledge,

I'm not even sure I know anyone named Mason. So we are not Masons. Okay. So, Danny, what led you to write this book,

Falling Flat? What began your interest in this topic? It was about, it was eight years ago in February.

I mean, just now, I'm starting my ninth year now. I was, in less than a week,

I encountered, I had conversations with three different adults about three different young people who were into the flat earth movement.

And I was quite taken aback. I thought, well, I've had three conversations in less than a week. There must be something going on.

I was on the road when the third conversation happened. So when I got home, I got online and boy, was

I surprised. You type in flat earth, and at that time you would just get hundreds or thousands of hits promoting flat earth.

I had no idea. There actually were a couple of clues going back a couple of years before that. And I think three different occasions or so that I can recall, somebody sent me a little

YouTube video about seeing too far on the earth. And they came four or five months apart, so I didn't really put it together.

But then I really got an education on that. So I started looking into it and delved into it.

And I've taken it very seriously. I believe with my biblical background and my background in astronomy and physics, it uniquely qualifies me to discuss this matter with some understanding and authority,

I think. So I took it upon myself to look into it. I asked some of the other speakers here at Entrance in Genesis.

I said, have you been getting any questions about flat earth? And they all said, what? I'd never heard of it.

But over the next few months, one by one, the speakers would come to my office and said, I got that question over the weekend.

And now we get it regularly here and on the road when our speakers go out. So it's become a big phenomenon over the last decade, really kind of erupting around 2014, 2015, big time.

And it continued to grow. To do this, I spent a lot of time. I read a lot of books, some of them written in the late 1800s, early 1900s, from the original modern flat earth movement, which then died back down over a century ago and then was revived about a decade ago by several people, mostly on YouTube videos and social media.

If it weren't for the internet, we wouldn't be having this discussion, quite literally and figuratively both. But I read those books.

I watched far more hours of YouTube videos than I would care to admit to. But I've also attended four flat earth conventions.

So I've been there. I've actually met many of the movers and shakers, some of the names you'd recognize. I actually have a good relationship with many of them, believe it or not.

And what I really like to do is talk to the people in the audience. And I've made friends there.

I didn't know how I'd be treated the first time I went. It was in 2017. It turns out it's okay.

I've had a few bad experiences, but for the most part, they've been very, very nice people, very nice people to me.

And I'm really thankful for that. And I like the attitude of a lot of people I've met in the flat earth, not all of them, but many of them that actually have a pretty good attitude,

I think. Yeah. Well, that's encouraging to hear. I'd say at least half.

And I think most of the comments that I've gotten on my little video have been pretty nasty.

I've been called a vessel of Satan. I hate God. I hate the Bible. I don't believe the

Bible. Of course, I'm a Mason and I'm accusing God of lying. If someone were to take what you just said,

I'm a Mason, they could really run with that. So yeah, they could snip that.

Yeah. So for the record, I'm no Mason. I've gotten a lot of the negative attacks too.

A lot of times they come on the internet, not so much face to face, but on the internet, people do have a different persona when you're not standing face to face with them many times.

Yeah, that is absolutely true. That is absolutely true. So you touched on it a little bit,

Danny, give us just a bird's eye view of the history of this movement, because I've seen a lot of people in the comments say that the flat earth belief was the predominant view amongst

Christians for all of Christianity. So for most of the 2000 years of Christian history, most

Christians have believed in the flat earth. Is that true or not? Absolutely false. That was a myth created in the 19th century, and there's an evolutionary connection, believe it or not.

Most of us grew up hearing what I call the Columbus myth, that everybody thought the world was flat until Columbus in 1492 showed otherwise.

And this has been repeated again and again. We're told that during the middle ages, the church taught the earth was flat and on and on and on.

And then it was disproved. But as it turns out, that's not the case at all. There was a medieval scholar named

Geoffrey Burton Russell, who in 1991, wrote a book with the title, Inventing the Flat Earth.

And he goes through the history of the church and demonstrates that no, the church never taught that.

As it turns out, there are only two people you can really identify in the history of the church. And they were early on the early middle ages who thought that, but they were outliers and they were not really coded very much.

They were kind of weird guys. So the church never taught that. I think people kind of conflate that with the whole thing of geocentrism was fought 400 years ago and how the

Roman Catholic Church had a real dispute with Galileo and such. So this myth was created in the late 19th century as part of what we call the conflict thesis that Christianity had held about progress and stuff.

And the middle ages were the dark ages. And finally, the Enlightenment released everybody from all the darkness and the ignorance of the past.

And that's simply not true. It was a fabrication of the late 19th century. And many historians have tried to correct this issue, but it's rampant in our culture.

People just keep repeating that lie. So the church never taught the earth is flat. I think

I also used to believe that Christopher Columbus set out to prove the shape of the world.

I got it from a Yep. There you go.

Would Warner Brothers lie to you? Right. Exactly. All right.

Well, so I want to run through some of the top flat earth argument.

And by the way, you and I will probably both refer to flat earthers. And when we say that, that is not a pejorative.

They refer to themselves as flat earthers, just a convenient term. So when we say flat earther, that's not a slur.

My first article I wrote on this eight years ago, I think I discussed that. I was debating whether I should use the term flat earther.

And what I discovered is that they use that kind of repurpose the term. So again, I'm glad you pointed it out.

We don't mean anything pejorative by we're simply using the term they use. It's unfortunate the rest of the world seems to use that as a pejorative.

Right. Right. Okay. Good clarification there. Um, so one of their one of their favorite arguments is the

Antarctica Treaty. They say, Mark Sargent said that the Antarctica Treaty is the only treaty in the history of treaties that has ever been upheld and followed and adhered to.

The Antarctic Treaty says that no corporation in the history of the world can set up shop down there forever. And according to him, the

Antarctica Treaty prevents anyone from going in the interior of Antarctica.

It's illegal. And if you try, the military is there to shoot you, keep you from going.

So talk to us about that. Yeah, that's a common flat earther claim. The whole argument here is that their model of the earth is it's round and flat.

The North Pole is at the center of that round, flat disc. There is no South Pole. And if you wonder what holds all the water in keeps from falling off the edge of the earth, well, there's an ice wall at a great distance from the

North Pole. We call it Antarctica, but it's really just a ring of ice that prevents the water from from coming out.

And there's a dome beyond that, that rests somewhere out there and spins around each day. That's generally what flat earthers believe.

There are variations on that theme, of course. And the reason why they believe the Antarctic Treaty prevents travel down there is it keeps flat earthers from going down there and finding the dome and finding the edge and so forth.

Right. Now, when I first heard this claim several years ago, I looked up the Antarctic Treaty. It's not difficult to find.

And there's no such language in there saying that prevents you from going there, nor are there any kind of weapons or ships that are going to intercept you to prevent you from doing that.

The reason for the Antarctic Treaty was there's a long history of different nations claiming new land that nobody else owns.

And they didn't want anybody to claim Antarctica, even though a couple of countries do. They said, look, this treaty is not going to recognize any of that.

Antarctica is an international preserve. Also, it's a fragile place. It's a very dry desert, as it turns out.

And they want to preserve it for scientific purposes and such. And they also wanted to keep the military out, stationing of troops there and stationing of military installations.

That does not prevent military operations in the sense of exploration, like Admiral Byrd had gone down there many times, not as to bring weapons to Antarctica, but to actually explore it as part of what he did as being part of the

Navy. So non -military use and not a lot of people going into the place. And the treaty goes on to restrict what you have to do when you're down there.

If you go, you have to pack out everything, including human waste, which is understandable because if you dump that on the ground, it's going to be there for a very long time.

And nobody wants to mess with that in the future. So there are some restrictions placed upon that. And so as I, as a

US citizen, if I wanted to go to Antarctica, I would have to get permission of the

State Department because that treaty, I'm obligated to that treaty under the

US law and constitution, as it turns out. And they're going to make sure I have, first of all, the proper backing to have proper insurance in case

I need to be rescued, have the proper equipment that I can safely get there and get back, and not to pollute the place and all sorts of things.

So anybody who wants to go there can do so if they follow those rules. The problem is it's not cheap.

It would cost you millions of dollars to mount such an expedition. So there aren't any ships that are going to stop you.

Flat earthers like to tell you that there's a bunch of naval ships there that will turn you back and shoot you if you don't.

Let's face it, there's a lot of water out there. You could probably sneak in if you really wanted to. But why would you want to?

It's a pretty hostile place, as it turns out. So the Antarctic Treaty, they use that a lot. But if you read the treaty as I have, it says none of the things that flat earthers claim.

Yeah, okay. So if you have enough money and you're willing to jump through all the hoops, you can indeed go to Antarctica.

And you know, there are other situations like that. For instance, every year I go on a week -long raft trip in Grand Canyon.

It's part of my job here, and we do geology by day and astronomy by night. But you know, everybody wants to raft through the canyon, and so it's restricted who can go through there.

There's a lottery that you can be a part of to take a private trip through. But before you enter, they make sure you have all the equipment you need, all the things, safety and other things taken care of.

And by the way, you have to pack your poop out. You can't dump it there. You have to take it out with you.

If you don't have plans for that, then you can't enter the thing. We go with an outfitter, and they have to be inspected every time they go through.

So this idea of going through the hoops is not that foreign to us, as it turns out. It's just few people have actually gone into a place that's quite so restrictive.

And you say you've met some of the more prominent names. Who are the people that you've met, some of the leaders in the

Flat Earth? Well, I went to a meeting back in October. I met Mark Sargent there. I had not met him before, and he was very, very nice to me.

David Weiss was there. We met a couple of times before, and he was not quite as nice, I guess, but not bad to me at all.

Let's see. I've met the late Rob Skiba. I had a good relationship with him. Robbie Davidson hosted the first three

Flat Earth International Conventions, and he was super. He really was. Rick Hummer was the emcee of those three conventions, and he was absolutely fantastic.

He really was a likable guy. He likes me. I can tell I like him. So those are some of the names of people that I've met that people might recognize.

Bob Nodell, I knew him as well. I did not know his wife, Cammie, until October. And when

I went to the meeting in October, Cammie wanted to talk. We sat down. We talked for at least an hour one day. A very sweet person.

I enjoyed talking to her. We disagree, but we don't have to be disagreeable while we're doing it. So those are just some of the names of people

I've met that I have a good relationship with. Yeah. But you weren't able to convince any of them? No.

That was not my intent. That's an important point. I don't really try to convince Flat Earthers.

I'm happy to have conversations with them, answer their questions if they really want to ask me questions. But I've found for the most part, if a person's really convinced that the

Earth is flat, there's not much I can do to change their minds. I think early intervention is a key thing, and that's who

I'm aiming at. In fact, you'll find a couple of times in my book, I actually say that. I didn't write this book for Flat Earthers.

I wrote it for people who are looking for answers to the questions that Flat Earthers raise.

Right. I agree with you. And judging from the comments, some of them, I think if you could actually put them on the space shuttle, even though the space shuttle is not flying anymore, but if you could put them on a

SpaceX rocket and send them up personally, and they were to come down, I still don't think they'd be convinced.

Probably not. But there are some that are more reasonable and open -minded, fair -minded.

So those are the people we're trying to reach. And also, as you said, kind of early intervention here.

So, Danny, let's run through some of these more popular Flat Earth arguments. Mark Sargent, in an interview that he did on some

European network, he went through quickly, and I'll play these clips.

But one is long -distance photography. To your proof questions, I know we don't have a whole lot of time left.

Sorry, let me give you the five bullet points that I gave Georgetown physicists. And he folded like a card table almost immediately.

I put this challenge up to Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, any of these guys. First one would be long -distance photography.

Curvature of the Earth is eight inches per mile squared. We eventually should not be able to see over the hill. We shouldn't be a hill.

It should be gone. HD technology has changed that. Now we can see things way, way further. There's some wonderful work being done by Nathan Oakley and some

UK teams where they're actually seeing a horizon behind oil platforms at 10, 15, 20 miles.

They claim that you can, if you go out to a large body of water, say like Michigan, you can pull in objects, boats, land masses that according to the curvature of the

Earth should not be visible at those distances. And yet, if you have a, like a

Nikon P900 or whatever it is, you can, you can pull these things back into view. So.

Yeah, that's a, that's probably the most common argument I hear flashers make. They say we see too far.

They take the P900 and P1000 and zoom in and say they're pulling things back in that where it should be obscured by the

Earth's curvature. In fact, this idea that ships disappear whole first as they, as they travel away, they are, that argument goes back to Pliny the

Elder in the second, first century AD. I think he was probably thinking more in terms of as a ship approaches land, if you're up on the top of the mast, you can see the land before, for people in a deck can.

It works both ways, you see. I don't live near a large body of water, but so I can't do this experiment myself, but very often, but I do travel.

And when I do, I often will take equipment with me to, to check this myself.

I use the, the observatory. We have an observatory here at the, at the Creation Museum.

And we have a three and a half inch Questar telescope. It's a, has superb optics on it. It has a focal length of 1300 millimeters.

People who do photography, they're usually impressed with that focal length because that's a whale of a telephoto lens.

And there's a port on the back I can pull out, unscrew a plug there, and I can take a camera adapter and put in my digital

SLR camera in there. And I take pictures. And the first time I did this was, would have been almost eight years ago.

It was at Virginia Beach. And I was taking photographs of container ships as they were coming and going there at the port, there in Virginia Beach.

And as I did, as the ships moved away, you could see that they, you could tell they got farther away because they're getting smaller and smaller appearing in my, in the, in the view.

And as they did progressively more and more of the holes, and eventually even some of the containers were being covered up.

I've done this since in South Florida a few times, gone down there to see my sister.

And the few times I've done this experiment, I always, always get results that are consistent with the earth being a globe.

I can only assume two things or conclude two things about flat earther arguments here.

Maybe three things. One is, one thing I conclude is that many flat earthers have not done this themselves or relying upon the testimony and the photographs that others and videos that other flat earthers have made.

But the other two things I can conclude is either they are just very lucky and do this on days when, when such a thing is possible, or they do it all the time and, and they, they simply select the, the data that they want.

You see, seeing too far is something's been documented over the years. It's nothing new to flat earthers. And it comes from what's called a temperature inversion that sometimes happens, particularly on, on, on warm summer and spring days.

If you go to the beach much or any body of water and spring and summer days that are warm, you know, the water's always cooler than the air temperature is.

And usually air temperature is warmest at the surface, and then it decreases as you increase in elevation.

But if, if it's a very warm day and cold water, like off the, off the coast, you can end up with a layer of very cool air next to that water could be quite thick actually.

And the speed of light is slower in that, that warmer, that cooler air than it is in the air above.

And so as the light moves across the surface of the water, and it starts to climb out of it because of, because of the curvature of the earth, it gets refracted back down, bent back down because of the, the temperature inversion and in a different, different speed of light in the thing.

And one of the most famous examples they have out there is what's called the, the, the, the black swan.

It's taken from a, as a screenshot taken from a 2016 flat earther video. A guy's on, on the southern coast of, of California, and he's looking out at two oil platforms, one a little over six miles, one a little over nine miles away.

And he has his camera short distance above the, above the water. And he argues that if the earth is really a globe, 25 ,000 miles in circumference, then the nearer platform ought to be partially blocked and the more distant one, even more blocked.

But he shows a picture where it looks like the horizon is behind both of them, and they're not obscured at all.

And he says, you know, they, they, they take a screenshot of this photo and say, see, we see too far, therefore the earth can't be a sphere, it must be flat.

Well, if you watch the video, and I'm sure you have now, I know I have many times, you will see that he shows in there a photograph that he took of the same oil platforms, but, but oil, but they were obscured as much as you would expect them to be if the earth is spherical.

And also he puts up text in there, both places on these photographs. He says on most days,

I see this, I see what's consistent with a spherical earth, but on rare days, not very often, on rare days,

I see what looks to be like flat earth evidence. And on the basis of that, he concluded the earth is flat.

So he threw out 99 % of the data and he, and he kept maybe 1 % of the data. And that's not the way to decide anything, let alone in science.

So I've never seen that. I'd love to get a photograph where the, where the, I could see too far, but so far

I've not been able to do that. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And another example of this is the

Southern end of Lake Michigan, of course, Chicago on the West side. And if you go to the

East side there, I think it's roughly 60 miles. And on rare days, these days that you're describing, you can actually see the skyline of Chicago, but most days you can't because it's too far and it's beyond the curve, but on these rare days you can correct.

Yeah. And by the way, I've, I've tried that myself several times looking across Lake Michigan. I've never seen across it.

It's on rare days. And the guy that they really credited to this is Joshua in the wiki. He's a superb photographer taking on, taking a number of really interesting photographs there of not only that, but other things on Lake Michigan.

And he's not a flat earther. That's important to note, but he knows optics very well. And he knows weather conditions that are conducive for this.

And you need a, you need some zooming to be able to do that with either with a telescope or with a zoom telephoto lens or something in order to do it.

And, and by the way, you don't see down to street level on the Chicago. If it really were flat, you should be able to, but you don't.

It's a partially obscure. And then you have to ask the question why, if the earth is flat, that's the case, but that's another big example they use that the new wiki photograph.

Yes. Yes. Okay. So temperature inversion easily explains that. Yeah. All right.

So the second one, Sergeant says, why doesn't our atmosphere rush into the vacuum of space?

Gravity versus the vacuum of space. Gravity is holding things down, right? That's gravity. No problem, right?

You make the upper part of this, a vacuum chamber, you pull a cork. Everyone's, everything's going to rush upstairs. Why?

When you go outside, why isn't the air outside rushing into space? You can't, you can't the atmosphere.

Why doesn't go, why doesn't go into space? Can't say gravity anymore because gravity didn't hold the air in this room for that little test.

I've encountered this question many times. So it was one time I famously refused to answer the question because the person asking me,

I didn't like his attitude at all. It's out there on the internet. People want to go see it. I won't tell you who it was. You can figure that out.

And so people conclude, oh, he couldn't answer the question. Well, yes, I could. I just, number one, I didn't want to. And number two, the reason why

I didn't want to is because he wasn't going to listen. He just wanted a sound bite. So I didn't want to give him one. And they probably thought your refusal to answer was your inability to answer, right?

That's, that's very poor reasoning, isn't it? I think the reasoning is if Danny can't answer the question, then

Danny won't answer the question. Danny didn't answer the question. Well, that is classic affirming the consequent folks, something that flat earthers supposedly know all about.

There are many reasons why I might refuse to answer. There were several that time, but you know, when I, when I encountered this question,

I tried to, I tried to ask people, well, what do you mean by a vacuum? Most people think a vacuum is a region that is entirely empty of any matter at all.

Well, no such thing exists. No astronomer suggests that there's a vacuum above us.

Now the vacuum of space, quote unquote, is a pretty hard vacuum, but it's not entirely empty.

And somehow flat earthers seem to think this nearly zero pressure vacuum is something magical about it.

But then I tried to ask them, okay, well, what, what causes the gas to move from higher pressure to lower pressure?

And by the way, a vacuum properly understood is simply a region of lower pressure.

Yeah. If you, uh, your, your engine produces a vacuum and your car can be run devices in your car, but it's not a, it's not a perfect vacuum.

I can create a vacuum by sucking on a straw. Everybody can do that. So there are plenty of vacuums.

Like there's a vacuum actually above an airplane wing that turns out because the speed of the air above and below the wing is different.

There's a lower pressure above and lower pressure as I already defined it is a vacuum. And so there's a pressure difference that pushes up on those wings.

It's called lift. That's what causes an airplane to fly. So if you've got a tall room of some sort,

I got news for you. There's a vacuum at the, at the ceiling. There really is because the pressure at the ceiling is a little bit less than the pressure at the floor.

So to talk about opening this container at a vacuum in a room and letting the air rise up, well, it's going to do that, but it's already doing that.

There's always a vacuum higher up in the air. So I have to ask the question, why does the air not suddenly rise up to meet that?

I went up to Pikes Peak number about 20 years ago and the air pressure up there is only about 60 % of what it is at sea level, probably about probably about 65 or 70 % of what it is at Denver.

And so why isn't all this air rising up to, to equalize that pressure?

Well, there must be, let's see, there must be some force pushing that pulling that air down.

Now I'm not going to identify that force for you. You can figure that out. Well, you can call whatever you want, but there obviously is some force pulling down on the air, even in the room

I'm sitting in, in the room you're sitting in. And once you get your head wrapped around that, then the question kind of answers itself, doesn't it?

Right. Right. It does. It does. But I've, I've actually seen some flat earthers, not all, but I've seen some say that gravity doesn't exist.

Yeah. That's a common, and for good reason, because if gravity exists and that argument goes away and a number of other arguments go away, they like to, some of them like to talk about this downward bias on the earth.

And they try to argue that there are two schools of thought on this. One is buoyancy and density, that there's this upward buoyant force and a downward force due to density.

And it's, they're kind of right about a couple of things there, but you know, in physics and hydrostatics, we talk about this quite a bit.

The Archimedes principle used to solve all sorts of problems with my students dealing with this. I love that part of physics about hydrostatics and pressure.

And it turns out without, without some sort of downward force, which you and I might use the

G word to describe, buoyance and density doesn't work at all, as it turns out. If you understand a little bit of physics about this, you know exactly what

I'm talking about. The other school of thought is that it's that this downward bias is an electromagnetic phenomenon that somehow the electrical charges within objects cause them to sink or float, depending on these things.

And it's fraught with all sorts of problems. These people don't understand electricity and magnetism much at all.

And I'm just flabbergasted. I used to teach that quite a bit when I was a university professor.

In fact, I think electricity and magnetism may be my favorite part of physics. It really is.

I enjoy it. Some really cool stuff going on there. And if what they're saying is true, then equal size or equal mass weights of steel and lead ought to be attracted differently or fall downward differently because they have different electromagnetic properties.

One's ferromagnetic, one of them is paramagnetic, I think. And so it's going to respond differently. Well, they don't.

They respond the same way. So I think this idea of just saying gravity doesn't exist is a desperate attempt to kind of take away many of the arguments against the flat

Earth. Next one,

Mark Sargent talks about, and many of them do, the Van Allen belts. That's a question which is the

Van Allen radiation trap question, which is, are the Van Allen radiation belts deadly? Yes or no. If they are deadly, then how do the

Americans get past it with no shielding whatsoever? Remember, the only thing that can stop radiation is gold, lead, and a whole bunch of water.

They went with aluminum and plastic. Nobody died. Nobody got radiation poisoning. Nobody even got cancer. There's still five of them walking around today.

If you say yes, then why does NASA have this wonderful video, Ryan, trial by fire, saying, oh, yeah, we can't send any capsules into space because we haven't solved the radiation problem yet?

Well, maybe that's because you've got to go closer when you go to Mars, and it takes longer, and there's more exposure, perhaps.

I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, well. Maybe, he says. Well, no, I'm not going to shoot it down. That's a better answer than I've gotten from a lot of people.

Yeah, you've got to keep in mind here that this is an attempt to discredit that we went to the

Moon 50 years ago. I like to point out to people, whether we went to the

Moon or not doesn't tell us that the Earth is flat or not. It's just the fact there were two movies done around 2001.

The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon is the title of one. I forget the other one, what it was called, but those documentaries were made by people who believe the

Earth is a globe. They weren't flat -earthers, so this argument isn't really an argument for flat

Earth at all. It's for Apollo Moon landing denial, but the Van Allen belts are a bit overrated.

They're a doughnut shape, a toroidal shape of a collection of charged particles that have been collected by the

Earth's magnetic field and confined to that kind of a doughnut around the Earth. There are three ways they really avoided that.

One is that they used a tin can. Actually, it was more like an aluminum can.

They had a thin skin around them that had to hold in the pressure they had of the air in there, otherwise it would have died.

It had some thickness to the wall and other equipment too, by the way, it just wasn't the skin on the thing. The charged particles in the

Van Allen belts can be stopped relatively easily, especially most of them, because they travel too slowly.

They hit that wall and they stop. Alpha particles are part of this. These are simply protons.

They're hydrogen nuclei. I remember back a half century ago taking a modern physics class, and we had a radioactive source in a cloud chamber.

I had a hard time seeing. At first, I was looking far away from the source to see these things, but then

I looked very carefully, and today I have to wear my reading glasses to see them, but there's little bitty trails in the cloud chamber really close to the source.

Then my professor, he took a very thin onion skin, remember onion skin typing paper, and he slid it down there and it stopped them cold.

I mean, just nothing went through that. The charged particle radiation we're talking about here, they can be stopped fairly easily.

The ones that are a little more powerful, they can penetrate. There are two strategies. One was to shoot past the

Van Allen belts very quickly. Remember, they launch to the moon. They take off at 25 ,000 miles per hour, so you're not spending a lot of time in it.

Also, they didn't go straight to the moon. Here's the Earth. The moon's over here. Instead of going straight to the moon, they went up like this, and they went over that donut part for the most part.

They avoided the intense part of the Van Allen belts. There were concerns about that back then, and there are concerns about that today.

I know at least one of the Apollo astronauts developed, I forget his name now, I have to look it up, but he went to the moon, and he was one of the

Apollo 13 astronauts. He developed later on a type of cancer that is associated, very rare cancer, associated with that kind of radiation exposure.

The question arises, if he hadn't gone to the moon, would he have had that cancer? Of course, we don't know.

I think there have been a couple of other cases like that too. You're still subject to the same sort of radiation damage when you fly in an airplane 35 ,000 feet.

There's actually some danger there, but you're largely protected by the skin of the aircraft. I think

I heard you say in another video I was watching of you that a couple of the Apollo astronauts actually later became

Christians, correct, after their moon landing. Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin. Jim Irwin's deceased.

I know Charlie. I don't know him really well, but he's from my adopted hometown of Lancaster, South Carolina.

Big man down there. I knew his identical twin brother very well, Bill. I also worked with Bill's daughter and his niece of Charlie there.

She was on the nursing faculty there at the university. I've talked to Charlie several times.

I actually emailed him a few years ago and got a quote about flat earth from him. When people deny we've been to the moon, whether they're flat earthers or not, they're in a position of accusing two

Christian brothers of lying about the biggest thing that's ever happened to them and their wives, except coming to the

Lord and finding salvation through Jesus Christ. I've met two other recent Christian astronauts.

One is Geoffrey Williams. He's now retired, but I've got a book of his on my shelf that he's signed.

He took a lot of photographs of a spherical earth from the space station, wrote a book about that.

Then the other one is Butch Wilmore. He's a current astronaut. He's done some speaking branches in Genesis.

I've been at conferences with him. Super guy. He's been hammered, as the others have, Geoffrey Williams, too, and Charlie Duke by the flat earthers.

If Christian flat earthers, I've got at least four Christian astronauts who testified that the earth is a globe.

You're calling them liars. Without any evidence that they're lying, other than the fact that you don't believe the earth is a globe, you're in a position of accusing four

Christian brothers of lying. That's a very serious charge. You only need two or three witnesses. I have four.

Yes. Amen. I'm so glad you said that. I know Geoff Williams as well. It's been an honor of mine to get to know him over the past few years.

We've developed a friendship and spoken at several conferences together, actually. I also have a copy of his book.

Up until very recently, he held the record for the most number of days spent on the International Space Station.

We'll than any other person ever. He is a wonderful Christian man.

He's a very humble guy. I was in an email dialogue one time with a flat earther who's a believer.

He actually was forced to say, yeah, I think. I asked him, I said, do you think Colonel Geoff Williams is lying?

He finally said, yeah, I think he's lying. Well, they have to. Otherwise, they have to give up their belief in the flat earth.

That's part of the problem here. They just plow through people. You look at the stuff that's been said about you recently on your video about you're not a

Christian, you're a wolf in sheep's clothing, and on and on and on it went, all in defense of this belief that the earth is flat.

That is dangerous ground they're treading on. It sure is. It sure did. It sure is.

I've just been astonished. For those of you watching, you need to think real hard, long and hard, before you accuse a brother of yours of lying just to hold on to this position.

The shadow from the moon during a solar eclipse is too small.

BD The moon eclipse is too small. The moon eclipse is 70 miles wide, and the moon is 2 ,000 miles wide.

We never see that in nature. We say the moon is about 70 miles wide. Yeah. Well, where did they get that 70 -mile figure from?

Well, it came from the 2017 eclipse. It came across Oregon to Charleston. Well, I've got news for you.

The upcoming eclipse on April 8th, the eclipse path is like 120 miles wide. So did the moon suddenly change size?

What's going on? Is it growing? Is it growing? When I heard that 70 being repeated,

I thought, well, that's the only eclipse you ever heard of. But in the past, the eclipse width has varied a little over 200.

It's as large as it gets down to zero. It's as small as it gets. The problem is they do a little demo.

They'll take a lamp, and they'll take a basketball, and then they will pull the two up and have a screen over here.

And if they move the screen farther back, the shadow of the basketball just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And I said, see, shadows always get larger. Well, you know, have you ever seen shadows of birds or planes flying over?

Yeah. But how high are the birds or the planes? They're pretty low, aren't they?

You never see the shadow of a bird that's up, say, oh, 1 ,000 feet or an airplane that's up several miles, do you?

It's because the angular size of those birds and planes are smaller than the angular size of the moon.

As a plane gets higher, as a bird gets higher, the shadow gets smaller and smaller, then it disappears. If what the flat earthers were saying were true, then if shadows do indeed get larger, all shadows get larger with increasing distance, then from time to time, an airplane would fly over, and we'd have this huge shadow that covered everywhere around you for miles.

That's not the case. While it's true that, well, here's the situation.

They take a light bulb which is smaller than the basketball or whatever ball they use, and then under those circumstances, the shadow will get larger with increasing distance.

However, if the light source is larger than the thing cast in the shadow, then it will get smaller with increasing distance.

And I've demonstrated this a couple of ways. One I did is I went to my basement and took a video.

It had a floodlight about this big around, and I had a wiffle ball about this big around, about a little over half the size of it.

And as I changed the distance from the screen, indeed, the shadow got smaller with increasing distance.

Eventually, it would disappear. Another demo I did several years ago is early one morning here at the

Creation Museum, the sun rose, wasn't very high in the sky, and I took a volleyball, and the volleyball's like nine, nine and a half inches across,

I think nine and a half inches across. I had one of my employees stand outside and hold this volleyball over her head, and I had calculated, given the angular diameter of the sun, about a half degree.

I think it was 42 feet beyond that. The shadow of the ball would be half as big.

And I stood her in this place 42 feet away. I had a white screen, and I ran over there real quick with a ruler, and I measured it.

Sure enough, it was one half the size of the volleyball. So as it turns out, flat earthers are only half right on this.

They only check the situation where the light source was smaller than the object casting the shadow.

If they were to reverse that with a larger light source, they would find that the shadow actually decreases in size and eventually will disappear with increasing distance.

And that basically tells us then that the sun must be larger than the moon if it tapers down to that size.

Yes. All right.

The next one. Moon temperature. So Mark Sargent says that the light of the moon, the moon is actually colder where it's lit than where it's in the shade or not lit.

And moonlight produces a cold light. Fourth would be the moon temperature.

That's a spooky one. I didn't even know that until about two years in, which is the moon generates a cold light, which is warmer in the moon shade than it is in the moonlight.

If you magnify moonlight, it gets even colder. It's generating a cold laser light. It doesn't even make sense. Yeah, this is a common claim, and this could be a throwaway for them because it doesn't have anything to do with the shape of the

Earth. I'm scratching my head saying, okay, this makes no sense. I wrote about this a few years ago, and I traced this back to one of the authors around 1900.

It wasn't the original Rowbottom that said this. It was one of the later ones that wrote it, and he was talking about the cooling effect of moonlight.

So what people have done, they've taken these infrared thermometers. They point them at things in moonlight.

They go outside the yard and set up a couple of things, one in moonlight and one in the other, not in moonlight, and they'll let them sit there for a while to reach equilibrium.

Then they measure the temperature of the infrared thermometer, and sure enough, the object in moonlight is cooler than the object that's in shadow and shade of Moon, so therefore that proves moonlight is cooling.

Now, right off the bat, this violates everything we understand about light.

Light is energy, and it has energy, which means if light falls on something and be absorbed by it, then it ought to increase the temperature of that object.

Now, it may not do it very much because it may not be much energy involved, but it would do that, and so to say that it actually can somehow remove energy, remove heat, is absurdity and would undermine everything we know about the physics of heat and energy and light, but there's something else going on, as there always is in these things.

If you've ever had a carport, I used to have one. I live in South Carolina. Everybody did down there, and on a clear night, if the car was parked in the morning,

I didn't have to scrape frost. I didn't have to wipe off dew. The car was dry. I could zip right out because even though the air temperature is the same under the carport as it is out in the yard or on the driveway, things left out at night on a cool night, on a clear night, will radiate away heat.

They'll radiate away heat like that, and so they fall below the dew point, and when they fall below the dew point, you get dew or frost if the dew point's below freezing.

That's why a carport is so helpful to avoid frost and dew on your car overnight.

Well, if you go outside and you're not really careful about this, if you set two objects outside your yard and one of them's in moonlight and one of them's not, well, why isn't the one in moonlight?

Why is it shaded? Well, it might be sitting under a canopy of a tree or something like that, and I can guarantee you on a clear night when there's no moonlight at all, there's no moon.

It's a new moon, let's say, the one object sitting out there exposed to the sky is going to be cooler than the one that's not.

That's a very basic understanding of what's going on at night when the cooling temperatures.

So I devised an experiment. I did this experiment more than 40 times. I would go out on a night.

I would set four identical objects out in the yard, and I would very carefully select them so that two of them were in moonlight and two of them were not in moonlight.

They were shaded somehow by a tree or something, but I would always, one of them was in moonlight.

I would make sure it's exposed to the sky above, and the other one, I would make sure it was obscured, had a canopy of some sort, like a tree canopy.

Moonlight could still reach it, but it had a canopy above. I did the same for the other one that wasn't in moonlight. So I tested those, and what

I found consistently was that the moonlight, the objects that were under the canopy were always warmer than the objects that were not under the canopy.

I did correlation between all four of those variables and did a statistical comparison on the two of them.

I published these results. I did two other experiments. I'll tell you about one other one. I did only twice. I took a 16 -inch telescope.

This has got a mirror 16 inches across, and I took a thermometer, a mercury bulb thermometer, and I put it in a stopper with a hole in it.

We see them in chemistry classes all the time, and I positioned it so I put the stopper in the eyepiece holder, and I positioned the bulb right at the focal point of the telescope.

So when I pointed the telescope to a bright moon, it was a gibbous, nearly a full moon, then

I was concentrating the light of the moon onto that bulb. As I did that,

I would let it sit for five minutes, record the temperature, then I'd move the telescope off so no moonlight was hitting it.

I would go for five minutes, record the temperature, and I went back and forth. I did this over much of the night, two different nights, and I saw no correlation at all that moonlight was chilling down.

You'd think a 16 -inch mirror would do this. I took a white piece of paper one time in the daytime, by the way.

I was trying to find the focus, silly me. I put it on the sun, and I held this piece of paper up there, and within a second, it burst into flames.

Oh yeah, it was gone. I had to drop it and stomp it to put it out.

So it collected light very well, and so if moonlight is cooling, it ought to be able to drop the temperature of that thermometer.

It never did. So this is just one of those things that goes on and on, and it's a hill that many flat

Earthers want to die on, even though it has nothing to do with flat Earth. Even if moonlight is cooling, does that prove the

Earth is flat? There's no connection. Yeah, no, it's not. And Danny, it seems to me that they would have to admit, well,

I take that back. No, they don't. What do flat Earthers say about the

Moon, as far as the shape of it? Do they admit that it's a sphere, or do they think it's also just a flat disk?

Well, most flat Earthers are pretty agnostic about the Moon. They refuse about many things.

In fact, when I've gone to these flat Earth meetings, I like to talk to people and ask them a series of questions. I really want to know what they're thinking, and I ask them questions.

And many times I ask them questions like, how far away is the Sun? How far away is the Moon? What causes eclipses? Those kind of questions.

And what's the Moon made out of? What shape is it? And their answer many times is, well, I don't know, but it's not this.

I don't know, but it's not that. So they're convinced that it's not a rock. It's not a hard, rocky object.

They're convinced it's close. It's maybe 30 miles across and maybe a few thousand miles up. Some of them argue that it's a plasma.

They argue that it's transparent, that you can see things through it. There have been people showing videos, supposedly, of stars shining through the

Moon. And having taken photographs of the Moon and stars quite a bit, that's a real difficult trick, because the

Moon is pretty bright. And so to capture images of stars, you have to increase the exposure time or the

ISO or the aperture size. And when you do that, you blow the Moon out. You can't possibly focus. So when they see these little dots through the thing, they look like hot pixels to me.

I've seen occultations of bright stars many times. I've recorded a few. And when that happens, the star is there, and then suddenly it's not, because it's being blocked out by the

Moon. So there's a lot of evidence that the Moon is not transparent, despite their claims. So they don't really agree on what the

Moon is as far as its shape is concerned. A few of them would grant that maybe it's a sphere. But many of them say,

I don't know, it could be a disc. It looks like a disc, but we don't know what the Moon's shape is. Yeah.

Plasma, that's a new one. I haven't heard that one. Plasma with craters? Yeah. Don't ask them to explain that.

They don't, or they can't. Okay. All right. A bonus question.

Mark Sargent didn't posit this one, but I've seen it a lot. There's a lot of videos about this. So on long distance flights, they would say if the

Earth is curved, then airplanes, you get on an international flight, the airplane would be constantly having to dip its nose down to go around the curve.

And yet planes don't dip their nose. They just stay level. Actually, the nose is, I think, just slightly tilted up.

But they say if the Earth is curved, it would constantly have to be adjusting down to hug the curve.

Yeah. Are you aware of what they usually say the rate of diving is on that? The number

I've seen is that there's something like a half mile every minute. I've heard that claim.

Every minute, the plane would have to dive like 2 ,700 feet. Well, let's think about that just a minute.

The plane's going 550 miles an hour. That's about eight miles, a little over eight miles, eight and two thirds miles in one minute.

Now, they like to quote the eight inches per mile squared.

So if you run through that, you end up with maybe 40 some feet of drop. So where do the other 2 ,730 feet go?

There's a problem there if you think about it. And it has to do with that squared relationship. And that's what's befuddling up here.

And if you, by the way, if you do it, if you do the kind of talk about this in my book, if you do the calculation over a minute, then over a second, that amount of dive per minute gets less and less and less and it vanishes, which is the nature of limiting behavior.

And what they're doing here is they're importing a flat earth idea into the globe earth.

Now, the late Rob Skiba used to give a talk where he cautioned globe earthers not to import globe ideas into the flat earth, which is a fair criticism, but it works both ways.

If we shouldn't import globe ideas onto the flat earth, you shouldn't. When critiquing the globe earth, import a flat earth idea.

And whether you think the earth is a globe or not, this is what it is. If the earth is a globe, the earth is spherical like this, and the atmosphere is a symmetrical, it's a shell around that, having the same sort of curvature around it, hugs it.

And so if you start over here at one, say, on the East Coast, and you go up, you're going to find the same sort of profile density and so forth as you would on the

West Coast. You're going in different directions, of course, but you're going outward, which is above the earth in either case.

So when a plane is flying along, if you put it on autopilot, or if you're just trying to control your plane, you want to maintain a constant altitude that is a constant altitude above the surface of the earth, regardless of what shape that earth has.

And you're going to trim the wings and the other control surfaces on the plane, so that you're going to maintain that constant, say, 35 ,000 feet elevation.

So if you were to suddenly start rising because you're going in a straight line and the earth is curving, then you would actually increase in altitude.

The air gets thinner up there, and the plane would not be able to make that climb. It's actually trying to, when you trim it properly, it's producing enough lift to maintain a constant elevation, no matter what the earth's shape is.

They get this idea that a plane can take off and just, if the earth was spherical, just keep flying in a straight line, would go into orbit.

The problem is planes have a ceiling. They can only fly so high, and if they try to go any higher, they just can't.

There's not enough air there to provide lift anymore. So if they understood a little bit about the physics of they would know that this is a silly objection.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's continue with questions, but change a little bit.

By the way, Nathan, that answer was for you. I'm assuming that's

Nathan. Yeah. He'll get inside thing. So flat earthers say that science has admitted that in order to see the curvature of the earth, they say even science says mathematically, you have to be at least 50 miles above the surface of the earth in order to see curvature.

So when people say like in the U -2 spy plane, which can go up to,

I think about a ceiling of 70 ,000 feet, you can see the curvature from 70 ,000 feet, even from 60 ,000 feet, like in a

MiG fighter, I've seen videos of that. And they say, you can see the curvature there, but they say, no, even science admits it to see the curvature with your naked eye, you would have to be at least 50 miles above the surface of the earth.

And no airplane comes even close to going 50 miles above the earth. You know, they like to quote here a little video of clip of Neil deGrasse

Tyson talking about the von Gardner jump and about this really curved surface there.

And that's from a fisheye lens. And he was speaking from the cuff. He was actually misspeaking. He said, it's flat from that altitude.

You can't see that. Pounding the table, you can't see the curve. Well, he's just wrong about that.

He couldn't be more wrong about it. I have here a paper from David Lynch from Applied Optics from 2003.

And he asked the question in here, how far can you see people, how high do you have to be to see the earth's curvature?

And a lot of people claim at 35 ,000 feet, they can see it. He analyzed it, goes through the analysis of the math of the curved earth.

And his conclusion is that close to 35 ,000, maybe a little less than 35 ,000 feet, the earth's curvature should begin to show up.

It's going to be extremely subtle. You're going to need at least 60 degrees angle field of view to do that, to see it.

The problem is if you're in the cabin of the plane, those windows don't allow you much vista at all.

Maybe from the cockpit, you can do it, but not from back there. So when people say they've seen the earth's curvature from a commercial flight, they're mistaken.

They have not. I've tried looking for it. By the way, to see it at 35 ,000 feet would require also superbly clear conditions for hundreds of miles, which is hard to do.

Now, he goes on to point out by the time you get to 50 ,000 feet, it's much more obvious. And by the time you get to 60 ,000 feet, it's downright unavoidable.

And people who flew the Concorde, it would fly almost 60 ,000 feet. They regularly recorded the dark sky and the curvature of the earth that they saw.

And I've talked to a B -52 navigator, flew the thing many times, and it went to 55 ,000 feet or more.

And she said she frequently saw the curvature of the earth. And she wasn't just seeing things here.

So you don't have to go up 50 miles. You can definitely see it at 50 miles, but 50 ,000 feet, you can see it as well.

Okay. So let's talk about the

International Space Station. They say, and I've done this. I know you have.

When we were living in Northern Idaho, we lived kind of up in the mountains. And I've got one of those apps that you can get on your phone.

It shows you where the ISS is and its flight path and all. And I checked it.

And sure enough, on this particular night, it was scheduled to go right over our house. And so we had a providentially, it was a clear night.

And so I went out there on my little electric scooter at just the right time. And I'm looking up and sure enough,

Danny, sure enough, this little dot of light right at the exact time goes right over my head at a high rate of speed.

Pretty bright too, wasn't it? It was. It was very bright. And that's one of their arguments.

They say, well, a 747 jumbo jet is almost as big as the

International Space Station. And when we look up, we can barely see a 747 at all with the naked eye.

And it's only about six miles or so above our heads. So if you can't see a jumbo jet at six miles, how can we possibly see the

International Space Station, which is only a little bit bigger at 240 miles above our heads?

Well, flat earthers confuse two different issues here on this. And they, in other areas, they do the same thing.

They're confusing angular resolution with seeing light. And they point out many other contexts that I think the hint is coming in here that the naked eye can see at best maybe an arc minute.

That's 1 60th of a degree. That'd be the resolution limit of the human eye without optical aid.

So they're saying basically, if this thing, the ISS is up a few hundred miles, its angular extent would be below the limit what the eye can resolve.

So how can you see that? And indeed, when you see it, you said it looked like a tiny dot.

It didn't look like this. If you see pictures of it, you know what it looks like. It's this big thing with different connections and solar panels and so forth.

And people have actually videoed and photographed as it passed in front of the sun in front of the moon showing that structure to it.

Now, just because something is below the angular resolution doesn't mean it can't be visible, particularly if it's a lit object going along in a dark sky.

We see our satellites, including the ISS by the sunlight they reflect. And if you've watched the

ISS sometimes, you'll see it disappear into the Earth's shadow. I've seen other satellites do the same thing.

Once they pass into the Earth's shadow, you can't see it anymore. That's the reason why you don't see them much in the winter. You see them generally in the summer and you see them in the early evening and early morning.

You don't see them much. You don't see them at all around midnight. Now, so the angular size may be far less than one arc minute, but the light is still there.

It just doesn't disappear. And if you take a little flashlight, a little LED flashlight with a one inch diameter light on it, if you get about 200 and 250 feet, as I recall, the angular resolution of that bulb is too small for your eye to see, but yet it doesn't mean the light suddenly disappears that far out.

If you take an automobile headlight a mile away, it's too small for your eye to resolve, but you can see headlights for miles.

And so just because it's very far away and very small appearing, it doesn't mean the light is invisible at that point.

And that's a common mistake they're making here. Yeah. Great illustration. Yep. That's absolutely true.

Okay. All right.

Oh, I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard this one. NASA. NASA means in Hebrew.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh. NASA in Hebrew means to deceive.

I wish I had a nickel. Does NASA in Hebrew mean to deceive? And if it does, would

NASA be so foolish as to telegraph their deception in such an obvious way? Well, if the

Joker or the Riddler were in charge of NASA, of course they would, you know. But real conspiracy people don't leave such quote -unquote obvious clues lying around.

And very quickly, one word, no, the word NASA does not mean deceive in Hebrew.

The word they're looking at there, and this is where amateur Hebraists can get into trouble real fast.

The word they're looking for here is nashah. It's an S -H sound. It's not an S sound, nashah.

That's right. There is a word that actually is pronounced nasah, which is far, far closer than nashah is to the pronunciation of NASA.

And it means to lift up. Yes. Which is interesting.

It's almost like if you're going to admit something, that's kind of cool thing. So that's just patently false.

One person got this notion, went through the lexicon and found a word that resembled, they thought, the word

NASA in Hebrew and ran with it. And this is a common problem with flat earthers. One flat earther will make a claim and other flat earthers will uncritically repeat it without checking out the claim first.

There's actually no kind of quality control in these things. So this good thing's been repeated endlessly.

There was a similar one made about Tesla, Nikola Tesla, a few years ago. They said he was a flat earther.

As it turns out, one flat earther put out a post on social media where he quoted

Tesla. And then he said something about the earth being flat. And he was saying that himself. And people saw that and thought it was a quote attributed to Tesla.

So back about seven, eight years ago, flat earthers were repeating this claim about Tesla being a flat earther.

It's since disappeared because I think people have pointed out to them their error. And they did clean that one up, but it took flat earther critics to get that straightened out.

Hopefully we can get this NASA Nashaw Hebrew meeting done away with too. And by the way, if people doubt us, just check it up.

Look them up in some lexicons, and you'll find out we're telling you the truth about this. That's right.

Two different words. And I've had the biblical languages. Admittedly, I kept up with my

Greek a lot more than I did my Hebrew. But I remember when I had Hebrew in seminary, that's how

I remembered that word, Nashaw. I was like, oh, it kind of looks like NASA to rise up. NASA sends up rockets.

And that's how I remembered that Hebrew word, Nashaw. Well, I've never formally studied Hebrew. I can work the lexicons a little bit.

But I have a couple of world -class Hebraists that I know. And I'm not afraid to call them and ask them questions.

And they really helped me out quite a bit. Yeah, absolutely. And they agree with me and with you that NASA does not mean to deceive them in Hebrew.

No, it does not. It's just emphatically... And it's easy to check. It really is. Yeah. Please, folks, the

NASA argument, please, lay that to bed. It's just emphatically, factually not true.

Now, I'm sitting here watching you, Danny, and I just realized there's something on your shelf back there that if I don't address it,

I promise you the comment section is going to get lit up. The all -seeing eye in the pyramid.

You are a Mason. Well, even better than that, I have a little jar here.

And I've got a Masonic letter opener in here. And I've got some dividers. And I've got a globe ball.

And even worse, it says right there, Mason, right on the jar. Now I know you're a Mason. You're drinking out of a

Mason jar. You know, what I did a few years ago, I was getting accused of being a

Mason. So I just took something on my desk and took a picture and put it on my, without many comment, you know, just put it up there.

And I had a little mannequin, this flat earth salute thing, putting next to it. And it lit up.

People were saying, he said, Manning is a free Mason. And, you know, the thing is that I had a Mason jar.

I mean, that, that ought to have been the first clue that I'm just playing with you folks. And I am, I'm playing with people on that.

But the other thing up there, all -seeing eye, that is a, several years ago, we had some, we, people here at AIG, Answers in Genesis wrote some books about cults and other things, including a free

Mason. And they had a conference that they did on it. And that was one of the flops that they had.

And since I was getting into the flat earth stuff, one of them gave it to me. And I just put the prop, usually when

I do these programs, I'll have these things in the background, just as a little Easter egg for people to see.

You didn't comment on my tiger rag over there though, from Clemson. So. Yeah, I noticed you're a

Clemson fan. I'm ACC Mississippi State, but there's no big rivalry there. So you're good. We're good.

So anyway, yeah, that's, I'm glad you noticed it. Very few people notice it, but many times this

Masonic letter opener, I'll leave it in the background somewhere. People rarely notice it's in the background and people say, well, that proves you're a free

Mason. Well, actually this letter opener was from a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the

Grand Watch of Kentucky, which was in 1950. Okay.

I mean, how old do people think I am? Yeah, right. I have a letter opener,

Masonic letter opener made several years before I was born. So now again,

I repeat, I am not a free Mason, never have been a free Mason, but I like to kind of yank people's chains.

Yeah. I've been accused of being a free mate, some guy did this video on me and he looked at that fireman's helmet behind there and said, oh, that's a

Masonic symbol. And oh, it's just my grandfather's fireman's helmet. And he was not a

Mason. Old number six fire station, Shreveport, Louisiana. So, all right. More NASA stuff.

Has NASA actually admitted that we did not really land on the moon? Have they admitted that?

No, they've never admitted that. That's kind of a new one on me. That people will be making that claim. And again, if we didn't land on the moon, that still doesn't mean the earth is flat.

Right. That's true. In and of itself, it doesn't. Now, they would say NASA has said that we don't even have the technology.

There's some video or some audio recording of some body in NASA. I can't remember. I have to look it up, but they -

It was an astronaut named Pettit who said that with the technology being destroyed. And I think what he was talking about was the molds from the parts.

You know, we have the plans from the Saturn V rocket and from the Lunar Excursion Module, Command Module, all that sort of stuff.

The documentation's there. But people don't realize that particularly the Lunar Excursion Module was a - each one was a custom job.

They changed each one of them. And they did it on the fly. And they didn't document a lot of the changes that they made.

And they had molds for the parts to manufacture those parts. And they threw those molds away when the

Apollo program went down, because why did they need those anymore? I got news for you. I - if you've got a, say, a 1969

Chevy, the GM destroyed the molds for those fenders in such a long time ago.

Good luck trying to get one manufactured at this point. You can do it, but it's going to be a custom job.

It's going to cost you an arm and leg. If we wanted to go back to the moon, and we're talking about going back to the moon at this point, why would you go back and do it with 60s technology?

The computers have changed tremendously, but a lot of other things have changed. And it would make about as much sense, you want a new car, but you want it to be a brand new 1969

Chevy. And there are a number of reasons why you wouldn't want that. One of them is that the 69

Chevy was struggling to get 20 miles per gallon. The 6 -cylinder might have done that, but the

V8s would not have. And it didn't have cup holders. It didn't have a lot of other things that cars demand.

They didn't have all sorts of the USB ports and things like that. So why would you want to go to the moon with 50 -year -old technology?

It just makes no sense. Yeah, exactly. All right.

So the flat earthers also say, Danny, that the International Space Station, they'll admit that something is up there because we can see it.

Something is up there. So I'm a bit of a space nut. Sure. Sorry. No, no, no.

I'm very happy with that. And I've got the app on my phone, which has got where the space station is right now.

And I have, in the past, looked at those live pictures. And I have seen where the space station is and thought, right, it's coming over me now.

And so I have watched the space station. You can see it as that light, it doesn't blink, doesn't flash, goes over as a solid light.

And at the same time, I've looked at my laptop and I've seen where I am. Yeah. Oh, I'm not saying there's not, there's, there's something up there.

No question. Is there a vehicle that could be the ISS up there? Yeah. Are there people inside it? No, not a chance.

But they say it's not in space. It is an airplane. I'm almost curious to even ask you that.

Go ahead. I can see the ISS or for that matter, any other satellite passes over. And I can talk to somebody else who saw the same, same flight, but a few minutes different from me.

I'll give you an example. Several years ago, oh, was it five years ago?

Maybe I stepped out one evening. I oftentimes, before I go to bed, I'll go out in the evening and take a look at the sky.

That's what I've been doing for years. I do it first thing in the morning too, just like looking at the sky and see what's going on, check the weather, all that kind of stuff.

And I saw all these really bright lights in a row moving across the sky.

I saw that a few weeks ago. I didn't know what it was at first, and it had me going.

I thought, wait a minute, I think I know what this is. I ran inside and I checked on it. Meanwhile, I'm checking, it's a Starlink launch is what

I'm seeing. Meanwhile, on social media, this woman out in, I think near Davenport, Iowa, hundreds of miles away, she saw the same thing a few minutes before me.

And she wanted to know what it was. Well, it's just a matter of minutes different from me.

No airplane we have can fly from Davenport to Northern Kentucky in a matter of three or four minutes.

It's going to take a while. If you'd run the numbers, you'll find out that thing was moving over 17 ,000 miles per hour.

And that tells me it's not aircraft, not balloons. You could argue there's a whole fleet of them.

There's one over Davenport and one over Springfield and one over Indianapolis and one over all these other places and other

East for me as well, perhaps, but it's silly to, if you really go, it sounds like a plausible argument until you start actually running the numbers and checking the details and suddenly it doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, exactly. Not even the SR -71 Blackbird could even approach that kind of speed.

Nor my beloved B -58. B -58? I love the B, the

Hustler. Yeah, that was a fantastic plane. Okay. Okay. P -58. I know the P -51. I'm not sure

I know the P -58. The B, the bomber, B -58, look it up. B -58. Oh, I'm sorry. B -58.

Gotcha. Gotcha. B -58. All right. I was like, I hadn't heard of the P -58, the B -58. It was a very fast bomber.

Officially went Mach 2 .2, but I think it went faster than that. It has several records that still stand today.

Wow. After more than a half century. Right. As fast as it is though, it does not approach the speed of the

ISS. No, it does not. No, not so much. Just a few weeks ago,

I was driving, Kathy and I were, and we were out in the rural area here in Montana where we live now. And I looked up on a clear night and I saw exactly what you just described, these nine or 10 little pinpricks of light.

And they were all equidistant from each other. And I could just tell by looking at them, they were way too, seemed like way too high to be planes.

They weren't blinking or anything, but they were exactly equidistant and they were just zooming through the sky.

And I thought, what in the world is that? And then it dawned on me, I bet those are

Starlink satellites. And sure enough, that's what they were. And sometimes they'll disappear into the, in the evening, they'll disappear into the earth's shadow.

Ones that I were looking at, they did it one by one that disappear. Yeah. That's what told me they were satellites. Yeah. Other than that, a flying saucer is one of the two.

Right. Right. And it's a whole other discussion. Yeah, exactly. All right.

So according to the typical flat earth model, Danny, the earth in my first video,

I called it a giant manhole cover. And some people didn't like that, but it's, they, the general model is the earth is this disc, right?

The North pole at the center and the sun and the moon revolve around the

North pole. And they attribute seasons to the sun.

Somehow they don't have an explanation for how this happened, but the sun will somehow expand its orbit.

And instead of circling around, say the Tropic of Cancer, as the seasons change, it'll make a bigger revolution and it'll kind of go around the

Tropic of Capricorn. But if that's true, wouldn't the speed of the sun also necessarily have to change because it's going in a much bigger circle and yet we don't see the speed of the sun going across the sky changing.

Yeah. They would argue that it's a, that the radius of the sun's daily motion changes throughout the year.

It's a smaller radius in December. It's a larger radius in, excuse me, a smaller radius in June and a larger radius in December.

And it's turning around at one revolution per day. And so if you're on the end of the second hand on the clock, you're going to be moving twice as fast as a point only halfway out to the end of it.

So you're absolutely correct. The speed would have to change, the linear speed would have to change. And of course that would be noticeable as an angular change in the sky as well.

And that's not what we observed at all. There are many, there are many problems with the sun motion in the flat earth model.

Another problem is that throughout the day and throughout the year, the sun's distance from us would have to change.

In the middle of the day, the moon's highest, the sun's highest in the sky, it's going to be much closer to us than it was when it was low in the sky, appearing to rise.

And you can work out the math on that. I've done that. It's basic trig. Any high school students taking good math curriculum can work this out.

And so the angular size of the sun should change throughout the day. And I photographed the sun at various times throughout the day and it doesn't change.

It does change by about 3 % throughout the year, but it doesn't change throughout the day.

Right, right. And the photo, I've seen these videos by flat earthers or photos, they say, they seem to show the sun, sure enough is bigger when it's directly overhead as opposed to when it's far away.

But that's simply the exposure and the brightness, right? It makes the sun appear to be larger when it's really not.

When they show the sun up high above the horizon, it is grossly overexposed. And so you bleed out and all these other things.

And I've demonstrated this myself a few times. I have a solar filter I put on my camera and I'll take photographs at different times.

I made a time -lapse video just last week where I caught the sun just as it rose and I didn't have the solar filter on it.

And then when I put the solar filter on it, it kind of shrank down like it should because now the exposure time's right.

And as the next couple hours went through, the sun got higher in the sky, but its apparent size did not change.

So with proper filtering, you can see that. But when they see this grossly overexposed sun, they think they're seeing the actual angular size, the apparent size of the sun, and they're not.

They're seeing something far larger than that because of the big blob of light. Yes, right. Okay. And to reiterate, again, if the sun makes larger loops depending upon the season and other seasons, you say that for the larger, the sun would have to be traveling twice the rate of speed as it does.

Not necessarily twice. I'd have to work out the numbers. I'm simply using the example of the second hand. The middle of the second hand is going to move half the speed of something at the end of the second hand.

But it would have to be quite a bit larger, faster speed since it's out by the Tropic of Capricorn than it is the

Tropic of Cancer. Noticeable. I don't have time to work my head what the speed would be, but it would be a change.

Whether it would be noticeable, it'd be unmistakable. And yet we do not, that in and of itself puts an end to the flat earth model.

Okay. Meteors. Just the other night, well,

I say the other night, about two months ago, we were driving again in a rural part of Montana, clear night.

And there was this bright, very brief, but very bright flash of light. It zinged across small portion of the sky.

And I saw it. My wife saw it. We had friends in a car behind us. They saw it. There's videos all over the place of meteors falling now with ring doorbells, you know, that take video from your doorbell.

You see videos of this, just people all over the place. And these meteors shoot down and light up the sky very briefly, but they're very bright.

According to the flat earth model, there's a dome over the earth.

If that is true, what in the world, how do they explain meteors and what would meteors be?

Well, again, this is one of those things that flat earthers are not agreed upon. Many of them will be agnostic about it. They'd say they don't know what meteors are.

They're just flashes of light in the sky. Many would say that the sun, the moon, the stars and meteors are just lights in the sky and nothing more.

Some others would argue that they're pieces of the dome that's fallen off. Well, I was about to say, do they really say that?

Because I think - Some of them do, not all. In fact, I would say that's probably a minority position, but I'm not certain.

But they particularly are in tune with the meteorites. When you see a meteor and then a meteorite is covered, well, what is it?

And they talk about these weird glass -like objects found, I think, in the

North African desert, I think. It's been a while since I've looked at it. And they're claiming these may be pieces of the firmament, the dome that have fallen off and gone down.

But getting back to it again, most flat earthers anymore seem to say that meteors are just lights in the sky.

Some of them say it's debris falling off. And one of the claims they make is that if the conventional explanation for meteors is correct, that there's space debris coming along, then from time to time, some of them might appear to move upward in the sky.

And they're correct about that. There should be some moving upward. But then they say that's never been observed.

And this is one of those situations where I'm thinking, well, you must have not seen very many meteors.

In my lifetime, I have probably seen tens of thousands of meteors. I remember one time 20 years ago,

I witnessed a meteor storm. And in a matter of a couple hours, I saw 1 ,500 meteors or more. And so each year, the bright meteor showers,

I see scads of them. The first meteor shower, the Geminid, I did for the first time this past December.

And particularly, both those meteor showers, if you go in the evening, early evening, after it gets dark and look towards the radiant, which would be towards the east in both cases, you will see meteors actually seem to rise in the sky.

And so back in December, I took photographs over two nights. I ended up taking a couple thousand photographs. And I went through and identified several score meteors, most of which were

Geminids. And I was able to show the radiant. And I demonstrated that, yes, indeed, they were moving upward.

They're still photographs, but moving upward. So anybody who spent much time watching meteors has seen upward moving ones.

So when I hear flat earthers say they never seem to be moving upward, I only can conclude that they haven't seen many meteors or their memory is faulty.

I don't know, because I've seen many move up. Right. There's no explanation for that.

And if meteors are pieces of the dome falling off, as many meteors as there have been, my goodness, that thing needs some bad repair.

But most flat earthers would say that those are meteorites they're talking about. Most flat earthers, I think, would say that meteors are just lights in the sky.

That's all they are. No explanation. So they reject the most obvious explanation in favor of, well, we don't know.

All right. The shadow of Mount Rainier. I had this in my short little video. And so the sun has cast this shadow from Mount Rainier.

And you can see the shadow cast on the underneath side of the clouds. And I said that that's simply not possible on a flat earth model, where they would admit that the sun and the moon are above the clouds.

So how does that happen? Is the shadow of Mount Rainier a legitimate argument for a globe earth?

I think it is. Keep in mind that some flat earthers would argue that the sun is in the clouds, but most of them would not.

They would say it's above the clouds. And if the sun is above the clouds, then you could never get light from the sun shining on the bottom of those clouds and hence cast shadows that way.

What confuses the issue is they try to invoke perspective. You stand there and you see a cloud and you see the sun.

And the sun certainly may look lower in the sky to you, but it's still higher in the sky.

Even on a flat earth, it's higher in the sky than the clouds can be. On a flat earth with the sun above the clouds, it's impossible for the sun to actually be below the clouds.

It's merely an appearance if you think that they are. So here are the clouds, cloud layer here with clouds of different layers here, and the sun is up here.

I don't care where you put the sun in this direction. If you're on the ground below this, the light of the sun can't come down and then come back up under like that.

That's your whole point you're making. If the earth is spherical, then around sunset, the sun can actually pass below the cloud layer briefly and shine up underneath.

Now, one of the responses they have, and I saw that in some of the comments and I've seen this before, is they argue that light from the sun is coming down, hitting some water or something, reflecting up and doing that.

That's problematic in my mind, but let's just let that go for the time being. But the Mount Rainier shadow really can't work at all because now the shadow is being cast by direct sunlight.

And if the clouds are here and the sun is above the clouds, then the light of the shadow cast will have to point away from the sun.

So now we're not going to convince any flat earthers of that, but I think simple geometry and understanding of perspective indicates that that is a good argument.

Yeah. Yeah. The sun would literally have to be lower than Mount Rainier to do that.

And yeah, just not tenable. And two, Danny, sometimes there's,

I've seen different photos of this, sometimes the clouds, sometimes we have very low clouds where the top of Mount Rainier or whatever mountain is above the clouds.

So we have a low layer of clouds, but other times clouds are higher and they're higher than the mountains.

Yeah. And the coastal regions there, you're going to get a marine layer many times with low level clouds, but on days you don't have that, particularly in the middle of the day, you're getting cumulus clouds and they can be like 20, 25 ,000 feet up.

Yeah. So they're going to be above it. Right. Right. Okay.

So let's talk a little bit about the stars. We rightly say that in the globe model, you don't see the same stars in the

Northern hemisphere as you do in the Southern hemisphere, assuming you're at least a reasonable distance away from the equator.

So if you're in Minnesota and you look up at the night sky, are you going to see the same stars as you would if you're in the

Chile, Southern part of Chile? There would be some stars that you would see from both locations.

Orion, for instance, is visible over most of the earth actually, entire earth, because it's on the celestial equator.

So people in Minnesota can see Orion, people in Chile can see Orion. I've been to Chile many times and I've seen

Orion down there. But the thing is stars North of Orion are not going to be visible.

You go to the Polaris, you go to the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, those are not generally visible down in say

Australia. But there are things down in Australia that you can see like the Southern cross that you can't see from Minnesota, much of the

United States as it turns out. You know, when people go to the hemisphere, one of the first things they want to see is the

Southern cross. I mentioned that raft trip that I go on every summer. Well, about eight or 10 years ago,

I had a couple of the Aussies that went on the trip with us. And early in the trip, before we even launched, one of them asked me, said,

I've always wanted to see the Big Dipper. Can you show me the Big Dipper on this trip? And I said, I'll be happy to.

And when I showed it to him that first clear night, it was like he could he could die a happy man, you know, because he finally saw this very famous group of stars and he had never seen it being on Australia all his life.

Yeah. So there are parts of the sky as you can see on both sides, but there are parts that you can't. And I have here a couple of planet spheres.

These are things that they take the what the sky would be. And you can dial it up for different dates and times, spin this thing around and you got different dates and times and it will show you which stars are visible.

These are nice little things that are very good. This is one for the southern hemisphere. It says right here for mostly northern hemisphere, 42 degrees north, it says on the on the planet sphere there and the stars are right there.

Now, here's one that is for the southern hemisphere. It's for 35 degrees south and Orion would show up on both of these.

But there are other stars like the Southern Cross will show up on this one, but it won't show up on that one.

A lot of a lot of flat earthers try to say that if the Earth orbits around the sun, then we ought to see different stars at night throughout the year.

And they say we see the same stars all the time. Well, that's just blatantly false. For instance,

I mentioned Orion. That is this constellation that's up all night in December.

It's still visible now and you can see it worldwide. But you know what? Come June, nobody in the world will see it.

It'll be gone because it's behind the sun. So the argument that they're making is absolutely correct that at least the first part of it, if we're orbiting around the sun, the stars ought to change throughout the year.

The problem is they say that's not what we see. And that's patently false. Again, don't take my word for it.

Go get a planet sphere and we have to dial it to move this around for time of night and time of year using that little spinner.

Also, you can get monthly sky charts that will tell you what's up for March, what's up in April, what's in June.

If you look at one for March and September, it'll be totally different stars from what you normally would see from one to the other.

So anybody can check this out. They don't have to believe me. They can check it for themselves. Right. Okay. What about star trails?

What can star trails, so like long exposure photographs with the star trails, what can that tell us about the shape of the

Earth? And I've done this a number of times too. I've taken time lapse videos. I've taken star trails and you get this nice circular pattern.

Once I can take about a half an hour for one single one because my camera won't go any longer than a half an hour.

But some people can go for four or five hours to do it because you need really, really low ISO setting in a dark sky to do it.

And you see this nice circular patterns. And I see flat earthers quite frequently. They make the claim that the circular pattern can only show up on a flat

Earth. And again, that's just wrong. Remember what their model is. You've got a circular disc with a dome over top and the top of the dome is over the

North Pole and the North Star is real close to that point. The whole thing spins around like this. This means that stars are going in circles like that.

Now, if you're on the North Pole and you look up in the sky, then you're going to see concentric circles.

But what if you're not at the North Pole? What if you're off some distance like I am? Then when you see these circular stars, it's going to project.

I'll hold this planet up to demonstrate what I'm talking about. Here is a circle that you're looking at on the axis of the circle.

I'm holding this so that a line perpendicular to the plane of the circle passes through the camera on my computer here on my desk.

But if I get off axis, notice what shape it has. It has an ellipse shape.

And so if the flat Earth model is correct, then if you're nowhere near the North Pole, and I am not anywhere near the

North Pole, then I'm not going to see circular patterns. I'm going to see elliptical patterns. And I have done this a couple of times in the planetarium.

Here at the Creation Museum, I would have the planetarium operator spin the stars around the point directly overhead.

We call the zenith. And I set my camera up near the edge of the dome. They're in the plane of the bottom of the dome.

So I'm stimulating what we would see there. And I get concentric ellipses.

I don't get circles. So the claim that only circular patterns are possible on the flat Earth is demonstrably false once again.

Yeah. What about just simple night and day, day and night, the flat

Earth model? Can they even account for that? Well, I don't think so.

The thing is, when you ask flat Earthers, they have an explanation for everything. But it turns out many of their explanations aren't very good when you examine them very closely.

If the Earth is a flat plane with a dome over top and the sun's going around, notice it's always above the surface of the

Earth. And so I should always be able to see it no matter where I am. They oftentimes will claim that the sun is really a spotlight shining down like this.

And so when that spotlight is over top of you, it's daytime. But when you move to the other side of the Earth, you're no longer in the spotlight.

So you don't see the sun anymore. But the problem is that spotlight's still above the surface of the

Earth. The sun should never actually set. And it's interesting that flat

Earthers, how many times do you hear them say, trust your senses? Do you feel like you're moving X amount of miles per hour in this direction, that direction?

No, you feel like you're stationary. And the Earth looks flat, so therefore the Earth must be flat.

But when it comes to sunrise and sunset, they say, throw your observation out the window. Throw what you see out the window.

The sun doesn't really rise or set. It just appears to rise or set due to perspective. And I think that's interesting, is that they proclaim we have to trust our senses, yet they throw their sensation away when it comes to sunrise and sunset.

It looks to me like the sun rises and sets. Exactly, exactly. How convenient.

You're exactly right. Trust your senses and everything, except this, because it doesn't work then somehow.

Change our hermeneutic. Okay, and it's just an absurd. I've seen their models, I've seen their videos of this, so that the sun and the moon are above the disk and they're just kind of, you know, going around like that.

And it's absurd. That seems to be the majority position, but you know, one thing

I've discovered in flat Earth movement is there's a lot of variation, more than you might think. There are some people who claim that the sun and the moon and the stars are in this dome.

Some of them claim the sun and the moon are below the dome, and some people claim the sun and moon may be above the dome.

So don't hem them in and say they're all saying that they move in a circle in the dome or below the dome.

It could be above. Some people are actually arguing that it's just simply a light from outside. They take these little hemispherical, looks like a paperweight or something.

It's made out of glass, and it'll take a laser or some other intense light and shine it in and the thing will move around and make odd patterns on the surface.

So they seem to be arguing that it isn't just a thin dome anymore. It's actually, the thing above us is a hemisphere of glass or some other substance, and the light is up above all of that.

It's bits and pieces arguing here. They're not giving a coherent, consistent picture to look at.

Yeah, no. No, and you're exactly right. If the sun always stays above the earth, the flat earth, you're absolutely right.

I don't care how far away that thing gets. You should still be able to see it. If it's that big, that bright, you should still be able to see it.

So the flat earth model can't predict anything. It doesn't have a working model for even night and day.

It cannot predict a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse. I think

I sent you this in a text. There was someone put up a newspaper clipping from whatever date it was, 1970, when they had a solar eclipse, total solar eclipse.

And from 1970, the newspaper said, next total solar eclipse in that particular area, anyway, wherever that newspaper is from, will be in the year 2024.

And here we are, we're doing this recording on March 20th, 2024. And in just, what, not even three weeks, we're going to have another solar eclipse.

It's going to happen just like that newspaper predicted. Well, you've unintentionally swerved into one of their claims.

Flat earthers will claim that the flat earth model has been used for thousands of years to predict things like sunrise and sunset and all this kind of stuff.

And whenever I hear that claim, I ask flat earthers, well, give me some documentation of that. And that's never forthcoming.

It's just that they say, well, people have been able to do this for a long time and they believe the earth is flat, so therefore they must have used the flat earth in order to predict this, but they don't give me a way this happens.

When it comes to eclipses, they say they've been predicting eclipses for thousands of years using a flat earth. And they say they use the

Saros cycle to do that. Are you familiar with the Saros cycle? S -A -R -O -S? I am not.

Okay. That's what swerved into what you just brought up here. The Saros cycle is a period of 18 years, 11 and a third days that when the circumstances of an eclipse will nearly, not exactly, but nearly repeat.

And some flat earthers stumbled across this at one time and said, aha, that's how people predicted. They simply noted when an eclipse happened and then they just realized the cycle, they worked out of it and just went into the future to calculate all of these.

And so the 1970, March 7th, 1970, there was a total solar eclipse that passed across part of the southeastern

United States. It came across the Gulf of Mexico, slashed across the northern, northeastern part of Florida, skirted parts of coastal

Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia before heading out to sea from there. I was a high school student at the time and I couldn't convince my dad to drive me over to Virginia to see it.

So I had to content myself to watch the partial eclipse from my home, which was near Dayton, Ohio, a little bit further, an hour and a half drive north before I live now.

And well, one Saros cycle later, now it's 1988, it's now in the middle of March, there was an eclipse.

Remember, it's now a third of a day shifted. So it actually happened over in, would be in the

Pacific part of Asia. And then 18 years, 11 and a third days later, it happened again, this time over Asia and Europe, I believe.

And then finally, we are 54 years, 33, 34 days removed from it.

And lo and behold, it's coming back where it was before, except now it's shifted a few hundred miles to the west.

It's going across part of Texas and so forth. So that paper, the article there that you've sent to me from an

Ohio newspaper, somebody there in 1970 realized that the same eclipse is going to happen, this time it was going to be total across part of Ohio where it wasn't in 1970.

Now, flat earthers again use that Saros cycle, try to argue that flat, that people use the flat earth to predict eclipses that way.

And a Saros cycle actually can be at best a crude way of knowing, predicting approximately when an eclipse will occur, generally a lunar eclipse rather than solar eclipse.

And it's off by hours, you can't get it very precisely. The modern way of computing, it is based on a spherical earth on a heliocentric model.

And it's not that hard to find how to do that. I have resources where I know what happens.

And they were able to predict very accurately using that model to within a matter of a second or so within probably hundreds of feet, exactly what totality will be.

And that's going to guide me on April 8, where I'm going to be, where I'm going to experience three minutes and 55 seconds of totality.

So you're right. The flat earthers can't explain anything, can't predict anything, even though there's a lot of bluster claiming that they can, but they never, it's just an assertion.

It's never actually backed up by any evidence. Right. Right. It's like,

I heard you say in one of your videos that regarding the stars and what we can see from the

Northern Southern hemisphere, some article back in, what was it, late 1800, a hundred years or so ago, some guy said that he could see a star in the

Southern hemisphere that should only be visible from the Northern hemisphere, but there's no documentation. There's no proof.

It's just like some guy said. Well, what it was was a thing around the 1850s, I believe it was a letter to the editor, to an

English newspaper. Okay. I mean, anybody can write anything in a newspaper and it was no documentation.

It was just a claim made and people, since it was in a newspaper, well, it must be true. And they printed it. Right. Yeah. They repeated it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I saw a pink elephant walking across my backyard and what's the proof? Well, I said, it's going to be on the internet now.

So you must have happened. Yeah, exactly. All right.

So now here's another argumentation and this one's it's easy, but it's a logical fallacy.

I saw a lot of people in the comment section say this, the same people that teach us that the earth is round or sphere are the same people that teach us that we came from apes.

And so how can you believe the people who say we came from apes, if they also say we, if the earth is a sphere?

I thought we settled this at the beginning of this program. I am not an evolutionist. I do not believe we came from apes or any other animals.

And yet I know the earth is spherical. So this is patently false. There are many, many people who believe the earth, know that the earth is spherical, but also don't believe that or know that evolution didn't take place.

Nor do I believe in the Big Bang. This is something I hear all the time from flat earthers. They want to equate belief with the earth being spherical with belief in evolution of all types.

And that's simply, I'm a glaring counter example to that. I'm a black swan as it were here.

I'm disproving that argument immediately. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a logical fallacy.

It's almost, you know, we've in the political world, we hear of Trump derangement syndrome. You know, if, if whatever

Trump says, it's gotta be wrong just because it's Trump. And so if, if something's coming from NASA, it's gotta be wrong because it's coming from NASA.

And so it's almost, it's like they have a NASA derangement syndrome. And if NASA were to put out a statement that says grass is green, it's like,

Oh, well, the grass can't be green because NASA says it's green. It's almost to that level. And even if you were trying to be wrong all the time, you'd eventually mess up and be right.

Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And you know, the same scientists that say we came from apes would also say the molecular structure of water is

H2O. I think we all agree with that. But just because we believe water is

H2O doesn't mean that we believe we came from apes. Yep. All right. So Dan, now let us, as we begin to land the plane here, so to speak, let's talk about scripture because as Christians, that is our authority, right?

Everything, that is our authority. So let, I hear over and over and over, people, you don't believe in the

Bible. You think God lies. You're calling God a liar. There's 200 verses in the

King James Bible that talk about the earth being flat. So let's just go through a few of these, of the more common ones that I see cited.

So there are verses such as 1 Samuel 2, 8, Job 9, 3, Psalm 75, verse 3, that speak of the earth as having pillars.

And they say, well, the earth cannot possibly be moving around, revolving around the sun if it is, if God has established it upon pillars.

Are we arguing or discussing flat earth here or geocentrism? I'm confused here.

Well, the flat earthers say... That kind of argument is an argument for geocentrism, not for the earth being flat, as it turns out.

So right away, that's, I wanted to point that out, a clarification, that even if you think there are literal pillars on the earth someplace, that doesn't mean that the earth, if the earth doesn't move, it doesn't follow that the earth is flat.

It doesn't follow at all. But you know, it's interesting, you mentioned this passage that come from, these kind of passages that come from the prophetic and the poetic books in the

Bible. And the prophetic and poetic books have a lot of symbolic, allegorical themes, non -literal things.

You know, we get accused all the time, we creationists get accused of believing that everything in the Bible is literally true. And that's simply not the case at all.

There are many metaphors in Scripture. There are similes. Jesus said that he was the door. He said he was the bread of life.

He said he was the light of the world. He said he was the vine and his disciples were the branches.

Then he talked about pruning those branches. He said many other things like this.

And we understand, most of us at least, understand that those are not literally true in that hyper -literal sort of sense.

And when you get into the prophetic and poetic books, they are just jam -packed with all that kind of stuff.

For instance, you'll find that trees clap their hands and things will sing and so forth.

And we generally, most of us understand that is not literally true. So when it talks about pillars,

I don't think it's necessarily talking about true pillars as we think holding up a building or something.

Right. Right. Exactly. And if you're going to maintain that kind of hyper -literalism,

I'm glad you brought that up, then we're going to have to be consistent and hold it all throughout Scripture.

And we're going to have to say that Jesus is a door. He's a piece of wood with hinges on it.

Or he's vegetation. He's a vine. Clearly, there's metaphorical and symbolic and idiomatic language in the

Bible. All right. So what about the verses that teach that the earth is immovable?

1 Chronicles 16 .30, Psalm 96 .10, He has fixed the earth.

And they say, well, the earth is immovable. God says it. So how can you say the earth is spinning on its axis and revolving around the sun if the earth is immovable?

Well, Psalm 16 .8, you left that one out, and David there is writing, he says, Except the

Lord always before me, because in my right hand I shall not be moved. It's the same word.

It's the same word. It's mote. And it means it has the same connotations as it does in these other things.

So if you're going to be consistent, then you're going to have to argue that David sat down one day and never moved again.

Never moved. Never got up, never walked around. And I think most people realize that's not the case.

So why are you insisting when it says that this, it doesn't mean, it means that the earth physically doesn't move.

And actually, it's been, if you look at the range of what that word means, it's referring to totter, to shake, to slip.

Those are ways that that word there, mote, has been translated. It's a bit of a mistranslation for modern hearers, particularly, to have it just say the earth shall not be moved.

That's right. And it turns out, if you believe as I do, the earth is rotating on its axis and it's orbiting around the sun, it's doing it in a very stable fashion.

It's not tottering, teetering, or deviating from its appointed motion.

So in that sense, it's not being moved. So therefore, it's correct. And it's absolutely consistent with a heliocentric model at that point.

Exactly. Exactly. The earth is on its established path around the sun, upon which

God has placed it and ordained it. And by the way, I would also say, he sustains it actively.

He upholds all things by the word of his power, right? So the earth is being held in its orbit right now around the sun by the constant exertion of God's power.

And by the way, I want to repeat, I got here a list of, I've got a better list than yours. Mine is 240 plus Flat Earth Scriptural Proofs.

And some of these verses we just discussed here are on this list. But the problem is, again, this argument that's being made here is that the earth doesn't move.

It's geocentric. It doesn't follow that the earth is flat. So to include these verses, as badly handled as they are, to include them on this list is disingenuous.

It doesn't show the earth is flat at all. It doesn't even show the earth is not moving. It's improper to say include it with a group of flat earth verses.

Yes. Right. Okay. All right. So a few more verses. Job 28, 24, and Psalm 48, 10 refer to the ends of the earth.

And they say, well, a sphere doesn't have ends. So it's got to be a flat earth for the earth to have ends.

Yeah. The flat earth is the disc. It definitely has an edge to it. You know, if you look at some of these passages, it talks about the ends of the earth fearing the

Lord, the ends of the earth being saved. Well, real estate and geography, they don't fear the

Lord. They're not saved. It turns out the ends of the earth is an idiomatic expression referring to people even at the remotest parts of the earth.

And it's an idiom that's translated well into English. It came from the Hebrew originally, but we have it in English today.

It doesn't talk about a physical edge of the earth. It's talking about people living at remote parts. Yes, that's right.

Exactly. Context, context, context, right? Yeah. Context is king.

Context is king. And what about, I wonder what they do with Job 26, 7.

He stretches out the earth over empty space. He hangs the earth upon nothing.

When I've posed that question to flat earthers, their response, and I won't say they all would say this, but the ones

I've talked to have said that the earth isn't hanging on anything. It's being supported below. Which, what are those supports being supported by?

Well, I mean, they're being really technical here. They're saying it says, so therefore it must mean hang.

You can hang a light from the ceiling, like a chandelier, and the earth isn't like that. It's more like a lamp sitting on a post, sitting on the floor.

So they're saying that God says it hangs upon nothing. It fits their model at all.

God didn't put a hook up there and hang it from a cord from above. He's supporting it from below. That would be their argument.

But I think it kind of misses the whole point of what this passage is actually saying.

Yeah. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. All right. One more. Revelation 7 .1

refers to the four corners of the earth. And they say, well, a sphere can't have corners.

And I imagine immediately people are thinking, well, neither does a flat disk. But what about the four corners of the earth?

It's also that that idiom is also mentioned in Isaiah. So it comes, I think it's Isaiah. So it occurs twice, once in the

New Testament, the Greek, and one in the Old Testament, Hebrew. And it's talking there about the four winds.

It's talking about the four angels, the four winds, the directions. And again, if the earth is a round disk like this, it doesn't have any corners either.

I'm just amazed that they would trumpet this as their model. And then they would say, well, a globe doesn't have any corners, but neither does this.

I'm flabbergasted they've used that argument. There's a guy named Orlando Ferguson in the 1890s who put up this model, a little picture, a diagram he did.

It shows a squared earth sitting there with the angels on each corner blowing.

And then you've got this dimpled sort of circular part in the middle. I don't know if any flat earthers really support that model at all.

But it comes down to it, the four corners is an idiomatic expression.

And I believe it refers probably to the four cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west.

Even today we use that if you have a detailed weather forecast or report, it will tell you what the wind direction and speed is.

And it's usually out of the west, northwest, southwest, whatever, a combination of those four directions.

I think that's what it's referring to. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So in short,

I'm sure there'll be people, well, you didn't talk about this verse, this verse, but Danny, does the

Bible teach that the earth is flat? No. And you'd think if it was so clearly, the flat earthers seem to think it's so clearly taught in scripture, you'd think that somewhere there would be a verse there that says the earth is flat.

Right. And there is no such verse. If you've read the Bible as I have, it's cover to cover, then you know that it's not in there.

Right. What they do is they take these passages again, the 200 -240, and they interpret it in terms of the earth being flat.

They then flip it around to use it in proof texts. And that's classic eisegesis rather than exegesis.

They're reading into scripture what they want to mean. And then they demand that everybody else must agree with their understanding.

Otherwise, they don't believe the Bible. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. All right.

Well, Danny, what's at stake here? Why do you believe this is such an important issue?

Why did you write this book? What are the stakes here for Christians believing in a flat earth?

You know, I got asked that question several times recently on one discussion group

I'm a part of online. This flat earther just accuses me many times, you know, why are you here?

Why do you care? Why do you bother with this? And I tried to tell this person, well, it's because I care about people.

Yeah. I see people who have fallen into this movement. It's like a cult.

It has cult -like qualities to it. And I've heard from countless people. I was going through my files today.

Over the past eight years, I've gotten correspondences, either letters or emails from people. I've had women email about their husbands who've fallen into this flat earth thing, and it's changed her husband completely.

I've heard from husbands whose wives have fallen into it. One poor fella, particularly, was more than one has told me that their wife no longer respects them.

He cannot be the spiritual leader of their family because he's been deceived by the satanic deception.

So she doesn't respect him at all, which is really kind of going against what Scripture teaches us, by the way.

I've heard from pastors with problems in the church. I've heard from many different people.

I do know that what happens if people get into this, they get excited. They want to share it with their church leadership.

When the church leadership doesn't agree with them, they accept it for a while. But whatever happens every time,

Justin, is that eventually they leave the church. And the reason why they leave is because they come to realize, well, if it is a great deception from Satan, and if my church leadership is so easily deceived, then

I can't sit under their teaching anymore. And people end up going to church nowhere. And that's tragic.

And it's really anti -biblical, anti -Christian all the way around, all sorts of problems.

And this is patently false. The Bible does not teach the earth is flat, even though people seem to think that it does.

Particularly Bible critics say that all the time. And again, if you read

Scripture, it doesn't say that anywhere. People draw all these inferences that nobody else seems to see.

And that's why it takes on cult -like qualities at that point. And it does change people tremendously.

And I wrote the book. I write articles. If people want to go to the Answers in Genesis website, that's answersingenesis .org,

they can just search for flat earth. I kind of recently, I think I have over 40 articles and blogs now on our website.

Some of them discuss things I do in the book, but I've been, I published a book five years ago. I'm continuing to write more things about it.

I've had articles go up very recently about things going on in the flat earth movement. And I'm here to provide answers for people.

Again, early on, I said, I believe I'm uniquely qualified with my biblical and physics and astronomy knowledge to handle these kinds of questions from people.

And it's sorely needed out there. And I know most people are not really prepared to give the good answers. I think that I am.

So I truly care about this because it's a real problem. We hear about it all the time here at Answers in Genesis, either through letters or correspondences or people actually coming up and talking to us about it.

So it is a problem. I'm glad that you've gotten on board to kind of counter the threat that this has, because it is an insidious movement.

It really is. It really is. And I have, by the way, I have compassion for the people who've fallen into it.

I really do. I'm not very optimistic that I can not much be done to help them.

I think, as I said earlier, early intervention is important. When somebody starts sliding down that into that rabbit hole, we need to try to get to them and give them some answers when they still are open to those answers.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And what you said resonates with me because just in a few days, my little short thinky video was up.

So many people in the comment section, I can no longer trust you. I can't trust you. How can I trust you anymore?

And several people say, I used to really like you. I used to watch your videos, but now I can't trust you because you believe the earth is round.

Just like you said, people begin to distrust their pastor if he's not a flat earther.

And then they leave the church and they end up not going to church anywhere because it'd be hard pressed to find a church that's fully committed to the flat earth.

There are a few, but not many. There probably are. Yeah. Well, there are. Yeah. In fact, I know Dean Odle is one.

I think that's his name, but at any rate, yeah, it does a lot of harm.

And I did say this in my little video, it brings a lot of unnecessary ridicule to Christianity, right?

Because the world sees this, the world thinks as Christians, we're nuts enough as it is.

And now they see that so many of the flat earthers are Christian and it brings unnecessary ridicule upon the gospel.

Yep. It does. Well, one final question, Danny, how do we engage if we have friends, family members, and I suppose people that we interact with on the internet, how do we engage our people that we really believe are brothers and sisters in Christ, but have fallen into this trap?

How do we engage them? Well, very carefully, you need to pray for them. You need to investigate these claims for yourself.

Again, my book's a good start, but there are other resources out there that you can go to, to get answers for yourself if nothing else, so you can be sane in countering the questions, because most people are not prepared to really have the discussion.

In treating the people, talking to them, you need to have compassion, you need to be kind. I know sometimes we get worked up, we get angry, and it's real easy to shout at people, yell at people.

And I've been out there in the environment quite a bit, and there's a lot of shouting and cursing, swearing at each other, name calling, and it coming from both sides, by the way.

It's not one side or the other, it's both sides, and it's totally uncalled for. And I frankly don't want to be a part of that, but you need to have compassion for people.

You may get frustrated and angry, but yelling at them, getting angry with them, is going to do nothing to solve the problem.

You need to love people, you really do, and treat them with kindness and respect as best you can, and pray for them.

And pray for them, absolutely. Well, Danny, thank you so much for your time. This was a big chunk of your day.

I appreciate it very, very much, and by God's grace, I think this video will be helpful for folks. In the editing process of this video,

I realized that there was another question that I wanted to ask Danny, and I did not ask him.

I just overlooked it, and also the interview that we did was already two hours in length. The firmament.

What is the firmament? I know that is one of the favorite arguments of flat earthers, and their support for a dome of some sort that is over the earth.

So I didn't get to ask him. Maybe we can revisit that in a future video, but for the time being,

I do want to point your direction. A link down below in the description to a very thorough article that Dr.

Faulkner wrote on the firmament, and it goes deep into it in the Hebrew, and so it talks about that.

It's also in his book. In fact, I was reading in that chapter just this morning in his book,

Falling Flat. He deals with the firmament, so explains what that is and what it is not, and I would also have this query.

For flat earth proponents, what do you do with SpaceX? This is

Elon Musk's company. It is technically called Space Exploration Technologies, but SpaceX for short, as it's more commonly known.

SpaceX is a private company. Of course, Elon Musk has SpaceX.

He has Twitter, or X now, and he has Tesla. These are private companies.

Elon Musk is spending millions upon millions, if not hundreds of millions, maybe billions,

I don't know, but huge, huge amounts of money building these rockets, sending up satellites, sending up even astronauts, a starship.

I watch a lot of these launches on YouTube when I find them, because I'm just fascinated by how quickly a rocket can get up and into orbit around the earth.

It's fascinating to me, so whenever I catch one, I'll watch it. This is a private company.

This is a for -profit company. He's not being funded by Uncle Sam. This is a private company, for -profit.

Do you have any explanation as to why Elon Musk would be spending incredible amounts of money to make rockets and send up satellites if they're not going anywhere?

I mean, if they just, I don't know, splash down into the ocean somewhere, hit the dome and fall?

What's he doing this for? What possible motivation could he have?

It's a private company. He's in it for a profit. It just, yet again, none of this makes any sense.

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that you and your family are doing well today.

I want to thank you so very much for joining me for this program. This is a really special program.

I've been looking forward to this for quite a while, and I have the special privilege of interviewing

Colonel Jeff Williams. Jeff is an astronaut. He has had three or four tours on the

International Space Station. He's a dear brother in Christ. He has been a member at Grace Community Church, pastored by John MacArthur.

He's moved recently, but was there for many years. Jeff and I spoke at the

Truth Matters conference back in 2019, and he did just a wonderful presentation there.

I've always had a bit of an interest in astronomy ever since I was a little kid, so I'm a bit like a kid in a candy store for this interview.

I'm really looking forward to it. Jeff, brother, thank you so much for coming on the program.

How are you today? I'm doing great, Justin. Thank you. It's great to be with you today. Good, good.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. So, Jeff, you have, was it three or four tours that you've spent on the

International Space Station? Well, I had four flights to the Space Station. The first one was an early assembly flight before the expeditionary cruise began on the

Space Station. That was way back in 2000. It was a space shuttle flight. Okay.

It was the third flight to the Space Station, and then after that, I had six, I'm sorry, three six -month tours.

Three six -month tours, and so you've spent, you told me just before we started recording, 500 and some odd days on the

International Space Station. Yes, that's right. And that's close to a record, correct? Well, at the time, it was a record among Americans, and then a year later, my astronaut classmate

Peggy Whitson surpassed, she got extended on orbit, and she surpassed that. So now they say

I still hold the record for American men. American men. All right, all right.

Well, Jeff, I'm looking forward to getting into some of the details about your time in space and the things you've experienced, but before we do that, can you give us just a little overview of your testimony, how you came to know the

Lord, and maybe just a little bit about your family? Yeah, you bet. My wife and I were, we met first when

I was a cadet at West Point back in the late 70s. We got married in 1980. She was raised

Catholic. I was raised, I guess, a cultural Christian without attending church or whatnot, but we were, our family was, we called ourselves

Lutherans, whatever that meant at the time. Again, no church participation.

And life went well, but then about seven years into our marriage, we went into, we got to a point like happens often, a crisis in our marriage and life, and through God's provision and providence, my wife,

Anna Marie, came to faith out of that in the middle of that. And for her, it was a sudden occurrence, a sudden regeneration.

And for me, I spent the next four or five months studying the scriptures, trying to understand what had happened to her.

And after primarily studying the Gospel of John in the letter to the Romans, which is where Acts and other things took me primarily,

I committed my life to Christ. And that was in 2000, I'm sorry, 1987.

So, from that point, we began to rebuild our life, our marriage, how we parented our children.

So, we've been living devoted to Christ since, I guess, 19 early, 1988 is what

I would say. Okay, 1988. So, you and your wife, Anna Marie, and you have how many children?

We have two sons, adult sons. They're in their mid -30s, mid or late 30s now.

They're both married. The older one actually lives with us, with his wife, here in Washington State.

And they have our five grandchildren, our younger son and his wife, no children yet, but they live in Singapore.

Okay, Singapore. I've been there before. Yeah, that's a busy place. Yeah, beautiful and hot.

Yes, beautiful and hot. Odd thing about Singapore, it's so crowded there, but I saw so many of these souped up sports cars, like high -dollar, high -end sports cars.

And I'm not sure there's anywhere in Singapore you could get over 50 miles an hour, but anyway.

That's right. Yeah. Okay. Well, Jeff, tell us a little bit, how did you become an astronaut?

What set you on that path? How did you get on that path? Well, way back in the 70s, when

I was at West Point, I was inspired by, at first, by some mentors who had just come back from Vietnam, Army helicopter pilots.

And they kind of, through their influence, I quickly set a goal to get into flight school and fly helicopters in the

Army. In 1978, I also read the book, The Right Stuff. The first Army astronaut was selected.

And all of that coalesced along with the influence of some friends to say, I want to do that. So, I set it as a goal then.

I applied first in 1985, and a long process, through some disappointments and setbacks, but I just kept on persevering.

And in 1996, I was finally selected by NASA after, I think, six applications and three interviews.

That's a lot of rigorous training went into that, I'm sure. Yes, yeah.

It took a couple years of training of primarily the space shuttle and all the operations for my first flight.

It took four years, nearly four years of training for my first six -month tour on the space station.

And half of that time was in Russia. So, Russia has been a huge part of my experience as well.

And I know we're going to get into a little bit more of that later. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, to be a candidate for going to the

International Space Station, you had to study, you had to learn Russian, correct? Because a lot of that thing is put together by Russians and manned by Russians.

Yeah, it's actually a great lesson in geopolitics. But after the Soviet Union fell, and after years of, after President Reagan had announced the space station freedom, but Congress would never approve the building of freedom through the 80s.

When the Soviet Union fell, and we entered into a partnership,

I think it was a brilliant proposal all around by some leadership in our space program, as well as getting together with leadership in the

Russian space program and coming up with a proposal to integrate what was space station freedom with what would have been the mere two space station in Russia.

Many of the components were built on the ground already. And that gained the support because of primarily because of non -proliferation policy issues.

With this new Russia, we didn't want their brain trust and their weapon systems to go to places like Iran and North Korea.

So we entered into partnership with them. And it's been a good partnership. That means that half the space station, about 40 % of it is

Russian made and Russian systems and uses the Russian language and controlled by mission control in Moscow, which is only in Russian.

And then also we're rotating crews to the space station on the Russian Soyuz. So it required about half my time in the 2000s in Russia training.

My commute was Houston to Moscow, Houston to Moscow, four to six weeks apart.

Wow. Was that hard to learn the language? People ask me, what's the hardest part of preparing to go to space?

And I said, by far, no doubt, the Russian language. I was always a math and science and engineering guy.

And I avoided those kinds of courses. But of course, the requirements forced me into it. But I love it now.

I've been taking Russian formally for over 20 years now. And I continue to take weekly lessons just to continue refining it.

Yeah, I'm still working for NASA, although remotely right now. Okay. And in God's providence, correct me if I'm wrong, but the church that you are a member of now has many

Russian believers in it. Is that correct? This is a Russian immigrant church.

There were three waves of immigration after the Soviet Union fell, primarily in the 90s.

But even since then, there's been a continuous trickle of immigrants that arrived here.

Several years ago, they recognized that now they're going into the third generation of the original immigrants.

And growing up in the American culture with English being more and more the primary language, they're transitioning also into English.

So there are lots of non -Russian speakers in the congregation. But it's an amazing, amazing story here of, you know, they were primarily

Russian Baptists, highly persecuted, imprisoned for their faith in the 60s.

And even I've heard of accounts even to the early 80s, merely for preaching the gospel.

So they came out of this underground Russian Baptist community. And when they had the opportunity to leave, many of them did.

And this is one of the largest concentrations here in the Vancouver, Washington, Portland, Oregon area.

The only other larger concentration of Russian immigration that I know of among evangelicals is in the

Sacramento Valley area of California. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, that's interesting.

Everything in God's providence. He studied Russian to be an astronaut, and now God's using that knowledge in his church.

Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Well, Jeff, let's talk a little bit about your time in space.

So 2800 orbits around the Earth. You've taken more photos of Earth from the space station than any other person in history.

Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. And what you're referencing is after the 2006 flight, the first long flight.

And that was all true then. And since I've had another year in space and continue to take photos at a rate beyond anybody else.

And my primary motivation for taking the photos was to be able to bring the experience back and share it vicariously with others.

So Jeff, let's talk a little bit about your time on the space station. So you were up there for six months at a time, up to six months at a time.

Were you able to take a shower in that time? Talk to us just about some of the logistics of daily life.

Yeah, obviously, it's a very unique environment. And no, we don't have a shower up there. A shower would be very impractical and weightlessness.

You would waste the vast majority of the water. And then cleaning up the water would be really quite a challenge.

So we essentially take sponge baths. And it's a very clean environment and very easy to stay clean.

But it is a challenge working in a weightless environment where everything from your pencil to your toothbrush to all the heavy equipment that you're working with, large equipment that you're working with is weightless.

So you have to manage it in a unique way. Yeah, I bet. As far as washing clothes, do you have different outfits?

Were you able to do anything with your clothes as far as washing them? How does that work? No, we don't wash the clothes either.

We just consume the clothes. And when they get dirty enough, we throw them away in the trash and pick up new ones.

So we got a stock that lasts us for the time we're going to be up there. So it's you don't have to do laundry up there.

Just throw it away. Okay. Now, one thing you might not think about is one of the biggest challenges up there is managing the trash because you can't throw it overboard.

There's no way to get it outside. So we manage all the trash, takes up a lot of space.

And then periodically when we have a supply ship that's emptied and getting ready to leave, we'll load it up with the trash and it burns up in the atmosphere.

But you can imagine never being able to take out your kitchen trash. You know, if it's been there over a long weekend, when you've been away, you come back and you smell it right away.

So you got to manage the smell. So we seal the stinky trash as we build it.

Okay. And from time to time, you would have what the space shuttle would come in and supply you with more supplies and that kind of food and whatnot?

Yeah, up through into 2011, we had the space shuttle, of course, flying regularly, both assembling the space station, as well as resupplying it.

But we also over the years have had a variety of supply ships, unmanned supply ships, the

Russian, so called progress supply ship has been a regular way to get supplies up there.

In recent years, we've had SpaceX flying cargo ships for us, the

Japanese had a cargo ship that has flown several times, the European Space Agency also had a cargo ship that flew for a few years.

So there's lots of different redundant ways to get cargo up there. Yeah. Okay. Well, talk to us a little bit about the interaction with your crewmates.

I mean, did you ever get on each other's nerves? And if you did, it's not like you could just go for a drive and, you know, get away from things.

What was the interaction like with your crewmates? Overall, the interaction was very positive.

I think if you add up all the my crewmates, plus the visiting crews, while I've been on the space station,

I think I've been in space with about 56 different individuals from maybe a dozen different countries or so.

And my interaction has been very positive all along. Now, obviously, we, we spent a lot of time thinking about those kinds of issues, we want to be a team player.

Most people are selected with that in mind, that they have those kinds of qualities to be part of a team.

And to have the right levels of self care to take care of yourself and then take care of each other.

We literally have our lives in each other's hands. So yeah. And we train, as I said earlier, typically for years together, so that we get to know each other.

My habit and during training was always to have the crew over to our house for dinner, periodically.

And they would reciprocate in like manner. So we invest a lot of time to get to know each other.

And then, you know, practical day to day, we interact in a normal way.

And then if somebody is having a bad day, you can kind of sense that. And you know, when to kind of give them some space and leave them alone and, and let them get some rest or whatever the case.

We also are up there so long, you have personal things that occur on the ground with your family. And, you know, it might be a death of a loved one or, or special event like a graduation or a marriage or whatever, a birth.

So they can be very positive events or negative events. And we help support each other through all those things too.

Yeah, yeah, indeed. So were you able to keep in contact with your wife? Were you able to talk to her from the space station?

Yeah, we knew right in the at the beginning of the program, it would be very important to maintain morale on the space station with the isolation, such as it is, it was important to, to build the systems for regular contact.

So we we had easy access to each other, I would say I had easy access to anybody on the earth, it was hard to get ahold of me.

But my wife figured out how to if she needed to talk to me, she figured out how to do that. But we would

I would call her every day, typically twice a day, when I knew she was awake, because we work on Greenwich Mean Time up there.

So we were awake about five or six hours before she was. So when she got up,

I would give her a call when I when I could in between work tasks.

And then I would be sure to call her at least by the time I went to bed. So we would talk twice a day.

And then every Sunday afternoon, we would have a two way video conference as well.

So then we'd be able to see each other. And she would often involve other family members or friends or whatnot in those video calls.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Very neat. So it didn't matter on which side of the world you were in your orbit,

I guess with satellites, you could talk to her at any point. Yeah, we orbit the earth every 90 minutes.

In the early days, we about half that time we would have coverage through the communication system to be able to make calls.

But in the later years, we virtually have 98 99 % of the time covered through relay satellites that orbit in different places over the year.

So we the space station communication system automatically just transitions from one satellite to another one.

And we have nowadays we have really good communication. We even have internet access up there, which is

I don't I'm not sure that's a good idea. But we, we got that a few years ago, I get asked sometimes what was the first thing

I did on the internet, because we gained access while I was on board in 2010.

And my answer was, well, of course, I got on the internet and ordered my wife flowers.

Oh, that's a good husband. That's cool.

That's cool. Well. So Jeff, when you're up on the space station, you're 200 and some odd miles off the ground, correct?

Yeah, it's about the average is 250 miles, 250 miles. Okay. So did the moon look granted, the moon's 250 ,000 miles away.

So kind of negligible as far as how close you are to it. But did it look any different? Up there?

Did was it did it look bigger, crisper? The moon itself, you could say you could argue that it looked a little bit crisper, because you wouldn't weren't looking through the atmosphere.

A clear night, especially places like where you live, you know, the moon's can be pretty crisp when you get away from city lights.

But it was it was definitely crisp. The obvious uniqueness of viewing the moon and other things is the setting in which you find the moon to find it to have the

Earth, the sphere of the Earth below you to have the moon either appear or disappear over the horizon as you orbit around the

Earth. And you see the sphere of the moon kind of be distorted as it goes to the upper parts of the atmosphere because of refraction of light rays.

All of that is very, very unique. And of course, the moon has attracted the attention of humanity since the beginning of time.

And it certainly attracts your attention up there. And it's not lost on people that we've been to the moon, but we we want to go back to the moon, too.

And I think that's just the curiosity put in us by by God at creation. Right, right.

Yeah, we're supposed to go back next year. Is that correct? 2023 or 24?

We're trying to launch. We're working at this spring launch and test flight of a new rocket and a new spacecraft unmanned.

And then about a year later, so having a test flight with a crew on board and it won't land on the surface of the moon, but it'll go and orbit around the moon.

Both those test flights orbit around the moon. So it's a it's a big program called the

Artemis program. Yeah. To establish a semi -permanent presence in the lunar system that includes a space station that orbits the moon, as well as operations to go periodically to the surface.

OK, OK. But not we're not planning on landing landing a man on the moon for the next few years.

Yeah, the original target given to us by the Trump administration was 2024. I think it'll be no earlier than 2025.

No, we're still working toward that. Yeah. OK. All right. What were the what were the stars like,

Jeff? I know on a clear night here when you can look up and see the

Milky Way, was it was it similar to that or was it exponentially better? Well, I would have to say it's it's much better.

And you do have very vivid views of the stars in your area and areas like where you live.

But up there again, you're off the planet. Of course, just like here, you have to turn all the lights off inside to be able to see them.

But the Milky Way looks like a painted background behind the star field and you're orbiting the

Earth. And it's at an inclination to the equator of a little over 51 degrees.

So that means you see in an orbit or at least the night part of the orbit in the night shifts through phasing.

So you're looking in all directions over a period of time of weeks at nighttime.

So you see both the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere over that time. So, I mean, we don't get to see the southern hemisphere stars unless you fly to South America or somewhere and then spend time looking.

We only see the northern hemisphere stars. So you can see all of that. They're very vivid.

They don't twinkle. Okay. Yeah. No, it's just an incredible, incredible sight.

Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. Talk to us a little bit about your spacewalks.

You did two spacewalks if I remember correctly from your book. And you didn't just wake up one morning and decide

I want to go for a stroll out in the space. I mean, this took a lot of planning, right?

Tell us a little bit about what the spacewalks were like and what they entailed. Yeah. The book chronicles in a very short way two spacewalks that we did in the 2006 flight.

In my career, I've done five total spacewalks. The first one was actually in 2000 and the most recent two were in 2016.

Spacewalks were very necessary for the building of the space station and currently continue to be necessary for the maintenance of the space station.

And we do periodic upgrades outside. We do repairs outside. We deploy experiments outside.

So there's a lot outside activities. A spacewalk is the highlight,

I think, of the entire experience. It's the most demanding thing we do both physically and mentally.

It's a long day. We start about six in the morning getting ready to get suited up and get everything configured and checked out and then get into the airlock and go through the protocol to depressurize and get the door open.

You're not out the door until afternoon. So you've already been working at it for a little over six hours and then you're outside for typically six and a half, seven hours.

So it's a long day. It's a very intense experience. I call it the ultimate skydive.

The whole time out there, it's very choreographed and planned. So there's every step of the way has been choreographed and rehearsed.

And for us, it's a mental rehearsal to prepare. But the mission control center also has somebody talking to us continually and we report to them our accomplishment of tasks and they keep us on the plan.

So it's definitely a highlighted experience. Wow. I can only imagine what it must have felt like the very first spacewalk you did and that hatch opened and you

Yes. Nothing. Yes. It's one thing to be inside the space station, look out a window and you still can't see the entire globe from at least the windows early on.

We added what we call a cupola in 2010,

I guess we added it. And from the cupola, you can see the essential, the globe of the earth.

But to go outside and then to see this space station with the earth in the background, see the entire globe of the earth and you sense the motion going 17 ,500 miles an hour.

So you're skimming like we would cross North America in about 10 minutes. Wow. And as children in school, we studied the globe and we saw the shape of continents and other features on the earth's surface.

Well, from up there, you can see those shapes and say, wow, it looks just like the globe in the study.

Yeah. So it's an absolutely amazing experience. And then you go day, night, day, night, 90 minutes around the earth.

Typically, almost half of that is nighttime. In talking about going out the door, it's an amazing view to go out, especially the first time and see the globe.

But there was a couple of my spacewalks where I went out when we were nighttime. And it's like going out into a black hole and all you see is the lighting of the structure of the space station around you.

And then it's just the black as black can be beyond that. So that's a little bit eerie, if you will, as well.

Oh, I bet. I can only imagine. My goodness. All right.

So, Jeff, this is the question that I feel embarrassed to even ask you, but I'm going to because I see comments and people email me.

Believe it or not, I know you're aware of it. There is a movement. Thankfully, I think it's reached its zenith and it's on the decline, mercifully.

But there are some folks out there that believe that the earth is flat.

She's around. She's a firm. She's a fully packed. She's around the back of my head.

She's flat like your head. And embarrassingly, many of them claim scripture as their support for that.

The foundation for their belief that the earth is flat. Is the earth flat and is there any biblical?

What would you say to those who say that they use the Bible as their support for it? I actually heard that for the first time in my last flight in 2016.

And I first became aware of some comments in the social media that I was posting about that.

And of course, I read it. I thought it was a joke. There's lots of humor and comments. And it wasn't until I returned to earth and looked into it a little bit more that I realized that there are those out there that believe the earth is flat.

And speaking of embarrassments, ironically, many of them are believers.

And they use, as you referenced, scriptures, which are clearly figurative language.

So, when I came back from the last flight in public speaking engagements and Q &A,

I would invariably get those kinds of questions. And at first,

I tried to inject a little bit of humor into it. Like, certainly, this isn't real.

Realized it was real. For a short time, I tried to engage logically.

But I finally got to the point where my answer is simply boiled down to two words, utter foolishness.

And as you alluded to, I think that over the last year or two,

I see that to start to be going away anyway, at least, maybe people are not willing to bring it up anymore.

But yeah, I mean, that's what I've finally come to is it's utter foolishness.

For some of the folks that have gotten caught up in this, which I think probably was energized by somebody in their basement on the internet.

You just have to pray for them. And I think over time, they'll hopefully come out of it.

It's nothing new. I mean, you can go back hundreds of years in history and see the same kind of thing.

And it was actually, as far as I've read in the history, it was actually the church that drew people out of that and said, no, the scripture is very clear.

And our practical observation is very clear that sustains everything as we understand it to include the sphere of the earth.

Yeah, indeed. You reference the book of Job several times in your book,

The Work of His Hands, Jeff. And Job 26, verse 7,

God stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing. You know, for those of us who have never left terra firma, we understand that intellectually, but you've seen that.

You talk in your book about how, indeed, God has hung the earth on nothing, right?

That's absolutely right. I mean, I, with a little bit of humor, tell people when

I'm given a presentation and I reference that verse, I said, you know, I forget the number you said, 2 ,600 times around the earth or something.

That was in that one flight. So multiply that by three. That many times around the earth, I can assure you there are no strings attached.

And what marvels me about that verse and many verses in the book of Job is that it reveals, one, it reveals a perspective that we would not normally have on the planet surface.

It relays a perspective from off the planet. And I had the privilege to spend time off the planet, and I saw that perspective in the scripture.

That certainly gives testimony to the author of scripture being the creator.

And that particular chapter, of course, is emphasizing the majesty of the creator, the majesty of God.

And the other interesting thing there is the first part of it is, of course, you referenced the hangs the earth on nothing, but stretches out the north over the void.

I just recently read a comment on that. I mean, what is in those days, and we think this is the oldest book of the

Bible, the concept of north and then stretching out above north.

And there's something about north even back then that was prominent. And of course, it is the transcendence of God.

I think it's certainly implied there. But think about it. The earth not only hangs on nothing in space, but it rotates every 90 minutes and rotates on an axis.

And so, we visualize the axis going out the north side, going infinitely is how we conceptualize axes, going to the north star, you know, that's why we call it the north star.

So, it alludes to what we practically understand in terms of the motion of the earth in the nothingness of space.

Yeah, indeed. And then just a few verses later, and this goes to the discussion of the shape of the earth as well,

Job 2610, God has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.

The boundary between light and darkness, that is known as the Terminator, not

Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator, but the boundary between light and darkness, day and night.

And Job 2610 actually supports, gives, in my view, irrefutable proof that the

Bible teaches that the earth is a sphere, correct? Yeah.

And again, it's affirmed by just practical observation. And like the earlier verse, it is one that gives a description that one would have from off the planet.

Yes, we call it the Terminator, and we cross the Terminator twice in orbit, obviously going from day to night, or night to day.

And it's very distinct on the ground. And yeah, I guess it just gives testimony to the author of scripture, again, inspired by the creator and perspective from off the planet.

So, it's a powerful chapter, especially when you put it in the context of experience as an astronaut.

Yeah, indeed. In fact, the Terminator, as Job describes it here, a circle on the face of the boundary between light and darkness, that would not even be possible if we were living on a giant manhole cover.

Right, right. If you take a sphere and you draw a line on the surface of the sphere, you get a circle.

That's exactly right. Right, right. Well, Jeff, let me, give me, bear with me here while I pick up.

I want to show everybody your book. Many folks have seen it in my bookshelf behind me in various videos, but this is your book,

The Work of His Hands. And this is, it's not just,

I mean, there's many pictures in here, some of the pictures you have taken of the Earth, but it's a fascinating story as well.

You give basically a kind of a synopsis, a chronology of your time in space, both before and preparation and all the way, what you experienced on space and even coming down after you got back to Earth and what that was like.

So tell us a little bit more about your book and where people can get a copy of it.

Sure. Yeah, the book was not my idea. Actually, it was, there were people that were watching my photography as I sent it down to the

Earth during that flight that were inspired. So apparently I, you know, took some pretty good photography or unique photography.

Amazing. And so people were encouraging me, Hey, you got to do a book, got to do a book.

And it's a longer story than we have time for today. But I said, okay.

And then God's providence, the door was open for me to do it, to include a publisher coming out of a crowd one day and saying,

Hey, we want to do a book. So none of it was my activity seeking to do a book.

It was all external. And I agreed to do a book.

I said, I don't want it to be just a boring technical book with pictures and a bunch of captions. I want to tell the story.

Yeah. And I want to not tell the story about Jeff Williams.

I didn't want it to be about me and my experience and all of that. I wanted, it has a goal to vicariously take the reader through the experience as if the reader is going through the experience.

And the experience of course, is it's framed in the mission, the 2006 flight from launch to landing and some of the major events that occurred during those six months on board.

But I also tried to be reflective in the providence of God and just being there and doing that and the awe and wonder of all that, but also reflective on the

God who we know, the triune God who we know as creator and who provides us everything that we need and who has uniquely provisioned the earth.

And of course, the climaxed history with the redemptive work of Christ. So that was my overall arching motivation in the book.

And it continues to, I think, bless people or the Lord continues to use it to bless people.

I think it's in its eighth printing right now. And folks can get it either directly from the publisher or from Amazon or from any of the book distributors.

It's easily found and so it's easily available. Well, it's a fantastic book.

I really enjoyed it. I'm going to read through it again, but many, many of the photos that you took are in here.

You've taken thousands of pictures, I suppose. One of them, I think maybe one of your favorites or at least one that you really highlighted was the

Cleveland volcano. And thankfully it's not in Cleveland, Ohio, but tell us a little bit about that.

That was a unique opportunity. That was kind of a special providence, kind providence of God to take that. That's right.

My wife, Anna Marie, likes to call them the leftovers of God's grace when we have relatively seemingly little things happen in life that just are timed in a special way.

In that particular case, it was 2006 in May. I had been on board for six weeks at the time.

And in those days, because we had reduced the crew size to just two of us after the

Columbia accident, after we lost that crew and the space shuttle was grounded, Pavel Vinogradov, my

Russian crewmate and I were the only ones on board. We've been there for six weeks. And like we all have bad days every now and then,

I was just having kind of a down day. Six weeks up there, isolated, away from the family, talking to Anna Marie every day, but knowing that she was enduring it as well.

And in a six -month flight, the end is still over the horizon. So we had talked through that that morning and I went about my business and I was doing my work.

And I tried to make it a habit of taking a break from my tasks every day and late morning and going down to the

Russian part of the space station where Pavel was typically working and have a bag of tea through a straw with him.

And so we would chit -chat during that time, during the break. And we did that that day.

And I started floating back to the front end of the space station where I was going to continue my work.

And I passed over a window and saw the Aleutian Islands pass. And I recognized them as the

Aleutian Islands. I had a camera right there staged next to the window. I picked it up as was my habit and started taking pictures of one island, then framed the next one, then the next one.

Something in the back of my head said, hey, that last one didn't look right. And I went back and reframed it. And what I maybe thought was originally a cloud was no, it was an erupting volcano.

So I had time just to snap two or three more pictures of the volcano before it was out of view. And of course,

I was all excited because I could see the entire plume of the volcano, which meant that it had just started its eruption.

I quickly floated up and called Houston and said, hey, we just passed over the Aleutians. I had this newly erupting volcano, got some pictures.

I'll put them in the downlink so you can come get them. And I was all excited.

And the energy that they heard in my voice kind of excited mission control. And so we got done with that call.

And then I went to work and orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes. I set the alarm on my watch so that I could be back in the window to take more pictures of the volcano 90 minutes later.

I came back for that time frame, passed over again. And the volcano was quiet, very quiet, had fresh lava that had flowed down.

It's a classic volcano shape. You could see the fresh lava, but the plume was completely gone.

Nothing left of it. I snapped a couple pictures. I found out that in the meantime, on mission control, they had gotten a hold of the

Alaska Volcano Observatory. I found it on the

Internet. They called them up. The Capcom was another astronaut by the name of Steve Bowen.

He called up, got a lady on the phone, one of the scientists up there, and tried to explain who he was and that they'd gotten a report from the space station about one of their volcanoes.

They were unaware of it. And he could tell by the tone in her voice that she thought it was probably a prank call.

Certainly wasn't real. They finished their phone call anyway, and he got the information to me.

So I called her up from the space station and talked to her. And when you got a call from the space station, especially in those days, it sounded different.

There was a little bit of a delay. So it's unique in that respect.

But I could still tell that she was a little bit speechless, a little bit, do

I believe this? Do I buy this? Is this a prank? Or whatnot. Well, eventually they found out it was all in the up and up and that really excited them.

And we had a nice conversation after the flight reflecting on that. So that was a lot of fun.

I had a lot of fun with the interaction with them. A lot of fun, of course, with mission control.

And it brought me out of my slump, brought me out of my bad day. And I rode that way for a while.

What I didn't know until later was that Anna Marie had been specifically praying that the

Lord would bring something into my day that would lift me out of my slump. I never believed that it would be an erupting volcano.

So it was an amazing providence of God, just in the relative little thing, right?

Just bring us something into our day to encourage us. To this day,

I'm the only person either on or off the planet that I know of that saw that eruption.

It was very short. The observatory in Alaska eventually got data. They didn't have real time data, but they would get it.

And they actually ordered some pictures after my report and got some global pictures of the eruption.

And I've got it somewhere, but the plume had come out and then it stopped.

And then the plume detached from the mountain and was a couple hundred miles maybe downwind of the volcano when they took this picture.

So that little puff was the Lord gave just for me. That is very cool.

That is very, very cool. Yeah. Kind providence of God. That's a really neat story. So I guess you didn't know it was at the time that you took the picture.

You didn't know, oh, that's the Cleveland volcano. I had no idea. No, I learned all those details after the fact.

It just happened to be a target in the window. It looked interesting to take a picture of it. And then it took me a second or two to recognize there was something unique going on there.

Right. Right. Well, Jeff, you also talk about in your book how your time and space, it didn't necessarily confirm or strengthen your belief in God as in his existence, because you're already a believer.

You had no need for any proof of that. But it did. It did deepen your belief or at least your understanding.

I'll say it that way. Deepen your understanding of God as sustainer and provider.

That's a great way to put it. And that's exactly what it did. It didn't change my understanding.

It didn't change my belief because we know by grace, faith comes through the work of the spirit and the word of God, the revelation of Jesus Christ.

And I already had that as you have. But the experience deepened in understanding in a very practical way.

Those the scriptures as reveals God and his work, his work of redemption, but also which is largely underestimated, his work of creation in the scriptures as well.

And the practical experience to then dovetail to that, to the word of God, just deepened my understanding.

And it actually motivated me in a renewed way to seek out the truth of scripture as it relates specifically to God's creative work and the provisioning that he put in his creation.

Right. Indeed. And oh, by the way, then if we think about it, like lots of things in life, when we actually, we are inspired with things like that.

If we look in the mirror, it also motivates us to dig a little bit deeper to gain more understanding, the depth of richness of the truth of burying the image of God.

Because only humans care about such things. Only humans contemplate.

Only humans are motivated to seek out the truth, to seek out what exists.

And that brings a deeper understanding as well. Yeah, indeed.

As much as we might, as much as attached as we might get to our pets and as much as we love our dogs and our cats, they're not fascinated.

They have no comprehension. There's nothing in them that makes them appreciate what we appreciate. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. One final question for you, Jeff. And this is something

I thought about too. What was with your crewmates, the interaction that you had with your crewmates?

I'm sure they became aware that you are a believer. Did you have any fellow believers as your crewmates?

Did you have an opportunity to share the gospel with them? What was that like? Just like our experience on earth,

I had a variety of opportunities, a variety of depth of conversation with different individuals.

Some individuals, absolutely no conversation on the topic. Yeah. But I think everybody was aware of my faith.

And some I was able to have a deep interaction with. There were two or three over the years that we would reflect on the scriptures, like what we referenced earlier, as well as many others in the context of being there and being able to be the earth and all of that.

There were a couple of other believers that were with me over the years that we were able to share communion.

And we would have typically a Sunday morning devotion and then share communion with up there.

So that was a special provision as well. And of course, related to that,

I was tied to and connected with lots of people on the planet, both individuals, friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, that I stayed in contact with one -on -one, as well as congregations.

The congregation here vicariously participated with me in the last flight.

Grace Community Church, you mentioned earlier, participated in many ways. My home church in Houston participated as well.

By the way, I got to go back. In the introduction, you mentioned Grace. I've had a long relationship with folks at Grace Community Church, Grace to you.

John, in particular, has been a friend for over 20 years. But we've never been members of Grace Church.

We've never lived it. Okay. So like you, I've been just a short -term visitor every time we've been there, but I've been there countless times.

And it's a special relationship. And I would say that it's the impact of that ministry, like so many others, has been by far the biggest impact on my growth and understanding of the gospel.

Yeah. Same here. Same here. I can say the same thing. And I haven't spent as much time with John as have you,

John MacArthur, as you have, but enough to where I've seen genuine, he's a genuinely humble man and loves the

Lord. I've got a lot of respect and appreciation for him. Absolutely. Yeah. He's been a tremendous impact on my wife,

Kathy, and me. And like your wife, my wife was saved out of the

Roman Catholic Church as well. And shortly after her conversion, she started, someone turned her on to John MacArthur, and she started listening to him and very instrumental in her growth.

So yeah. Yeah. That's very good. And speaking of MacArthur, you were telling me,

I think this was before we started recording, but you took the cover of one of his commentaries in orbit.

Yeah. The commentary of the New Testament, the last one to be published was a commentary of Mark.

And a couple of my friends down there and I, we brainstormed before the flight, what could

I take? I wanted to take something that would be unique and special to space, to the space station, and then give it back to him.

So we finally settled on just the cover. So we took all the pages out to make it lighter, because I was limited by the mass

I could take. Took that cover. And then when it got back to earth, took that and took some pictures of it on orbit and some other elements and put them in a big frame.

And I have the privilege to present that as a gift to John at Shepard's Conference. I'm pretty sure it was 2017.

Yeah. But yeah, that was a special opportunity. Yeah. That's really neat.

That's really neat. And yeah, I was telling you before we started recording as well, that in 2016, there's only been one time where I've seen the

International Space Station with my eyes. And when we were living in Idaho and in the mountains and the told me when it was coming around and when it cleared light, clear night.

And so I rode out on my little electric scooter down the driveway and looked up and right on time, there it was.

And I guess you were probably on it. I could be. If it was prior to, if it was over the summer,

I was definitely on it. Yeah. It was actually. Yeah. Yeah. So that's pretty cool.

Pretty cool. All right. Well, this has been really fascinating, brother. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for your witness, your testimony. Thank you for your book. And how can people find out more about you if they want to find out more about you or if they want to contact you?

Do you have those channels available or what? I don't have them out in public at all.

I do have social media accounts, but I've been completely passive on them since I landed and shortly after I landed in 2016.

So I maintain a pretty low profile, I guess, in that way to learn anything about me.

It's I mean, NASA is good about putting stuff on the Internet so people can search my name and there's there's all kinds of stuff out there and photography as well as stories and other things.

And I like you, I'm a frequent speaker in churches and church conferences and that kind of thing.

So there's lots of those examples out there that just a search will bring up.

My passion in the ministry is to well, it's largely reflected in the book to give glory to God as creator and provisioning creation and the work of providence, and particularly providence that brings us to faith in Christ.

I have done some worldview conference work that's a little bit broader than that.

But it's it's so important that most recently I'm doing some work to to address the perception of the conflict between science and scripture, which there is no conflict.

Right. So it's, it's been an amazing privilege.

And like you, you've been given a platform and an opportunity to be a witness to Christ.

And you, I know, have an elevated sense of not only purpose in that, but a sense of responsibility to steward what the

Lord has given you and you do it well. And I thank God for that. And that's been my motivation as well to steward what the

Lord has given me to include the opportunity to, to get off the spherical earth.

Yeah. Indeed, indeed, brother. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Jeff. This is, this has been a joy to have you. And I know our viewers are really going to, to enjoy and be edified by it.

I appreciate, appreciate you very much. And, and praise the Lord for the work that he's, he has done and continues to do through your life.

Praise God, Justin. Great to see you. You as well. You as well. And Lord willing, I'll see you in May, correct?

That's right. We'll both be at the Truth Matters conference at the, near the Ark anyway.

Yeah. In Kentucky. Yeah. Have you been to the Ark? Never have. You're in for a treat.

It's, it's pretty cool. Looking forward to it. Yeah. That was pretty amazing. That was quite a testimony. That conference sold out in 20 some minutes.

Yeah, it did. It did. I know I was, I was shocked at how quickly it sold out, but boy, it was, it was gone in no time.

I wish I could extend an invitation to our viewers to come to it, but you can't. I don't think the fire marshal will let you in, but all right.

Well, Jeff, thanks again, brother. And may God bless you and your wife, your family and, and your ministry there at your church in Washington.

Thank you, Justin. All right. God bless you. Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Justin Peters. I hope that you and your family are doing well today. I want to thank you very much for joining me in this program.

And I am really looking forward to this. It is my special privilege to have

Dr. Jason Lyle on the program, and I'm going to be interviewing him about the flat earth movement.

Yes, that is a thing. And also here lately in the last several weeks, UFOs, believe it or not, have been very much in the news.

And I'm, so I'm going to ask him about his impressions of that and what might really be going on.

But just as a brief introduction, Dr. Jason Lyle is a Christian astrophysicist, and he is the founder of the

Biblical Science Institute. He double majored in physics and astronomy. He has both a master's and a

PhD in astrophysics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

He's authored a number of books, Taking Back Astronomy, Stargazer's Guide to the

Night Sky, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, Discerning Truth, Understanding Genesis, and also my most recent acquisition of one of his books is

Understanding Faith in an Age of Reason, in which he deals with 400 thereabouts alleged contradictions in the

Bible. And he explains why they are not, in fact, contradictions. So it's a very, very helpful book.

So Dr. Lyle, thank you very much for joining us. It's an honor to have you.

Well, thanks. Happy to be on. Yeah, good deal. Well, Jason, if you would, is it okay, would you prefer to be called

Dr. Lyle or Jason? Whatever you like. Okay. All right. All right. Well, by the way, dear friends,

Dr. Lyle came to our church a couple years ago, Kootenai Community Church, and did a conference for us.

And he is, not only is he obviously very intelligent and very well read in his field, but he's just a nice guy.

He really is. Very down to earth, very accessible, very nice guy. And so it's a pleasure to have him on. So Dr.

Lyle, if you would, give us a little bit about, a little background to yourself, specifically your testimony, how you came to faith in Christ and where you attend church now.

Okay. I was, fortunately, I was saved when I was very young. I'm grateful for that.

My parents, it's interesting because I think my parents were not believers at the time that they got married.

And when I was on my way, they decided they wanted their son to be raised in a moral setting.

So they began attending church and, hey, the Lord saved them. And so then they raised me as a believer and they taught me to trust in the

Bible. And even when I was young, six or seven years old, I knew enough of the scriptures to know that I was a wicked sinner, that I deserved death and hell, that Jesus is

God and also man, and that he'd paid for my sins on the cross. And if I repented and trusted him, he'd save me.

And so I asked the Lord to save me at that point and to be Lord of my life. And I believe that's when

I was saved. I believe that's when the Lord got a hold of me. And of course, my theology has improved over the years, but that we're sinners and we need salvation therefore.

So I have a very boring testimony and I'm very grateful for that because I've been able to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that a lot of people encounter.

You know, sometimes a lot of people have to hit rock bottom before they get saved and I'm just grateful I was saved when I was young.

Yeah, okay. And where do you attend church now, Jason? So I'm here in Colorado Springs and I attend

Hope Chapel of Colorado Springs. It's a wonderful church. I'm a member there. I feel privileged.

It's a small church, but just great people there and great folks who love the Lord and have good theology.

There's good preaching on Sunday mornings, which I appreciate. And in fact, they asked me to fill in last

Sunday. I preached the sermon there, so it's an honor to occasionally get to do that. So a really good church,

Hope Chapel of Colorado Springs. I highly recommend it if you're in the area. Okay, excellent. Good deal. And Jason, you are a young earth.

You believe you take a very literal interpretation of Genesis, as you should.

So young earth, you don't believe in this theistic evolution, kind of try to compromise the

Bible with what the prevailing view of science is. Great, and yeah,

I take the Bible the same way that my Lord and Savior Jesus did. He took Genesis as literal history and so did the apostles and Paul refers back to the first man,

Adam, and so on. So yeah, I take it the same way my Lord does. I take Genesis literal history. It's written in that style.

I do have articles and books, even my book, Understanding Genesis, which shows that if we're going to get to the author's intention, we really have to take

Genesis as literal history. There's no doubt that Moses intended it to convey historical truth.

It's just the way that it's written. So I would reject the idea that it's an allegory or parable or whatever.

That does not fit the context. Yes, indeed. All right, well, Jason, the two primary issues

I'd like to talk to you about today, flat earth and the latest kind of interest in UFOs.

Believe it or not, the flat earth view is a thing. I am just amazed that we, you know, we're living in a day and age in which information has never been more readily accessible.

I mean, a quick Google search and you can come up with, I mean, just all kinds of information, photos of earth and planets and all of that kind of stuff.

And yet there is almost counterintuitively to me, a resurgence in the belief that the earth is flat.

How is this a thing? And are you surprised this is a thing? It is a little surprising.

It's disappointing to me. It shows an extreme lack of discernment in our society in general, which frankly, these days,

I'm no longer surprised. When I first heard about it, I thought there's no way that people can believe that.

Do they not have any knowledge of astronomy? Human beings have known that the world is spherical for thousands of years.

The Greeks knew that before the time of Christ, when Jesus was in his earthly ministry, people already knew the world was round. The idea that Christopher Columbus was out to prove that, that's a myth.

People already knew the world was round at the time of Columbus. He just thought it'd be faster to go that way, partly because he underestimated the size of the earth.

And also because of course, he didn't know about the Americas at that point. So Columbus wasn't out to prove the world was round.

He was out to prove that it was faster to go the other way than to go what he thought would be the longer way.

He was wrong, but I'm glad he made the trip. So it comes from a lack of discernment.

I think people don't realize the good evidence that there is for a round earth, the fact that the ancients were able to discover that, the fact that the

Bible teaches that the world is round. The Bible is not an astronomy textbook, but it does reference the roundness of the earth in a couple of places.

In Job 26 .10, the Bible poetically describes God inscribing a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.

And that boundary between light and darkness is what we astronomers call the terminator. That's where light stops on the earth.

That's where evening and morning are happening. And the only way that can be a circle, especially on waters, because the earth's surface is mostly water, 71 % water.

The only way that can be a circle is if the earth's spherical. Any other shape, it could be a circle maybe at one time, but in other times it won't be.

So that's an example right there of Job knowing something about the spherical nature of the earth.

And Job, we think, was written around 2000 BC, which is interesting because the secularists at that time were the ones that taught the flat earth.

It was those that were faithful to God who understood the shape of the earth. Apparently, God had revealed that to them, interestingly, or maybe they figured out another way.

I don't know. But in any case, we know that the Jews did have some divine insight to these issues. It wasn't until around 500

BC that Pythagoras began arguing that the world was roughly spherical in shape.

And it's usually not considered until the time of Aristotle, so that's what 100, 150 years, 200 years later, that the world is considered to have been proved to be round.

And one of the ways that Aristotle proved it was by pointing out that in a lunar eclipse, when the earth is between the sun and the moon, the shadow that the earth casts on the moon is always a circle.

And it doesn't matter what the orientation is. Now, if the earth were flat disk, that could only happen at midnight, because that's the only time it would project as a circle, right?

Any other time, if the moon's lower in the horizon, then that means the earth would be closer, it would cast an elliptical shadow.

And if it was edge on it, it would cast just a line. And I actually had the opportunity to confirm this just a couple days ago on Wednesday of this past week, we had a lunar eclipse.

And this particular eclipse happened right around the time of sunrise, just a little before sunrise. So the moon is setting in the west, the sun's rising in the east, which means

I know I'm between the two, because I can see the moon's there, the sun is going to rise over there. So I know I'm in between the two. And also because the orientation of the earth, if it were disk, it would be edge on, which means the shadow it would have cast would have been a horizontal line.

And it wasn't, it was a round shadow. And I've got pictures to prove it. That's just one example of many that we know that the earth is round the way when ships come up over the sea, there, the mast appears first, and then the rest of the ship and so on.

And people knew that in ancient times. And so Aristotle argued that that was a good evidence that the world was round.

By the time of Eratosthenes, he actually was able to measure the size of the earth pretty accurately, actually, using light and shadows and so on.

So it's people have been clever for quite a while, and they've been able to figure that out. And so I think that most people who believe in a flat earth, if not all of them are not aware of how these things came to be the fact that one, the

Bible teaches the world's round to the scientific evidence for it, how that was discovered, it's not a recent idea.

The world's been known to be round for a very long time. Yeah. Well, speaking of what the

Bible says about around earth, that's, I'm glad you brought that up because many of the flat earthers, sadly, and embarrassingly, profess to base their belief on the

Bible, they profess to be Christians, they say, Oh, well, the Bible speaks of the four corners of the earth, which that doesn't really help their argument any, but they use the

Bible as their support. So what verses would they use to try to support belief in a flat earth?

And why is that erroneous? The verses that they use, when you read them, you're like, how does that even remotely support a flat earth?

The one that you mentioned would be the one that I would think would be the go to one because you could argue for four corners, but that would make it a square.

And you know what? Flat earthers don't believe that. They believe it's a disc. So they can't use that verse because if it's a disc, it doesn't literally have corners.

So that one's not going to work. I've heard them say, well, the Bible talks about the surface of the earth and the surface is always flat.

I'm thinking, no, the Hebrew word for surface, panin, it means it's the same as the word for your face.

My face is not flat. In fact, it's closer to a sphere than it is a flat surface. So that doesn't work.

And in fact, I dealt with a few of these. I actually wrote up an article a while back on our website, Biblical Science Institute, and I analyzed the first 10 or so biblical proofs of a flat earth and none of them made any sense.

The only one that gets even close to it, there's the vision that the king had that Daniel had to interpret.

Remember that where there's this, well, there's more than one, but there's one vision where there's a mountain that can be seen from all the earth.

And so, you know, well, that's a vision though. That's not meant to be taken as literal narrative.

Or the other one that they'll try to use is they'll say, well, Jesus, when Satan took him to a tall mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world.

But in one gospel, it says in a moment in time, indicating that this was a vision. It wasn't that he was literally seeing all the earth because they say, well, you know, there's a mountain therefore where you can see all the earth.

And then my question is, if that's the case, where is this mountain? And why can't I see it? Right? Because if there was literally a mountain where you could see everywhere on earth, then everywhere on earth should be able to see that mountain, but you can't.

In the middle of Kansas, you don't see any mountains. You see nothing. So that doesn't make any sense.

So I, again, there is no verse that says, well, you know, the earth's flat or there are verses that talk about, you know, the pillars of the earth again, you know, kind of a poetic way, but that doesn't make it flat.

That just means it's supported, which of course it is. The mantle supports the crust and so on. So a lot, it has to do with very bad eisegesis reading into the text based on your presuppositions rather than exegeting the text and seeing what the text has to say, because there aren't any verses in scripture that really teach that it's flat.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And if the earth was flat, theoretically, all of us should be able to see

Mount Everest. Yes. It's the tallest point on earth and I should be able to walk out my front door and see it.

Right. I don't. Right. And you don't. That's right. Yeah. And isn't it true that the stars that you and I see, the constellations that you and I see gazing upward in the

Northern hemisphere is not what our friends down in Australia or the tip of Chile would see, correct?

Right. Right. And some are the same if they're close to this celestial equator, but the North star, you can't see the

North star from once you get significantly below the equator, the North star is not exactly at the

North pole. So you could see it on the equator at certain times and there's atmospheric refraction.

But once you get down to Australia, you cannot see the North star. And the flatters will say, well, no, that's because it's what's too far away now because they imagine the stars are relatively close to the earth,

I suppose. But that won't work because you can see the constellations that would point toward the

North star. You get a little bit south of the equator. You can still see the Big Dipper. You can use the two pointer stars in the

Big Dipper and you can see that the North star is below the horizon. And that doesn't work on a flatter if you can't in the current picture of the flatter.

And I should say, that's what I'm doing when I refute their view. I'm taking their current, the current most accepted view among flat earthers, which is that the earth is a flat disc and the sun and the moon rotate above that.

And the sun casts a shadow kind of like a cone on the surface of the earth and moves around like that. And you can explain some things that way, but not all things, including the positions of the stars, you cannot account for them in that model.

Yeah. You can't account for the seasons. Right. Eclipses, as you were talking about earlier, is just,

I'm just, I'm just kind of amazed that we're even having this conversation.

Not too infrequently, I get emails from people calling me a false teacher because I'm one of those ball earthers.

They say, you know, you're a ball earther. Well, I guess. Yeah. Well, yeah,

I am just as, just as Joe was. Yeah, just as exactly. Well, let's deal with a couple.

I've watched some of these videos and you can really get in some, go down some rabbit holes with some of these flatter, but they're all over YouTube.

Globe Busters is a flat earth YouTube channel. And I think it's got almost 63 ,000 subscribers and it's a pretty popular thing, but a couple of their more popular arguments, they'll say, they say that if we were truly living on a, on a sphere and this sphere is rotating at week, the planet rotates at about a thousand miles per hour.

Is that correct? At the equator. Yep. At the equator. Right. And so they say, if that were true, then all of the lakes, rivers, and oceans would be flung off of the planet.

And they say, and they have some experiments that they set up and they'll like take a tennis ball and they'll dip it in water and they'll spin the tennis ball and they'll show it in slow motion.

And you see the water spinning off of the tennis ball when it rotates really quickly. And they say, well, the tennis ball isn't spinning anywhere near a thousand miles per hour and it's throwing the water off of it.

So if we were really rotating that quickly, then everything would just be flung off of the planet into space.

So is that a valid argument? That's a very, uh, bad analogy because it's, it, it, it reveals an ignorance of physics.

The, the issue is not the velocity. The issue is the acceleration you see in, in one of the things that we understand now about physics is an object in motion tends to remain in motion.

Object at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. And so in order to, um, now rotation is, is a change in velocity because you're changing the direction and you're constantly doing that.

And so when, when you're doing it with earth's oceans, for example, how long does it take to completely change the direction of the ocean from this way, all the way around to that way?

It takes about 12 hours. So if they were to do that accurately with their tennis ball, it should, they should put the water on it and take 12 hours to turn it.

Okay. Because it's not the velocity, it's the acceleration. It's, it's the, the acceleration is what, um, causes the, the water to change direction.

That's the key. But the fact is I, you know, in an airplane, I fly quite a bit. You can, if you drop a ball in an airplane, it doesn't go flying back because I'm moving at 600 miles per hour.

From my vantage point, it goes straight down. Now, somebody watching the plane from the outside would watch both me and the ball.

And they would say, no, the ball is following a parabolic trajectory. But from my standpoint in the plane, it seems to fall straight down as if, as if I weren't moving at all, but I know better.

I know that I am moving. It's no different on the surface of the earth. You drop something, it doesn't go flying back. It moves with the earth because an object in motion tends to stay in motion.

And so that's true of the lakes and the oceans. That motion, that motion is changed because they're accelerated and it's gravity that does that.

It's gravity that pulls them around, keeps them fixed to the surface of the earth. But if they really wanted to do a proper analogy, they should take the tennis ball and turn it so that it makes a half a revolution in 12 hours.

And they would see the water does not go flying off. Yeah, exactly. All right. One of their other favorite lines of argumentation is the

Bedford Canal Experiment. And I don't have the gentleman's name in front of me, but back in 1838,

I believe, this man in the United Kingdom, Great Britain, got on the

Bedford Canal, I suppose, or Bedford River, and he wanted to test whether or not the earth is really a sphere.

And so he got one of his friends to get in a boat with a mast sticking up out of the boat, a flag on it.

I think it was about three feet. The flag was about three feet off the surface of the water. And so he got in the canal with his telescope.

And this canal is in a straight line, a number of miles long.

So this fellow rode out six, seven or eight miles. And according to the mathematics of it, if the earth was truly spherical, after he had gone out six, seven, eight miles, then the curvature of the earth should have completely hidden his little rowboat and the little flag.

And yet this man with his telescope could still see it, could still see the boat and the flag, even though he should have been hidden by the curvature of the earth.

So is that a valid argument for the flat earthers?

Well, it would be if it weren't for atmosphere. That's a good idea. That experiment's a good idea.

But we do need to keep in mind that light can be bent. And we know that if you stick your hand under water, the reason your hand looks like it changes the angle, like it's being bent sharply, and you're wondering, how's my bone not broken?

It's because when light transfers from the water to the air, it changes its direction a little bit. Air can do that too.

We know this. If you ever look down a road on a hot summer day, and it looks like the road's dancing around.

The road's not really dancing around. The air is changing the path of the light very slightly.

And what will cause that is temperature differences. Temperature differences in air will bend light, especially if it has to travel over a distance of a mile or so.

It gets bent a little bit. So I'm not opposed to the Bedford type experiments.

That's a good idea. But the only time where you can be assured that the light is not being bent is if there's no temperature differences between the water and the air.

So you have to pick the right day to do that experiment. And if you do, it will work, it will reveal that at a certain distance, the mast is no longer visible.

I've done the equivalent of that experiment myself in Kansas. And this was a long time ago.

The first time we took a trip, I was a kid, we took a trip out to Colorado. And as we were going through Kansas, I figured how, you know, from my position in this car, how far ahead in the road can

I see because of the curvature of the earth, and it's not very far. In terms of seeing something that's on the road, now something sticking up, then you can go further, right?

But it's something like a mile and a half, it's not very far. And sure enough, you can't once cars get beyond a certain distance, you don't see him anymore, because the curvature of the earth.

So I'm not opposed to that kind of experiment. And it will reveal the roundness of the earth if you do it when the temperature is stable.

And that's something that Danny Faulkner has written about in his book, Falling Flat, where he talks about that experiment.

But it's so it's temperature differences, that's, that's so tricky. That's not an experiment that I would recommend.

There are there are better ones. I mean, I live in Colorado, I can go to Top of Pikes Peak, and I can see a certain distance to the edge of Colorado, maybe even a little bit into Kansas, I can't see

Ohio. And it's because of the curvature of the earth, you can only see so far because of the curvature of the earth. And that that experiment is not quite as dependent on temperature differences, because the angle is, is a bit steeper.

So but there are experiments you can do that are not sensitive to temperature. And I have listed some of those in that article that I wrote on the

Biblical Science Institute website, if you go to our website and do a search for flat earth, you'll find a couple articles.

And in the second one I wrote, I showed some experiments you can do to test the curvature of the earth that do not depend on temperature.

Okay. Okay, I've not yet read that article, but I'll put a link to it in the description below.

Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and some people

I don't mean to mock because some people I think are, for whatever reason, genuinely confused. I had a gentleman that has emailed me a number of times, and we've exchanged a few emails and he's, he's really appreciative of, of my teaching of John MacArthur's, he listens to John MacArthur a lot.

And he's a, he writes well, I mean, but he thinks the earth is flat.

And for some reason, he's, he's got a blind spot. And he's fallen into this, into this deception.

Even though I even pointed out to him, speaking of John MacArthur a couple years ago at the Truth Matters Conference, Jeff Williams, an astronaut,

Jeff Williams, do you know him, by the way? I do. Yeah, you do. Okay. So he sent me his book one time and autographed it.

So I've had a number of conversations with Jeff. He's just a great guy. Yeah, he is. He is. So he's been up in the

International Space Station, I think holds the record for the, he did, it got broken recently, it got broken.

Okay. He was the American who had spent the most time in space. And then that recently, a couple years ago, it got broken by somebody else.

But okay, I was with him one month before that got broken. I said, How long until that gets broken? He said, next month.

Oh, really? Yeah. But in fact, I actually had a conversation with him one time when he was on the space station, we

Skyped. And that was cool, because he's floating there. So I know he's not faking it. It was pretty neat.

Well, that's, that's the thing. And these people would say, speaking of faking it, that it's all faked.

The moon landing is faked. NASA is fake. The space shuttle, one guy that does

Flat Earth videos, he said, it's, it's just a big balloon. Basically, it's like a bouncy house. It's not real.

It goes up, but it doesn't go up into space and give us some some idea of the magnitude of the deception that people would have to, that that NASA and all these other space agencies would have to force upon us to keep a secret like that.

I mean, how would, it just boggles my mind that that everything is, is faked.

Every person in every space agency would have to be in on this deception, right? Yeah. And, and, you know,

I've, I've, Jeff Williams, he took me on a personal tour of NASA in Houston.

And it was one of the highlights of my life. It was a blast. And I got to meet all these, these wonderful people.

You know, these are, these are not, these are not demon possessed charlatans that are out to fool us.

These are people that are going, good science. NASA is very transparent in terms of, you can go and watch.

I've seen the space shuttle launch. I've seen it go into space. I've seen it go into orbit and cross over the horizon.

So I knew, I mean, I know it's in space, it's in orbit. I've seen it happen. It was a night launch. So at a night launch, you can watch it go all the way into orbit.

So I've seen that with my own eyes. There's no doubt about that. I've seen the, uh, I've been inside mission control. The, the, uh,

Jeff is one of the advantages of knowing an astronaut Jeff was able to get us. He was, he and a few others of us were, he was leading us around there and we got to go inside mission control.

The astronauts were in their downtime. So they said, okay, we can come in and just kind of be quiet.

And it was really cool. I got to see the old mission control where they did the, uh, the moon landing. It's so they, they use a different building now, or at least a different room.

Anyway. Um, the funny thing is it's, it's not technologically, it wasn't technologically possible to fake it.

And what I mean by that is if you look at some of the movies that they've done where they've tried to put people on the moon, it, it looks pretty fake.

It looks pretty fake. And one of the reasons is it is very hard to simulate one sixth gravity, especially in a large environment.

Now they can do it on that plane that there's a plane that they can use to simulate zero G. They can also simulate one sixth

G by taking, you know, by taking the plane out and then diving, but only lasts like 30 seconds or so.

And then they have to come out of it to simulate one sixth G on a soundstage. You can't do it.

If you slow down the camera motion, you can tell it looks like it's slowed down camera motion. I've seen that. There's that old series space 1999, where that takes place on the moon.

And when they're outside there, you know, they're fighting or something and they slow down the camera, but you can tell because of the way other things move, you can tell the camera's been slowed down and that's not it.

We didn't have the technology to fake it back then. Now we're very close to being able to do that. Now they, the movies that come out like, like today, they're pretty close to being able to, where they can build a complete environment all on computers and simulate one sixth

G. And it looks pretty real, but back in the sixties, they didn't have computers were slide rules back then.

I mean, that was, that was about the extent of it. They had very primitive computers. They couldn't do stuff like that back then. Or, or, you know, people say, let's

Photoshop. There was no Photoshop back in, in 60, in 69. So when you see the picture

Earthrise, that's, that's what it looked like. They didn't have computer technology where they could manipulate that today.

We can get pretty close back then. Not possible. So the ironic thing is it's actually easier in the 1960s.

It was actually easier to go there than it would be to fake it. That's the bottom line. That's ironic.

Yeah. I've also heard them say, I think it's, is it, is it the Allen radiation belts?

Van Allen, the Van Allen radiation belts. They say that back in the sixties, we didn't have the kind of technology for an astronaut to safely pass through the

Van Allen radiation belts. It would have killed them. I think some of them say we, we couldn't even do that today. And they say there's proof that we really didn't go into orbit because of the

Van Allen radiation belts would have killed anybody that tried. Show me the math. That's, you know, it's easy to make these outlandish claims.

You know, well, do you know how much radiation is the Van Allen belts? No. Do you know how much radiation would be lethal?

Well, no, but I just don't think you could possibly survive the Van Allen belts. Well, it seems to me if you have two unknowns, you can't make any argument at all.

Now I happen to know the amount of radiation in the Van Allen belts, because that's something that's been measured, it's been studied. And when the astronauts went through the

Van Allen belts, they did get a little blast of radiation about the same as you, as you get when you get an x -ray. So if you've ever been x -rayed and you didn't die, then that's, that's evidence that you can pass through the

Van Allen belts. You wouldn't want to spend your life in the Van Allen belt because that would build up over time. But you know, every time

I go through an airport, I get x -rayed and you know, it doesn't kill me. You can get a little bit of radiation and it doesn't kill you.

And we do know the amount of radiation that the Van Allen belts possess. We know the amount of radiation that human beings can tolerate safely.

Even in low earth orbit, the astronauts, Jeff Williams was telling me that there's certain places in the orbit where the magnetic field is weak on the earth, and they won't let them do spacewalks when they're in that part of the orbit.

And also there's a, there's a lifetime radiation limit where if you're getting close to that, they'll say, okay, you can't go up anymore.

So that is something that NASA looks into, but they actually, unlike the people who make the claims to the contrary, they actually go through the numbers and say, okay, what is the quantity of radiation and how long till that builds up to an amount that would be dangerous?

So they've done those calculations. UFOs. And I have told,

I told you before we started officially recording here that ever since I was a little kid,

I've always had an interest in astronomy. I've just been absolutely fascinated with the size of the universe, the galaxies.

I mean, it's just the human mind cannot comprehend. And from time to time,

I'll talk to people that believe that there might be intelligent life out there somewhere. The universe is so vast, you know, what's to say that God didn't make some other life and put it out there somewhere.

And I've always told them, and you can flesh this out much better than I, even if there were aliens out there, even if, even if there were, which there aren't,

I believe that theologically and scientifically, but even if there were, they would have no way to get here.

Right. So, all right, walk us through, I sent you a couple of videos that have been on the news lately, interviewing some fighter pilots and showing these recently released video footage of taken from some of these fighter jets about these unusual objects.

And according to the testimony given, these things are doing things. They are moving at speeds and angles and in ways that we just absolutely cannot explain.

Pulling it's estimated six, 700 G's, what would be the equivalent to six or 700 G's, which of course

I don't think a human could even withstand more than 10 or 11. So, and there, they say there's no means, apparent means of propulsion.

There's no wings help us here. What, what do you think might be going on?

Oh, it's, there's so many, so many possibilities that it irritates me when people jump to aliens, because first of all, that, that I don't think

I agree. I don't think there are extraterrestrial aliens out there. There's some theological issues there, right?

You know, earth is very special in God's plan creation week. God spends five days working the earth.

He takes one day and it's everything else. All the other planets in the universe are made in one day on day four earth's made on day one.

It's, it's unique. It's special. All the times that God creates life, it's always on the earth, either in the oceans or in the land or in the atmosphere.

And so, uh, it was really a special, um, what about various UFOs? And of course we get all kinds,

I used to work in an observatory and we'd get, we'd get calls in about 90 % of the UFOs that were reported or the planet

Venus when Venus is low in the sky, um, because of atmospheric turbulence, sometimes it'll look like it's moving around a little bit or it might go like that.

And is it, you know, just because of the way the atmosphere, uh, perturbs the image. And a lot of times it'll, you'll get dispersion too.

And so for like a little rainbow and now this is, this, this is physics that I've studied.

And so I know why that happens. And when people will call and I'd say, no, no ma 'am, that that's just the planet Venus. Yes. I know it looks like it's dancing.

That's because of the earth's atmosphere and so on and so forth. So, uh, a lot of these

UFOs that people report and I'll grant they're a UFO to the person, because they're unidentified to that person.

But if I were there, it would, I would be able to tell you what it is. I've spent more time outside looking up than probably anybody else, you know, and I've never seen anything that didn't have a very logical explanation.

I've seen satellites. I've seen, I've seen a satellite re -entry, which was spectacular. And that would startle people because it's very bright and it's slow moving and, um, and it disappears at some point.

Um, I've seen, uh, fireballs, which are spectacular. Um, yeah, I saw one that was amazing.

It was bright green in the middle and orange with material falling off. It was spectacular. Uh, just, um, a few weeks ago, a month ago,

I was, um, uh, I was doing an event somewhere and staying with a friend.

And as we pulled in, it was nighttime. He said, Jason, what is that? And I looked up and there was a series of bright spots moving in a straight line.

Now I'm sure that would start a lot of, a lot of people, but I happen to be kind of a tech geek. And I knew that that was the startling project that Elon Musk had been launching these satellites.

Cause I'd already seen one earlier and it is spectacular. It looks amazing. And if, but if you don't know what it is to you, it's a

UFO to me, it's, it's the next, um, uh, internet service that I'm going to purchase once it gets online, apparently.

But right now, I mean, it looks, when they first launched, they formed a streak of beautiful, bright lights. It's quite stunning. And, um, anyway, so there's all kinds of stuff like that in space.

I've seen satellites, I've seen satellites that are in formation. And if you're, if you had just a little bit of imagination, you might connect to those and it would look like a triangle, uh, you know, stuff like that.

Um, there's man -made aircraft that are really strange looking, uh, very short minutes after you called me earlier this week.

Um, cause I live very close to the air force Academy minutes after you called a B2 bomber flew over my apartment.

And of course, if you've seen a B2 bomber, I mean, they, they look like something from a sci -fi movie, but they're not, they're real, they're real airplane.

And it stands to reason that there are some, uh, airplanes that the military has not declassified.

And so if you saw one of those, you might say, well, I've never seen anything like that. Well, no, you have it. So there's a lot of different possible explanations there.

The other thing too, um, if you're looking through glass, I immediately discount anything that you see anything, because when you're looking through glass, it is very easy to be fooled because glass, we think of glass.

Well, it just, all it does is provide a barrier, but it, you know, light just passes straight through it. Well, no light gets bent a little bit by glass and light reflects off of glass.

And so I could imagine a scenario and I've, I've seen scenarios like this. Remember you're driving at night or somebody else's driving and I'm looking out the window and I'm looking at the stars.

Cause that's what I do. And, uh, they take a turn and I'm looking at this bright, fairly bright star. I'm thinking that shouldn't be there.

And then the person turns the car and that spot immediately moves over, you know, over to here. And then it stops again when they turned because it was a reflection of Venus.

And because when the car turns the angle between Venus and the windshield changes. And so that it looks like it's moving. You gotta be real careful when you're looking through a window that you're not seeing something that actually is coming from behind you, perhaps relatively close, perhaps

Venus, but the change, the change of the window causes it to move in a peculiar fashion. So that's just one example.

It's, it's easy to fool the eyes. And there are lots of different ways to do it. And I think I would imagine that a lot of these

UFOs are that they're, they're even fighter jets. They're looking through glass and one of their instruments, a light from one of their instruments could reflect on that glass.

They could say something, boy, that's moving fast. Uh, human beings are terrible at estimating velocity.

When, um, we're good at estimating certain other things, a distance, if you're within 20 feet or so, you can, you can estimate that because of parallax, but, um, whenever there's an automobile accident and they ask the different witnesses, you know, how fast, oh, those were, they had been, had to be going 50 miles an hour.

Somebody else say, no, it's about 10 miles an hour. We're terrible at estimating velocity, especially if we don't know the distance to something.

And so they see this, this thing out there and they say, I mean, it stopped almost instantly and then went up like that.

It had to have been moving. Well, if it was a fly, it would have been like that. And then, you know, that's not a problem. They're assuming that they know the distance to it, which we don't necessarily know the distance to it.

So there's all kinds of possibilities there. And it's, it's often frustrating for me because a lot of times the way it happens with me is somebody will come up to me and they'll say, my friend saw such and such, and they'll describe it.

Now we're so many links away from reality at this point, because I, I didn't see it.

The guy who's telling me about it, he didn't see it. His friend allegedly saw it. So we're already trusting two people, which, and perhaps they're trustworthy, but you know, communication, sometimes it breaks down a little bit.

There's the telephone effect. And, and then was this, was this person looking through a window? Well, I'm going to immediately discount it then.

Were they on medication? There's all, there's all kinds of possibilities there. But again, most of them are just Venus or very natural, all kinds of natural phenomenon that if you don't know what they are, they look peculiar.

Atmospheric phenomenon. I'm, I'm aware of a lot of them because again, that's something that I study. It's something I find interesting.

There are, you know, there are mock suns, sun dogs, parhelia, where they appear to the left and right of the sun, bright spots look like little rainbow.

And if clouds are moving the right way, they can, they can act strange or the, the, what do they call it?

The upper tangent arc and so on. And I've seen a lot of these atmospheric phenomena. So there's all kinds of stuff out there like that.

The ones that are, well, even, even the videos that I saw, cause

I watched the videos that you, that you sent me to look out. And there's one where it looks, it looks pretty good, but it's on a computer screen.

I can make anything appear on my computer screen. So right there, I don't know that that's original. It could be, but I don't know that it's, it's one possibility of many, but it looks kind of like a flying saucer.

Yeah. But you know what, if you overexpose something on a CCD, that's exactly what it looks like. And I know that because I've taken plenty of pictures of things.

And if you expose things, it tends to bleed to the other lines. It looks like a little flying saucer. I've taken pictures of stars that look that way because they're overexposed.

So that's one of the artifacts that appears. So these are just a few of the things that people will think are

UFOs. And then there is the possibility, of course, that there are actual aircraft that are able to do some pretty spectacular things.

I, there was actually a flying saucer that human beings built back in, I think it was 1958 or 59, maybe.

So late fifties. And it was built up, it was built up in Canada, I think, but it was for the U .S. military.

They were going to use it to replace Jeeps and also helicopters. They thought that'd be kind of neat because it's one person flying saucer and it worked and it doesn't fly very well, but it did work.

So, and then as I was, I was, I was looking that up on the internet earlier today to try and refresh my memory on that.

I found another article about somebody had built a model flying saucer just because they thought that would be an interesting shape to try.

And this was, and it worked and this was back in 1932. So my point is, human beings have had the capacity to build flying saucers that work for almost a century now.

This is old technology. And so it wouldn't surprise me if, if people were doing that today, you can get drones that are shaped like UFOs and say, well, there's no visible means of propulsion.

Yeah, they hit the, they hit the propeller really well. And you know, so it looks like a flying saucer and you can, you can purchase these.

So there's all kinds of different possibilities out there. And I don't, I'm not suggesting that one fits all the situations.

I'm suggesting that there are all these different situations and each one has its own explanation. Yeah. So we don't, with some of these, we don't know exactly what they are, but we know what they're not.

And it just can't be alien life. It just, it's impossible. Yeah.

It doesn't make any sense. People don't understand the distances involved in space because I mean, we watch things like Star Trek and I'm a huge sci -fi fan.

I love science fiction, but the real universe isn't that way. It's just not that way. The distances involved are enormous and the speed of light is a limiting parameter in terms of getting from there to here.

Well, we can, we can develop warp speed. No, you can't. Technology allows us to use laws of physics.

Technology never allows you to break laws of physics. And so the light barrier is not like the sound barrier. The sound barrier is not a physical, there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents something going faster than sound.

It just creates vibrations that are difficult to deal with. And so humans eventually figured out how to deal with that. But, um, the speed of light is, is that's a, that's a physical barrier.

That's not something you can, you can beat. And I have written a book on that topic on the physics of Einstein, if people want to learn more about that.

But so that, that limits the, it takes years to get from one start to the next.

If you wanted to actually go there now, from your point of view, it wouldn't seem that long because of time dilation, there's some weird effects that kick in due to the physics of Einstein, but it's very impractical to go somewhere else.

Um, it's, it's more, it's more practical to do science when it comes to astronomy outside of our solar system passively by improving telescopes rather than trying to improve engines.

Cause it would just take a long time to get there. Even the next nearest star, um, four light years away, right?

It is 4 .3 light years away in our solar system. You could put, you can put all the planets in our solar system in a box that I think is 6 billion miles on the side.

Okay. So pretty big. And we visited all the planets in our solar system. People say, well, you know, go to the next star.

The next star is 4 ,000 solar systems away. You could fit 4 ,000 of our solar systems between our solar system.

And the next one space is really big and people don't appreciate that, I think. So that's, that's an issue.

It's, it's very, very impractical. Star Trek's fun, but the real universe just, it's just not that way. Yeah. I like,

I like to watch star Wars. I'm maybe not probably what you would call a, you know, a super fan or whatever, but I like it.

And, uh, yeah, but you can't really do the castle run in 12 point whatever parts.

Right. Yeah. I'm solo. I'm captain of the

Millennium Falcon. Chewy here tells me you're looking for passage to the Alderaan system. Yes, indeed.

If it's a fast ship, fast ship, you've never heard of the Millennium Falcon. Should I have?

It's a ship that made the castle run in less than 12 parsecs. Um, are there other earth -like,

I keep hearing, you know, earth -like planets, there's earth -like planets out there. Are there any of those to our knowledge?

And if there are, how far away would the closest one be? Uh, I would say, no, there are none that are known.

Um, the best we can do is get a planet. That's about the same size as the earth.

One of the problems is with these other, we don't, we don't have detected planets orbiting other stars and people get upset because most of the methods by which we detect them are indirect.

It's like, show me a photograph. Well, I'm sorry, but a lot of the things that are discovered in physics, you can't, you know, you can't photograph a neutrino, but there's good evidence that exists.

Um, but actually some of these planets we've now photographed, I actually have a, um, a time -lapse animation of three or four planets orbiting another star.

It's so cool. They were taken, you know, one over periods of time. It's amazing. So we can actually see other planets in other solar systems.

Now, most of them we can't see they've been detected indirectly. I was able to find one actually using Kepler data a number of years ago.

So it was kind of neat. I was able to find one actually using

Kepler data a number of years ago. So it was kind of neat, but, um, there's no doubt that there are other planets out there.

About the best you can do is estimate their size and in some cases their mass. And if they cross directly in front of their star and, and that you think, well, that, that would require the system to be edge on.

Yes, it does. So only a small fraction would be edge on. Yes, but there's a lot of systems out there. So if you hunt enough, some of them are edge on and they've discovered thousands of planets this way that cross in front of their star and the star's brightness drops by a little bit and it goes back up when the planet is finished crossing.

And you can, you can recognize that signature and that if you know the size of the star then, and that, that it is possible to know the size of the star spectroscopically, you can tell what kind of star it is and you can estimate the size.

You can then compute the size of the planet. It tells you how big the planet is. If you're able to get radial motion from the star, the star wobbles as the planet orbits it.

That tells you how much mass the planet has. And so that gives you an estimate of the density, but that's it.

That's all we know about these extrasolar planets. We know, well, we know their period, but in terms of their physical properties, we know how big they are.

And in some cases, how massive they are. That's it. We have no idea about, I mean, you can make a guess at temperature, but temperature's tricky because the atmosphere of the planet will change the surface temperature.

The Earth's a little warmer than it would be if it had no atmosphere because, you know, there's a mild greenhouse effect, which is not, people complain about that.

It's a good thing. You want a small greenhouse effect or the Earth would be very, very cold. So we don't know much about any other properties.

Do they have liquid water on them? We don't know that. We found that are about the size of the

Earth. Most of the ones we've discovered are much bigger than the Earth. And that's because they're easier to find.

The bigger it is, the easier it is to detect. That's just a, that's a selection bias. But in our own solar system, we have a planet that's almost the same size as the

Earth. Venus. Venus is almost the same size as the Earth. And it's not a place you want to visit because the surface temperature is 900 degrees

Fahrenheit. So it could melt lead. The atmosphere is, you know, toxic and the clouds are made of sulfuric acid type compounds.

It's just nasty. So, you know, when people talk about Earth -like planets, they find, we found planets that's the same size as the

Earth. I want you to think Venus, because that could very well be what it's like.

We haven't found anything that's like Earth. And if we did, again, the distance would be enormous because the next nearest star is 4 ,000 solar systems away.

And we've just, we've got what four or five spacecraft that are just, they're just a little bit outside our solar system.

The Voyagers, the Pioneers and New Horizons are just kind of outside the, at least the planets. So we don't understand how far away these things are.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And we shot those all for it in the mid 70s, 76 or? Yeah.

Yeah. The Voyagers, I believe were 77, I think. So maybe 76, 77. Yeah. And Pioneers were a decade earlier.

So, yeah, they've been flying for, you know, 45 years and they've just now made it outside of our solar system.

You got 4 ,000 more of those to go to the next nearest star, the next nearest star, which does not have any

Earth -like planets around it. Right. I mean, you just, you can't, you can't get there from here.

I mean, you can't, even if they were out there, it's, there's no way. Yeah. And our galaxy, the

Milky Way galaxy is 100 ,000, roughly 100 ,000 light years in diameter.

It's probably a little, yeah, around there. Yeah. It's 80 ,000, maybe 100 ,000. Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know how many, do we have any estimate of how many galaxies there are in the?

At least a hundred billion. At least a hundred billion. Yeah. And that comes from images like the Hubble Deep Field where they, they know how they count the number in this section of the sky and then extrapolate.

So there's at least a hundred billion in the visible universe. Right. One for each star in our own galaxy, just to put that in perspective.

The human mind cannot comprehend such enormity. But God calls them all by their names, the

Bible says. Isn't that the truth? Yeah. Isn't that amazing? What a great God we serve. Amen.

Amen. Well, well, Jason, thank you so much for giving us your time today.

I really. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. I appreciate it. I'm very grateful. I appreciate you.

Appreciate you being so, you know, just as I say, you're, you're a nice guy, very down to earth, very accessible.

Thanks. And you make the complicated simple for, for folks like us.

So thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks. And where can people find out more about you and the work that you do, your website and some of your resources?

Okay. Well, I'm at the Biblical Science Institute and the website is just biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

So it's that simple. And then if they want to find out where I'm going, cause I do travel quite a bit now that some of the panic has released a little bit.

If you look down the lower left, you can see where I'm going to be at in the next several months. Anyway, we have videos on our website as well.

There's a videos tab, lots of articles on the website. And that's, that's all free for you to enjoy.

If you wanted to contribute to our ministry, you can, there's a partner option. You can do that. And that gives you access to our forum where people can chat back and forth and discuss these things.

And that's been, I think that's been a blessing to the folks who have enjoyed that particular aspect of our ministry.

So yeah, biblicalscienceinstitute .com. Check us out there. All right. Good deal.

Well, thanks again, Jason. And Lord willing, would love to have you back on sometime. Oh, it'd be great. Yeah.

All right. And finally,

I see a lot of flat earthers say that the geocentric model is what brings the most glory to God.

It puts us at the center of the universe, as opposed to the heliocentric and all that, you know, in the heliocentric model.

We're just, you know, a little speck and really insignificant. Why would God do that when we are the pinnacle of his creation?

Wouldn't he put us at the center of his creation? And my response to that would be that I think just the opposite of that is true.

I think it's a rather arrogant position to think that we are the center of everything.

Yes, as humans, we are the only creatures that are created in the image of God. But I think the very fact that we are just this tiny little speck in a universe that is incomprehensibly huge.

I mean, when you think about, and I've done some of these numbers, you can fit 1 .3 million earths inside of our sun.

And our sun is just an average size star. There are some stars out there that are many, many, many times larger than our sun.

From what I've read, there are stars like UI Scuti and Canis Majoris, where you could fit potentially billions of suns inside some of those red giant stars.

And that's just a star. Our Milky Way galaxy has over a hundred billion stars, and our

Milky Way galaxy is just one galaxy of, we don't even know how many.

I mean, maybe trillions of galaxies. We don't even know. The human mind can't even begin to comprehend that kind of enormity, and the beauty of it, and the majesty of it, the precision of all of it.

I think the fact that we are so small, that we are but just a tiny little speck in the grand scheme of things, that to me brings an even greater impact and more meaning to Psalm chapter 19 verse 1.

The heavens are declaring the glory of God, and the expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

To me, it brings more meaning to Psalm chapter 8 verses 3 and 4. When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established, what is man that you remember him, in the

Son of Man that you care for him? The enormity of space, the universe, that makes that text even more impactful for me.

What is man that you are mindful of him? So, dear ones,

I hope that this has been helpful. Again, we are trying to reach the reasonable people who hold to flat earth.

Lord willing, I'll probably do some more videos, some more follow -up on this. We'll see how it goes.

I've got a lot of irons in the fire, but I hope this has been helpful. Please take into consideration all the scientific evidence, all of what we've said with scripture.

If you're going to hold to the flat earth, I want you to keep in mind that you're going to have to call a number of Christian astronauts liars.

Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to call someone like Colonel Jeff Williams a liar?

It's got to be one or the other. If the earth is flat, then Colonel Jeff Williams is a liar.

This is a man who loves Christ, who loves his word. Are you really ready to call this man a liar and slander your brother in Christ?

I might remind you that slander is a very serious sin listed in Romans 1 amongst sins that mark the lives of unbelievers.

You need to think long and hard before you do that. All right. Thank you very much, dear ones.

Long video, but I hope the timestamps have been helpful. Until our next time together, may the grace of our

Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit be with you all.