August 11, 2025 Show with Dr. Jason Lisle on “What Scientists Have Learned from the James Webb Space Telescope”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 11th day of August 2025.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have a returning guest today, Dr. Jason Lyle, who is a Christian astrophysicist, a theologically Reformed Christian apologist, a young Earth creationist, an author, conference speaker, and founder of Biblical Science Institute.

And today, he will be addressing what scientists have learned from the James Webb Space Telescope and the biggest lies perpetuated by scientists and why they continue to tell them. We're also going to be announcing an upcoming conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and one in Colts Neck, New Jersey.

But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Jason Lyle.

Well, thank you for having me on, Chris. Appreciate it.

Tell our listeners, please, a little bit more about the Biblical Science Institute.

Biblical Science and Genesis

Well, we're a Christian ministry, and what we do is we show people how science confirms what the Bible teaches, particularly in Genesis. A lot of people have the misimpression that science has proved millions of years of evolution, that it's disproved the historical account of Genesis.

And what we do is we show people that's not the case, that science, when you understand it, confirms that God really did create in six days the way the Bible teaches, and that was thousands of years ago, not millions or billions.

It's contrary to the narrative, so it takes a little time to go over that evidence. But that's really what we do. And because I'm a scientist, I tend to focus a lot on the science of this issue. I try to, you know, we get into some of the theology as well, but I try to deal with the scientific issues, particularly in my own area of specialty, which is astrophysics.

Yes, and I had the great honor and privilege to feature Dr. Jason Lyle recently as the keynote speaker of one of my biannual Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors luncheons, when he spoke on that very thing, the importance of Genesis and using visual aids for us all.

And everybody that was there was totally riveted to Dr. Lyle, and I had many people approaching me afterward, thanking me for inviting them there and just raving about how blessed they were from Jason's presentation.

And I look forward to many other opportunities to work with him on some kind of a special event. But if you are interested in inviting Jason to speak, the website is biblicalscienceinstitute .com, biblicalscienceinstitute .com, and all of the details will be there.

And also, as I've already said, you are speaking at two different events, I'm sure even a lot more than that, but we're going to highlight two coming up in the not-so-distant future. First of all, let's talk about the one that's closest, September 5th through the 6th of this year in Nashville, Tennessee, the War of the Worldviews.

Tell us about this conference that you are featured as one of the keynote speakers.

The War of the Worldviews Conference

Yeah, there's going to be four speakers, I believe, at that conference, James White, Eli Ayala, Marcus Ross, and myself. And we're going to deal with a number of different topics, but basically we're going to focus on the presuppositions that are necessary for science, the presuppositions that come out of the Christian worldview.

So it should be a lot of fun.

Yeah, and I'd love to learn more about Dr. Marcus Ross. He's the only one of the four you mentioned that I have not yet interviewed, and it's fascinating and encouraging that he is a geoscientist who will be speaking at this, because the geoscientists that I have become familiar with who are professing Christians love to boast of the fact that nearly all of them are old earth creationists.

And I'm assuming, since Dr. Marcus Ross is speaking with you guys, that he is not. He's a young earther, I'm assuming. That is correct. He's a PhD,.

I believe, in paleontology, but he is an expert on issues relating to fossils, rock layers, things like that. Really sharp guy, and frankly, a good friend. I really like Marcus. We really hit it off right away.

I first met him when he was working as a professor at Liberty University. And of course, that's one of the requirements at Liberty is that you have to be a biblical creationist, which of course he is.

But he's a sharp guy, a very good scholar. I think he's going to be talking on the subject of alleged ape men, and that is something that he is very knowledgeable of. So I hope to actually sit in on his presentation on that.

I think that'll be a lot of fun. Great. And I hope that he also seeks to disprove the commonly held myth that I am one of those ape men. So I would be delighted to be vindicated. And by the way, folks, for more information on that conference, War of the Worldviews, on September 5th and 6th, go to tennesseeapologetics .org forward slash War of the Worldviews.

No spaces or dashes in that. That's tennesseeapologetics .org forward slash War of the Worldviews. And then coming up in November, November 30th, to be more precise, which is a Sunday, you are speaking at the church pastored by a friend of mine, Chris Durkin, who is actually providentially speaking here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio tomorrow.

That was not planned that way to have you two back to back. It just wound up that way. And Pastor Chris Durkin has been a guest in this program. Not only is he pastor of Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, but he is the co-host of a documentary on Fox Nation that he co-hosted along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, before Pete was Secretary of Defense, The Life of Jesus.

And he recently was invited by Pete Hegseth, in fact, it was in June, to speak at the Pentagon. He led a prayer breakfast there. So I was delighted to hear that since he is so biblically solid. But on Sunday, November 30th, you are going to be speaking on the biblical astrophysics of the star of Bethlehem.

Can you tell us more about that?

The Star of Bethlehem in Matthew 2

Yeah, that's a fun topic. What I do in that presentation, it's an issue I've studied in some depth, because there have been a lot of speculations on what was the star that guided the Magi to Christ, as mentioned in Matthew's gospel in chapter two.

It's the only place it's mentioned in Scripture. And what we do basically is I go through Matthew two and exposit the passage and give people a little bit of background information on it, and see if we can figure out what this mysterious star was that guided the Magi to Christ, looking at the biblical text, looking, in some cases, we'll have to go back to the Greek a little bit to study it.

But a lot of the speculations that you hear really don't match what the text of Scripture says. And I am a Christian first and a scientist second. And so I believe that it's most important to exposit the text correctly.

That's what we're going to look at. And then after we get that, then we can look and see, is there a scientific explanation for this? Or is it something that God did that was a supernatural manifestation of his power?

Which, of course, God can do. God is not limited by scientific means. Science is the study of the normal way that God upholds his creation. But God is always welcome and able to do something extraordinary.

And spoiler alert, I believe.

That the star was a supernatural manifestation of God's power. Yes, I assume that. I think everybody did. And by the way, folks, if you would like a list of all of Dr. Jason Lyle's East Coast speaking engagements coming up for the remainder of 2025, send me an email, and I will forward it to you.

I just now received an email from the wonderful sister in Christ who sets up Dr. Lyle's speaking engagement, Denise Toth. She just sent me a list of all of these churches, and I can forward it to you if you ask me at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. By the way, I forgot to mention, I think, the Colts Neck Community Church website for more information on that November 30th speaking engagement on the biblical astrophysics of the Star of Bethlehem.

That website is coltsneckchurch .com. Coltsneckchurch .com. Well, Dr. Lyle, we are speaking on something that has got you very excited, and this is something that is bringing about new developments in the study of space by scientists such as yourself, and I believe scientists such as you who are young earth creationists and astrophysicists, probably even especially, are probably more excited than anybody about the James Webb Space Telescope.

Before we go on to the biggest lies perpetuated by scientists, tell us more about this James Webb Space Telescope, why it is superior to other telescopes, and what it enables scientists to see that they couldn't see before.

What the James Webb Space Telescope Reveals

So, the James Webb Space Telescope, it was really conceived back in the late 80s, early 90s. It was designed to be the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope, and I think most of us are familiar with the Hubble Space Telescope, these wonderful images that we get.

You can google them. Frankly, the best images in astronomy, up until very recently, have been from the Hubble Space Telescope, but the Hubble Space Telescope can only peer so far out into space because galaxies, as they move away from us, their light gets red-shifted, which basically means it gets shifted to longer wavelengths, lower frequencies, and the Hubble Space Telescope has a range of frequencies that it can detect, and the farthest galaxies are below the detection threshold of Hubble.

It cannot detect their light anymore. It's been stretched too much, and its instrumentation is not able to do that. That's where the James Webb Space Telescope comes in. It is designed to detect these longer wavelengths, much longer than Hubble, and therefore it can see galaxies that are much farther away than Hubble can, and frankly, it's pushing the frontier in terms of how far we're able to see into space.

Where no man has gone before.

So tell us about some of these things that you've seen.

So it was this James Webb Space Telescope. It was launched back in Christmas of 2021, and in January 2022, I thought, I need to make some creation-based predictions on what I expect this telescope to find, because the secularists have their expectations based on the Big Bang, based on billions of years, based on their ideas of galaxy evolution.

They believe the universe exploded into existence 13 .8 billion years ago, and then after a few hundred million years, the first galaxies, the first stars formed and collected into galaxies, and the galaxies get bigger over time and more massive, and I thought, wait, I don't believe in any of that.

So I'm going to make some different predictions, because in the secular view, as you look out farther into space, they say it's like looking back in time, because the light has taken so long. It's allegedly taken billions of years to get from there to here, and so you're seeing the universe, the distant universe, not as it is today, but as it was in the distant past.

Now, I could dispute that. I have written some articles on that, showing that, in fact, we can see the universe in real time, depending on how time is defined. It's kind of complicated. It involves the physics of Einstein, but basically, I don't believe that galaxies have slowly evolved over billions of years.

I don't believe that there was a time of hundreds of billions of years where there were no galaxies. I only believe there was four days where there were no galaxies, and in any case, what I predicted was that the James Webb Space Telescope would see lots and lots of galaxies at distances farther than the secularists thought possible, that these galaxies would be large, not babies, because God created them as adults.

God created Adam and Eve as adults. I believe he made the galaxies as adults, and that they would contain what astronomers call heavy metals, which are elements like oxygen and nitrogen, which from a chemistry perspective are not metals, but from an astronomy perspective, they're classified as metals, and that's the opposite of what the secularists are predicting.

They're predicting that as you go out farther, you should see fewer and fewer galaxies because you're looking to a time when only a few of them had formed, and you ought to be able to see a distance. The James Webb ought to be able to see a distance where there are no galaxies because they hadn't formed yet.

It's looking back to that time, and frankly, the earliest galaxies that you should see should be babies, and they believe that the earliest galaxies should not have these heavy elements because those are supposed to be produced in the cores of stars later, and therefore, the earliest galaxies should not have them.

Long story short, the three predictions that I made have now all been verified.

Wow, hallelujah.

Yeah, very exciting.

Were you able to say, I told you so, to any of these secular scientists?

In a polite way, yes. Yeah, so that article I wrote, Making the Predictions, that was back in January of 2022 before James Webb had taken any data, and that it wasn't until July of that same year that the first images were released from the James Webb Space Telescope, and it showed, indeed, tremendous numbers of galaxies, far more than the secularists were expecting, at distances farther than they were expecting, higher redshifts than they were expecting, and it did detect the presence of heavy metals, things like oxygen, carbon, and so on, and it found that these galaxies that are there, many of them are massive.

Many of them are as massive as our galaxy, and based on the luminosity. So, that shows you they're not babies. They're adult galaxies, which is just exactly what creationists expected. So, 2020 year was a very fun year to be.

A biblical creationist. Amen. Now, have you heard of any walking back by secular scientists as they scramble to explain how they were wrong? Well, the funny thing is, I knew that would happen,.

And so back in 2022, I not only predicted that the secularists would be wrong in their predictions, but I also predicted how they would respond. I predicted that they would, rather than give up the Big Bang, because that's sacred, that's their sacred cow, they would just push back galaxy evolution to an earlier time.

They would say things like, the Webb Space Telescope discovers that galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought, and lo and behold, I can show you quotes where they have said almost exactly, almost verbatim, what I said they would say.

Namely, they pushed back, they've said, galaxies must have formed much earlier than we thought, but it would have to be a lot earlier because they're massive galaxies. And so, the results of that I published later that year, it was in September of 2022, and you can find these articles on the Biblical Science Institute website, biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

The results article is, I believe it was September that year, where I pointed out that cosmology confirms creation, that these discoveries confirmed the predictions that creation scientists expected,.

And were contrary to what the secularists were expecting. Now, I have friends, they're not scientists, but they do a lot of public speaking as Christians, they believe in Biblical creationism, and some of them that I've had conversations with will take an agnostic position in regard to the Big Bang.

They don't think that believing in God's use of a Big Bang, unlike secular scientists who believe God caused anything, because they don't believe God exists, or that you can in any way prove it or what have you.

But they don't even seem to make a big deal whether or not that was true. Now, why is that view, the Big Bang, I believe you may have explained this on your last interview with us, but I think it warrants repeating, why is that view not compatible with a Biblical creationist view, in your opinion?

Why the Big Bang Conflicts with Genesis

Yeah, of course. Basically, first of all, it.

Kind of defeats the purpose. The Big Bang was designed to explain how the universe could come about, or at least how it comes to its current rate of expansion and so on, without invoking the Creator. Now, the inventor of the Big Bang did believe in a God, in fact, the Biblical God, to some extent, but he did not believe in the literal Genesis.

He thought that wasn't real history, and he was trying to use the Big Bang to explain how the universe could come about naturalistically, how it could come about without supernatural intervention. So, the first thing I'd point out is the purpose of the Big Bang is to explain the universe without God.

Secondly, the details of the Big Bang are not compatible with Scripture. The Big Bang, for example, supposedly takes place, I mean, the expansion of the universe, the formation of galaxies, is supposed to take hundreds of millions of years for the first galaxies to form, but according to the Bible, stars, and therefore galaxies, which are comprised of stars, are made on day four of the creation week.

They're only two days before Adam. Adam's made on day six. So, the idea that these galaxies took millions of years to form is not compatible with the Bible. Some people try to say, well, the days of creation aren't really days, they're long ages.

First of all, that doesn't work in terms of the Hebrew. There's no doubt that the author of Genesis intended those days to be taken as ordinary days. That's the basis for our work week, according to Exodus 2011.

But even if you did, the order of events is wrong. The Big Bang, that model, the standard model, supposes that the galaxies formed hundreds of millions of years ago, actually hundreds of millions of years to form, and the galaxies that we see today are like 10 billion years old, and that they formed long before the Earth.

So, our galaxy's supposed to be 10 billion years old, the Earth's supposed to be 4 .5 billion years old, so it's later than the galaxies. But according to the Bible, the Earth's made on day one. In the beginning, God created heaven and the Earth, and stars aren't made until day four.

So, according to Scripture, galaxies come later. My point is the order's opposite. Big Bang says galaxies, then the Earth. The Bible says Earth, then galaxies. So, you can't reconcile those two. If the Big Bang is true, then Genesis is false.

If Genesis is true, then the Big Bang is false. You can't have it both ways.

Well, we're going to our first commercial break. If you have a question for Dr. Jason Lyle on anything regarding astrophysics, and space, and the James Webb Space Telescope, and any of the common, most perpetuated lies of scientists, you can give us an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Jason Lyle,.

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Announcing that this September, I'm heading out to Pennsylvania to speak at two events that my longtime friend Chris Arnson has lined up for me. On Thursday, September 18th, at 11 a .m., I'm speaking to men in ministry leadership at Chris's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Free Pastor's Luncheon, at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with Dr. Jason Lyle, who is a Christian astrophysicist, a Reformed Christian apologist, a young earth creationist, an author and conference speaker, and the founder of biblicalscienceinstitute .com, and we are addressing some of the discoveries through the James Webb Space Telescope.

And by the way, isn't that kind of redundant? Aren't all telescopes space telescopes?

No, most telescopes are on earth. Most telescopes are what we call ground-based, and the reason that space telescopes are so superior, and the James Webb and the Hubble being two very prominent ones, is because they're above the turbulent effect of earth's atmosphere.

Also, I've got a telescope in my backyard, a pretty decent one, and I can zoom in on the stars, but they always look a little bit blurry, and that's because of the earth's atmosphere. That light travels trillions of miles through space in perfect clarity, only to be screwed up in the last 10 miles or so as it comes to earth's atmosphere.

James Webb and Hubble are both above the earth's atmosphere, and so they're not subject to that turbulence or the blocking of infrared light, which the James Webb Space Telescope, that's why it wouldn't work on earth, because it's looking at infrared wavelengths, and they are absorbed by earth's atmosphere.

Now forgive me if I asked you before, but where exactly are the James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope?

Yeah, the Hubble Telescope is in what we call low earth orbit, so it's orbiting around the earth, and the advantage of that is it's repairable. Remember back when the Hubble was first launched, they had miscalibrated the mirror curvature very slightly, and that caused the initial optics to be incorrect, and they were able to design CoSTAR, and the astronauts were able to go up and repair it, basically.

They basically gave Hubble glasses to fix its incorrect curvature of the mirror. Now the James Webb Space Telescope, it's out much further in space. It won't work in a low orbit because it's seeing these long wavelengths of light, infrared, basically heat, and this heat would affect it if it were too close to the earth.

So they had to put it way out in space, it's about a million miles out in space, in the opposite direction of the sun. So think where the sun is, point in the opposite direction and go a million miles, you'll find the James Webb Space Telescope there.

It's what's called the L2 Lagrangian point. It's a stable spot where Earth's gravity and the sun's combine so that it will orbit sort of along with the earth, but a million miles out farther into space.

So it's four times farther away than the moon.

Marc Thiessen. Fascinating. Well, we have a listener in New Rochelle, New York, Joey. Joey, you can say hello to Rob and Laura Petri for me out there in New Rochelle. I don't know if Joey is old enough to remember the Dick Van Dyke show, but that's where the characters Rob and Laura Petri lived in New Rochelle.

But anyway, Joey asks, thank you for standing firm on biblical authority. Secular astronomers more and more agree in positing dark matter as a way to explain various phenomena, such as the unexpected expansion rate of the universe.

Wondering what is your view of dark matter and whether it is relevant to the Christian worldview? In fact, what Joey didn't even ask is, do you believe that the universe is expanding to begin with? But go on and answer Joey's questions.

Joey. Okay, so dark matter, a lot of people have the sort of misimpression that it was invented to sort of fix the Big Bang or things like that. That's not the case. Dark matter is the observation that the way stars move in galaxies suggests that there's more mass than what we can account for by our visible observations, by the observations of stars and gas and dust, which we have various ways of detecting that.

The way that stars move tells us how much mass is interior to their orbit. And when we add up all the visible stuff we can see, we find that it's insufficient to keep the stars in their orbit, and yet they're still orbiting.

So what that suggests is that there's a great deal of invisible mass in the universe, which we call dark matter. And there are several lines of evidence that would support that. So I am an advocate of dark matter.

I think there's good evidence that it does exist. It's not relevant to the Big Bang. It's just good science. In fact, before Neptune was discovered, technically it was dark matter because astronomers knew it was there because it was pulling on the orbit of Uranus, but they couldn't see it yet because they didn't know exactly where it was.

And then when they finally pointed the telescope at it and saw the planet Neptune with visible light, then it's no longer dark matter because now we can see it. But apparently there's a substance in space, we know not what it is, that is pulling on stars, keeping them in their stable orbits in their galaxies, and it accounts for more mass in the universe than is visible mass.

Now with regard to, you mentioned the acceleration of the expansion, that's a different issue. That's thought to be caused by Securus. It's thought to be caused by dark energy. And dark energy basically is the hypothesis that empty space might have a little bit of energy to it.

Even if there's no particles in it, empty space sort of has a little bit of mass to it, and that would create a sort of pressure that would cause the universe to expand at an accelerated rate. Now that is more controversial, and in fact I published a paper just last year challenging the idea that the universe is expanding or that the fabric of space is expanding.

And if my alternative is right, then dark energy might not actually exist. So I would say dark matter is on very good scientific grounds. It's not absolutely proven, but it's the best hypothesis we have, whereas dark energy is far.

More tentative, far more controversial. Now am I misremembering a previous conversation with you where you were saying that the latest discoveries of the universe is that it's not expanding?

So what I, yeah, what I discovered is, and I published a paper on this last year, is that there is evidence that the fabric of space does not expand as the galaxies move through it. So the universe is expanding in the sense that galaxies are getting farther away from each other and from us, but the fabric of space, you could think of empty space as sort of like a rubber sheet or something that can be stretched.

The latest observations from the James Webb Space Telescope are not actually very consistent with that. And this was something that surprised me, but when I, if the fabric of space is expanding in the way that secular astronomers and frankly, creation astronomers have assumed for the last hundred years, it follows a mathematical formula called the Friedman-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric.

And that's named after the four scientists who discovered this. And it postulates that the fabric of space is like a rubber band that's stretched and the galaxies just kind of go along for the ride. If that's true, then that sort of distorts the appearance of distant galaxies, making them larger than they really are.

It creates a sort of magnification effect. You know how normally when you look at something that's far away, it looks small, right? You see a car that's close by, it looks big. You see a car that's down the road a couple of miles, it looks very small.

That's angular size. Now, if the universe is expanding, that effect is only true out to a certain distance, a redshift of 1 .6. And then after that, things should start to look bigger the farther away they are, which is counterintuitive.

But that's what the math tells us. And when I looked at the sizes of these galaxies in James Webb Space Telescope data, I did not see that effect at all. I was expecting to see that, to see galaxies starting to look bigger and bigger at a redshift greater than 1 .6, but they don't.

They continue to look slightly smaller and smaller. And what I did is I did the math and calculated how big they should look if the fabric of space is not expanding at all. And it turns out they should look exactly the size that they look.