James Webb Space Telescope with Dr Jason Lisle

Okay. Okay. So let's make sure that there we go.

And we're live streaming. Okay. So I am Terri Kammerzell and I'm here with Creation Fellowship Santee.

We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how

God created the universe and all life in just six days a few thousand years ago.

We've been meeting online here in this format since June of 2020. And we've been blessed by a lot of different presentations by people who love the

Lord and have a message to share. And you can find links to most of those presentations by typing in tinyurl .com

forward slash CF Santee. That's C like creation F like fellowship and Santee is spelled

S -A -N -T -E -E. You can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com.

And that way you can get on our email list so that you don't miss any links to our upcoming speakers tonight.

We're so blessed to have our fan favorite Dr. Jason Lyle back. Dr. Lyle is the president and founder of the

Biblical Science Institute. He's an astrophysicist. So his specialty is definitely studying things in space.

And we've actually had him several times before on other topics as well. He teaches logic and he has a number of different videos that that we've had.

And you can find those on our channels and also visit his website biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

But tonight we have him here to talk to us about the James Webb Space Telescope and the newest findings and the predictions that he had made and how those have been shown to be true so far.

So Dr. Lyle with that I'm happy to hand it over to you. Okay well I thought I'd begin by talking a little bit about the

James Webb Space Telescope itself, why it was built, what it's for, the predictions that these secular astronomers made and why the predictions that I made and why.

And I think it would be good to start talking about this spacecraft by comparing it and contrasting it with another space telescope that a lot of people are familiar with and that's the

Hubble Space Telescope that was launched in 1990. And unless you've been living in a cave for 30 years you've probably seen some of these amazing images from the

Hubble. And the Hubble was a, it's still in operation, but it's basically a space telescope with a 2 .4

meter diameter mirror. That would be seven feet long, seven foot ten inch mirror in diameter.

So it's a it's pretty big. Now there are Earth telescopes that are a lot bigger than that, but the advantage of Hubble is it's above the

Earth's atmosphere and Earth's atmosphere creates a blurring effect. At least a little bit of turbulence wind will divert the paths of the light beams and that causes images in ground -based telescopes to always be just a little bit blurry.

Sometimes you can reduce it by getting a real still night, but Hubble's above all that and so it gets images that are as clear as is mathematically possible.

Those of you that remember when Hubble went up, the original curvature of the mirror was slightly wrong due to one of the instruments they used to actually check and correct that curvature.

And they had to service it by basically getting it glasses. They produced the COSTAR instrument which kind of acts like a contact lens that goes over Hubble and corrects that curvature.

But they were able to do that because the Hubble Space Telescope is in low Earth orbit. So that's basically, it means it orbits a couple hundred miles above the

Earth's surface. And the nice thing about that is we can get people up there to fix it if it has in fact happened in the 90s.

And in fact Hubble was designed to be upgradable. It's got four different instruments in it and the four instruments it has now are not the four that it launched with.

They've been replaced over over the decades. And we could get the space shuttle up there, the astronauts could reach it, replace parts as needed.

And so that's kind of a neat feature of Hubble. And it's able to do that because it's in low Earth orbit. We can get to it fairly easily.

We're going to see with the James Webb, that's not going to be possible because it's quite a bit, it's a different telescope in a different orbit.

Now one of the other things about the Hubble is it is a visual wavelength telescope.

Hubble sees what we would see. I kind of like that, right? So these images that we get of planets and nebulae, if as long as they assign the colors to the appropriate filters, basically that's what it would look like if you were there.

Hubble has about the same range of wavelength frequencies of light that it can detect as the human eye.

It goes just a little bit beyond it. It can see a little bit into the infrared and a little bit into the ultraviolet. So it can see a little bit beyond human vision, but for the most part it sees what we see.

Some of the images that have been taken by Hubble have been false colored just to bring out certain features.

Astronomers do that not to be deceptive, but to bring out certain features. So certain images are false color, like the famous Pillars of Creation, part of the

Eagle Nebula. It's very beautiful. It's false color. The actual color of that nebula is red. But in any case,

Hubble sees what we see, and it gives these crystal clear images because it's above the Earth's atmosphere.

And by taking a longer exposure, because it's got a pretty big mirror, it basically can leave the shutter open of the charge couple device, the

CCD, and gather in light over a long period of time. And it can see things that are very, very faint.

And so not too long after it was launched, and after they corrected the mirror problem with COSTAR, Hubble did what we call the deep sky image.

They pointed that telescope at a small region in space, not too far away from the

Big Dipper, a region that in our galaxy is relatively empty, so we could see what's beyond it.

And they were hoping to see galaxies in the process of formation because in the secular view, as you look deeper out into space, farther out into space, the thinking is, well, the light would have taken longer to get here.

And so basically you're kind of looking into the past. Now the issue is more nuanced than that, but that's the standard secular view.

And so secularists who believe in the Big Bang, they believe the universe exploded into existence and then stars formed from the initial gas, and then those stars collected into galaxies.

And so they were kind of hoping that Hubble would be able to see the earliest stages of galaxies.

That's not what it found, though. If you take a look at the Hubble deep field, it found fully designed galaxies, not too dissimilar to galaxies the way they look nearby, almost as if they were all created like that.

And of course, I believe they were. So one of the goals of the James Webb Space Telescope was to go out deeper into space than Hubble and to be able to see galaxies in the process of formation and hopefully be able to see regions of space where galaxies had not formed yet.

And so trying to confirm the secular origin story is one of the reasons that this new telescope was developed.

But Hubble can only see, the Hubble Space Telescope can only see out so far, and then it can't see out any further than that.

Why is that? Well, it has to do with what we call the Hubble law, not connected to the telescope, both are connected to the man,

Edwin Hubble, who discovered by his telescopic observations back in the 1920s, that galaxies tend to be redshifted.

And we tend to think of, you're probably familiar with the Doppler effect, you've certainly heard it when a car goes by and the pitch of the horn changes, or the pitch of the engine changes as it goes by, because when it's approaching, the sound waves are compressed, and so the pitch sounds higher.

When it's departing, the waves are stretched out a bit, and so it sounds lower in pitch.

Light will do that too. And so if you had a laser and you could move it really fast, really forward, it would be shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, the light would increase in frequency.

And if you were to move it away from you, the light would decrease in frequency, be redshifted. Now with light, it's harder to detect that effect, because you have to get close to the speed of light for it to be easily noticeable.

But we have instrumentation that can detect it, and we know that stars in our own galaxy, some of them are moving toward our solar system, some are moving away.

The ones that are moving toward are blueshifted, the ones that are moving away are redshifted. Now this has nothing to do with the intrinsic color of the star, you can't tell just by looking at a star if it's blueshifted or redshifted.

You might say, well there's a blue star, that must be blueshifted. No, because the star might actually just be blue.

But if it's moving toward us, it'll be a little bluer, and the frequencies will be shifted more toward the blue.

And if it's moving away, it'll be a little bit redder. But you can't normally tell the redshift or blueshift just by looking at something.

You need a spectrograph, you need a spectroscope to basically break down that light into its frequencies, look for the atomic fingerprint of the elements that are making that light, and then see which way they've shifted.

So it takes some pretty sophisticated instruments to do that, to measure these redshifts.

Well, Edwin Hubble back in the 20s discovered that galaxies were just about all redshifted, except one or two that are really close by.

And he found not only are galaxies redshifted, but the farther away the galaxy is, the more redshifted it is.

And so it's basically like all galaxies, it's like the entire universe is being expanded. Perhaps he could have anticipated that.

Isaiah 40 talks about that, that very thing. And so maybe he could have seen that, but in any case, it's there.

The galaxies seem to all be moving away from each other, more or less. And the farther away they are, the more redshifted they are.

Now, what that redshift means is that the frequencies of light that galaxies give off are shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.

And again, you can't tell just by looking at a galaxy, because normally the redshift's pretty small. For nearby galaxies, it's pretty small.

But as galaxies get farther and farther away, the redshift is so much that all the light from that galaxy has been shifted into frequencies that we can't see anymore.

They've been shifted below the red end of the spectrum, and the human eye can't detect them, and the Hubble Space Telescope can't detect them, because its range goes just a little beyond human vision.

And so that was one of the goals then with this next generation space telescope, was to be able to, in order to be able to see galaxies that are farther away than Hubble, instead of looking in the visible range of light that human beings see, it's designed to look in infrared.

And that would be natural for looking at highly redshifted galaxies that Hubble can't see because they're too far in the infrared, but the

James Webb Telescope can see them. So this project was, actually started development in the late 1980s, before the

Hubble had even launched, scientists were already planning its successor. And that's often the way science works, especially when it's federally funded, you have to think in advance, you have to think sometimes decades in advance.

And so scientists began proposing what they called, at that time, the Next Generation Space Telescope, and that was the name for it until 2002.

But I remember discussing this project when I was in grad school in the late 90s, in I think it was 98, when

I was in my instrumentation class. The professor was very excited about that, about this new space telescope that would be the successor for Hubble, and describing the way it works, and so on.

And we were all excited about it, it was just a neat project. And we lamented that it would be, it wouldn't be until 2007 that it was supposed to be launched.

Well, as misfortune would have it, it would have to wait until 2021 for it to be launched.

So it just, sometimes things just take longer than they should, especially in science matters, and especially when politics are involved, that can happen too.

But I know people who have worked on this amazing space telescope, folks up in Boulder, Colorado that worked on various components of it, and the way it unfolds, and so on.

It's really an amazing design. And so I thought I would talk a little bit about this telescope itself, how it's different from Hubble, and then what the predictions would be, and why it was developed.

So the Next Generation Space Telescope is renamed the James Webb Space Telescope in 2002.

And James Webb, he was the, he was in charge of NASA from 1961 to 1968.

And if you think about that, that was kind of the glory days of NASA. That was the, you know, where the

Apollo program was in its early development. And in fact, James Webb was responsible for getting a lot of the, he pushed for federal funding for the

Apollo program. And so if you're happy that people landed on the moon, you can thank James Webb for that.

He was instrumental in making that a reality. He passed away in 1992. But he was a good man.

And I'm glad that we've honored him by naming the telescope after him. So the

James Webb Space Telescope differs from Hubble in two primary ways. And all the other ways it differs are to support those two primary differences.

First of all, it's bigger. The, the Hubble mirror is 2 .4 meters across, about seven feet.

The James Webb Space Telescope, its mirror is 6 .5 meters, that'd be about 21 feet in diameter.

It's so big that they didn't make a single mirror. Hubble has a single mirror. The James Webb Space Telescope has been organized into 18 hexagonal pieces that fit together to make the main mirror.

Perhaps you've seen images of it. Let's see if I can show you this. So there it is.

There's the, there's the James Webb Space Telescope. And you can see that enormous mirror, 21 feet across.

There's a sunshield below it. That's about the size of a tennis court. And then, I don't know if you can see it at this scale, but that that's not a single mirror.

It's made up of 18 hexagonal mirrors that actually fold together to make the big one.

And that was necessary because we don't have, we don't have rockets big enough to carry that thing as it is.

And so the engineers designed at least some of those panels to be able to fold into a more compact shape.

And then after it launches, they unfold into their final position. It's really ingenious the way it was designed.

The sunshield as well. It has a stowed position and then it unfolds into this tennis court sized sunshield.

Really pretty brilliant. And just some of the, some of the details in this. And I, my compliments to the people who built this thing and got it out there and calibrated it because it's an ingenious design.

I mean getting those, even getting those hexagonal mirrors to connect together.

James Webb is designed to operate at a very low temperature. And so they actually built those mirrors a little bigger than they should be on earth because materials contract in the cold.

And so they designed it so that when it cools to its final temperature, there'll be the right size to operate appropriately.

So it's really just pretty ingenious the way that it works. So it's, it's bigger than Hubble was the one difference.

And that's why they had to design it to be able to kind of unfold. The Hubble Space Telescope can fit in a, in a shuttle, space shuttle cargo bay.

Not that we use shuttles anymore, but back when it was launched we did of course. James Webb won't.

And so we had to use our biggest rockets that we can, that we have now to get it up there and design it to be compact.

The other difference, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the range of frequencies of light that it detects are below what we normally see.

And so it's designed to peer into infrared wavelengths that Hubble really can't penetrate.

Hubble can go a little bit into the infrared. James Webb goes much deeper into the infrared. It's, it's the wavelength range of Hubble is 6 ,000 angstroms to 28 ,500 angstroms.

Now for comparison, human range of vision, we can see from about 4 ,000 angstroms to 6 ,500 angstroms, maybe 7 ,000 angstroms, something like that.

There's a little bit of overlap. So James Webb can see just a little bit into the red, but most of it's designed to peer into the much deeper infrared.

And that's going to allow it to see galaxies that are red shifted beyond the frequency range of Hubble, beyond the frequency range of our eyes.

Now all the other differences are really are designed around those two. The fact that it's bigger than Hubble and the fact that it sees infrared.

So for example, you might notice from that picture that I just showed you, the mirror, it's not silver.

It looks like it's gold, and that's because it is in fact gold plated. The reason you do that is because gold reflects infrared better than silver.

Silver is great if you want to see visible light and Hubble designed to detect primarily visible wavelengths.

It's got a silvered mirror, but with the James Webb Space Telescope, each of those hexagonal segments, they're actually made out of beryllium, which is a very light metal and one that doesn't contract as much as as others with temperature.

And it's coated with a thin layer of gold. In fact, the layer of gold is only about 700 atoms thick.

So it's a very thin layer. And that's because gold reflects infrared very well. So that's why it has that gold tinge to it.

The other thing, the James Webb Space Telescope cannot operate at room temperature.

Why? Well, because anything that is at room temperature or a little warmer gives off infrared.

Maybe you've seen on television, people who had, you know, these thermal goggles and they pointed at like an animal, the animal's just glowing, because we give off infrared radiation, infrared light.

And that's not something we can see, but it's something that the James Webb Space Telescope can see. And so if it were at room temperature, it itself would be glowing.

And imagine trying to take a picture when you're giving off all this light, it's not going to work. So the

James Webb Space Telescope has to operate at a very cold temperature so that it's not giving off very much infrared radiation.

And so it actually has an operating temperature of about 40 kelvins, 40 degrees above absolute zero.

So that would correspond to, what would that be? I got it written down here, negative 370 degrees

Fahrenheit. That's colder than Wisconsin. So that's pretty amazing.

And it will get to that temperature passively. If you can get it out into space and let it cool off, get it away from all heat sources, it will naturally drop to that temperature.

It takes several months, but it'll get there. And so, but then the problem is we've got this source of heat in the solar system and it takes you, you have to leave the solar system to get away from it.

And that is the sun. The sun is what heats up the earth. And if James Webb Space Telescope were not carefully designed, it would heat up that space telescope.

So what they did with that is they designed that sun shield that you see at the, at the, at the base of the spacecraft there, that goes between the sun and all the other instruments.

All the instruments are on one side of the space shield, of the sun shield, and then the sun is on the other side.

And there are five layers to that. It kind of unfolds and each one drops the temperature by a certain amount.

And this was all calculated in advance, and it's very sophisticated and very brilliant and it's been working perfectly. So how about that?

But the other thing is, because the James Webb Space Telescope has to operate at such a cold temperature, you can't put it in North orbit because the earth itself is warm.

The earth is giving off infrared radiation into space. It's receiving new energy from the sun and radiating that away into space.

And so again, the, you don't want to put a telescope next to this giant light bulb because that's what the earth is in infrared, it's glowing.

And so they had to put it in a different kind of an orbit and they put it at what's called the L2 Lagrangian point.

It turns out if you have, you know, the sun and then the earth orbiting the sun, there are five places relative to the earth and the sun where you could put a third object and it would orbit at the same, with the same period as the earth, taking 365 days to go around the sun, but would maintain its relative orientation to the earth and the sun.

And those, those points are called Lagrangian points after the man who figured out those, those positions.

It's kind of places where the earth and the sun's gravity combine in just the right way so that an object will orbit just like the earth does, but in a different position.

The L2 Lagrangian point is opposite the sun. So you got the sun, the earth, and then

L2 would be a little bit further away from the earth. It's a million miles away from the earth in the opposite direction of the sun.

That's where the James Webb Space Telescope is. And it took it a little while to get there. They had to, they launched it in, actually launched it on Christmas day, 2021.

And it took it a few weeks to get out to that L2 Lagrangian point. And then it's actually orbiting around that Lagrangian point.

And then they had to wait for the spacecraft to cool down. And then there was a calibration process where they had to get those 18 hexagonal mirrors so that they were just exactly aligned.

And there's a process by which that occurs and so on. It's absolutely ingenious. And just the innovations too, the lens for this thing, for example, normally you'd think, well, lenses are made of glass.

This one's made of salt, not table salt, but nonetheless a metal and non -metal that are ionically combined.

And so, and they did that because glass does not transmit infrared light very well.

Glass blocks infrared, which is why your car gets really hot in the summer when you leave it out in sunlight, just baking on the inside, you get that greenhouse effect.

We don't want to block infrared because that's what the instrument is designed to look at. So you got to put it far away from the earth, a million miles away, which means unlike Hubble, it's not serviceable.

We can't get people out to a million miles in space. The farthest human beings have been into space is the moon, and that's 240 ,000 miles away.

So, and even that, we're going back, but that takes quite a bit of effort. So that's the disadvantage of that orbit is the, unlike the

Hubble, the Hubble's upgradable and serviceable. The James Webb Space Telescope is not upgradable, it's not serviceable.

And so if anything went wrong, it's $10 billion down the drain. But fortunately, it's worked flawlessly.

They did find one little hiccup with the spectrograph, but other than that, it's working very, very well.

And very exciting, very exciting. So there's even more to it, though.

It actually has four different instruments on it that detect different ranges of wavelengths of light.

And three of them operate at this operating temperature of about 40 kelvins, 40 degrees above absolute zero.

But there's one that operates in the mid infrared, the other three are sort of near infrared, they're closer to our vision.

There's one that's further out, and it requires really cold temperatures to work, and it's called MIRI. And it actually has to operate at a temperature below seven kelvins.

So that would be negative 447 degrees Fahrenheit, or about less than seven degrees above absolute zero.

And it turns out that passive cooling won't get you there. So they actually had to build basically a cryo cooler, an air conditioner basically, on board the spacecraft that will cool that one instrument.

And it's worked, it's down to below seven kelvins. So amazingly, pretty neat.

So what then are the predictions? Why build this thing? And what were secularists expecting to find?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, one of the goals of this thing is to confirm some of the predictions of the

Big Bang, the secular model of the origins of our universe. The Big Bang is supposed to say that according to the

Big Bang, the universe starts as a point, not a point in space, but space itself is in the point, as weird as that is, which then rapidly expands.

And this point has essentially infinite temperature, because you've got all the energy of everything that will become everything in the universe crammed into a point.

So the energies, the temperature is essentially infinite. And then when it expands, it cools.

If you think of the ideal gas law that you learned in chemistry or physics, as it expands, the temperature will drop because it has more volume.

And initially, the temperature is so high that you can't even have things like atoms. You can only have these exotic particles that have a very brief existence that live in very high temperature situations.

Eventually, the universe cools to the point where some of these particles, quarks and stuff can combine to form protons and neutrons and electrons.

And then eventually you get atoms. Now, according to the Big Bang model, the only atoms, the only types of atoms that the

Big Bang can produce because of the temperature and the density, and I've worked through the math on this, the math's right.

I just, I don't believe those conditions ever existed. But if they had, the only atoms that could be made would be hydrogen and helium gas and a little bit of lithium.

The temperature and pressure and conditions are not right in the Big Bang to produce anything heavier than lithium.

So things like oxygen, nitrogen, the Big Bang cannot produce those. And yet we have oxygen and nitrogen in our universe.

So how do we get those? Well, according to the secularists, the first stars that formed, formed out of that hydrogen and helium gas as gravity pulled that gas together.

And then some stars under certain circumstances will explode. And that can create theoretically the heavier elements.

It will fuse the hydrogen, helium into heavier and progressively heavier elements. And then when it explodes, those elements get dispersed out into space.

And so the second generation of stars then has a few of these heavier elements, things like oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, things like that, stuff that we're made of.

So one of the expectations was that the James Webb Space Telescope would be able to see out to a point in space where the heavy elements had not been formed yet, because they haven't had time.

That's one of the predictions that was expected. So in the

Big Bang model, the first galaxies that form, because the atoms form, then they collect into stars and stars collect by their gravity and form into galaxies.

And that's supposed to happen around 400 million years after the Big Bang. That's how long it takes to form the first galaxies.

Maybe between, early estimates would be between 300 million years and 400 million years after the

Big Bang. That's when the first galaxies are supposed to form. And that corresponds to a distance, because in secular thinking, as you look out to farther distances, which correspond to farther redshifts, then it should have taken the light longer to get here.

You're effectively looking back in time. And a redshift, basically 400 million years after the

Big Bang would correspond to a redshift of 11. That means the light's been stretched out by that factor.

300 million years would correspond to a redshift of 14. So I'm going to say redshift, but think distance.

So a redshift of 11, that's pretty far out. A redshift of 14, that's really far out. Those are both farther than, that's farther than Hubble can go.

And so the idea was, since the James Webb can see at distances farther than that, it should see a distance where there are no galaxies, because they haven't had time to form yet.

It's looking back in time. It's looking at a distance that corresponds to a time where galaxies had not yet formed.

That was one of the predictions that the secularists made. And then, in fact, let me bring that up.

Let's see here. Oops, wrong window.

Hold on a second. There it is. There it is. Okay. So according to the secular predictions, few galaxies at great distances, because it takes time for them to form.

They don't all form immediately. That's a creationist view. The secular view is that they take time to form.

And so you should see very few galaxies at tremendous distances and none beyond a redshift of 14, because that corresponds to, in the secular view, a time of 300 million years after the big bang.

There shouldn't be any galaxies at that distance. Furthermore, since it takes time for stars to collect and form galaxies, they would expect the very earliest galaxies, and therefore the farthest galaxies, would be very low mass, because it takes time for those stars to gather together.

So the first galaxy shouldn't have very many. And they should be clumpy and irregular, because the idea is, the reason we have these beautiful spiral galaxies nearby, secularists believe that that happens as a result of galaxies interacting with each other over time.

It's supposed to take time in hundreds of millions of years to form these beautiful spiral structures and analytical galaxies as well.

So the secularists were predicting that the earliest galaxies, those that are near redshift 14, ought to be low mass and clumpy and irregular, not these beautiful design spirals.

And then finally, because secularists believe that the big bang can only produce hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium, it follows that the first stars that collapsed from that gas ought to be made of only those three elements and nothing else.

And so the farthest galaxies that we see, which have stars in them, should have only what are called population three stars.

Population three star is a hypothetical star predicted by secularists that has no heavy elements in it, nothing like oxygen, nitrogen, what astronomers call metals.

Astronomers use that term different from chemists. In astronomy, anything heavier than helium is considered a metal.

Okay, so it's different from the chemists that would not classify oxygen as a metal, but astronomers do. So the farthest galaxies should not have any metals in them except for a little bit of lithium, because the big bang can only produce hydrogen, helium, lithium, and the stars haven't had time to go through a generation and then explode where they contaminate the gas around them.

And then the next generation of stars that forms from that gas has a few heavy elements, and then the third generation has even more.

So these would be called population three stars, and so far they're hypothetical. Now we do know of population one and population two stars.

Our sun is a population one star. It's kind of backwards because of the way they were discovered.

The sun was analyzed first, so it's population one. It's got a lot of heavy elements in it.

Well, it's still less than one percent, but for a star it's got a lot of heavy elements in it, things like oxygen, carbon. We can detect those in the sun through spectroscopy.

The analyzing of the light and analyzing that atomic fingerprint that's found in the light.

And then we discovered population two stars that have fewer heavy elements, and then the hypothetical population three should have no heavy elements other than lithium.

So it's backwards. The first generation of stars in secular thinking would be population three, the second generation would be population two, and the third generation's population one.

So it's kind of backwards thinking, but I didn't come up with it. So there we go.

So that's their predictions. And you can see why they made them. It follows logically from the

Big Bang and the time scale that is assumed for the Big Bang in terms of how long they think it takes for the first stars to form.

I mean, stars can't form when the universe is incredibly hot because the gas pressure would prevent that.

So it takes a while for the universe to cool after the Big Bang to the point where the gas can collect.

And again, the first galaxies are supposed to form 300, 400 million years after the Big Bang. That corresponds to a redshift of 14 to around 11 or so.

Those earliest galaxies that do exist should be very low, low mass, clumping, irregular, and they should have no, they should be only population three stars, which means no heavy elements.

My predictions are exactly the opposite. I don't believe in the Big Bang. I believe that God spoke the galaxies into existence.

I don't believe that we're effectively looking back in time. Again, that's a nuanced issue, but I believe the

Bible's using an anisotropic synchrony convention whereby we're looking at the universe in real time. And so I would expect no matter how far out we look, things are going to look kind of similar to the way they look here.

They don't have to be exactly the same, but my prediction is lots of galaxies at great distances. I predicted that the

James Webb Space Telescope would see galaxies at much greater distances than the secularists were expecting because I don't believe in the

Big Bang. And I believe God created those galaxies. And because I believe God created the galaxies,

I don't believe that you're going to find galaxies sort of in the process of formation where they're low mass and clumpy.

I'm expecting that the farthest galaxies that the James Webb can detect would be fully formed galaxies, massive, well -structured, even spiral disk -shaped galaxies, not sort of in -between forms, not transitional galaxies.

I believe that they would be fully designed for what they are designed to do. And then third,

I would expect that the farthest galaxies will have heavy elements in them, things like oxygen and nitrogen, because I don't believe that those are, well, let me clarify,

I do believe theoretically that those heavy elements can be produced in the core of a star when it's supernovas.

I do think the math checks out for that. But I don't believe that all heavy elements were created that way, because according to scripture, the earth's made on day one and the earth has heavy elements.

At the very least, it had water right away, because the Bible mentions water being on the earth in verse two. Water's made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.

Oxygen's a heavy element. And then stars are made on day four. So at least oxygen had to exist before the first stars.

And so I don't have any reason to believe that you're going to find stars that have zero heavy elements I believe that these most distant galaxies will have heavy elements in them, as do stars nearby.

So as you can see, my predictions are the exact opposite of the secularist predictions. But I'm thinking as a creationist, they're thinking in terms of the

Big Bang and secular evolutionary ideas. And I'm confident enough in my predictions, or at the very least that the secular predictions would be wrong, that I not only predicted these scientific results, but I also predicted how secularists would respond when their predictions fail.

So I was confident enough that I predicted that we will see galaxies way beyond what they were expecting and secularists will respond with statements like this, quote, web discovers the galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought.

Because, I mean, you'd think, hey, the standard secular model predicts that there shouldn't be galaxies beyond redshift -14.

They haven't had time to develop. I mean, you'd think a rational scientist would, when he sees that, hey, there are galaxies way beyond that, he would maybe rethink, well, maybe the

Big Bang's wrong. But you see, evidence will not dissuade people of the

Big Bang, because the Big Bang is not based on evidence. It is a philosophical pre -commitment.

It's a presupposition through which all the evidence is interpreted. And so no matter what we found in deep space, people will continue to believe in the

Big Bang, even if it's contrary to their models. And so I predicted that they would just push back the time of galaxy formation to whatever absurd limits it needs to be when they find that galaxies are at distances that are far in excess of their predictions.

Now I made these predictions back in January 21, the year 2022,

January 21st, 2022. And you can see the date there. You can go to our website and look up, there's the article where I made those predictions.

Now this was before the James Webb Space Telescope had even reached its destination at L2.

It hadn't begun collecting data yet. They were still in the process of letting it cool, and then it had to be calibrated, and so on and so forth.

And so I am making these predictions well in advance. And then in July of 2022, we got back the first data from the

James Webb Space Telescope, and it did what kind of what Hubble did. It pointed out to a section of our galaxy that's relatively empty of stars, and they were hoping to look and see a deficit of galaxies, galaxies that are just starting to form.

But what they actually found was this. This is the James Webb Space Telescope deep field, and they intentionally pointed it at a, there's actually a cluster of galaxies in the middle there.

You might see that that really bright one in the middle. That's a very massive galaxy, and there's several others around there.

And that acts as a gravitational lens. It causes the background galaxies to look a little bit distorted, and it's like a magnifying glass.

And the reason they pointed it there is because that magnifying glass not only makes the, it not only distorts the appearance of the background galaxies, but it also makes them look bigger and brighter.

Effectively, it lets us look even deeper into space than the James Webb Telescope could all by itself.

So we're basically pointing a telescope at a nature -made telescope to get even further into space.

And you can see that there are galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies. Every one of those little fuzzy specks that you see, there's a galaxy.

There are a few stars in our own galaxy that get in the way, and you can tell them because they got these spikes coming out of them.

That's an artifact of the way the space telescope is built in terms of the hexagonal mirrors and so on.

But galaxies upon galaxies at tremendous distances. And although you can't normally tell the redshift of something just by looking at it, by the way these images were collected, you kind of can.

At least you can estimate it. The galaxies that are the reddest are the ones that are actually most redshifted because they've been shifted out of the frequency range of some of the instruments that get the higher frequency data.

They've been shifted to deeper, longer wavelengths. And so again, galaxy upon galaxy upon galaxy upon galaxy.

But how far? I mean, there's a lot of them there. But how far out are they? Well, there have already been some preliminary papers where they've...

Let me back up. There are two ways to estimate the redshift of these galaxies.

One is there's an instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope that can take a spectrum of these and determine the exact redshift.

But that takes time and effort. There's a sort of a quick way to estimate the redshift, and that is by comparing the brightness in the various wavelengths.

And that allows you to do all these galaxies at once and estimate, get you a rough estimate of the redshift. And so based on these rough estimates, some of these galaxies are not only beyond redshift 14, but some of them are up to redshift 20.

And that is way beyond what the secularists were expecting. In their view, that would correspond to a time only 180 million years after the

Big Bang, which is not nearly long enough for stars and galaxies to form. That was not what was expected.

And so the secularist predictions were wrong. You'll notice too that the galaxies that are there, they're not clumpy and irregular.

They're beautiful. A lot of them are spiral galaxies. They're very similar to nearby galaxies. They have a nice mature structure to them.

Now, some of them look distorted if they're near the gravitational lens. They look stretched. But we would expect that.

We know what a gravity lens looks like. We've seen them before. But in terms of the actual structure of these galaxies, a lot of them are spirals.

They're disk -shaped galaxies. That was not expected by the secularists. So what do we find?

Lots of galaxies at great distances, well beyond redshift 14, and lots even at redshift 14, where they were just supposed to be starting to form.

They're already there, as if they were spoken into existence. They are fully formed.

There's no evidence of galaxy evolution in that image or in any of the data that James Webb has collected so far.

The farthest galaxies look pretty similar to nearby galaxies. They are as massive as nearby galaxies.

Some astronomers actually were able to estimate the mass of these galaxies, and they are comparable to the mass of nearby galaxies.

They're not low -mass stuff that's building up over time, and they're well -structured. I've read a number of technical papers where astronomers were astounded, secular astronomers were astounded, that you're finding disk -shaped galaxies out at that distance at times where they shouldn't have formed yet.

Well, what about the heavy elements? Well, the James Webb Space Telescope does have an instrument on it to detect the atomic fingerprint, as it were, of these galaxies, and it found that these galaxies all have, the ones that it's analyzed so far, all have heavy elements in them.

They're population one and population two stars. It detected oxygen, the signature of oxygen in these galaxies.

That's a heavy element by astronomy standards. All three of those results were the results that I predicted back in January of last year, and they were confirmed in July of last year by the

James Webb Space Telescope. Of course, all of those are contrary to the predictions of the secularists. They were wrong on all three of those.

The creationists, we were right on all three of those. It's not because we're just a lot smarter than they are. It's we have a better starting point.

I start from God's word and build my thinking on that. Now, my thinking is fallible, but God's word isn't.

Starting from that foundation gave me a huge advantage. What about my fourth prediction on how the secularists would respond when their three predictions failed?

Remember, I predicted that Webb, you'll see headlines like this, Webb discovers that galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought.

Well, I found some technical papers and articles. Here's one that said, hey, it turns out galaxies started forming much earlier than many astronomers previously thought.

That's from UConn today, August 9, 2022. There's another one, massive galaxies formed earlier in the universe than previously known.

That's from Nature News, July 27, 2022. Here's another one, evidence is building that the first galaxies formed earlier than expected.

That's from Sky and Telescope, January 10, 2023. I was not only right about the science,

I was right about how the secularists would respond to it. That's because I know something about human nature.

The Bible tells me something about human nature. It tells us that human beings are great at deceiving ourselves.

Self -deception is a real phenomenon. It's something that we need to keep in check. What you're seeing there really is just very powerful confirmation of biblical creation.

You're seeing galaxies at distances beyond where they should have been allowed to form in the secular view.

You're seeing fully designed galaxies as if they had just been spoken into existence by God and didn't need any time to evolve into their current state.

We're seeing that those distant galaxies have heavy elements in them, as we creationists would expect, because we know at least some heavy elements existed before stars, since the

Earth existed before stars. Pretty exciting. Even the way the secularists responded fits right into our predictions, because the

Bible tells us that people are not the neutral and objective, rational observers of nature that they like to think they are.

We have a bias, and there is an anti -God bias in the Big Bang view, the secular view of origins.

That's the whole point of it, to explain how the universe could come about without invoking the supernatural. So we did pretty well.

I'm very excited about this. This, I think, blows away the idea that, well, creationists, they don't do real science.

Creationists, they don't make any predictions that are then confirmed. Well, here you go. Here are three scientific predictions that are confirmed and one psychological prediction that was confirmed.

There was a fourth prediction I made in the article, but it'll take a few years for that to be confirmed or refuted. I'm predicting that James Webb will also detect extrasolar planets whose composition or orbit, or what have you, defies secular expectations.

They'll have a composition that's not expected, something like that, or evidence of a strong magnetic field, which cannot exist in a billions of years view without some kind of recharging mechanism.

It has yet to do that. It's only I think two extrasolar planets so far. And so it'll take a little more time to see if that fourth one is confirmed, but it's a very exciting time to be a biblical creationist and particularly a biblical creationist astronomer, because we're now getting data from regions of the universe that were inaccessible just a few years ago.

I mean, we're looking at regions in space that secularists thought we'd see just stuff starting to form and so on.

And instead we see evidence that God spoke these things into existence, that they were designed from the beginning to work the way that they do, to give light upon the earth and ultimately to glorify

God, one of the purposes of Him making all these wonderful galaxies.

It's a very bad time to be a secularist right now because the data just keep coming in.

There's always been sufficient data to confirm that God's word is true from the beginning.

That's always been the case. There's never been an excuse for atheism, but how much more now, now that we have instruments that can probe into the level of atoms and see the way things are organized and now reach out to the deepest levels of space and see that God's word is true from the beginning.

And that should encourage all of us, because when the science, when the Bible touches on science, it is right because it's

God's word. And therefore when it touches on other issues like the gospel, we can have confidence. That's not something, you know, the fact that I'm going to have eternal life one day is not something

I can verify by the scientific method, at least not yet. But it's something that I know is true because it's something that's promised me in God's word and all those who trust in Christ, those who repent of sin and put their trust in Him.

And so it should give us confidence to preach the gospel with boldness. And when people come and challenge us on scientific matters, say, hey, science is on our side too.

In fact, science itself is a creation endeavor. The fact that we can probe the universe and gain information from it because the universe is upheld logically by the mind of God and God made our senses to be able to observe and probe that universe.

So a very exciting time to be a consistent Christian and a biblical creationist in particular. I think

I'll end the presentation there and be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you so much.

That was great. And a couple of things before we get going with Q &A.

So people who are in the Zoom with us, as a reminder, especially for those of you who are new and joining us, please keep your, continue to keep your microphones and cameras off during this

Q &A time. There will be a time when we go off air that those of you in Zoom can turn them on for a couple of minutes before we say good night to Dr.

Lyle. So that was Dr. Lyle, you've helped us set a couple of records tonight.

We've had the most people in attendance, both in Zoom and watching with us along on Facebook. So the other thing is we have more questions coming from Facebook than here in the

Zoom. So we'll go back and forth, but we're going to start with a couple of related questions here in Zoom.

So you mentioned that the telescope is, that people are able to fix the telescope.

Actually, I think Robin said the Hubble was fixed. Can you explain how that, how that they do that?

So the, when the Hubble was originally launched in 1990, and the first images we got back, they were blurring and that they immediately recognized something's wrong.

And it turned out the curvature of the mirror, the mirror has the, the mirrors on both the

Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, they're not flat, they're slightly curved. And that's necessary in order to bring the light to a focus.

The curvature for the Hubble was wrong. Now it's wrong by a tiny amount. This is just a tiny amount, but it had to do with the instrument that was designed to correct and polish and make the final adjustments.

That instrument had a bad circuit on it or something, and it caused the curvature to be a little bit off. And so once they realized that they were, they were able to go back to that instrument, realize how much the curvature was off, and then they designed an instrument called

CoStar, which basically acts like a contact lens that fixes the image so that it's clear again.

And once CoStar was installed, that eliminated that problem. And then I think the other instruments that were, that replaced it over the years, had that correction built into it in any case.

How did they install it though? That's my question. Space Shuttle. Did they land it on the Space Shuttle? Yeah, they went up with Space Shuttle and the astronauts would get out.

Several times the astronauts have gone out, they've replaced the gyros on Hubble and they've done other things.

All those instruments have been swapped out. That's always done by astronauts in the Space Shuttle. And I'm not sure if there was a mission after the

Space Shuttle had been discontinued, but in any case, when the Space Shuttle was active, that's how they would do it. And similarly, then with the

James Webb Space Telescope, what keeps it in orbit? Bill's asking that. And maybe you can touch again, there was a little bit of conversation in Zoom about what point it's orbiting around.

It's not orbiting around the earth, it's orbiting around a point. And what is it that keeps it in orbit?

Yeah, so the L2 Lagrangian point, it's a point in space that's a million miles away from the earth, exactly in the opposite direction of the sun.

So L2 and the earth and the sun are in a straight line. And then the spacecraft orbits around that L2. And it's weird because it's orbiting around nothing.

There's nothing there at L2. But it turns out that the gravity of the earth and the sun add in such a way that the spacecraft will naturally orbit around that point.

It's what's called an unstable equilibrium, which means a natural object orbiting there would eventually escape.

But the spacecraft has maneuvering thrusters, and it's able to keep it in that orbit. But it's a weird way of gravity, basically, the gravity of the earth and the sun combining to produce a stable point in space.

So it orbits around L2 and L2 orbits around the sun, just outside the earth's orbit.

It's kind of a strange phenomenon, because it's something that we don't hear a whole lot about.

But if you look up on the internet, look up Lagrangian points, you can get some information on that.

Okay. And then from Facebook, Dan is asking, are you going to write a book about this?

And he says you should. Um, certainly, I'd like to include these results in a book at some point.

I'm not sure I've written I've written a follow up article on the website that was posted back, I think, September last year,

I posted a results article. And in fact, if you go to the original article, I added a link to the results article.

So you can it's all published. It's all there on the website. I like having on the website, it's free, it's accessible to everyone.

And so everybody can get blessed by that. I'm always writing books or thinking about writing books.

So who knows, it'll probably make it into one at some point. I there's, there's a lot more research to be done, because there's some other things when

I saw that image, there's some other things that surprised me a little bit, that made me think, okay,

I need to make some adjustments to my cosmology as well. I mean, my main predictions were right. But there's, there's an effect with the apparent angle of galaxies that needs to be taken into consideration.

And it's given me food for thought. So it's given me food to develop a more detailed cosmology that would probably result in the book at some point.

So we'll see, it won't be anytime soon, though. Well, and speaking of books, so Taylor on Facebook says that he's read your physics of Einstein book, and he he enjoyed that.

And he said, using ASC, we would expect to see fully formed galaxies regardless of distance, correct?

Yep, yep, exactly. That was the basis for my making. At least the my second prediction that the galaxies be fully designed, fully formed at any distance.

So yeah. And then as a follow up, he also said, when using the ASC to defend a young creation against the distant starlight issue, would you then not be able to use the

JWST findings effectively because of using ASC? So the got to be a little careful here, the anisotropic synchrony convention is that it's a convention, it's something you can choose to use, or you can choose to use a different convention, you can use the

Einstein synchrony convention where light takes a year to travel a distance of one light year. Or you can use the anisotropic synchrony convention where it takes no time if it's inward directed, two years if it's outward directed, you can use either of those.

It's a question of how do you how do you define now at a distance in space, and there's no objective way to do it because of the physics that Einstein discovered.

Building on that, if I then say, okay, but I think the Bible is using the anisotropic synchrony convention, now

I've made a claim that's testable. Conventions aren't testable, truth claims are. And so if I say

I think the Bible's using anisotropic synchrony convention, therefore I think God made on all the stars in the universe on day four by that convention, which would be the more ancient convention, rather than the modern convention of Einstein, that makes certain predictions on what we would expect to see.

And those have so far been confirmed. I'm now kind of expecting that galaxies may continue indefinitely.

There might be an infinite number of galaxies actually. So that's something that I hadn't really considered before, but now I'm taking it very seriously.

So it makes, it allows us to make some testable models. The convention's not testable, it's a convention, but the model that says the

Bible's using that convention, that's testable and allows us to make predictions, and the predictions

I've made so far have been correct. So that's very exciting. And is the telescope, it's still in orbit taking pictures?

I mean, is there a date when we'll get more pictures that like the next set or something? Yeah, there already have been more.

It's just the, you know, the first few were news media because they're, you know, they're there, but it's already taken more data.

It's imaged an exo -stellar planet, so it, which is exciting. I just think it's amazing because, you know, when

I was young, we knew of nine planets because Pluto was a planet back then, and that was it. And now we know of about 5 ,000.

That's amazing, orbiting other stars. And the James Webb Space Telescope has actually seen one.

It's actually got a, you can see a picture of a planet orbiting another star. I think it's amazing. There are some Earth -based telescopes that can do that too, but Webb has confirmed that.

So it's continuing to take data. Not all the data will be pictures. A lot of the data will be analyzing the spectra, which will tell us the composition of planets and or distant galaxies.

But yeah, they continue to release data. And so there's more than just the five initial images that were released back in July.

Okay, so this is coming from Zoom. Ronald is asking, what was the original motivation to build the telescope?

Because if secularists expect to see nothing or very few galaxies, why still spend so much money to build it?

Is it intended to confirm the Big Bang Theory? Yeah, that was one of its principle.

You can take a look at the James Webb Space Telescope, their homepage, and you can see here's our mission objectives.

And one of their things was they wanted to study galaxy formation. They wanted to see how these early galaxies are forming.

And so they built a telescope that theoretically can go beyond the distance when the first galaxies have formed.

So they can see the first galaxy forming, and then they can, by looking closer and closer, they can see galaxies, how they've evolved over time.

And instead, what they found was it looks like the galaxies were all just created right there where they're at. So I'm very happy that, and by the way, my sincerest thanks and congratulations to the team that built this amazing instrument.

It is a work of genius. And I appreciate the minds that went into it. Again, I know some of them from Boulder. And people sometimes tend to think that, well,

NASA, you know, they're all secularists. There's a lot of Christians in NASA. There's a lot of, there's biblical creationists there.

Now, the main funding was to, you know, to basically confirm the

Big Bang. But I think those creationists who worked on it said, we know that's what it's for, but we don't think that's what it's going to discover.

And of course, the creationists were right. So I'm very happy that the telescope has been successful.

Thank you all for your tax dollars for this $10 billion spacecraft.

I think it was a good investment. All that money just to confirm Genesis. Hey, money well spent. That's really,

I mean, it's really cool. Are they working on another telescope? Chris and Monica here are asking if they are and when it would be expected to launch.

It's a good question. I would imagine that there's a group that's already working on the next one. Because like I said, this one was in the works since the late 1980s before Hubble even launched.

So I'm sure there are people considering the next one. I am not in the loop on that anymore. Back when I was in grad school,

I was daily meeting with all kinds of astrophysicists there at, you know, at JILA and CASA.

And I'm not in the loop as much anymore. So I haven't kept up with it. But I'm sure there's a next, there's always a next program.

And whether it'll get funded or not, that's the big issue. Okay, back to the Facebook.

Glenn is asking, does the expansion of space itself add to the redshift? Okay, that's an interesting question.

So the idea has been for many, many years, actually just about for about a century, that the expansion of space is what's causing the redshift.

The galaxies are thought, you can think of the galaxies as being ants on a balloon and the balloons getting blown up, right?

The ants can move a little bit, but the balloon is the main thing that's causing all the ants to separate from all the other ants.

Ants that are really close together on the balloon might be able to overcome the expansion and actually meet. And so there are galaxies like the

Andromeda galaxy that's actually moving toward us. But the thinking is that the expansion of space is actually what's causing the redshift.

Rather than the galaxies moving through space and it being a simple Doppler shift, the idea is that space itself has expanded in the time between when the light was emitted and when it was received on earth.

I'm now questioning that because there are some effects in the data that I'm seeing, and I'm not ready to go on record as saying this is it, but I'm looking into this, that it may not be expansion of space at all, but actually just Doppler shifts.

And the farther away galaxies are, the more Doppler shift that they are. So it could be either. There's no way to distinguish what's the cause of a redshift just by measuring the redshift.

And the three known possible causes are gravity, which is not terribly relevant here,

Doppler, and expansion of space. They all produce the same effect, so we can't tell which one's causing it.

So similarly from a biblical perspective, Rob here in Zoom is asking, doesn't scripture speak of God stretching out the heavens?

What do you understand this to be telling us? I think that is referring to the fact that galaxies are all moving away from each other.

The universe is getting bigger. But what I used to think that that's applying to the fabric of space being stretched out, but now

I wonder if it's merely the objects in the universe that are being stretched out. The galaxy is actually moving away from each other. I'm not alone in that.

There's at least one other creationist that proposed fairly recently in a technical paper, and I'm not sure if it's come out yet.

I was a reviewer on it, so I got an early lead on it, and so I don't want to take credit for his idea, but he was proposing that you can explain redshifts just with the

Doppler effect rather than expansion of space, and I think he's right, and I'm going to try to incorporate that into the model that I'm working on, the

ASK model, and see if we can get some information about that. But I do think the verse in Isaiah is referring to, and there's several places actually, there's several places in scripture where it refers to God stretching out the heavens, but at the very least it seems like God is making the universe bigger than it was originally, perhaps by moving all the galaxies away from all the other galaxies.

I think that's what that's referring to. So back on Facebook, Scott is saying, so was the universe fully expanded in the first 300 to 400 million years, making up for inflation?

Say that again. Yeah, so was the universe fully expanded in the first three, so we're going to have to go back a little bit just to explain some things, but he says, so was the universe fully expanded in the first 300 to 400 million years, making up for inflation?

So, okay, so in the Big Bang view, inflation is, it's over real quick, it doesn't last very long, it lasts like a fraction of a second, and by the time the universe is the size of an orange, it's over.

So inflation is basically supposed to, it's a way of trying to solve a problem that the

Big Bang has called the horizon problem. Inflation is the idea that the universe, shortly after it banged into existence, began accelerating at an inflated rate, and then switched back to the slower rate, which is still quite fast.

So that takes place very quickly and then shuts off, and there's problems with it, there's problems getting it started, there's problems stopping it, but since it reduces what's called the horizon problem, a lot of astronomers have jumped, the majority of astronomers that are secular believe in this inflation scenario.

That's very early in the Big Bang, by the time we're talking 300 million years, that's long gone, and so in the secular view, since inflation, the universe has been sort of coasting at this whatever rate it is, and perhaps it's been accelerated a little bit, if there's what's called dark energy.

That's a conjecture that's fairly recent, but in any case, so it's not something that stops at 300 million years or 400 million years.

It's something that would continue to today, again, in their view. In my view, it's just the universe is bigger than it was when

God first created it. Okay, back here in Zoom, Chuck and Chrissy are asking,

Dr. Lyle, are more elements expected to be found out there or even here on Earth?

So there are around 90 naturally occurring elements that exist in the universe, and then we can create new elements on the

Earth by slamming together existing ones at high energy, very high energy, but these heavier elements that we create are unstable, right?

Anything heavier than like, let's see, would it be uranium or plutonium?

Anyway, these heavier elements, they're always unstable. They last, the ones that we create in the laboratory, last a fraction of a second, so you might notice on modern periodic tables, there's that list down at the bottom that just keeps growing a little bit as we make these new elements.

We don't expect to find them out in space because they have such a transient existence.

The only place they could exist in space would be in some place that's a very high energy situation, like in a quasar or something like that.

Other than that, we would not expect to find elements out in space that do not exist on Earth or can not be created on Earth anyway.

There is a conjecture that after a certain atomic number, I forget what it is, 126, 128, something like that, that the elements will become stable again, and theoretically there could be heavier ones, but that is, as far as I know, that has not been confirmed.

Okay, so speaking of finding things out in space, Jessica here in Zoom wants to know if we could find other life in another galaxy or planet.

Well, I don't expect to find life on space. Again, thinking biblically,

God formed the Earth to be inhabited, the Bible says in Isaiah 45, 18, so Earth seems, not that the

Bible actually says and there's no life in space, it doesn't say that, but the Earth does seem to be very special in scripture.

God spent five of the six creation days working on the Earth, making it right for life. Day four, everything else.

So all the other planets were made on day four, almost as an afterthought to go along with the Earth. God created the animals on the

Earth, he created plants for the animals to eat, and then he created human beings to care for the animals, to have dominion over them, and we would not be able to have dominion over animals that were on another planet.

So I don't expect to find life out in space. If you have intelligent life out in space, there's some theological issues you're going to have to think through, right, because, you know,

Klingons, they can't be saved because they're not related to Jesus and so on, and so as much as I like science fiction,

I don't expect to find life out in the universe. That's another prediction where the secularists would disagree, because they believe in an evolutionary origin of life.

Life's just something that happens when the chemistry is right. Hey, it's a big universe, so there's probably another place where chemistry is right.

So in the secular view, there ought to be life on all kinds of planets, and so it's more, they have more, they have more of the Star Trek view, but I like sci -fi, but I think the real universe,

I think intelligent life in particular, and probably all life is limited to Earth except life that we bring out into space with us, obviously, if we set up a colony on Mars or something, which would be neat, but I don't know what would happen, but other than life that we bring with us,

I don't think you're going to find life out in space. Did the James Webb Space Telescope take any pictures of black holes?

Did it take a picture? No, not really. No, it's not really, it's not really designed to be able to do that.

Until recently, no one really had a picture of a black hole, and they're small compared to other objects in the universe, and so, but a few years ago, they finally got one using radio telescopes.

They got an image of the black hole that is in the core of the M87 galaxy.

It's a massive black hole, and the image of it, what would you see when you see a black hole?

It's black, right, because it sucks in all the light, but around many black holes, especially those that are in the core of a galaxy, we think just about every major galaxy has a massive black hole in the middle of it.

Acts like a gravitational anchor, keeps the stars orbiting at the right distance and rates, and M87 definitely has one, and we now have a picture of what's called an accretion disk.

There's material that's being funneled into that black hole, so the black hole is black, so you see nothing there, but you see this accretion disk orbiting around it, and it was a remarkable image that was produced just a few years ago, and then they did it again with the black hole that's in the middle of our galaxy, which is obscured in visible wavelengths, but it's visible in radio, and so they were able to do that again, and again, you have that accretion disk.

It's exactly what we were expecting to find, so that's pretty neat, but James Webb isn't really designed to detect that, so I would be surprised if they were able to get it to do that.

Okay, the next question we have, from here in Zoom, why does dark energy and dark matter need to be added to the

Big Bang? Well, they don't. The reason we think that dark matter exists,

I'm a little more skeptical of dark energy, but dark matter, there's good evidence for it, and it has nothing to do with the

Big Bang. Dark matter is the name we give to anything that we think exists because it's gravitationally pulling on something we can see, and yet we can't see the thing itself.

So Neptune, when Neptune was first discovered, it was discovered because it was pulling on the planet

Uranus. Before anyone had seen Neptune, two mathematicians knew it was there, and they calculated its position based on its gravitational influence on other planets, so for a short period of time,

Neptune was dark matter until somebody saw it visually. Now it's not classified as dark matter.

Dark matter is anything that you can't see, but you know it's there because it's pulling on something that you can see gravitationally, and when we look at the rate at which stars orbit in their galaxy, we can measure that from their

Doppler shift. We can measure the speed of stars orbiting, and we can calculate the mass that would be necessary to keep the stars in that orbit, and lo and behold, the mass is much greater than all the stuff we see interior to those stars, and things that we can account for, like dust that might not, you know, glow in visible wavelengths, but you can see it in radio, and so we think dark matter,

I think dark matter exists. The only alternative is that physics, as we understand it, is wrong, basically, and we know it can't be too far off because we can get people to land on the moon and stuff, so we know our understanding of physics is at least close, but it could require a little modification, but I tend to lean toward dark matter.

Dark energy is the idea that that empty space may have a little bit of mass to it, and if it does, then when the universe expands, if indeed the space is expanding, that changes the energy content of the universe, and so that it's weird because that creates kind of an acceleration effect.

It's a little counterintuitive. I'm a little more skeptical of dark energy, but I think there's very good evidence for dark matter.

Neither of these really has anything to do with the Big Bang. There are some, I mean, they have to incorporate them into the

Big Bang because there's good evidence that, at least for dark matter, that it exists and maybe dark energy, so they incorporate it into the model, but a lot of people have the misconception that dark matter was invented to save the

Big Bang. It wasn't. It was a conclusion drawn based on the rates at which stars orbit their galaxy.

Okay, we have one of our past CFS speakers on with us tonight. His name is Jim Pamplin, and he has a couple of in -depth questions that we're going to save for the end if we have time, but on the topic of dark matter, he's asking, could cold molecular hydrogen be dark matter?

Cold molecular, if it were, probably not, probably not. If it were concentrated into clumps, that might do it, but then that would cause what are called microlensing events, and the last

I heard was that, and this is something that I studied a while back. I actually did some actual research on this where we looked at microlensing events, so if you had these blobs of very cold hydrogen gas, when they pass in front of a star, the gravity will lens the starlight and make the star temporarily brighten.

We do see a few of these events, but not nearly enough to account for the amount of dark matter that would be needed to exist in order to keep the galaxies in orbit, so the prevailing theory is that dark matter consists of particles that have not yet been discovered.

Okay, let's talk about stars. On Facebook, we have a question from Asa.

He says, is there any evidence for star and galaxy formation, or is that purely a secular speculation?

I would say that's purely a secular speculation. We certainly don't see any evidence of galaxy formation, and that was the one thing that the

James Webb Telescope was really, the secularists were hoping to find with it in these data, and you don't see it.

You don't see it. Star formation, likewise, we don't see stars forming. That's certainly true.

Sometimes you'll see an article. We think this is a star forming region, but let me clue you in. A star forming region is a region where they see lots of hot blue stars, and we all agree that hot blue stars can't last billions of years, and so the conclusion that the secularists draw is they must have formed recently, which means this must be a star forming region, but they're not seeing stars actually forming in the sense of a collapsing cloud of hydrogen gas.

There are some theoretical reasons to think that it probably doesn't happen at all, or at least that it's very rare.

Gas tends to expand. Normally, the outward force of gas pressure is orders of magnitude greater than the meager inward force of gravity in something like a nebula, which is what stars are supposed to collapse from, and there's problems of how do you dump the angular momentum.

There's problems of how do you dump the magnetic field pressure, which would tend to resist collapse as well, so I'm not being dogmatic, but I'm of the opinion that stars probably do not form at all, and I certainly don't think there's any evidence that they do.

Okay, so on a similar note here in Zoom, Chris and Monica are asking, have we seen a star die?

If so, did God then create that star on the brink of death? We've seen stars explode.

I mean, we're being a little anthropomorphic when we talk about stars living and dying. They're blobs of gas, but they do occasionally explode.

As far as we know, only the really massive stars do that, and did God create them?

Well, he knew they would do that, so that's part of what happens in the universe.

There's plenty left. It's not like we're going to run out of stars anytime soon. There's at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and we haven't had a star blow up in our own galaxy in about 400 years, so we're overdue, by the way, so I don't know, cross your fingers, but I say sarcastically, but we have seen stars in other galaxies explode.

I got to see one back in the late 90s. There was a star in a galaxy that's, you know, with a backyard telescope, you can see it, and when that star exploded, it briefly became as bright as the rest of the galaxy.

You can clearly see that one star in the galaxy. It's really kind of amazing to see that. I've seen a few since then, so yes, stars do blow themselves to bits every now and then.

Only the massive ones do it, and there's plenty left. Did God create it on the brink of explosion?

Not necessarily, because it's taken a few thousand years for it to accomplish that process, but God created the process, obviously, so it's something that that he planned from the beginning.

Also here in Zoom, Stacy's asking, do you believe in the end, when this

Earth is judged, that the Earth and universe are destroyed and remade by the Lord, or is the Earth going to be the only thing remade?

The Bible talks about there being a fire. It might be a fire of purification that burns everything that's not pleasing to God, but if you think about it, people have said blasphemous things.

They've said blasphemous things over the radio. Those radio waves are now traveling out into space. The universe has been polluted by our sins, so I expect that God will, when he talks about the new heavens and the new

Earth, I expect it's a new heavens and a new Earth, perhaps a resurrected heavens and Earth. There's a sense in which we're going to have a glorified body in the eternal state, an immortal body, and yet we bury our dead.

Why? Because we expect a resurrection, that that body is going to live again. So is it the same body, or is it a new body?

Well, yes, and maybe the same is true of our universe. Maybe God burns away anything that's impure in this universe and remakes it.

The one thing we do know, it's going to be a good state for those of us who are in Christ, a state where the curse will be no more, and it's something that I look forward to.

Yeah, me too. Another Zoom attendee is asking, using the method they use to discover

Neptune, is that why they believe there is planet nine? I would sort of.

It's a little more complicated. Not everybody believes there's a planet nine in our solar system. There are a few people that proposed it.

It's not as direct as the method that the astronomers used, or that the mathematicians used.

Le Verrier and Adams independently, based on the orbit of Uranus, calculated the position of another planet that should be out there.

That's brilliant. It's good science. Those who have speculated that there's a ninth planet, they're not doing it nearly as directly.

They're looking at the orbits of certain long period comets and saying, you could explain that maybe if there was a planet orbiting way out here, but it's not like they predicted the exact position of the planet or anything like that.

It certainly hasn't been detected. I'm kind of skeptical that they'll find a planet out there.

If they do, it would have to be really far away from the sun, or we would have found it by now, and very dark as well, or we'd have found it by now.

It's not exactly the same method, but it's related. It's related to gravitational interactions. From Facebook, Curtis is asking, my understanding is that secularists do not expect

Earth to be the center of the universe. Is there the opportunity for JWST data to prove or disprove that?

Well, okay, what do we mean by the universe? What do we mean by the center? What does that mean? In ancient times, there was this debate about, in terms of motion and whether or not the

Earth was stationary and the planets all sort of moved around that, the geocentric view. Then there's the heliocentric view.

The sun really is the center of our solar system. The planets go around that. From a Newtonian perspective, heliocentrism is true.

Geocentrism is false. From a mathematical view, you can pick any center you like.

You can say Mars is the center of all things. You can measure everything from Mars. What do we really mean by the center?

The Earth's in motion. If there's an exact center of the universe, the Earth wouldn't be there for very long, because it is in motion.

There's the question of, well, is our solar system, maybe it would be better, is our solar system near the center of a finite number of galaxies?

It's possible. On the other hand, it's possible that the galaxies go on forever. If they're infinite, then there can't be a center.

There can't be a center if there's an infinite universe. If the galaxies are finite, and maybe they form like a sphere, a sphere of galaxies, then there would be a center.

We might be near that, or we might not. There's no way to know in terms of the observational data. It is eight o 'clock on the

West Coast. That's what time we normally end. We have quite a few more questions. Do you mind going another 10 minutes with us?

Go ahead. Next comes from Facebook. This is from Sam on Facebook.

There's several parts of the question. Let me read it. Then if you need me to go back, I will.

He says, are the edges of the universe casually disconnected from us because space -time is expanding further than light?

Are we losing sight of part of the universe? Also, could different parts of space -time be in different time eras, and the universe is aging at different rates in different areas?

The first one, are they causally connected, is probably what he's saying. Light has reached from there to here.

They can affect us. We can potentially affect them. I'd say anything you can see is in the past light cone of us.

Therefore, they're causally connected. Anything we can see is causally connected.

In some models of the expansion of the universe, there are places that get pushed out of the light cones.

Therefore, we can't ever access them or know about them. It's interesting whether the actual universe is that way.

I don't think the actual universe is that way. For one thing, God made the stars to give light upon the earth.

He says, and it was so. That tells me the stars gave their light upon the earth. I think immediately because he's using an anisotropic synchrony convention.

That would mean that they're causally connected. Therefore, everything, every star would be causally connected to the earth in some fashion.

That's my best guess on that one. I'm not sure I answered all of those. That was the first.

The next one was, are we losing sight of part of the universe? I answered that. There is that possibility.

I don't think that's the case, but the math allows for that. Also, could different parts of space -time be in different time eras?

That's hard to answer because we'd have to define what we mean by now and things like that.

That depends on the synchrony convention that you're using. Assuming that the

Bible uses an anisotropic synchrony convention, I would say we're looking at the entire universe in real time. It's aged at about the same rate as us, other than there is an effect with redshift.

Redshift and time dilation are connected. Galaxies that are highly redshifted have aged less than galaxies that are nearby, which is to say they've aged 2 ,000 years instead of 6 ,000 years.

There is an effect of differential aging due to redshift, whether that aging is apparent due to light travel time or real due to time dilation, and an anisotropic synchrony convention is observationally indistinguishable.

I hope that answers the question. Then the last part of it was, could the universe be aging at different areas?

I answered that. That is possible. Yes. Okay. Let's do this one next.

In Zoom, Rob is asking, do you think that star explosions are the result of the fall? I don't, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about that.

We got to be a little careful. We know what the effects of the fall are that the Bible specifically tells us.

We know it affected the earth because God cursed the earth. We know it affected plants because God caused thorns and thistles to come forth as a result of the curse.

We know it affected animals. God cursed the serpent above the other animals, suggesting they're also cursed, but not to the same extent.

We know it affected human beings in that men would work by the sweat of their brow. Work would be difficult at times.

Labor would be difficult for women. I think there's evidence that it affected the universe because the

Bible talks about the creation groaning and travailing in Romans 8. The problem is the

Bible doesn't give us the details on how the environment outside the earth was affected by the curse. Could it be things like stars exploding?

It could be. It could be. On the other hand, a star is not a living organism. There's no problem with a star.

It's a ball of gas. It's fun to watch them blow up. It's really neat. I've seen a few supernovae now in my life.

It's neat. It gives us information about the distance to those galaxies and things like that. It's not necessarily a result of a curse.

It could be, but my initial guess would be no. From Facebook, Jason is asking, is the universe rotating?

That's a good question. I don't think there's any hard evidence for that. It could be though.

The math allows for a rotating universe. It's really interesting. If it rotates fast enough, then you can actually get the light cones to where you could use it to time travel.

That makes me think that probably it isn't, at least not at that rate. Then we'd have to ask what's causing it and so on.

What do we define by the universe? Are we defining it by the fabric of space -time? Is that rotating? Are we defining it by the mass in the universe or does the mass in the universe determine the rotation rate?

It's a tough question to answer, but it is possible, but I don't see any evidence of it. Then also on Facebook, Taylor is asking, would dark energy break the first law of thermodynamics?

Yeah, potentially, but then probably what would happen is they would modify the law and they'd say, well, the average energy density of the universe is constant, something like that, but the net energy, potentially.

Yeah, that's a good question. Okay. I'm skimming.

I think that might be, for the most part, everything. There are some interesting comments.

For example, somebody here in Zoom mentioned that he worked at NASA or he works at NASA and got canceled for bringing up these predictions and confirmations in a public science summit.

Yeah, that can happen. Sorry to say that. I won't name names on that one. I think for the most part, the star formation only happens in Hollywood.

Oh, here we go. What is the most impactful and succinct response to those who believe that the earth is flat?

Well, I would refer them to some articles that I've written on that topic. I might point them to Job 2610, where the

Bible indicates that the terminator of earth, the boundary between light and darkness is a circle, and that can only happen on a sphere.

That's the only shape that will always produce a circular terminator. The oldest document that I found that speaks to the sphericity of the earth is the

Bible. You're going against the Bible if you believe in a flat earth, but also it's relatively easy to measure the shape of the earth.

There are several experiments I've done. If you look at the series of articles that I've written, I think there are about four or five articles that I've written on this topic.

One of them was a response, actually a three -part response article. I showed some experiments that you can do to test the shape of the earth and even measure its size.

That's something that it's not hard to do. I remember when I grew up in Ohio and when we took our first family vacation,

I was 16, just learned how to drive. We took our family vacation out to Colorado.

I remember calculating based on the size of the earth when the Rocky Mountains would first be visible.

Lo and behold, I got the right answer because the earth really is round. If the earth were flat, theoretically, you'd be able to see the

Rocky Mountains from Ohio because on a flat earth, you can see anywhere from anywhere. We can use trigonometry.

This is high school trigonometry. You can use that to calculate the distance at which you can see the Rocky Mountains. It's about 150 miles, by the way.

150 miles away from the Rocky Mountains, you can see the tops of them. It depends a little bit on the local terrain, but you can't see them from Dodge City.

Now, if the earth were flat, you would be able to see the Rocky Mountains from Dodge City. I've shown some calculations where you can do that and you can drive to Dodge and look west and see if you see

Pike's Peak. If you can, the earth's flat. If you can't, it's round. We're going to do one more.

As I mentioned, Jim has a couple of very in -depth science -y ones. Maybe we'll put him in touch with you later because you can look at them in the comments.

One more question that came from Facebook is, or maybe it's more of a comment, but it's,

I think, before very long, scientists will refer to the start of galaxies in a similar way they talk about the

Cambrian Explosion in the fossil record. Yeah, this already kind of started because, again, z equals 20.

We've seen galaxies at a redshift of 20 and that corresponds in the secular thinking to only 180 million years after the

Big Bang. Galaxies are not supposed to form at that distance. Yeah, you're not wrong. You're about this and anything else that they want to find and how they can support you because we want to be sure to thank you for your time by telling people how they can support you.

Well, thank you. Yes, the website, biblicalscienceinstitute .com. Biblicalscienceinstitute .com.

You can get all the articles there. It's a free website. You're welcome to look at all those articles. The ones on James Webb Space Telescope, those are freely accessible.

You can see the predictions I made. You can see the results of those as well. If you do want to support us, there's a donate option at the top.

You can support us. A lot of people support us with a monthly, like $20 monthly donation, something like that.

Or some people give us a one -time donation. That's always appreciated. Of course, you can always support us in prayer. I have a heart for students.

I really want to reach college students, maybe because I was one for what seemed like millions of years. Of course, they don't have any money.

How can we help you? You can pray for me and pray for this ministry. You can take a look at the live events that are coming up.

I don't have any for this month anyway. You can take a look at those at the bottom on the website.

Check out the website and support us if you can. Once again, we're

Creation Fellowship Santee. You can find links to most of our past presentations by typing in tinyurl .com

forward slash cfsantee. That's C like creation, F like fellowship. Santee is spelled

S -A -N -T -E -E. You can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com.

We never send spam. We just send links to our upcoming speakers. Speaking of that,

Dr. Lyle and I and our ministry have a couple of mutual friends who are going to be coming the next couple of weeks.

Next week, we have cartoonist Dan Litha, who will be talking about the creativity of our creator.

The week after that, we have Eli Iola from Revealed Apologetics, who will be talking about presuppositional apologetics, another favorite topic of Dr.

Lyle. We hope that you'll join us for those as well. With that, we're going to go ahead and sign off. Dr. Lyle, if you want to stay back a few minutes here in Zoom, that would be great.