Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
Today's episode features Dr. Jake Hebert, physicist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Heber.
Solar eclipses, especially the total solar eclipses, are really amazing sights and people used to be alarmed by them. But there's a lot of things we can learn about creation and our creator from the sun itself as well as solar eclipses.
Now, at the time we're making this recording, there's an upcoming solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017, and another one scheduled in 2024.
So, what should you do if you'd like to see a solar eclipse and see it safely? The safest way to see a solar eclipse is to get two stiff pieces of cardboard or poster board, punch a hole in one of them, and make a kind of pinhole projector where you project an image of the sun on the second piece of poster board. That's the safest way to do it. You can also get solar glasses that enable you to look at the sun while the eclipse is occurring. As far as I know, there's only four companies that make.
These glasses that are safe to use to view the Sun during a solar eclipse. The companies are Rainbow Symphony, American Paper Optics, Thousand Oaks Optical, and TSE 17. You can also use a welding hood, but you've got to have number 14 welders glass or darker. And if you're not sure what the shade number is for the glass, don't use it. Don't take any chances.
And you need to inspect these glasses before using to make sure they haven't been damaged. And also, sunglasses are not good enough. You've got to have these special glasses to view the solar eclipse. The only time it is safe to view the eclipse without those solar glasses is during totality when you're right in the deepest part of the moon's shadow where the sun is essentially completely blocked except for the corona and a little bit of the chromosphere that you can see around the edges. But that only lasts for maybe two minutes or so.
And you want to make sure that that's the only time you can safely look at the sun directly. Anytime there is even a small sliver of the bright surface of the sun that's visible, you need to be using those protective glasses.
Now, solar eclipses are kind of interesting because they involve sort of an amazing coincidence. The fact that we can have these total solar eclipses requires both the sun and the moon to have approximately the same angular size in the sky. And it turns out that the sun is about 400 times farther away from the earth than the moon is. But it's also 400 times larger. And so the net effect, those two factors, cancel out so that the moon and the sun have approximately the same size, very nearly the same size in the sky, and you can get these total solar eclipses.
And it's interesting that really the only place in our solar system where you can really see a total solar eclipse is the one place in our solar system where we have people to see it. And that's something that a lot of people have pointed out. Guillermo Gonzalez, the astronomer, and Jay Richards have pointed that out in their book, The Privileged Planet. Even though they accept the Big Bang cosmology, which we don't, they make a number of good points in their book. And that's one of them about how just the fact that we can even see these total solar eclipses is really remarkable.
If you believe it's a coincidence, it is a very remarkable coincidence.
Now, of course, the secular scientists claim that our sun is totally insignificant. The late Carl Sagan, in his book Cosmos, he asked these questions. He said this. He said, Where are we? Who are we?
We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy, which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
So, in his view, we are totally insignificant. Our sun is insignificant. And yet, there are a lot of things about the sun that really do suggest design. And the coincidence, if you will, for the angular size of the sun and the moon being one of them. But there's a lot of other things about the sun that are remarkable.
Its location in our galaxy is a good place. It's a safe place for us to be. We're not too close to supernova and dangerous radiation. Its motion around the galaxy is in a good stable orbit, nearly circular orbit. We're in a pretty safe place.
It's a good place for us to be. Our atmosphere, it's remarkable that our atmosphere allows visible light to come through, but it blocks harmful X-ray and gamma radiation. Fortunately for us. Likewise, the sun is exceptionally stable, and a lot of astronomers are baffled by the fact that our sun is more stable than other stars like it. You often hear people say that our sun is just a typical run-of-the-mill star, but it is very stable.
And we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we come back from the break.
Now it's time for a short break. We'll hear more from Dr. Hebert in a moment. From sharks to butterflies, bats to orangutans, we can't help but marvel at the stunning and amusing creatures God has made. If you and your kids enjoy learning about animals, then you'll love our book, Guide to Animals, with its beautiful full-color images and fascinating facts.
Published by the Institute for Creation Research, Guide to Animals provides answers to many popular questions about the animal kingdom. How do chameleons change colors? How do jellyfish live without a brain? And what happened to the dinosaurs and other extinct animals? Guide to Animals shows how everything that can slither, crawl, soar, or swim displays the handiwork of God.
Order your copy of Guide to Animals from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. That's 800-628-7640 or visiting icr.org. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert.
Well, we were talking earlier about how the sun is very stable as far as its output of radiation, and one astronomer, Dr. Donald C. Brownlee from the University of Washington, said, could the sun send out a monstrous flare powerful enough to melt the ice on Jupiter's moons, destroy much of Earth's ozone layer, and obliterate all our satellites? It's possible, say astronomers who have studied other sun-like stars in our galaxy, which seem to produce enormous superflares about once a century. They are baffled by the fact that there are no records of similar solar explosions.
So, even though secular scientists are fond of saying that our sun is just a run-of-the-mill star, it's much more stable, and that seems to suggest that it is exceptional. Another reason that the sun is really remarkable is that really it should not exist except apart from a miracle. Secular scientists claim that stars in general, including our sun, form from these rotating clouds of dust and gas, primarily gas. This is sort of a modern version of something called the nebular hypothesis. But one big problem with this idea is that gases, unconfined gases, don't contract.
In order for this idea to work, you have to have these gases contract. They have to be compressed enough so that gravity can take over and then compress it still further so that nuclear fusion starts. The problem, though, is that when you have an unconfined gas, it doesn't do that. It just spreads out. You know, unless you have this giant piston out in space somewhere, how did you compress these gases?
And that's an enormous problem for these ideas that our sun, as well as other stars, came from this secular idea about a rotating cloud of gas. And there's lots of other problems with this idea as well. Even if you could somehow get around that difficulty, one big problem with this is that there's a problem with something called angular momentum. Angular momentum is a property possessed by spinning objects. And if you've ever seen a figure skater out on the ice, when she's spinning, when she brings her arms and legs closer to her trunk, she spins faster.
That is a result of something called conservation of angular momentum.
Well, in this view, you have this enormous gas cloud contracting, and so it ought to spin fast, really fast. In fact, the Sun has nearly 100% of the solar system's mass, and you would expect it would be spinning really fast. And yet, its angular momentum is not that much. It only has, I think, about 2% of the solar system's angular momentum.
So why is that? Why is the Sun not spinning much faster so that it has nearly all the angular momentum of the solar system? People have come up with ways to try to get around this, but nobody has really solved this apparent problem. And there's lots of other problems as well. One very famous secular astronomer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, said that if none of us knew in advance that stars exist, frontline research would offer plenty of convincing reasons for why stars could never form.
Now, of course, Dr. Tyson is no friend of biblical creation, but he's admitting that there are some serious problems with this idea that stars can form naturalistically. And also, our sun, believe it or not, presents problems for this idea of millions of years. About 40 years ago, a well-known solar astronomer named John Eddy created a bit of a ruckus when he made the following comments. He said, there is no evidence based solely on solar observation.
That the Sun is 4.5 to 5 billion years old.
Now he said, I suspect that the sun is 4.5 billion years old.
However, given some new and unexpected results to the contrary and some time for frantic recalculation and theoretical readjustment, I suspect that we could live with Bishop Usher's value for the age of the Earth and the Sun. I don't think we have much of the way in observational evidence and astronomy to conflict with that.
So John Eddy was doing what we creation scientists have pleaded with other scientists to do for many years, and that is to distinguish between the actual observations and the interpretation of those observations. And he's saying, Based on just what we see about the sun, it could very well be just 6,000 years old in accordance with the age you would get from scripture. And of course, we would argue that is in fact the case.
Furthermore, this claim that the sun is billions of years old gives evolutionists another problem. And ironically, Carl Sagan, who was fond of saying that our sun is ordinary and humdrum, is one of the fellows who pointed this out. According to their ideas about stellar evolution, the intensity of the sun would only have been about 70% of what it is now billions of years ago. Because of that, the Earth would have been much colder and you probably could not have had a liquid ocean. And yet, secular scientists believe there was a liquid ocean at this time.
This is coming directly from their belief in billions of years. And so that's a problem that they have not solved.
Now, every now and then, you will see news articles claiming that they've solved this problem, but they keep saying that over and over again, which is telling us they really haven't. And so this is a big problem for evolution. We hope this little discussion has been a blessing to you, and we'll see you again for the next Science Scripture and Salvation. Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org.
For over 45 years, ICR has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible's accuracy and authority by showing how science supports the Genesis creation account. Our scientists research the evidence for creation and communicate their findings through books, articles, DVD series, and conferences. Please visit our website at icr.org for more information about the latest scientific discoveries, to subscribe to our free magazine and devotional, and to locate our next creation conference at a venue near you. All of this and more at icr.org. If you've enjoyed this podcast, subscribe to Science, Scripture, and Salvation on iTunes.
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