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.
On today's show, we'll be joined by Brian Thomas, science writer with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Brian Thomas. Why does recent creation or biblical creation even matter? Why not just settle with creation? Hey, God did it, doesn't matter how He did it, as long as we agree that He did it.
I hear this a lot, but it does matter. It mattered to Jesus. If God's Word says it, and God meant to say what he said, and if all the other prophets and apostles, including Jesus, believed it and referenced Genesis creation, If it mattered to them, then who am I to say that it doesn't matter? One of the biggest reasons I think this really does matter, the age of the earth, if you will. Is that when we erase biblical creation, when we say, ah, Genesis didn't quite get it right, we blunt the impact of the gospel itself.
By inserting millions of years of death oh, by the way, and thorns and thistles Before sin, then people were dying. Before sin even entered the universe, before sin and before the curse, people were dying.
Well, that means they were suffering the curse of death before they even sinned, before sin was around. This is backwards, and it undermines the foundation for the gospel. And you know, what's exciting to us at the Institute for Creation Research is all the scientific evidence that backs up recent creation. It backs up biblical creation. We've been talking about many of these evidences this week.
We're looking at the stars now. And in the solar system One of my favorite planets is Saturn. Of course, Saturn itself is too hot for its evolutionary age. It should have cooled down if it says Yeah. the evolutionary age assignment of four and a half billion years or so.
And no one, no secular astronomer, knows how to how Saturn could still be as hot as it is. And the same is true with one of its moons. Enceladus, It's a small moon. It orbits the E ring. You know Saturn has these beautiful rings.
has provided a number of surprising discoveries in recent years. A new report shows it once again defying expectations. Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have found that it produces far more heat than they ever predicted.
So the smaller an object is, the less likely it should still retain heat from a supposedly billions of years old beginning. It should be cold. if it's that old. But the Cassini spacecraft collected heat output data from the moon. Cassini had earlier performed similar studies on Saturn itself.
and found that the planet is too hot to fit the standard Long age model, but in that standard model, Enceladus, like all the moons and planets in the whole solar system. was born as a spin off from a ball of hot gas billions of years ago. According to this story, after a few million years the planets and moons should have lost all their original heat. which itself has given no explanation, But that heat should have gone to the surrounding universe. Shouldn't be still locked in these moons and planets, but it is.
For this reason, evolutionary astronomers have been pointing to the still ongoing process of Tidal friction, it's kind of like a rescuing device. It does occur. It's supposedly a means of generating the heat that we currently observe. Tidal friction works like this. The moon flexes due to gravitational attraction as it approaches and then retreats.
from a nearby mass. thus generating friction inside its rocky crust. that friction should lead to heat. According to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a two thousand seven study estimated the heat output of Enceladus based on tidal friction over millions of years. It predicted that Enceladus should be should have no more than 1.1 gigawatts of heat output due to tidal forces.
So we can measure the tidal forces, we can calculate the heat that it should be putting off, and then we can compare that to the heat it actually puts off. We add to that the natural radioactivity inside the moon that should add a little bit more heat. But it falls woefully short. JPL press release said that the south polar terrain of Saturn's moon Enceladus emits much more power than scientists had originally predicted. Their report, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, found that the quote power of Enceladus's south polar terrain is fifteen point eight gigawatts.
ten times the expected amount. Of course, if Saturn and Enceladus are young, recent creations only thousands of years old, then it's no problem at all for them to have as much heat as they do. It's time for a short break. Stay with us. Dinosaurs are fascinating creatures.
Seeing their fossils inspires a sense of awe and wonder that sparks the imagination. We're learning more about them all the time, but many questions still remain. Are dinosaurs really millions of years old? Did they live at the same time as humans? How do they fit with the Bible?
And why are they extinct today? The Institute for Creation Research addresses these questions and more in their full color and easy-to-read book, Guide to Dinosaurs. Guide to Dinosaurs delves into the history of dinosaurs, fossil discoveries, dinosaur kinds, and what the Bible has to say about these mysterious creatures. It serves as a helpful resource for parents and kids alike. Order your copy of Guide to Dinosaurs from the Institute for Creation Research by calling 800-628-7640 or visiting ICR.
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 Brian Thomas. We've been considering scientific evidence for recent creation.
The science behind recent creation. Creation of a world that's only thousands of years old. And I gotta say, I've saved my favorite for the last. And it's blue stars. NASA sometimes calls them blue stragglers, but they're just blue stars.
I think God created them just the way they are to baffle evolutionary age assignments. Stellar evolution requires that they have a Have been around for many millions of years, but a blue straggler, according to NASA, is an older star. but acquires a new lease on life when it collides and merges with other stars. This conflicts, though, with a study in 2011 that called into question whether stellar collisions can really account for these remarkable stars. Blue stars burn their fuel so quickly that they simply look young.
Since their discovery, evolutionary astronomers have sought a way to explain how these stars can even exist. They burn fuel so fast that they should have burned out millions of years ago. American astronomers Aaron Geller and Robert Mathau Published in the journal Nature. A description of their model for how older stars could have required a new lease on life by siphoning matter. from nearby gas giant stars.
through a process that they call mass transfer. They investigated stars within a cluster named NGC one eighty eight. It's found in the constellation Cepheus. The cluster contains twenty-one blue stragglers. Sixteen of these are binary stars.
That means they are closely orbit and interact with a neighbor, a partner star, each one of these sixteen. The researchers suspected that the blue stragglers' partners were white dwarfs, which would be small, leftover remnants of larger red stars that the blue ones had drained of fuel. Such dwarfs are too faint for direct observation, but they have enough mass to cause their blue stars, their partners, to wobble. That's how we know that they're binary stars. Of these sixteen binaries, twenty five.
12 had rotational periods right at 1,000 days and were thus called long-period blue stragglers.
So the study authors ran a statistical analysis and it showed that the theoretical and observed mass distributions are the same. In other words, their theory that other stars fed these twelve blue stragglers matched well with what they observed. But did this reconcile the relative youthfulness of these binary blue stars with their assumed billions of years of history.
Well, the answer is no. They wrote this, these study authors. Blue straggler stars should already have evolved into giant stars and stellar remnants. See, they're talking about star evolution. You know, the Bible talks about stars.
It says in Genesis 1, About God. And he made the stars also. Almost like, eh, it's as easy as flicking his pinky. But he spoke and it was done. I think that's where blue stragglers came from.
That would explain why they look so recently created, and why they still have so much fuel packed in them. Blue stragglers should burn through all their fuel in quote a few million years at best. But these NGC one hundred eighty eight stars are supposed to be seven billion years old.
Well, they shouldn't even be there. Why are they still there? That's why they have the siphoning concept.
so that they can imagine ways that these blue stars can keep getting fuel Like an airplane that gets fuel in the air. This is a story that they're telling.
So to make these stars fit the seven billion year age assignment, these authors maintain that they were not initially blue stars, but instead they burned fuel at a normal rate for billions of years. Then suddenly, within the last one million years, All twelve of them, at the same time, began siphoning extra fuel from their binary partners so that they only look young. right now.
However, nothing explains the many blue stragglers. that are not binary stars. and yet exist. Close to Earth. Far from Earth, in the Milky Way, throughout the universe.
Blue stars are everywhere. Could they have received recent youthfulness through collisions with other stars? It's ridiculously unlikely. In an article summarizing the Geller and Mathau paper, University of Cambridge astronomer Christopher Taut. Wrote this in 2011.
Thus, in this cluster, NGC one hundred eighty eight, a collisional origin for blue stragglers is much rarer than expected, and the author's study casts doubt on whether it occurs at all.
So the modelled scenario in which blue stars form by collision did not match observations. Which means isolated stars, blue stars. could not have received their young looks from a binary system, since by definition they have no binary from which to siphon fuel. They probably didn't receive their youthful appearance from collisions, either, according to these results. And though the binary Blue Star stragglers may have siphoned fuel from nearby partners, they may have done that.
The idea that twelve or sixteen did so only just recently, after an imagined seven billion year wait, defies all reason. The best explanation is the most straightforward one. Blue stars look young because they are young. But that means the Bible's right. The Bible's right about the age of the world.
The Bible's right, therefore, about everything else it says. It's right when it says we are sinners and we need to repent and we need salvation. We need the Lord Jesus to be. To reconcile us to God the Creator who made us and wants relationship with us. 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.
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