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 hear from Dr. Jason Lyle, astrophysicist and director of physical sciences with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Lyle. The solar system is wonderfully designed, not just for life, but to be scientifically interesting as well.
and that reveals something about the creativity of the Lord. Proverbs 25.2 says, It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter. It's as if God delights in hiding these little bits of truth for us to find in the universe. It reminds me of a sort of a tradition that a lot of families have around Easter time where they will hide Easter eggs for their young children to find. And the children have a lot of enjoyment about trying to find these beautifully colored little things that are hidden.
And the parents enjoy watching the children find these things. It's very similar with what God has done in his creation. He has planted these wonderful little truths for us to find. And I would argue that the fun and the thrill of science is to discover some of the truth that the Lord has hidden for us to search out and find. And many of these examples of these wonderful truths are found in our own solar system.
Each of the worlds of our solar system exhibits God's handiwork. And as we go through and look at each of these major worlds of our solar system, we see that there are just wonderful truths that the Lord has placed for us to find. Starting with Mercury, which is the closest planet to the sun, it's about a third the size of the Earth, and it's three times closer to the sun. It's essentially a large rock in space, and you might think that's not interesting, but when we look at it, it has a beauty to it. It's kind of like the moon, really.
It's got a cratered, desolate surface, but it's eerily beautiful. It's very different from Earth, though, because Mercury has no atmosphere, and so anything that comes near it simply collides with it. That's why it ends up with all these craters. It's probably what we'd look like if Earth had no atmosphere. A lot like the moon, but it doesn't have the dark maria that the moon has, those large areas that form the sort of the man-in-the-moon feature that we see in our night sky.
Mercury has a surface temperature on the day side of around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
So it really gets baked, and that's partly because it has no atmosphere and it's a slow rotator.
So the sun is out for a very long time. But the night side gets down to minus 279 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, and that's again because it's such a slow rotator. The heat from those rocks can just radiate off into space. Interestingly, Mercury has a magnetic field, which was a bit of a surprise for secularists because magnetic fields naturally decay with time. And you'd expect that a planet as small as Mercury is would have lost its magnetic field by now. Magnetic fields are caused by electrical current, and just like a battery, they run down with time.
Why does Mercury still have a strong magnetic field? And I would argue it's because it's not billions of years old, it's a few thousand years old. The next planet out is Venus. Venus is about the same size as the Earth, and it has some features like mountains and valleys and canyons and so on, but it's very different from Earth because it has an extremely thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and concentrations that would be lethal to us, so you can't breathe on Venus. The atmosphere is so thick that at the surface it would be about 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth.
And that atmosphere, again having carbon dioxide in it, which is a mild greenhouse gas, but there's so much of it, it actually causes the surface temperature of Venus to be 872 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's just really kind of astonishing, enough to melt lead. The clouds that encircle Venus are made of sulphur dioxide and sulphuric acid, and so there's just lots of wonderful ways to die on Venus. It's not a place you'd want to visit. But those clouds also make Venus very bright.
They're very reflective, and that makes Venus the third brightest object in Earth's sky, next to the sun and the moon. One interesting little Easter egg about Venus that I think the Lord planted just maybe just to confuse the secularists and to delight Christians is that it rotates backwards. Venus rotates in the opposite direction of the other planets of the solar system. And that is contrary to the expectations of secularists, who believe that the solar system formed from a collapsing cloud, in which case conservation of angular momentum ought to have everything spinning about in the same direction. Venus is just exactly the opposite and very slowly.
The next planet out is Earth. And of course, Earth is designed for life. That's something the Bible teaches in passages like Isaiah 45, 18. The Earth is at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light, has the right type of atmosphere so that we can breathe and so that water can exist in a liquid state. And that's pretty unusual.
The water molecule, H2O, is pretty abundant in the cosmos, but it's almost always either frozen or vapor. It's very unusual to have liquid water because that requires just the right temperature constraints and the right atmospheric pressure. Earth also has plate tectonics, which is unusual. Other planets have tectonics, but only Earth's, as far as we know, has a surface that is divided into plates that can be moved. And we think that that was the mechanism that God used to both start and end the worldwide flood.
And so it's interesting, the one planet that God knew he would need to flood at some point was the one that's designed to be able to do that. Let's take a short break. Stay with us. 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. Lyle.
Well, we've been discussing the design that's in the solar system and seeing how each of the worlds that the Lord created has these just interesting things about them that confirm scripture. And we're now out to Mars, which is the fourth planet from the Sun. Mars is about half the size of the Earth and it's probably the most similar to Earth in terms of its other properties. It has a rocky surface with mountains and valleys and canyons. It even has polar ice caps like the Earth does, although Mars's are made primarily of carbon dioxide, dry ice.
Mars has seasons like the Earth, and so the polarized caps grow in winter and shrink in summer. If you were standing on the surface of Mars, it would have a fairly bright sky like the Earth. Not quite as bright as the Earth's, but it would be blue most of the time.
Sometimes orange because the rocks on Mars are very red due to the iron compounds, and when wind will kick up that dust, it'll make the sky kind of an orange color, but otherwise it'll be blue on a still day. It has a 24-hour, 37-minute day, which I think is interesting.
So you could sleep in a little bit later every morning, and it'd never catch up with you. That'd be kind of nice. But it's otherwise similar to the Earth. But you couldn't survive there, not without bringing a little bit of Earth with you, because Mars doesn't have the right kind of atmosphere. It's a very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, so you couldn't breathe on Mars.
And there's no abundant liquid water on its surface, and that would be a problem for life.
So as far as we know, there's no life on Mars either. Mars has two tiny moons called Phobos and Deimos, and they orbit very close to Mars. Another interesting feature about Mars is that, like the moon, it has remnant magnetism. And that's again where you have little bits of magnetic field indicating that Mars had a magnetic field, a global one in the past, and it's decayed down in a few thousand years. But it's an indication that Mars can't be billions of years old.
The next planet out is Jupiter, and it's quite different from the four we've discussed so far, because Jupiter is basically a large ball of gas. It's actually ten times larger than the Earth in diameter. But because it's a ball of gas, you can't land on Jupiter. There's nothing to land on. It has no solid surface, but that gas is held together by its own gravity.
Jupiter has cloud features and they tend to form in these loops around Jupiter that are called belts and zones. The belts are dark and the zones are kind of light. And it's kind of like jet streams on the Earth. Jupiter has a large red spot, which is an enormous hurricane, and you could easily drop two Earths right into that red spot. Jupiter has a lot of internal heat, meaning that it actually it actually somehow has energy coming from its core that it radiates out into space.
In fact, Jupiter emits about twice as much energy as it receives from the sun, and that is a strong indicator that it's not billions of years old, because it's constantly losing energy to space. It can't do that forever. It's kind of like a potato that you take out of the microwave. It's nice and warm, you can feel the heat coming off of it, but after a while it cools off.
Now Jupiter, being a much bigger potato, can do that for a lot longer, but it can't do it for billions of years. And Jupiter has an enormously powerful magnetic field, and any time you find a magnetic field in space, that's an indication that it's nowhere near billions of years old, because magnetic fields naturally decay with time. The next planet out, Saturn. The planet itself is kind of similar to Jupiter. It's just a scaled-down version of Jupiter, a ball of gas held together by its own gravity.
It also has internal heat, like Jupiter, but there is a mechanism that secularists use to explain that that might work for Saturn, so I tend not to use that as an argument. But the rings of Saturn certainly are young. They can't be many billions of years old because of the way they spiral. And so the rings are young. And Saturn has a very strong magnetic field.
And again, magnetic fields are an indication of youth.
So Saturn just can't be anywhere near millions of years old or billions of years old. The next planet out is Uranus, and it's interesting because it's tilted on its side about 96 degrees relative to its orbit around the Sun.
So it sort of rolls around the Sun. And I think it's interesting that with Uranus, not only does it have a magnetic field, but it has one that was predicted by creation scientist Dr. Russ Humphreys. Dr. Humphreys, who's a friend of mine, he's a biblical creationist like myself, and he actually has a model of how God might have started the magnetic fields of all the planets.
And based on that model and 6,000 years' worth of decay, he was able to predict in advance what the magnetic field of the planet Uranus would be before it was measured by the Voyager spacecraft. And he was exactly right. The secularists were way off because they were assuming billions of years for that planet. And unlike Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune for that matter, Uranus has no internal heat, which is a perplexing problem for the secularists, because if they're able to come up with a good mechanism to explain the other three big planets, they have to explain why Uranus somehow is different. Neptune is very similar to Uranus.
It's the last of the eight large planets. And it's very similar to Uranus in that it's about the same size, about the same color, same composition. It was discovered, in fact, due to its pull on Uranus. Astronomers found that the planet Uranus was a bit off from where it should be in its orbit if there was nothing else out there. And they were actually able to calculate the position of this other planet that was pulling on it.
And astronomers pointed their telescopes to that location, and lo and behold, there was the planet Neptune. It has a large dark spot similar to Jupiter, has internal heat and a magnetic field like Jupiter, which indicates that it can't be billions of years old. And it has a large moon, Triton, which actually orbits backwards. And I love things like that that are just the opposite of what you'd expect in the secular model, but make sense in light of God's creative diversity. It's just intriguing, all of these Easter eggs that the Lord has hidden for us to find, and they all bear witness of being created supernaturally in the recent past.
The Bible is certainly trustworthy, and so its message of salvation can be trusted as well. 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.com. ICR.org. If you've enjoyed this podcast, subscribe to Science, Scripture, and Salvation on iTunes. Also, do us a favor and rate and review the show so that more listeners can find us.
Thanks for listening and God bless.
