Christian Chat is a moderated online Christian community allowing Christians around the world to fellowship with each other in real time chat via webcam, voice, and text, with the Christian Chat app. You can also start or participate in a Bible-based discussion here in the Christian Chat Forums, where members can also share with each other their own videos, pictures, or favorite Christian music.
If you are a Christian and need encouragement and fellowship, we're here for you! If you are not a Christian but interested in knowing more about Jesus our Lord, you're also welcome! Want to know what the Bible says, and how you can apply it to your life? Join us!
Other Problems.If the big bang occurred, we should not see massive galaxies at such great distances, but such galaxies are seen. [See “Distant Galaxies” on page 425.] Nor should a big bang produce rotating bodies (q) such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Also, a large volume of the universe should not be—but evidently is—moving sideways, almost perpendicular to the direction of apparent expansion (r). q. “Galaxy rotation and how it got started is one of the great mysteries of astrophysics. In a Big Bang universe, linear motions are easy to explain: They result from the bang. But what started the rotary motions?” William R. Corliss, Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos: A Catalog of Astronomical Anomalies (Glen Arm, Maryland: The Sourcebook Project, 1987), p. 177. r. Alan Dressler, “The Large-Scale Streaming of Galaxies,” Scientific American,Vol. 257, September 1987, pp. 46–54. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences17.html]
For every charged particle in the universe, the big bang should have produced an identical particle but with the opposite electrical charge (s). (For example, the negatively charged electron’s antiparticle is the positively charged positron.) Only trivial amounts of antimatter have ever been detected, even in other galaxies (t). s. “It is a fundamental rule of modern physics [namely, the big bang theory] that for every type of particle in nature there is a corresponding ‘antiparticle’.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1977), p. 76. “If the universe began in the big bang as a huge burst of energy, it should have evolved into equal parts matter and antimatter. But instead the stars and nebulae are made of protons, neutrons and electrons and not their antiparticles (their antimatter equivalents).”Kane, pp. 73–74. “But to balance the cosmic energy books—and to avoid violating the most fundamental laws of physics—matter and antimatter should have been created [in a big bang] in exactly equal amounts. And then they should have promptly wiped each other out. Yet here we are.” Tim Folger, “Antimatter,” Discover, August 2004, p. 68. t. “Within our galaxy, we can be confident that there are no stars of antimatter; otherwise, the pervasive interstellar medium would instigate annihilation and ensuing gamma-ray emission at a rate far in excess of that observed....One difficulty with the idea of antigalaxies lies in maintaining their separation from galaxies. Empty space may now separate them, but in the early universe, these regions must have been in relatively close contact. Annihilation seems difficult to avoid, particularly because we now know that many regions of intergalactic space are occupied by a tenuous gas. Interaction with the gas would make annihilation inevitable in antimatter regions, with the consequent emission of observable gamma radiation.” Joseph Silk, The Big Bang(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980), p. 115. “Also, as far as we know, there is no appreciable amount of antimatter in the universe.” Weinberg, p. 88. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences17.html]
If a big bang occurred, what caused the bang? Stars with enough mass become black holes, so not even light can escape their enormous gravity. How then could anything escape the trillions upon trillions of times greater gravity caused by concentrating all the universe’s mass in a “cosmic egg” that existed before a big bang (x)? x. One might also ask where the “cosmic egg” came from if there was a big bang. Of course, the question is unanswerable. Pushing any origin explanation back far enough raises similar questions—all scientifically untestable. Thus, the question of ultimate origins is not a purely scientific matter. What science can do is test possible explanations once the starting assumptions are given. For example, if a tiny “cosmic egg” (having all the mass in the universe) existed, it should not explode or suddenly inflate, based on present understanding. Claiming that some strange, new phenomenon caused an explosion (or inflation) is philosophical speculation. While such speculation may or may not be correct, it is not science. [See “How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific?” ]In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific? [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences17.html]
If the big bang theory is correct, one can calculate the age of the universe. This age turns out to be younger than objects in the universe whose ages were based on other evolutionary theories. Because this is logically impossible, one or both sets of theories must be incorrect.[SUP]y[/SUP] All these observations make it doubtful that a big bang occurred.[SUP]z[/SUP] y. “Big Bang Gone Quiet,” Nature, Vol. 372, 24 November 1994, p. 304. Michael J. Pierce et al., “The Hubble Constant and Virgo Cluster Distance from Observations of Cepheid Variables,” Nature, Vol. 371, 29 September 1994, pp. 385–389. Wendy L. Freedman et al., “Distance to the Virgo Cluster Galaxy M100 from Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Cepheids,” Nature, Vol. 371, 27 October 1994, pp. 757–762. N. R. Tanvir et al., “Determination of the Hubble Constant from Observations of Cepheid Variables in the Galaxy M96,” Nature, Vol. 377, 7 September 1995, pp. 27–31. Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., “An Old Galaxy in a Young Universe,” Nature, Vol. 381, 13 June 1996, pp. 555–556. James Dunlop, “A 3.5-Gyr-Old Galaxy at Redshift 1.55,” Nature, Vol. 381, 13 June 1996, pp. 581–584. “It’s clear to most people that you can’t be older than your mother. Astronomers understand this, too, which is why they’re so uncomfortable these days. The oldest stars in globular clusters seem to date back 15 billion years. The universe appears to be only 9 billion to 12 billion years old. At least one of those conclusions is wrong.” William J. Cook, “How Old Is the Universe?” U.S. News & World Report, 18–25 August 1997, p. 34. z. “I have little hesitation in saying that a sickly pall now hangs over the big-bang theory. When a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that the theory rarely recovers.” Fred Hoyle, “The Big Bang Under Attack,” Science Digest, May 1984, p. 84. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences17.html]
Evolutionists historically have had difficulty explaining the origin of heavy elements. (A big bang would produce only the three lightest elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium.) The other 100+ elements supposedly formed deep inside stars and during stellar explosions. This theory is hard to verify, because stellar interiors and explosions cannot be carefully analyzed. However, a vast region of gas containing the mass of 300,000,000,000,000 suns has been found that is quite rich in iron and other heavy elements. The number of nearby visible stars is a thousand times too small to account for the heavy elements in that huge region (a). Heavy elements are even relatively abundant in nearly empty regions of space that are farthest from stars and galaxies (b). Most hydrogen atoms weigh one atomic mass unit, but some, called heavy hydrogen, weigh two units. If everything in the universe came from a big bang or a swirling gas cloud, heavy hydrogen should be uniformly mixed with normal hydrogen. It is not (c). Comets have twice the concentration of heavy hydrogen as oceans. Oceans have 10–50 times the concentration as the solar system and interstellar matter. [See “Heavy Hydrogen” here: [In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - Details Requiring an Explanation] a. “Given that the cluster apparently comprises few galaxies, yet contains a large amount of iron, a new type of astronomical object is implied by our results. A revision of theoretical models of the metal [heavy element]enrichment process in galaxy clusters may therefore be required,” M. Hattori et al., “A Dark Cluster of Galaxies at Redshift z=1,”Nature, Vol. 388, 10 July 1997, p. 146. b. Lennox L. Cowie and Antoinette Songaila, “Heavy-Element Enrichment in Low-Density Regions of the Intergalactic Medium,” Nature, Vol. 394, 2 July 1998, pp. 44–46. c.“In both cases, the scatter of the observed values [of heavy hydrogen] is quite large and seems to reach a factor of 10. Although it is already surprising to see such variations within ~1000 pc from the sun, this looks unbelievable within only 30 pc from the sun.”[1 pc (or parsec)=3.258 light-years] A. Vidal-Madjar, “Interstellar Helium and Deuterium,” Diffuse Matter in Galaxies,editors J. Audouze et al. (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983), pp. 77–78. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences18.html]
Detailed analyses have long shown that neither stars nor planets could form from interstellar gas clouds (a). To do so, either by first forming dust particles (b) or by direct gravitational collapse of the gas (c), would require vastly more time than the alleged age of the universe. An obvious alternative is that stars and planets were created. a.“The process by which an interstellar cloud is concentrated until it is held together gravitationally to become a protostar is not known. In quantitative work, it has simply been assumed that the number of atoms per cm[SUP]3[/SUP] has somehow increased about a thousand-fold over that in a dense nebula. The two principal factors inhibiting the formation of a protostar are that the gas has a tendency to disperse before the density becomes high enough for self-gravitation to be effective, and that any initial angular momentum would cause excessively rapid rotation as the material contracts. Some mechanism must therefore be provided for gathering the material into a sufficiently small volume that self-gravitation may become effective, and the angular momentum must in some way be removed.”Eva Novotny, Introduction to Stellar Atmospheres and Interiors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 279–280. b. Martin Harwit, Astrophysical Concepts (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973), p. 394. “...there is no reasonable astronomical scenario in which mineral grains can condense.” Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Where Microbes Boldly Went,” New Scientist, Vol. 91, 13 August 1981, p. 413. c. “Contemporary opinion on star formation holds that objects called protostars are formed as condensations from the interstellar gas. This condensation process is very difficult theoretically, and no essential theoretical understanding can be claimed; in fact, some theoretical evidence argues strongly against the possibility of star formation. However, we know that the stars exist, and we must do our best to account for them.”John C. Brandt, The Physics and Astronomy of the Sun and Stars(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 111. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences19.html]
The theory of stellar evolution was developed by arranging (on paper) different types of stars according to their color and absolute brightness—what is called a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. A physical rationale was then devised for how stars changed from one portion of the diagram to another. Supposedly, a star’s age was determined by its place on the diagram. However, astronomers recognize that all stars in each massive star cluster formed at about the same time, because the stellar wind from the first stars to form would have blown out of the tight cluster the raw material needed to form all the other stars in the cluster. Despite the same age for stars in a given cluster, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram sometimes gives drastically different ages.
In our galaxy, about 60% of all stars are grouped in closely spaced pairs called binaries.Fortunately, our Sun does not have a binary partner. If it did, temperatures on Earth would vary too much to support life. The mutual gravitational attraction between stars in a binary pair causes them to orbit each other, just as the Moon orbits Earth. The closer paired stars are to each other, the faster they orbit. Their orbits do not change appreciably, even over long periods of time. Two particular stars are so close that they orbit each other every 11 minutes! This implies their centers are about 80,000 miles apart (a). In comparison, our Sun, a typical star, is more than 800,000 miles in diameter. Other close binaries are also known (b). Stellar evolutionists believe stars slowly change from one type to another. However, scientists have never observed such changes, and many stars do not fit this pattern. According to stellar evolution, a typical star’s volume, late in its lifetime, expands to about a million times that of our Sun and finally collapses to become a small star about the size of Earth (a white dwarf) or even smaller (a neutron star). Only such tiny stars could have their centers 80,000 miles apart and still orbit each other. Obviously, these fast binary stars did not evolve from larger stars, because larger stars orbiting so closely would collide. If two stars cannot evolve into a condition that has them orbiting each other every 11 minutes, one wonders whether stars evolve at all. a. A. R. King and M. G. Watson, “The Shortest Period Binary Star?” Nature,Vol. 323, 4 September 1986, p. 105. Dietrick E. Thomsen, “A Dizzying Orbit for a Binary Star,” Science News,Vol. 130, 11 October 1986, p. 231. “Ultrafast Binary Star,” Sky & Telescope,February 1987, p. 154. b. Jonathan Eberhart, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t,” Science News,Vol. 135, 7 January 1989, p. 13. Patrick Moore, The New Atlas of the Universe (New York: Arch Cape Press, 1988), p. 176. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences21.html#wp1257384]
Evolutionists claim that stars form from swirling clouds of dust and gas. For this to happen, vast amounts of energy, angular momentum, and residual magnetism must be removed from each cloud. This is not observed today, and astronomers and physicists have not explained, in an experimentally verifiable way, how it all could happen (a). The most luminous stars in our galaxy, called O stars, are “burning fuel” hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our Sun. This is so rapid that they must be quite young on an evolutionary time scale. If these stars evolved, they should show easily measurable characteristics, such as extremely high rates of rotation and enormous magnetic fields. Because these characteristics are not observed, it seems quite likely these stars did not evolve. a.“The universe we see when we look out to its furthest horizons contains a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these galaxies contains another hundred billion stars. That’s 10^22 stars all told. The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form.”Martin Harwit, Book Reviews, Science, Vol. 231, 7 March 1986, pp. 1201–1202. Harwit also lists three serious problems with all theories that claim stars formed—or are forming—by the gravitational collapse of interstellar gas clouds: i. “The contracting gas clouds must radiate energy in order to continue their contraction; the potential energy that is liberated in this pre-stellar phase must be observable somehow, but we have yet to detect and identify it. ii. “The angular momentum that resides in typical interstellar clouds is many orders of magnitude higher than the angular momentum we compute for the relatively slowly spinning young stars; where and how has the protostar shed that angular momentum during contraction? iii. “Interstellar clouds are permeated by magnetic fields that we believe to be effectively frozen to the contracting gas; as the gas cloud collapses to form a star, the magnetic field lines should be compressed ever closer together, giving rise to enormous magnetic fields, long before the collapse is completed. These fields would resist further collapse, preventing the formation of the expected star; yet we observe no evidence of strong fields, and the stars do form, apparently unaware of our theoretical difficulties.” [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences22.html#wp1783267]
Cambrian rock layers contain many strange animal fossils, and very few fossils appear in layers below them. Called the "Cambrian explosion of life," the creatures in these layers come from all the major groups of animals alive today (including fish, which represent the vertebrates), plus many more that later became extinct.
Evolutionists, starting with Charles Darwin, have had a difficult time explaining why such richly diverse aquatic life forms appeared so suddenly and with no trace of evolutionary ancestry in lower (pre-Cambrian) rocks. According to neo-Darwinism, new life forms develop through time, chance, and death. Without the time, the formula cannot work, and yet Cambrian fossils are a parade of well-designed creatures that lived at the same time, not in separate evolutionary ages.
This problem is what some scientists term the "Cambrian Conundrum,"1 and researchers recently made another attempt to solve it. But their scenario, published in the journal Science, is a series of unfounded ad hoc stories coated with a scientific-sounding façade.
The standard tale is that Cambrian creatures did not evolve until about 500 million years ago. In contrast, these authors suggested that animals were actually alive and evolving 800 million years ago. But without the fossils to support their story, why should other scientists believe it? Their answer was to ignore the fossils and emphasize molecular clocks. When the idea of a molecular clock was first conceived, researchers believed that DNA bases change at a steady rate over time, and thus "tick" at a reliable rate.
However, a decade of abundant research has clearly shown that DNA base change rates are not steady at all, and they are restricted to mutational "hot spots" and non-lethal changes that are different for various genes. For these reasons, and because most molecular clock-based evolutionary histories are markedly different from fossil-based ones, researchers routinely "calibrate" molecular clocks to fossils of supposedly "known ages."2, 3 The molecular clock estimates in this Science study were adjusted to 24 fossil-based "ages."
Thus tuned, the researchers' clocks indicated that "the last common ancestor of all living animals arose nearly 800 Ma [million years ago]."1 This falls within the range reported by Stony Brook University's Barry Levinson, who wrote in BioScience in 2008 that the molecular-based histories constantly contradict the fossil-based histories of life on earth.4
But if this molecule-based age of 800 million years is true, then how did animals avoid fossilization for 300 million years?
The Science authors dismissed this problem and wrote that "teasing apart the mechanisms underlying the Cambrian explosion requires disentangling evolutionary origins from geological first appearances, and the only way to separate the two is to use a molecular clock."1 In other words, they asserted that molecular clock procedures, though known to be unreliable, provide the real evolutionary history, not fossils.
The fact that these authors calibrated their "clock" to fossil age assignments proves that their clock was just as unreliable as prior clocks. It relied on the very fossil ages that their attempted solution to the Cambrian Conundrum tried to avoid! They can't have it both ways, and they should not have cherry-picked parts of the fossil record to serve their story—or the seven genes that best served their molecular clock estimates.
The Cambrian Conundrum is still a fossil-based problem for evolution. But now that evolution-based molecular clocks fly in the face of the evolution-based history attached to fossils, the conundrum has only worsened.
But the creation model suffers no such difficulties. Since vast marine animal varieties were killed and deposited at the same time when swept up and buried by Noah's Flood, it would be expected to find a sudden "explosion" of them in the rock record.
If stars evolve, star births should about equal star deaths. Within our Milky Way Galaxy alone, about one star dies each year and becomes an expanding cloud of gas and dust (b). The less frequent deaths of more massive stars are much brighter, more violent explosions called supernovas. Star births, on the other hand, would appear as new starlight not present on the many photographic plates made decades earlier. Instruments which could detect dust falling into and forming supposedly new stars have not done so (c). Actually, stars that some astronomers believe are very new are expelling matter. We have seen hundreds of stars die, but we have never seen a star born (d). b. These explosions were misnamed “planetary nebula,” because early astronomers with evolutionary ideas thought these clouds were forming planets around new stars. [See Bruce Balick and Adam Frank, “The Extraordinary Deaths of Ordinary Stars,” Scientific American,Vol. 291, July 2004, pp. 50–59.] “Herschel...speculated they might be planetary systems taking shape around young stars. The name stuck even though the opposite turned out to be true; this type of nebula consists of gas molted from dying stars. ... [Planetary nebula]pose challenges to stellar evolution theory, the physics that describes the life story of stars.”Ibid., p. 52. c.“... no one has unambiguously observed material falling onto an embryonic star, which should be happening if the star is truly still forming. And no one has caught a molecular cloud in the act of collapsing.”Ivars Peterson, “The Winds of Starbirth,” Science News,Vol. 137, 30 June 1990, p. 409. “Precisely how a section of an interstellar cloud collapses gravitationally into a star—a double or multiple star, or a solar system—is still a challenging theoretical problem. ... Astronomers have yet to find an interstellar cloud in the actual process of collapse.”Fred L. Whipple, The Mystery of Comets (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), pp. 211–212, 213. d. “Yet astronomers have never witnessed[even]a high-mass star being born, and hotly debate how they form.”Eric Hand, “Mega-Array Reveals Birthplace of Giant Stars,” Nature, Vol 492, 20/27 December 2012, p. 320. This 1.4 billion dollar mega-array is being built in hopes of seeing a star being born. The birth of high-mass stars would be the easiest to see. So far, no births have been seen. “The origin of stars represents one of the most fundamental unsolved problems of contemporary astrophysics.” Charles J. Lada and Frank H. Shu, “The Formation of Sunlike Stars,” Science, Vol. 248, 4 May 1990, p. 564. “Most disturbing, however, is the fact that, despite numerous efforts, we have yet to directly observe the process of stellar formation. We have not yet been able to unambiguously detect the collapse of a molecular cloud core or the infall of circumstellar material onto an embryonic star. Until such an observation is made, it would probably be prudent to regard our current hypotheses and theoretical scenarios with some degree of suspicion.” Ibid., p. 572. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences22.html#wp1783267]
Some stars are found where astronomers agree they could not evolve, near the center of our galaxy. These short-lived stars orbit a massive black hole, where gravity is so strong that gas and dust clouds could never evolve into a star. Instead, the black hole’s massive gravity would pull such clouds (supposedly evolving stars) apart. (e). Nor could stars have evolved in globular clusters, where up to a million stars occupy a relatively small volume of space.
e.“In fact, given our current understanding of how stars form and the properties of the galactic center, it’s[stellar evolution near the galactic center is] not allowed to happen.” Andrea M. Gaze, as quoted by Ron Cowen, “Mystery in the Middle,” Science News, Vol. 163, 21 June 2003, p. 394. “For example, no one can explain how the stars—which are 15 times heftier than our sun—got there [near the center of our galaxy]. According to most astronomical models, they are too big to have formed in the chaos of the galactic center but appear to be too young to have moved there from farther out.”Robert Irion, “The Milky Way’s Dark, Starving Pit,” Science,Vol. 300, 30 May 2003, p. 1356. “The bizarre question of the hour is what the young stars are doing there at all. Clouds of gas need a calm and cold setting to collapse into a ball dense enough to ignite nuclear fusion. Yet gravitational tidal forces—from the black hole and from stars in the galaxy’s nucleus—make the galactic center the antithesis of such a [stellar] nursery.” Ibid., p. 1357. “Ironically, stars such as these have no business being so close to a black hole...there is no plausible explanation of how and why the hot, young stars near the centre of the Milky Way and Andromeda got there.”Fulvio Melia, “Odd Company,” Nature, Vol. 437, 20 October 2005, p. 1105. f.“Little is known about the origins of globular clusters, which contain hundreds of thousands of stars in a volume only a few light years across. Radiation pressure and winds from luminous young stars should disperse the star-forming gas and disrupt the formation of the cluster.”J. L. Turner et al., “An Extragalactic Supernebula,” Nature,Vol. 423, 5 June 2003, p. 621. []In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - 61.
A similar problem exists for stars that are more than twenty times more massive than our sun. After a star grew to 20 solar masses, it would exert so much radiation pressure and emit so much stellar wind that additional mass could not be pulled in to allow it to grow (g). Many stars are heavier than a hundred suns. Black holes are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun. Poor logic is involved in arguing for stellar evolution, which is assumed in estimating the age of stars. These ages are then used to establish a framework for stellar evolution. That is circular reasoning (h). In summary, there is no evidence that stars evolve, there is much evidence that stars did not evolve, and there are no experimentally verifiable explanations for how they could evolve and seemingly defy the laws of physics (i). g.“Once a protostar reaches a threshold of about 20 solar masses, the pressure exerted by its radiation should overpower gravity and prevent it from growing any bigger. In addition to the radiation pressure, the winds that so massive a star generates disperse its natal cloud, further limiting its growth as well as interfering with the formation of nearby stars.”Erick T. Young, “Cloudy with a Chance of Stars: Making a Star Is No Easy Thing,” Scientific American, Vol. 302, February 2010, p. 40. “Nascent stars above 20 solar masses are so luminous that they would be expected to disrupt their own formation, as well as that of nearby stars.” Ibid., p. 37. h. Steidl, pp. 134–136. i.“Nobody really understands how star formation proceeds. It’s really remarkable.”Rogier A. Windhorst, as quoted by Corey S. Powell, “A Matter of Timing,” Scientific American,Vol. 267, October 1992, p. 30. “If stars did not exist, it would be easy to prove that this is what we expect.”Geoffrey R. Burbidge, as quoted by R. L. Sears and Robert R. Brownlee in Stellar Structure,editors Lawrence H. Aller and Dean McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 577. “We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.”Carlos Frenk, as quoted by Robert Irion, “Surveys Scour the Cosmic Deep,” Science,Vol. 303, 19 March 2004, p. 1750. []In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - 61.
Evolutionists now admit that galaxies cannot evolve from one type to another (a). There are also good reasons why natural processes cannot form galaxies (b). Furthermore, if spiral galaxies were billions of years old, their arms or bars would be severely twisted (c). Because they have maintained their shape, either galaxies are young, or unknown physical phenomena are occurring within galaxies (d). Even structures composed of galaxies are now known to be so amazingly large, and yet relatively thin, they could not have formed by slow gravitational attraction (e). Slow,natural processes cannot form such huge galactic structures; rapid, supernatural processes may have.
Figure 27: Spiral Galaxies.
a. “There is much doubt, however, that galaxies evolve from one type to another at all.” George Abell,Exploration of the Universe,2[SUP]nd[/SUP] edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969), p. 629. “Our conclusions, then, are that the sequence of the classification of galaxies is not an evolutionary sequence...”Paul W. Hodge, The Physics and Astronomy of Galaxies and Cosmology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 122. b. “The problem of explaining the existence of galaxies has proved to be one of the thorniest in cosmology. By all rights, they just shouldn’t be there, yet there they sit. It’s hard to convey the depth of frustration that this simple fact induces among scientists.” Trefil, The Dark Side of the Universe,p. 55. Trefil explains the basis for this frustration in his fourth chapter entitled, “Five Reasons Why Galaxies Can’t Exist.” “We cannot even show convincingly how galaxies, stars, planets, and life arose in the present universe.”Michael Rowan-Robinson, “Review of the Accidental Universe,” New Scientist, Vol. 97, 20 January 1983, p. 186. “A completely satisfactory theory of galaxy formation remains to be formulated.” Joseph Silk, The Big Bang (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980), p. 22. “The theory of the formation of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems of astrophysics, a problem that today seems far from solution.”Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Bantom Books, Inc., 1977), p. 68. Fifty cosmologists attended a conference on galaxy formation. After summarizing much observational data, two of the most respected authorities optimistically estimated the probability that any existing theory on galaxy formation is correct is about 1 out of 100. [See P. J. E. Peebles and Joseph Silk, “A Cosmic Book,” Nature,Vol. 335, 13 October 1988, pp. 601–606.] c. Hodge, p. 123. d. Harold S. Slusher, “Clues Regarding the Age of the Universe,”ICR Impact, No. 19, January 1975, pp. 2–3. Steidl, pp. 161–187. e. “In its simplest form, the Big Bang scenario doesn’t look like a good way to make galaxies. It allows too little time for the force of gravity by itself to gather ordinary matter—neutrons, protons and electrons—into the patterns of galaxies seen today. Yet the theory survives for want of a better idea.” Peterson, “Seeding the Universe,” p. 184. “It [the Great Wall, composed of tens of thousands of galaxies] is far too large and too massive to have formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of its member galaxies.”M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Astronomers Go Up Against the Great Wall,” Science, Vol. 2 46, 17 November 1989, p. 885. [See also Margaret J. Geller and John P. Huchra, “Mapping the Universe,” Science,Vol. 246, 17 November 1989, pp. 897–903.] [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences23.html#wp1257493]
The popular media frequently claim that stars are actually seen evolving and that pictures of these stellar nurseries prove it. Impressive pictures of the Eagle Nebula are usually shown. Many people accept the claim without asking themselves, “Do the pictures contain anything that shows stars are evolving?” Of course not. If stars were evolving, other physical measurements could confirm it. Where are those measurements? Silence. This willingness to accept what others tell us reminds one of the tale in which citizens told their naked emperor he was nicely dressed. Rather than believing or reporting what their eyes clearly told them, people preferred to accept what others said—or at least not object. Better not disagree or even ask questions; it could be embarrassing. Why do some astronomers say stars are evolving? Until recently, the atmosphere prevented astronomers from seeing infrared radiations from space. Then in the late 1960s, satellites outside the atmosphere made infrared sky surveys that showed some surprisingly warm clouds of dust and gas in our galaxy. Several things could cause this heating. Perhaps a dim star (a brown dwarf) is behind the cloud, maybe something nearby exploded, or a star is dying as it is being pulled into a massive black hole. Those who struggled to understand how stars evolved had a different interpretation: “Gravity is collapsing the cloud, raising its temperature. In about a million years, it will become a star.” Still other interpretations are possible. NASA’s claim in 1995 that these pictures showed hundreds to thousands of stars forming was based on the speculative “EGG-star formation theory.” It has recently been tested independently with two infrared detectors that can see inside the dusty pillars. Few stars were there, and 85% of the pillars had too little dust and gas to support star formation. “The new findings also highlight how much astronomers still have to learn about star formation.” [Ron Cowen, “Rethinking an Astronomical Icon: The Eagle’s EGG, Not So Fertile,” Science News, Vol. 161, 16 March 2002, pp. 171–172.] What prevents stellar evolution?Just as the Sun’s gravity does not pull planets into the Sun, gravity does not pull gas and dust into a tight ball that then ignites as a star. Each cloud of dust and gas in space has a specific amount of kinetic and potential energy, angular momentum, and magnetic energy that must be removed for even a slight collapse. Evidence of that removal is missing. Furthermore, any collapse would only increase the cloud’s temperature and pressure, which, in turn, would expand the cloud. If someone tells you that the emperor is well dressed, ask questions, and insist on seeing real evidence.
To date an event or thing that preceded written records, one must assume that the dating clock has operated at a known rate, that the clock’s initial setting is known, and that the clock has not been disturbed. These three assumptions are almost always unstated, overlooked, or invalid. For the past century, a major (but incorrect) assumption underlying all radioactive dating techniques has been that decay rates, which have been essentially constant over the past 100 years, have also been constant over the past 4,600,000,000 years. Unfortunately, few have questioned this huge and critical assumption (a). It is also critical that one understands how a dating clock works. For radiometric dating clocks on Earth, this is explained in the chapter “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” on pages 367–416. After studying that chapter, you will see that Earth’s radioactivity—and the many daughter products that misled so many into thinking that the Earth was billions of years old—are a result of powerful electrical activity during the Flood, only about 5,000 years ago. a . Larry Vardiman et al., Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, (El Cajon, California: Institute for Creation Research, 2005). Earlier researchers have argued that radioactive decay rates were much faster in the past. See:"Lead and Helium Diffusion" on page 40. Robert V. Gentry, “On the Invariance of the Decay Constant over Geological Time,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 5, September 1968, pp. 83–84. Robert V. Gentry, Creation’s Tiny Mystery, 2nd edition (Knoxville, Tennessee: Earth Sciences Associates, 1988), p. 282. Paul A. Ramdohr, “New Observations on Radioactive Halos and Radioactive Fracturing,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory Translation (ORNL-tr-755), 26 August 1965, pp. 16–25. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences25.html]
Estimated old ages for the Earth are frequently based on “clocks” that today are ticking at extremely slow rates. For example, coral growth rates were thought to have always been very slow, implying that some coral reefs must be hundreds of thousands of years old. More accurate measurements of these rates under favorable growth conditions now show that no known coral formation need be older than 3,400 years (a). A similar comment can be made for growth rates of stalactites and stalagmites in caves (b). [See Figure 145 on page 251.]
Figure 28: Stalagmites. Water from an underground spring was channeled to this spot on a river bank for only one year. In that time, limestone built up around sticks lying on the bank. Limestone deposits can form rapidly if the groundwater’s chemistry is favorable. Just because stalactites and stalagmites are growing slowly today does not mean they must be millions of years old. As we will see in Part II, conditions after the flood provided the ideal chemistry for rapidly forming such features. a. Ariel A. Roth, “Coral Reef G rowth,” Origins, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1979, pp. 88–95. J. Th. Verstelle, “The Growth Rate at Various Depths of Coral Reefs in the Dutch East Indian Archipelago,” Treubia,Vol. 14, 1932, pp. 117–126. b. Ian T. Taylor, In the Minds of Men (Toronto: TFE Publishing, 1984), pp. 335–336. Larry S. Helmick, Joseph Rohde, and Amy Ross, “Rapid Growth of Dripstone Observed,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 14, June 1977, pp. 13–17. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences26.html#wp4414873]
In the early 1800s, some observers in Western Europe noticed that certain fossils are usually preserved in sedimentary rock layers that, when traced laterally, typically lie above other types of fossils. Decades later, after the theory of evolution was proposed, many concluded that the lower organism must have evolved before the upper organism. These early geologists did not realize that a hydrodynamic mechanism, liquefaction,helped sort organisms in that order during the flood. [For an explanation, see pages 191-204 athttp://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Liquefaction2.html#wp1100074] Geologic ages were then associated with each of these “index fossils.” Those ages were extended to other animals and plants buried in the same layer as the index fossil. For example, a coelacanth fossil, an index fossil, dates its layer at 70,000,000 to 400,000,000 years old [see figure 29]. Today, geologic formations are almost always dated by their fossil content (a), which, as stated above, assumes evolution. a. “Ever since William Smith [the founder of the index fossil technique]at the beginning of the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century, fossils have been and still are the best and most accurate method of dating and correlating the rocks in which they occur....Apart from very ‘modern’ examples, which are really archaeology, I can think of no cases of radioactive decay being used to date fossils.” Derek V. Ager, “Fossil Frustrations,” New Scientist,Vol. 100, 10 November 1983, p. 425. [http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences27.html#wp1655298]
