Our Sun – Creation Perspective

Posted by Alpha Omega Institute on Sep 3, 2014 in Marianis from the Front, The Biggest Challenges to Evolution | 0 comments

 

Creation Answer:

As the Bible records, God created the sun on day 4… after the earth. God created the lights in the heavens (including the sun) for signs, seasons, days and years and to give light on the earth.  (Gen 1:14-15) The sun also declares the glory of God. (Psalm 19:1) The sun causes different climates and weather patterns and even “plays a major role in producing clouds.”[i] There are many factors about the sun that make it very important for life on earth.[ii] Naturalistic methods say that the sun is 4.6 billion years old, but that result is based on assumptions about how much hydrogen has fused into helium. Naturalists have to take these results on faith that their assumptions are correct, whereas creationists have faith in the Bible and that God made the sun with the composition of elements that He wanted.[iii]

Many say that our sun is very average and normal. Cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”[iv] Ph.D. astronomer Theodore P. Snow stated, “Our star, the sun, is rather ordinary…in many respects then, the sun is a very run-of-the-mill entity.”[v]

In reality, our sun is “brighter than about 85 percent of all stars, and it has more mass than about 90 percent…Our sun is very stable and has small flares, if the flares were bigger they could rip away our atmosphere and fry the earth…A superflare could be deadly, but there is no evidence of any superflares…our sun is very unusual because of this.”[vi] “Sun-like stars normally produce a bright superflare about once a century…a consensus is emerging that our sun is extraordinarily stable.”[vii] Hopefully this stability continues, because Earth is constantly threatened by solar activity which could do tremendous damage to electronics and communications systems, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

A great challenge to naturalistic models is that the sun needs to have been extraordinarily stable throughout its whole life. The young faint sun paradox explains that as the sun has aged, it should now be 40% brighter than it was 4.6 billion years ago, so consequently in the past it was dimmer and the earth would have been colder. Astrophysicist Danny Faulkner describes the problem that at 3.8 billion years ago the earth would have been an average temperature of -3° C, which is below freezing.[viii] “Simple energy-balance climate models of the Budyko/Sellers type predict that a small (2–5%) decrease in [current] solar output could result in a runaway glaciation on the Earth. But solar fluxes 25–30% lower early in the Earth’s history apparently did not lead to this result.”[ix] That would have been devastating for life as it was just starting to evolve.

These estimates are in stark contrast to the naturalistic hypotheses. “Geologists note that Earth’s rock record insists that Earth’s average temperature has not varied much over the past four billion years, and biologists require a nearly constant average temperature for the development and evolution of life.”[x] Naturalistic hypotheses say that “as new forms of life evolved, the mix of gases in Earth’s atmosphere gradually changed. Evolution proposes that the early atmosphere contained a greater amount of greenhouse gases (such as methane) than today. This would have produced average temperatures close to those today, even with a much fainter Sun. As the Sun gradually increased in luminosity, Earth’s atmosphere is supposed to have evolved along with it, so that the amount of greenhouse gases have slowly decreased to compensate for the increasing solar luminosity.”[xi] “While there is some tolerance for deviation, any prolonged deviation from ideal conditions could have led to catastrophic heating or cooling from which the Earth might not have recovered. Venus and Mars are possibly examples of each of these scenarios.”[xii] “The precise tuning of this alleged co-evolution is nothing short of miraculous.”[xiii]

“James Kasting stated in Nature: ‘Despite all these proposed warming mechanisms, there are still reasons to think that the faint young Sun problem is not yet solved.’ Alicia Newton writes in Nature Geoscience: ‘Challenges for each hypothesis remain, and are likely to remain for some time.’”[xiv]

That paradox is not the only challenge to the naturalistic models. Just like the sun, gas planets, like Jupiter and Neptune, also radiate heat and enough to challenge their 4.5 billion year history. With Jupiter and Neptune radiating more than twice the energy that they receive, they could not have lasted billions of years.[xv]

The sun rotates around its equator and the planets should have supposedly formed revolving around the sun’s equator as well (everything rotating in one disk), but the planets all go around the sun in a disk that is different from the sun’s rotation. This is a big challenge to the nebular theory, as a couple of scientists put it: “we may note that one difficulty common to all solar nebula theories concerns the rotation axis of the sun, which is at 7 degrees to that of the system as a whole. It is not feasible that the rotation axis of the central body could be so inclined to that of the disk or, alternatively, that planets produced within the disk could systematically depart so much from its plane.”[xvi]

The rotation rate of the sun is also a challenge in that it rotates too slowly, and thus, “the angular momentum of the sun is far too small to be consistent with an evolutionary origin.”[xvii] It works like this, “as skaters pull their arms in, they spin faster…When the skaters pull their arms in, the distance from the centre decreases, so they spin faster or else angular momentum would not stay constant [which it has to]. In the formation of our sun from a nebula in space, the same effect would have occurred as the gases allegedly contracted into the centre to form the sun. This would have caused the sun to spin very rapidly. Actually, our sun spins very slowly, while the planets move very rapidly around the sun. In fact, although the sun has over 99% of the mass of the solar system, it has only 2% of the angular momentum. This pattern is directly opposed to the pattern predicted for the nebular hypothesis. Evolutionists have tried to solve this problem, but a well-known solar-system scientist, Dr Stuart Ross Taylor, has said in a recent book, ‘The ultimate origin of the solar system’s angular momentum remains obscure.’”[xviii]

 

by Brian Mariani and others

 

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