Elements of Life – Creation Perspective

Posted by Alpha Omega Institute on Sep 16, 2014 in Marianis from the Front, The Biggest Challenges to Evolution | 0 comments

Creation Answer:

God created the Earth before the sun, moon, and stars, and  so the earth is very unique. He created the sun and the moon specifically to be perfect for the life that He created on the earth. The earth is perfect for life, especially compared to other planets. The earth is so perfect that naturalists have to make countless assumptions, making it harder to believe their story than to accept God and His record of history.

God created and placed the elements just the way He wanted them – to give Him glory. There is no way for naturalism to explain why physics and the elements work the way they do. Renowned physicist James Clark Maxwell states that “there are immense numbers of other atoms of the same kind [throughout the universe]…Each is physically independent of all the others…We are then forced to look beyond them to some common cause or common origin [i.e. supernatural creation] to explain why this singular relation of quality exists.” His words still hold true that there needs to be a cause for the laws and structure of our universe.[i]

Currently, “there’s one thing on which most geochemists and astronomers agree: The celestial pantry is now empty of a key ingredient in the recipe for Earth.”[ii] This is saying that the origin of water on earth is still unknown. Water could not have survived the conditions in space and the hot early earth; it would have been burned up and lost to space. It has long been thought that water has come from comets shortly after the majority of the earth had accumulated, but recent studies of the water on comets show that they have a heavier water molecule. So those comets could not have contributed the majority of the water to the earth, because making the earth’s oceans from those comets would have been like “trying to make a low-fat dessert from heavy cream.”[iii]

“Scientists don’t really understand why various objects have different amounts of heavy water…People generally think that objects which formed further from the Sun should have more heavy water, but the new measurements don’t really fit.”[iv] Scientists estimate that “probably less than 15 percent” of the earth’s oceans could have come from comets or other space objects, although there may be evidence that some comets or other objects may in fact have the correct water for the earth.[v] Some scientists conjecture that “if existing objects in space couldn’t have combined to make Earth’s unique mix of water and other elements, the planet must have formed from—and entirely depleted—an ancient supply of water-rich material that has no modern analog.”[vi] This means that there is no evidence of that hypothetical material that preserved the water during the formation of the earth.

“Water isn’t the only matter on our planet today that seems unlikely to have formed at Earth’s proximity to the sun. There are also compounds and elements that readily vaporize, including chemically inert noble gases, such as argon, krypton, and xenon, and the elements nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen.” Osmium should have sunk towards the center of the earth early on in the earth’s formation, but yet it is found in the crust of the earth and the osmium that is found, does not match the osmium isotopes found on meteorites.[vii]

There are other planets and moons in our solar system that are perplexing as to how they have (or still have) the elements they currently do. Mercury, for example, should not be as dense as it is, so naturalists hypothesize that a large impact must have brought heavier material while stripping the light material away from the planet. There is no evidence of this kind of impact.[viii]

“Evolutionary models predicted that Jupiter would lack certain elements: argon, krypton, xenon, nitrogen, and others. But it turns out that Jupiter has lots of these elements.” Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, “has an atmosphere of mostly Nitrogen and Methane. Sunlight breaks methane down…Titan’s methane would only last for a few million years, not 4.5 billion years. However there is still methane there today…If Titan were really billions of years old, it would have…a source of new methane [and] lots of accumulated ethane…They have found potential lakes of methane and ethane, but at most only 1/10 of what it should have…They have only found 4 craters on Titan meaning that it is really young.”[ix] Another challenging moon of Saturn is Enceladus, which has a geyser on its south pole, but it should be “cold, old, and dead.”[x]

Jupiter’s moon, Io, is very volcanically active, which is a huge challenge for old age views. It puts off a tremendous amount of heat and material and simply would not be like that after billions of years. Callisto is also very geologically active, but shouldn’t be.[xi]

Also, the “naturalistic theory did not expect a uniform atomic nature of matter. ‘The relative abundances of the various isotopes of different elements are repeatedly found in similar ratios in stars, in the interstellar medium, in meteorite fragments and in the earth’s crust. The similarity of these ratios cannot be accidental, and the detailed explanation of the hundreds of known abundance ratios provides a severe task for the theory of stellar evolution.’”[xii] “In a similar vein, Gamow, a prime originator of big bang theory, also claimed ‘Relative abundances of elements [throughout the cosmos] have been exhaustively studied. … The most important result of these studies is the fact that the chemical composition of the universe is surprisingly uniform [emphasis in original].’ The interstellar medium and the intergalactic medium have D/H [Deuterium to Hydrogen] abundance ratios that do not fit into conventional NST [Nucleosynthesis Theory].”[xiii]

“It has long been claimed that big bang theory correctly predicted the 3:1 abundance of H to He in the universe. This is not true. The H/He ratio was known before big bang NST was conceived. The theory has been modified to fit the facts.” Therefore, these were not “predictions, but merely adjustments of theory (‘retrodictions’) to accommodate current data.” Also, “the belief in dark matter is at least partly due to retro-fitting big bang theory to the observed H/He cosmic abundance ratio.”[xiv]

“Other long-standing difficulties are the deuterium synthesis problem, and the overage of Population I stars. Neither has stellar NST actually explained the origin of the elements. The elements in their existence and abundances continue to point to creation.”[xv]

Radioactive decay of elements has been assumed to be constant. There are many observations that confirm this, but as more research is taking place, there are more reasons to be skeptical of that assumption. Rocks can be accurately dated only if: 1) the initial conditions are assumed correctly; 2) the elements have remained the same (they cannot come and go within the rock); and 3) the decay rate is and has remained constant.[xvi]

Some scientists are observing that radioactive decay rates may be faster the closer you get to the sun (or due to solar flares) – possibly because of more neutrinos or some other unknown particles coming from the sun.[xvii] Neutrinos can also originate from nuclear reactions in the earth or from other sources in the galaxy, both of which could affect the decay rates.[xviii] Some experiments are starting to show that under certain conditions (temperature, specific ionized states, and chemical environment), some decay rates are up to billions of times faster than normally observed.[xix]

As radioactive decay occurs, a common by-product is helium. Therefore helium is created within rocks and the rate that helium leaves those rocks has been observed and calculated. But if the earth were old, there should be much less helium in these rocks. This should contribute to more helium being in the atmosphere. Helium does escape the earth’s atmosphere, but that rate is less than the amount that is coming out of the rocks. This means that there should be more helium in the atmosphere, but there is not, and so this evidence shows that the atmosphere can be no more than 2 million years old.[xx] And actually “helium diffuses so rapidly that all the helium should have leaked out [of the rocks] in less than 100,000 years.”[xxi] There is even Carbon-14 in coal, fossils, and diamonds, which should have decayed beyond detection by now and thus is evidence that these items are not millions of years old.[xxii]

The most challenging aspect for naturalism is that it has an almost impossible amount of variables and details to work out in their theories. They bear the burden of proof to show more evidence that will prove answers beyond a reasonable doubt for the many necessary processes for their theory to be true. Naturalists have a lot of challenging questions to answer. Consider even how they claim that the earth gained its oxygen from cyanobacteria around 2.45 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event, “but mysteries remain. What occurred 2.45 billion years ago that enabled cyanobacteria to take over? What were oxygen levels at that time? Why did it take another one billion years—dubbed the “boring billion” by scientists—for oxygen levels to rise high enough to enable the evolution of animals? Most important, how did the amount of atmospheric oxygen reach its present level? ‘It’s not that easy why it should balance at 21 percent rather than 10 or 40 percent,’ notes geoscientist James Kasting of Pennsylvania State University. ‘We don’t understand the modern oxygen control system that well.’”[xxiii] Everything in this complex story, billions of years long, with very little observation and experimentation is a rough guess, very speculative and worthy of healthy skepticism.

 

What the Bible Says: Gen 1-2

 

by Brian Mariani and others

 

Before commenting, please read the following disclosures.

Any offensive language will automatically disqualify your comment for publication, even if the arguments contained are good. Please comment on the ideas that are presented and not the presenter.  If your comment becomes an ad hominem argument and does not substantially address the issue, your comment will be disqualified as well.  We are looking for real arguments, not fallacious ones, so that we can present and challenge opposing ideas and arguments as they are truly believed by evolutionists.  We do not want to tear down straw men as well as you do not want to be misrepresented. Also, please keep your comments as brief as possible, and if the majority of the comment does not address the current issue, but becomes a red-herring, it will not be posted as well. If your comment does not fall into one of the above restrictions, then your comment will be posted unedited (you may want to check your spelling, grammar, etc.) We thank you for your time and comments.

One thing to keep in mind, each blog is one piece of evidence. Evidence has to then be interpreted, which is not a fact…but evidence strengthening or weakening a specific hypothesis or theory. So there can be multiple ways of interpreting the same evidence. I am not being unscientific, but asking more questions and being skeptical is being more scientific. I am still working on these, so please help with your comments.

 

If you would like to see if an AOI seminar is right for you, or you would like to help the work of Alpha Omega Institute, please visit our website events page or our donate page. Keep up to date with what AOI is doing.  Thanks for your partnership.