Recommended practice for teens and up

Wandering through cyberspace trying to decide on the best theme for an astronomy post today, I ran into this video by the old-earth cosmologist, Marcus Chown.

Much of what he discusses is appropriate for everyone. However, many of his “just so stories” are so confidently stated, and the ideas are so big, that it would be overwhelming to kids under 12 (they’d probably find him boring, too).

One of our basic premises (logical assumptions) about the world is that everything in it brings glory and honor to its Creator. This is true even when the person talking refuses to admit the Creator God exists. Almost everything Chown mentions is awesome and can lead us to worship our Creator more if we have ears to hear!

Study notes:

The sun was created on Day 4 as a fully functioning mature star.  Adam was created on Day 6 as a fully functioning adult. This is nowhere close to being a lie or impossible; it means God is very powerful and understanding.

Did you catch him making fun of Archbishop Ussher?  People like doing that, so you will want to study up on who he was and what he actually said.  Answers in Genesis has a great article on him.

Think about his assumption that finding marine fossils on top of mountains means the earth must be very old. We look at marine fossils on top of mountains and say, when God claimed the high hills were all covered by the Flood of Noah’s day, He meant it! The facts are no different, our assumptions are opposite.

And then there is Darwin’s assumption that we can know all animals developed from a common ancestor even though we’ve never seen it happen. How do we know? Because if you add huge amounts of time, it’s bound to happen. So, therefore, we know the world is very old because of all the evolved beings in it.  Logical, right? Hardly. This is called the fallacy of “begging the question” (a title I can never remember the meaning of, but the idea is quite important).  Dr. Lisle has a nice article explaining how this all works for you to arm yourself with.

Around the 28 minute mark, Marcus Chown mentions the particle characteristics of light. For more on the nature of light and how it acts both as a wave and a particle, check out my post, Jesus Knew what He was Talking About: Light.

At the 32 minute mark (following a very neat mystery about Saturn), he makes a blanket statement that some of the static on your TV comes from the Big Bang. This idea is based on something real, cosmic background radiation, being caused by something imagined, the Big Bang.

It is amazing that there is this stuff traveling uniformly throughout the known universe. However, his assumptions that it proves the man-made story of its origin is based entirely on faith. For more, see Answers in Genesis’ article: Surprise? NASA ‘Confirms’ the Big Bang.

As for the universe expanding (the phenomenon the Big Bang was developed to explain), God predicted that WAY back.

Next, he gets into the ultimate “just so story” of what conditions would have been like at the time of the Big Bang. The amount of assumptions and rule changes needed to get what they want to be true to fit what they know to be true is staggering. And they tell us we are unscientific for our belief in 6 Day Creation!

Quote of the Day: “So, randomness is the same as information…Randomness, that’s where all the information in the universe comes from.” Really? Hasn’t he heard of chaos? I bet a 2 year old is smart enough not to fall for that kind of nonsense. That is, until their sin becomes so precious to them they will do anything to keep from thinking about God!

As for Dark Matter, I’m planning to cover this theory sometime, but finding good info without blowing my brain circuits isn’t easy!  For now, you can check out Dr. Lisle’s article No Nearby Dark Matter.

His last statement about the infinite number of copies of us is so off the wall I’m not going to bother critiquing it. But the Bible did:

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:
So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation. Hebrews 9:27,28