Episode 16: We’re back on Day 4 of Creation Week exploring the biggest understatement ever! What are stars like? Why do scientists who live for decades predict what would take billions of years to happen? And, a little of how God might have flung the stars into place while letting us see them the whole time. Then, we learn about a totally different light source: electrical switches.
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And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. Genesis 16-18
What are Stars Like?
Our sun is the size of the 5th one, top row
We did a little exploring of how stars work, their sizes, and even colors. Mostly, this is common knowledge, so I just found a couple good kids pages and shared them. You can check them out here:
- Science Kids.nz Fun Star Facts for Kids
- National Geographic: Stars
Preparing these show notes, I ran into a beautiful 1 minute video about stars on Answers in Genesis. You’ll have to go over there to see it and then you can see their other main star articles.
Do we see stars forming today?
For more about blue stars (my favorites), check out Dr. Danny Faulkner’s article: Blue Stars Unexpected Brilliance.
Woah! Look what I just ran into:
“But Ken Croswell points out in New Scientist that a star called FG Sagittae has changed from being a blue star (with a temperature of 12,000 degrees Kelvin) to a yellow star (temperature 5,000 K) in only 36 years of observation.” Published by Creation Ministries International back in 1991
Stretching the Heavens
I did a brief recap of Episode 5 where I talked about what God says about how the universe got as big as it is and we can see so far out is such a short time.
How Did God Do It?
There are a number of theories out by creation scientists trying to explain how God could have gotten light from a gigantic universe to earth in a single earth rotation. I’ve read some of them, including a set of articles from the Institute for Creation Research’s Acts & Facts: A New Creationist Cosmology.
But none of them impressed me much. It seems too much like trying to force every day, modern scientific ideas onto God during an obviously miraculous week.
Then I read Dr. Danny Faulkner’s proposal in the Answers Research Journal:
A Proposal for a New Solution to the Light Travel Time Problem
Basically, he recognizes something others ignore:
No one tries to figure out how God got full sized fruit trees and animals in a matter of moments during the rest of Creation Week. If we did use the same reasoning, we would have all kinds of hypotheses on how God could have had some sort of cloning chambers bringing embryonic creatures to maturity in a safe environment.
When we think about this happening to living things we can see how crazy this notion is. Yet people are determined to find normal processes God could have used to make “the stars also”.
Of course, it’s hard to think of scientific predictions to make if this kind of miracle actually happened, so Dr. Faulkner’s proposal has run into some flack. But He’s got a pretty good response in my opinion.
I willingly admit I was biased to accept Dr. Faulkner’s proposal as his thinking matched how I had always pictured Day 4 of Creation Week happening. Those of you with sturdy brains can have some fun checking these ideas out for yourselves!
BTW Everyone has to explain how we can see mature galaxies out as far as we do. Even assuming the universe is billions of years old, they shouldn’t have had time to form.
Plus, the Big Bang has a major starlight and time problem. I don’t know why they don’t just claim the universe is older like they used to, but 13.45 billion years still isn’t enough to account for how far away we can see now!
We all must believe in something that goes beyond our understanding. As for me, I’m going to trust the Creator so powerful He can also purify me and give me eternal life as well as fling the universe out in moments!
Light Switches
This episode’s report was on how flipping a little switch can cause a light bulb half a room away to start glowing.
“Simple” Circuit diagram. S1 is the light switch
I’m going to talk to our librarian about getting a decent book for kids explaining electrical circuits. It was surprisingly difficult to find an explanation of the process that wasn’t full of jargon or was more than three sentences long. So, eventually we cobbled together the basic elements of how they work. But…
There is a really great collection of online electrical activities for kids you can check out at Woodlands Junior School in the UK. Charity did the one on the top middle: Learning Circuits.
