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Believing the Unbelievable
Myths
of our Times
let's be particularly cautious about "believing
unbelievable things."
.
It is clear from the Scriptures that the disruptions within the Solar System are not yet over, and several exciting climaxes are actually going to impact the Planet Earth shortly. It is also astonishing that the Ruler of the Universe is going to set up His Headquarters on a particular piece of real estate on this very planet in the not-too-distant future! Let's recognize the foolishness that masquerades as science and discern the differences between interesting conjectures and verifiable truth. And let's measure the true nature of reality by the established reference provided by the Creator Himself: the Word of God. Finally, let's be sure we haven't disregarded our forthcoming appointment with Him. He is coming, "Ready or not!"
by Chuck Missler
"One can't believe impossible things," Alice
laughed.
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour
a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
-Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll 1
For a presumably enlightened culture,
our lives - and schoolbooks - are littered with an astonishing array of beliefs
that pose as being scientific, but are actually in contradiction to available
evidence.
We need to regard many of our cherished
myths with cautious skepticism and not allow conjectures to masquerade as
proven facts.
With all of the interest in the recent
alignment of five planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the
western evening sky - one of the finest gatherings in 20 years (see graphic
below), this may prove an interesting conversation piece.
The Nebular Hypothesis
Most of us have been taught that the
planets of our solar system came out of the sun.
It may come as a surprise that there
are serious scientific difficulties with this presumption.
In fact, a careful analysis of existing
evidence suggests some surprising alternative possibilities.
Immanuel Kant, in his General
History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, in 1755 in Germany, theorized
that some four billion years ago, the sun had ejected a tail, or a filament, of
material that cooled and collected and thus formed the planets.
Kant is generally credited as the
originator of what is commonly called the "Nebular Hypothesis," but
the originator was actually Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).
Swedenborg wrote his treatise on cosmology
in 1734, in Latin: Prodromus Philosophiae Retiocinantis de Infinito et
Cause Creationis .
Some 21 years before Kant's
publication, Swedenborg proposed that the planets were the result of
condensations of a gauze or filament ejected out of the sun.
Swedenborg was a mining engineer with a
wide range of interests and also claimed to have psychic powers.
Historians and biographers seem to take
him quite seriously and a number of public incidents caused his fellow Swedes
of Stockholm to regard him as irrefutable.
He claimed confirmation of his nebular
hypothesis from seances with men on Jupiter, Saturn and places more distant.
(Some 20 years earlier, in 1712, when
Swedenborg was 24 years old, he had the opportunity to visit with Edmund Halley
at Cambridge, who described to him the various aspects of comets and their
tails.
Halley had made a study of the reports
of various medieval comets, their orbital trajectories, dates, and
descriptions, and, of course, is famous for his predictions regarding the comet
that still bears his name.)
The famous mathematician Pierre Simon
Laplace (1749-1827) lent his endorsement to Kant's theory, but without checking
the mathematical validations he was capable of providing.
Thus, the nebular hypothesis gained
widespread respectability despite serious mathematical flaws.
Subsequent writers have continued to
develop variations of this view even though increasing difficulties render it
rather doubtful.
Difficulties Mount
The sun contains 99.86% of all the mass
of the solar system. Yet the sun contains only 1.9% of the angular momentum.
The nine planets contain 98.1%. (This
was known in the time of Laplace a century ago.)
There is no plausible explanation that
would support a solar origin of the planets.
James Jeans (1877-1946) pointed out that the
outer planets are far larger than the inner ones. (Jupiter is 5,750 times as
massive as Mercury, 2,958 times as massive as Mars, etc.)
This is also a difficulty with current
theories. Other observations seem to raise even more provocative enigmas
concerning our planetary history:
·
There are three pairs
of rapid-spin rates among our planets: Mars and Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, and
Neptune and Uranus, are each within 3% of each other. Why?
·
Earth and Mars have
virtually identical spin axis tilts (about 23.5). Why? (From angular momentum
and orbital calculations, it would seem that three pairs of these planets may
have been brought here from elsewhere.)
·
Why does Mars have
93% of its craters in one hemisphere and only 7% in the other? It would appear
that over 80% occurred within a single half-hour!
The Shrinking Sun
Has the size of the sun changed over
the years?
John A. Eddy (Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder) and Aram A.
Boomazian (a mathematician with S. Ross Co. in Boston) seem to have found
evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century,
corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet/hour.
The data Eddy and Boomazian examined
spanned a 400-year period of solar observation, so that this shrinkage of the
sun, though small, is apparently continual.
If the sun was larger in the past than
it is now by 0.1% per century, a creationist, who may believe that the world
was created approximately six thousand years ago, has very little to worry
about: the sun would have been only 6% larger at creation than it is now.
However, if the rate of change of the
solar radius remained constant, 100 thousand years ago the sun would have been
twice the size it is now, and it is hard to imagine that any life could exist
under such altered conditions.
Yet 100 thousand years is a minuscule
amount of time when dealing with traditional evolutionary time scales.
Furthermore, assuming (by
uniformitarian-type reasoning) that the rate of shrinkage has not changed with
time, then the surface of the sun would have touched the surface of the earth
at a time in the past equal to approximately 20 million B.C.
And, since the time scales commonly
assumed for organic evolution range from 500 million years to 2,000 million
years, it would appear especially amazing since all of the evolutionary
development, except the last 20 million years, took place on a planet that was
inside the sun!
Catastrophism Views
Most writers dealing with the origins
of the universe - and our solar system - tend to be uniformitarian in their
presuppositions (as are the typical astronomers).
Uniformitarians cling to the
presumption that things have remained essentially unchanged over billions of
years.
There is evidence, however, that our
solar system has endured a series of catastrophic events, and it is hard to
ignore the innumerable craters and other evidences on the planets - including
the Earth, the moon, et al. - as indications of an extensive and turbulent
history.
Look at the moon through any pair of
binoculars and it's clear that it has been in a rough neighborhood!
Planet X?
Unresolved anomalies in the orbits of
the nine known planets have led to numerous searches for a yet-to-be-discovered
"Planet X," which has gone by many other names: Vulcan, Oceanus, and
other designations.
The "Planet X" comes from
Percival Lowell who built a private observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, and
devoted considerable effort in his searches before he died in 1916.
Of the nearly 1,000 photographic plates
in his last search were 515 asteroids, 700 variable stars, and, ironically, two
images of Pluto (which wasn't discovered until 1930!)
Clyde Tombaugh began his searches in
1929, and found Pluto in February 18, 1930.
He continued his searches for another
13 years and examined 90 million images of some 30 million stars over more than
30,000 square degrees of the sky.
He found one new globular cluster, five
new open star clusters, one new supercluster of 1800 galaxies, and several new
small galaxy clusters, one new comet, about 775 new asteroids - but no new planet
except Pluto.
He concluded that no unknown planet
brighter than magnitude 16.5 did exist.
Other Conjectures
Many provocative conjectures continue
of the wandering antics of comets or other remote planetary bodies, with
Immanuel Veilikovsky and his Worlds in Collision as a well-known example.
The remarkable possibilities suggested
by Donald Patten, Loren Steinhauer, and Ronald Hatch are featured in our
commentary on "the long day of Joshua," and some of our other
publications.
They have proposed a surprisingly
comprehensive model based on orbital resonances between the orbit of Mars and
the Earth that would seem to explain seven major Biblical catastrophes, and
which, strangely, seems to be corroborated by the writings of Jonathan Swift in
his Gulliver's Travels !
What's Next?
It is clear from the Scriptures that
the disruptions within the Solar System are not yet over, and several exciting
climaxes are actually going to impact the Planet Earth shortly.
It is also astonishing that the Ruler
of the Universe is going to set up His Headquarters on a particular piece of
real estate on this very planet in the not-too-distant future!
(Read about it in Revelation 19-22, and
the final chapters of Isaiah, etc. Fasten your seat belts! It's going to be a
grand adventure for those who have done their homework and are prepared!)
In the meantime, let's be particularly
cautious about "believing unbelievable things."
Let's recognize the foolishness that
masquerades as science and discern the differences between interesting
conjectures and verifiable truth.
And let's measure the true nature of
reality by the established reference provided by the Creator Himself: the Word
of God.
Finally, let's be sure we haven't
disregarded our forthcoming appointment with Him.
He is coming, "Ready or not!"
Are you?
Charles W. Missler (May 28, 1934 – May 1, 2018) was an American
author, evangelical Christian, Bible teacher, engineer, and former businessman.
He was the founder of the Koinonia House ministry based in Post Falls, Idaho
Koinonia Institute is an online Bible Institute with a focus on verse-by-verse study where
serious Christians can grow in knowledge, understanding, awareness and
commitment!
At KI,
we delve into the relevance and reliability of Scripture, including prophetic
insight both past and present.
Koinonia
Institute is dedicated to training and equipping the serious Christian for
ministry in today’s world.
This
unique international membership offers education, insight and community for the
serious believer. Pray about joining us!
https://www.khouse.org/articles/2002/418/
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