← The Creation Podcast
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- [00:06]
A
Space is full of some of the strangest and most breathtaking objects in existence. Among them, black holes sit right at the top of the list. They're so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull. They push the limits of physics and challenge how mainstream scientists think the universe formed. Hi, I'm your host, Trey, and welcome to the Creation Podcast, the show where we discuss how science confirms scripture. Joining me today is ICR physicist Dr. Jake Hiebert. Dr. Hebert, thanks so much for being here.
- [00:37]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [00:38]
A
Of course. It's always a pleasure to have you on here. So before we get into the meat of it, you've spent years studying physics. You know, I know you have multiple degrees in physics, and you've studied physics related things here at ICR or researched physics related things here at icr. For listeners who may not be familiar with your background, can you just share a little bit about your expertise and how it connects to today's topic?
- [01:04]
B
Well, like you said, I've researched a number of things here at icr, but one of the things I tried to do is keep up with developments in astronomy and cosmology that bear on the creation evolution debate, because obviously that's something people are interested in. And for the last four years or so, I've been working on a book on evidences for a young universe. It seems like it's taken a little longer than it should for me to get it finished, but we're getting there, but I've been working on that. And so obviously, this is something that's. When you talk about origins, the Big Bang, it comes up distant starlight. Those are topics that often come up in this area. And so, understandably, people want answers to that. And so I'm trying to show that science, if you do it right, it confirms what the Bible says. The heavens really do declare God's glory.
- [01:57]
A
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing, by the way.
- [02:00]
B
Before I forget.
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A
Sure.
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B
We do have a creation astronomy club that meets here at the Discovery center the third Saturday of every month at 5pm so if you live in the DFW area, Dallas Fort Worth, feel free to come. It's open to the public. The only exception is we don't normally do it in December because everybody's really busy in December.
- [02:22]
A
And it's cold.
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B
It's cold, too. Yeah. But that's a great opportunity if you're interested in creation and astronomy. This is a great opportunity to participate with a group that combines both those interests.
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A
Excellent. Well, actually, we can put a link to. I know we have those on our website.
- [02:42]
B
Sure.
- [02:42]
A
So we'll link to that. Okay, well, so today we're talking about black holes. And I think a lot of people have heard of black holes, and mainly that's through science fiction or Hollywood or books or whatever. But at least in my understanding, I don't know what it actually is, what it does, why it exists. Could you just give us a very like 30,000 foot view, big picture explanation of what it is? That would be understandable to the average viewer?
- [03:14]
B
Sure. It's just a region of space where there is so much mass in it that if you get too close, nothing can escape, not even light. A simple example is like, you know, Earth, we know that there's a minimum speed you have to have to escape Earth's gravitational pull. All right, you can do a similar calculation, like for something that's really massive. But it turns out when you calculate the escape velocity, it's greater than the speed of light. And no object that has mass can accelerate up to that speed. So basically nothing can escape, not even light. And so that's basically what a black hole is. And of course, some black holes are maybe relatively small. Okay, they got a lot of mass, but relatively small. But there's some that they think have masses a billion times greater than that of our sun.
- [04:06]
A
Wow. Yeah. So regions of space where gravity is so strong. I see now why.
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B
Yeah, it's because the mass is very concentrated. It's in a very small volume.
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A
Okay. That kind of makes sense why they're such big deals in science fiction.
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B
Right, right, right.
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A
Makes for compelling storytelling. So not even light can esc. Some are bigger than our sun.
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B
Yeah. And they've got very strong gravity. I mean, that's basically what you're talking about here.
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A
Just intense, intense gravity.
- [04:37]
B
Yeah.
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A
How do black holes, at least from a uniformitarian perspective, how would black holes form?
- [04:45]
B
Okay, they would say that if you have a star that's very massive, let's say it starts to run out of nuclear fuel, and at some point the internal pressure cannot balance the force of gravity, and it just collapses and you get a black hole. And as a creationist, I don't really have a problem with that per se. I can imagine something like that happening. And I don't have a problem with black holes either. I mean, I think they're real. I don't think there's any real doubt about that now. I do think maybe could it be that some of that stuff happened during day four? You know, could it be that God allowed stuff to collapse in order to form the black holes directly. That's possible, but I don't have any kind of a problem with black holes existing. You know, basically, it's theoretically possible for a star to collapse in the form of a black hole.
- [05:37]
A
Okay, yeah. So you mentioned, you know, a supermassive star that supposedly collapses.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say super massive, but it has to be considerably more massive than our sun. Okay, yeah, yeah.
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A
Okay. So we're talking millions, you said there's some that are even billions of times.
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B
Well, some of them, I think, are only maybe a few times more massive. But there are some very super massive ones that can be maybe 100,000 times the mass of our sun or even billions of times more massive. Yes, a huge spectrum, right? This is a. Yeah, right.
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A
Why does it matter that there's like such a spectrum? Is that relevant to the whole formation of black holes from a uniformitarian perspective?
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B
Well, when you get into the supermassive black holes, there's a problem for them. And I think we can get into that if you like. But it's the supermassive black holes that are a real problem for evolutionary theories. But the regular black holes, they also cause some problems for them.
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A
Okay.
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B
You know, I did an article on our website back in 2019 called Deep Space Objects are Young.
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A
We'll link to that here.
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B
It presented arguments that the universe is a lot younger than what evolutionary scientists are saying. And I didn't elaborate on it, but I had one sentence in there where I said that they've been surprised at the number of black holes they found in these star clusters, called globular clusters, which are these really just beautiful. They're like celestial snow globes. They're just gorgeous. But they're a dense collection of stars. They're really dense toward the center, and they become a little less dense as you move out. But the thinking is they think that these globular clusters are some of the oldest objects in the universe, maybe 10 billion years old or more. And the stars in there are supposed to also be very, very old. And the thinking is.
- [07:31]
A
And this is from a timeline of 14ish billion years.
- [07:34]
B
Okay, 13.8 billion years. Yeah. So these are supposed to be very old. And so the thinking is that you had these stars early in that history that could turn into black holes, but after that, there's really no more reason for black holes to be forming for the most part. So they think, okay, you have these black holes form early in its history, basically no more black holes are forming. But they think that because of gravitational Interactions, the black holes should eventually get ejected. They get kicked out of those globular clusters. Well, they were surprised to find that those globular clusters had more black holes than they were expecting. Okay. Which could be an argument against their timeline.
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A
Okay.
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B
That these things are younger than what they think. It doesn't necessarily prove they're 6,000 years old. Okay. But as creationists, we think it's possible that objects in deep space could be more than 6,000 years old, as measured by those clocks.
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A
Right.
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B
Okay. But as far as the Earth is concerned, and really, as far as the universe is concerned, time is measured on Earth. The entire universe is 6,000 years old. I want to make that clear. We're not trying to worm in millions of years. Okay. It's measured by clocks on Earth. And if you read Genesis 1, it's clearly in an Earth reference frame. The Earth, the solar system, and the universe itself were all just 6,000 years old. Okay, but you could have clocks in deep space that might be ticking faster than that.
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A
Right.
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B
Okay. But nevertheless, relativity and all that. Yeah, relativity and all that. And it looks like these things are younger than what they're expecting. They were very surprised by that.
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A
Okay. So when it comes to the Big Bang model and all of that, so mainstream astronomers expect black holes to follow a pattern. Right. That's kind of. Kind of how things work is there's, like, a gradual buildup. But it seems that what they're finding isn't fitting that.
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B
Right.
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A
Okay.
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B
We did a podcast earlier about the James Webb Space Telescope and how they are finding very distant galaxies that look too mature. It looks like, if you accept their ages for those galaxies, there should not have been time for those galaxies to form. Okay, so you've got, like, right now, the most distant galaxy that we know of has a redshift of about 14.44. And in their reckoning, that corresponds to a time 280 million years after the alleged Big Bang. But you really shouldn't be able to have well organized galaxies at that point. In fact, in 2012, just as recently as 13 years ago, there was an official NASA poster that showed the Big Bang timeline. And on it, it says, first stars, 400 million years, meaning 400 million years after the Big Bang. Well, most evolutionists will tell you the stars have to form first, then the galaxies. Okay, so, but now we're looking at. Forget stars. We're looking at galaxies that are, by their reckoning, existing 280 million years after the Big Bang. Okay, so that's a problem for them. You see the same thing with these supermassive black holes, because they think it should take a very long time for these supermassive black holes to form. I mean, if you're starting from a universe with hydrogen, okay, you gotta have the stars form, then you've gotta have those stars. Some of those stars collapse to form black holes. Then presumably, I guess, some of them might interact with each other and merge to form an even bigger black hole. This ought to take a very, very, very long time. And so. But they are seeing supermassive black holes at distances that should be impossible because in their minds, this is too soon after the Big Bang for these supermassive black holes to form. So it's very similar to this mature, distant galaxy problem that they've got. It's the same idea. Not enough time to form these structures. Now, supermassive black holes are interesting because they're found in pretty much every large galaxy. And I don't think that's a coincidence. There's probably a reason that God did it that way and may even give us a clue as to how God made these galaxies. But creationists and evolutionary astronomers would probably agree that it's not a coincidence that it's like pretty much every big galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, including our Milky Way galaxy, we've got one, a very large black hole. It's in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. There's a radio source called Sagittarius, a star. And you've got this supermassive black hole there. And interestingly enough, you know, there are stars that are in fairly tight orbits around that black hole. And you can actually see how they make these relatively sharp turns, I mean, because they're being strongly influenced. And from that you can figure out what the mass of that body is. So, yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting.
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A
Do the uniformitarians believe that the supermassive black hole at the center of these galaxies have something to do with how they formed?
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B
I don't want to misrepresent their position.
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A
Sure.
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B
I don't have, like, a detailed study of this, but basically, you got to have probably black holes and supermassive black holes just to get the galaxies.
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A
Okay. And the galaxy forms around it.
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B
Yeah, something like that, naturally. Quote, unquote. Yeah. And the details may differ a little bit, but it's this idea of taking smaller structures and forming them into bigger structures.
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A
Okay.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Okay. What about the idea of, like, black holes serving as some sort of, like, wormhole? Where does that come from?
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B
Well, it's sort of a theoretical thing. I don't think there's actually any wormholes. It's a theoretical thing, but as far as like an actual wormhole, I kind of doubt it. This idea. But the idea is like you could travel from one part of the universe to another, right? Yeah, yeah.
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A
I mean, I like science fiction, so I'm just curious.
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B
Yeah, sure, yeah.
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A
We've talked about black holes some. Let's talk about their hypothetical opposite. So if black holes are real, white holes are like a mirror image to that, at least in theory. And these are obviously less common in pop culture or just in the general, you know, human culture in general. So for those who have never heard of them, what exactly are they, at least in theory?
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B
Basically a white hole, whereas a black hole, nothing can escape.
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A
Yes.
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B
With a white hole, nothing can enter it. So instead of stuff falling in, you have stuff coming out.
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A
Okay.
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B
So it's kind of like a black hole running in reverse. And basically they're theoretical. I don't think there's any observational evidence for them, but they're theoretical. If you could have a black hole, you could. Theoretically, we have a white hole.
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A
Right. How or why did this theory begin? What was the purpose of it?
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B
Basically, if you think there's black holes, it's not a stretch to think you could have one running in reverse.
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A
Sure.
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B
So this is all coming from Einstein's theory of general relativity. In creationist theories, there's been a little bit of talk of white holes as well. For instance, back in 1994, creation physicist Russ Humphries had a book called Starlight in Time, which was an early attempt to explain how you can get distant starlight to Earth in a short time. And his cosmology involved a white hole where basically God was using a white hole to kind of create the universe. That theory has really been abandoned. I don't think even Dr. Humphreys holds to it anymore. It really didn't work. Interestingly though, there's another view on Distant Starlight by another physicist named Philip Dennis, who did a 2018 paper at the International Conference on Creationism. And he used white holes to kind of set the argument up. It's not so much that his actual explanation was involving white holes, but he was using it to explain the theory. So there is some interest if you're looking at creationism and starlight and cosmology, but pretty much they're hypothetical.
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A
Okay. Yeah. Okay. I guess a follow on question to that would are these like. These aren't devised as some sort of rescue Device for the big.
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B
I think it's legitimate from the theory.
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A
Okay.
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B
I mean, it kind of makes sense. If you've got a black hole, presumably you could have one running in reverse.
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A
Okay. Okay.
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B
Yeah. So, no, it's not a rescuing device.
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A
Okay. Okay. And so you're saying there's never really been any evidence for one.
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B
There is evidence for black holes.
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A
Yes.
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B
You know, they photographed. I remember that picture. Yeah. A black hole, or technically, they photographed the shadow. But yes. I mean, the black holes are real. Some creationists, the supporters of icr, kind of act like they don't like black holes, but they're legitimate. There's nothing really evolutionary about them. These are real objects.
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A
They're just a deep space phenomenon.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Okay. Okay. Well, then, so from a creation perspective, how do discoveries of black holes, and the more that we're learning about them, how does this point to design rather than, I don't know, cosmic accident?
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B
It's certainly pointing to design in the fact that it's a problem for the Big Bang timeline.
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A
Okay.
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B
They're finding these supermassive black holes at distances that really seem. And their reckoning corresponds to a time shortly after. Relatively shortly after the Big Bang. Okay. We might be talking a billion years after the Big Bang, but still, if you've got this slow, gradual process where you're building a supermassive black hole from the bottom up like that, that's gonna take a long time. And so you've got that. And also, I don't know if it's proof of design, but the fact that you find these supermassive black holes within pretty much every major large galaxy, it suggests there's a reason for it. It could be a design feature, or it could be a clue about how God made them. Black holes present a number of problems for mainstream astronomers. You've got the supermassive. You've got the fact that it looks like there's too many black holes and globular clusters. Another thing that may not be quite as problematic for them, but it's interesting. We talked about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. You've got some of these stars that are in very tight orbits around that black hole. And the reason that sort of bothers mainstream astronomers is because they think these stars had to form naturally. The problem is close to a black hole is a very bad place to try to form a star.
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A
Right?
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B
You've got these tidal forces. You've got radiation. It's just not a good place to try to make a star. And these are like blue stars, right, that have relatively short lifetimes. Okay. By evolutionary reckoning, they might have a lifespan of maybe 10 million years.
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A
Right? Right.
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B
The problem is, for them, the apparent problem is they could argue, well, maybe they migrated in somehow, maybe they formed farther away and migrated inward. But the thing that perplexes them, it looks like it would take more than 10 million years for them to migrate inward. In other words, the time to migrate is longer than the stars. What we would call main sequence lifetime.
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A
Right.
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B
Now, I don't know if that's an airtight argument. I've seen some more recent papers where they think, oh, well, maybe there are places close by that they could form. I don't know. But it's interesting. It's interesting that they've been puzzled by this. In fact, one of these blue stars, they described it as a paradox of youth, you know, that near this supermassive black hole, that didn't really make any sense. So there's a lot of things about black holes that can be problematic for the mainstream evolutionary view.
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A
That leads me to think, so you know, we've got these stars orbiting this black hole. Like, I guess eventually a black hole would pull in everything that's around it, right? That's like very second law of thermodynamics, entropy.
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B
Okay, if it's nearby. Okay. Now if it's far enough away, it won't do anything.
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A
Okay.
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B
Yeah. This was a question on an astronomy test I took once. I got it wrong.
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A
No.
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B
So you remember the question was, if our sun would turn into a black hole, what would happen to the Earth's orbit? And the answer is, nothing.
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A
Okay.
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B
Okay. It would just keep. Now, of course we'd all die because it'd get really cold, but as far as the orbit's concerned, nothing would change. Because when you're doing gravity, you treat the sun as a point anyway, right?
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A
It's just the same mass.
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B
So it's not like the black holes are just gonna gobble up the universe, you know, it's not like everything is eventually gonna get turned into a black hole. As long as you're a safe distance away, nothing happens, you know?
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A
But do they grow?
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B
They can grow, but they can also disappear. Theoretically, in some cases, maybe they can evaporate. There's a question about how long do these things last? They can grow, but it's not like they're gonna gobble up the rest of the universe like you see in some sci fi movies.
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A
Yes, and that's exactly what I'm thinking is like, just Interesting to kind of imagine even though it's. We're not there. We're not even close enough to see,
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B
you know, not yet.
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A
Okay. For a Christian who's watching this and whose only, I guess, cultural touchstone to black holes is sci fi or something like that, and they don't think about space or physics beyond, oh, look, there's the moon. Do black holes have any relevance to a Christian?
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B
Well, you know, maybe tangentially. I mean, in the same way that they defy evolutionary expectations. Okay. The same way the rest of the heavens defy attempts to explain the universe apart from God. It's the same thing. Okay. And black holes are relatively simple compared to living things. You know, and the thing is, we don't really fully understand black holes, even though they're relatively simple. You know, our understanding of physics breaks down. You know, if something simple like a black hole is a problem, then you can imagine how hard it is for people trying to explain the origin of a cell. Yes. Where it's basically like a miniature, super sophisticated city. You know, there's just, there's just no way to explain it.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Yeah. Apart from a creator.
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A
Absolutely. Is there a way that, you know, black holes could be used to open doors to talk about creationism?
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B
Well, you could. I mean, the stuff that we mentioned earlier, you could maybe even get into entropy, you know, black holes. Now, nobody's really exactly sure how to calculate the entropy of a black hole. Okay. There's different ideas, but they're not really sure. But I don't doubt that if once you figure it out, it's going to. It's not going to violate the second law. The universe is running down. Things are becoming more disordered over time. And so I think if you do the calculations correctly, I don't doubt that the entropy or the disorder in the universe is increasing.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
And of course, the second law is very relevant to the creation evolution controversy, maybe more so than black holes per se, because they strongly implied that the universe had a beginning and that this was at a finite time in the past because everything's running down eventually. You can imagine a time in the future where there is no more available energy for useful work. And they would call that heat death. And we haven't gotten there yet. Okay. So that strongly suggests that the universe isn't infinite, it's not eternal. Now there are evolutionists who will try to tell you the universe is eternal. Okay? And they're clever and they recognize this. And by the way, this is why in this controversy, you know, people want Silver bullet arguments, they just slam and there's no comeback at all. Even this argument is not completely airtight because what the really, I would say really smart evolutionists would say, they claim that energy is popping into existence, but it's happening so slowly you don't notice it. Okay? So they argue it could be infinite, it could be eternal. Okay. That's why we haven't reached heat death and because where there's energy coming into being that we don't know about. Now, the problem with that, though, is it's not based on observation. Nobody's ever seen that.
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A
It's just speculation.
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B
And if you're going to stick to observations, what we actually know, it looks like the universe has to be finite, it can't be eternal. And also it looks like it was created because the universe is running down, the disorder is increasing. That means that at some point in the past, it had to be wound up. And as Dr. Henry Morris, who founded the Institute for Creation Research, pointed out years ago, these two laws of thermodynamics together are a really strong argument for creation. Yeah, they really are.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. I have kind of an off the wall question. Okay, all right, hear me out. What about the idea that there are multiple universes and white hole to black hole is like a connection between them? I've actually seen that in people discussing multiverse theory.
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B
I don't see how you would have a black hole, white hole going from one universe to another. That quite doesn't make sense to me. The whole idea of a multiverse and there's different kinds of multiverses, but when you're talking about like the Big Bang and things like that, that idea is coming from something called inflation theory. Okay, The Big Bang. The early versions of the Big Bang model had huge problems, big problems, including their own version of the distant starlight problem, that they had these problems. And so in order to solve these problems, they invoked a tack onto the Big Bang called inflation theory, which the idea was that very shortly after the Big Bang, I mean, really shortly after, the universe goes through this enormous growth spurt, increases exponentially in size. And that supposedly solved these problems. Well, it turned out that it's actually made things worse because inflation theory is now very complicated. It's just weird. It's just really weird. And there are former proponents of it who are now harshly criticizing it. And in the other podcast I mentioned Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, he's a good example of that. Now, he still believes in a Big Bang of sorts, I think, but he's become Very critical of inflation theory. But the idea of a multiverse is coming from that. And of course, there's zero evidence for inflation. Okay. You know, supposedly I think it was 2013 or 2014, there was front page news that they finally found the smoking gun evidence for inflation, for the Big Bang. Well, that got quickly knocked down. It didn't stand up to scrutiny. There's no evidence for inflation. The Big Bang doesn't work without inflation. It's not evidence for inflation. Okay, that is a circular argument. That's the argument they usually use. But there's no evidence for it. There's no evidence for these other universes. How could there even be be evidence? I mean, by definition the argument is these universes are so far apart from each other, they can never have any contact with one another. So how on earth could you possibly prove or disprove that these other universes exist? It's really, it's a non scientific concept. It's not falsifiable.
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A
It's just imagination at that point.
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B
Yes. And really they're trying to use it as a substance. And some of them have said that. They've come right out and said, if you want to avoid a creator, you have to have a multiverse. The multiverse argument doesn't work. It doesn't even work as advertised.
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A
Right.
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B
They admit, they admit that it seems wildly improbable that we could be here as the result of a cosmic accident. But they say, okay, inflation theory says you have all these other universes and the laws of physics and chemistry in each of these universes can be a little bit different. Maybe in some universes, those laws of physics and chemistry allow life to exist. Now when they phrase it that way, they're cheating a little bit because the issue is not whether life can exist, it's whether life can evolve or spontaneously come from non life. Okay, you can have laws of physics that permit life to exist, but which do not allow life to spontaneously generate. That's the real issue. So when they phrase it that way, they're cheating a little bit. Okay, but they would say, okay, we just got lucky. We happen to live in a universe whose laws of physics and chemistry allow life to come from non life. Okay, the problem with that, in order for that argument to work, we actually have to live in a universe whose laws of physics and chemistry allow life to come from non life.
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A
Well, we don't.
- [29:06]
B
We don't. Okay, Nobody's ever done an experiment to show that it looks like it's scientifically impossible. We're not the Key here is we're not trying to explain the origin of life in other universes. We're trying to explain the origin of life in this universe. So even if you grant them that you have infinitely many hypothetical other multiverses out there and you grant that every single one of them, evolution can happen, it's irrelevant. It is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand because we're not trying to explain the origin of life in some other universe. We're trying to explain it in the universe we actually live in. And it just doesn't work. You don't even have to do any mathematical calculations. That's just simple logic. And so the argument doesn't even work as advertised. By the way, I should say something else about the second law. It should say two things about it. Early on, creationists suggested that maybe the second law was part of the curse or the fall. And most creationists don't think that now. We think that the second law was already in effect before Adam sinned. Okay? Because when you're dealing with the second law, you're talking about things like how heat flows and things like that. Like if there was an ice cube and a glass of water in the pre fall world, would it have melted? Yeah. Okay, so the second law was in effect. What most creationists think, and I agree with this, is that we think that although the second law was already in effect, God supernaturally protected living things from the detrimental effects of the second law. In other words, he was upholding living things so they didn't break down. And there is scriptural precedent for this. Okay, we read In Deuteronomy, chapter 34, you know, it talks about Moses, he was 120 years old. And the scripture says his eye was not dim, nor was his natural force abated. The Bible says that for the Israelites, when they were walking in the wilderness, their shoes did not wear out nor did their feet swell. Caleb is another example. Okay, he was 80 years old, but he was out fighting giants, okay? God supernaturally protected them from that. And so it's clearly God can do it. And so we think that's basically what happened. And when Adam and Eve sinned, God just sort of withdrew his hand and let nature take its course. And so the second law was. Almost all creationists agree on this. The second law was already in effect before the fall. But the negative detrimental consequences of that were not in effect for living things. Now another thing I want to say about this is that creationists, you know, we've backed away from the argument from the second Law a lot, because we would make the argument that evolution was contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. And the evolutionists would come back and say, oh, that's not true. Okay? If you have an open system, okay, where energy can come into the system, entropy can decrease, it can become more ordered over time. And so the fact is, an open system is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for entropy to decrease in a system, okay? Dr. Andy McIntosh, he is a professor emeritus of thermodynamics at Leeds University. He's done a lot of this and he's been arguing. And I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think the argument he's making is that we creationists need to take back the second law. It is a valid argument against evolution, but you've got to express it correctly. And the point he makes is that a lot of times it's more convenient to talk about something called the Gibbs free energy. And as far as we know, in spontaneous reactions, the Gibbs free energy can either decrease or it can stay the same. It never increases. And the Gibbs free energy is basically the energy that's available for useful work. And the point that Dr. Macintosh has been making is that the only way that we know of for the Gibbs free energy to increase, as if you have a machine to make it happen, okay? It just doesn't spontaneously happen. Both he and I would challenge evolutionists if you think there's an exception to this. Show us an example where the Gibbs free energy can spontaneously increase on its own without machinery of some kind.
- [33:35]
A
Right?
- [33:35]
B
And just. I know what they're going to say. They're going to say snowflakes. Snowflakes don't count, okay? Because the Gibbs free energy stays constant when a snowflake is formed, okay? It doesn't. The Gibbs free energy does not increase, you know, because it superficially looks like maybe it's becoming more ordered. They would try to argue. That's an example. But we need to take that argument back. But this is another example of how in this controversy, you have to be ready for the rebuttal. It's very wise policy. Don't use an argument if you're not ready for the rebuttal. Because even if the argument is valid, if you aren't ready to respond to the rebuttal, the argument appears to be invalidated in people's minds. And I think what Dr. Macintosh is getting at is that this is a valid argument. We creationists need to take it back. We just need to make sure that we formulate the argument in a way that doesn't give the evolutionists wiggle room. I'll give you an example. For instance. They would argue, well, you know, you can take a little embryo, an egg, and it turns into a person. That shows the complexity can increase. Right. But the problem with that argument is that, yes, you have energy coming into the system, but there is cellular and molecular machinery that's making that happen, that's taking that energy and increasing the free energy. Okay? It's doing work. It's ordering things. A leaf, okay? You can have light falling, sunlight falling on a leaf. Normally you would think that would just warm the leaf up, okay. But there is cellular machinery in there that takes that solar energy and produces sugar and oxygen. Okay? So there's always something in there, some machinery of some kind that's making that happen. It doesn't happen spontaneously. And where do machines come from? Okay. Somebody either has to make them or the information has to be present to make the machines. You either make them directly or you provide the information to make the machine. Which they can do this through DNA, right? Yes. And as far as we know, information only comes from living things. So what I think Dr. Macintosh is getting at is that we need, as creationists, we need to take back that argument. We just need to be careful to express it in a way that does not allow evolutionists to wriggle out from under the argument.
- [36:01]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I think that that's important and maybe a little bit more valuable for the average listener when it comes.
- [36:11]
B
By the way, Dr. Macintosh has a website. It's Andy McIntosh. It's spelled M C I N T O S H dot org. He gives talks. You know, he will be happy to do talks. Of course, sometimes you have to plan it far out in advance because he's got a busy schedule, but he's also got YouTube videos on this and he's got a couple of technical papers for those who want to delve into this more deeply. He's got some technical papers on this subject that are open access. Just do a search on the Internet for Andy McIntosh. Second law, free energy. You'll pull this stuff up. You can pull up those articles, and it goes into a lot more depth than what we can here.
- [36:54]
A
And we'll put some links in the description also. Absolutely. Well, Dr. Heber, thank you so much for joining me today and chatting about this. Do you have any final thoughts before we close?
- [37:06]
B
What would happen if you were facing imminent death? Like, let's say you're orbiting a black hole. And you're so spiraling inward. You know what? You know you're going to get turned into spaghetti here. What's the appropriate response? And if you're a Christian, you don't need to panic. Okay. You know, I think at that point, probably their appropriate response would be to start singing a hymn like, this is My Father's World. And I would be praying and saying, lord, well, looks like I'm about to come see you. But I know that because Jesus died for me and paid for my sins on the cross, I don't have to worry. He rose from the dead. That showed that you accepted his sacrifice, and that gives you a totally different perspective. People say black holes are scary. Oh, they're terrifying. Well, God our Father made them. He made them, okay? So if you're in a right relationship with him, you don't really need to be worried. You don't need to be worried about death. When you talk about the second law, you're talking about death. These are issues where Christ has conquered death. Okay? And the Bible says that when he comes back, he's going to undo this groaning that he himself imposed on the creation. That gives you a totally different perspective on these things. Even things that seem terrifying and frightening, like black holes. When you think about it that way, you realize, well, you know, my father made that.
- [38:33]
A
You know, I can trust him.
- [38:34]
B
Yeah, I can trust him. Yeah.
- [38:35]
A
I don't have to worry about it.
- [38:36]
B
Yeah. Awesome.
- [38:37]
A
Thank you again, Dr. Ebert. And so what we've seen is that black holes are more than science fiction. They're real, mysterious, and they're challenging some of the biggest conventional science ideas about how the universe formed. And even though white holes are hypothetical, talking about them is still a helpful exploration of the boundaries of science and the majesty of God's design. Before you go, please hit like and subscribe and share this episode with someone who. Who loves asking big questions about science and faith. Also, if you'd like to join with us in the work that we're doing here at icr, you can join our members and patrons community. Their names are scrolling on screen right now, and one of them actually had a question for you, Dr. Heber. Okay, so Alan Bouley, 6374 asks, how does Earth's magnetic field relate to the sun's activity and its effect on our planet?
- [39:32]
B
Okay. Oh, this is. This is interesting. This. My PhD research actually involved this. The sun has its own magnetic field, and the magnetic field changes over time. Okay. It can become stronger and then weaker. And it turns out that that magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays. Okay. Energetic protons mainly enter our atmosphere, what we call galactic cosmic rays. And a lot of people for a long time have suspected that there is a connection between weather and climate and solar activity and these cosmic rays. And my PhD research touched on this. Now, there is a popular explanation out there by a physicist, a Danish physicist named Heinrich Svensmark. He basically says, basically, when you have more cosmic rays, you get more clouds. Okay. That's kind of his idea. I think that's too simplistic.
- [40:33]
A
Right.
- [40:35]
B
My PhD advisor at the University of Texas at Dallas, his name's Brian Tinsley. He may be retired by now. And I want to make it clear he's not a creationist. He does not share my creationist convictions. But he had an alternate theory that I think is much stronger and has not gotten the attention it deserves. Is. It turns out it's not the cosmic rays themselves that are doing. Cosmic rays are only one thing, one factor that are affecting it. There's other things coming into play. But in order to get into that, you have to talk about something called the global Electric Circuit, and you have to talk about the ionosphere. And my PhD research was on this and I was able to help him move the football a few more yards down the field into showing that he was on the right track. And I think the evidence for his explanation is quite strong. If you're interested in this topic, we've got two articles on our website and I forget the exact title, but it's like something like cosmic rays, solar activity and weather, something like that.
- [41:37]
A
We'll find them in link up there.
- [41:38]
B
Yeah, those are two articles that I did. Those are popular level articles. And we've also got links to four technical articles on this subject, if you're more interested. Now, this doesn't really deal with creation evolution per se, but it is. It does get this issue of climate change. And are there other factors that could be coming into play that aren't being taken into account?
- [41:59]
A
Sure.
- [42:00]
B
Now, as far as the Earth's magnetic field is concerned, that's more of a creation evolution issue because the Earth's magnetic field is getting weaker over time. Evolutionists do not. They have to believe the Earth's magnetic field is billions of years old. They do not have a good mechanism for how that can work. They have something called the Dynamo theory. It's got big problems. They've been working on it for over 100 years. It still doesn't work. And it's actually worse than that because based on historical measurements we can infer that the energy of that magnetic field is decreasing so quickly that just a few tens of thousands of years ago, the current needed to produce that magnetic field would have produced so much heat that the Earth's crust and mantle would have melted. So that is a very powerful argument that the Earth is young and the Earth's magnetic field is young. So those are kind of two separate points to your question. But as far as the sun's magnetic field, that does touch on weather and climate, and the Earth's magnetic field is more of an age indicator as far as how old the Earth is.
- [43:08]
A
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for taking the. The time and how fortuitous that, you know, God was, really. He had you do that PhD research so you could answer this question.
- [43:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [43:21]
A
He. He plans our steps, so he does. Awesome. Thank you, Dr. Hebert, and thank you for everyone for watching this. And as a reminder, the link to become a member or a patron is in the description below. We'll see you next time on the Creation Podcast.
- [43:36]
B
Sam.