Why genesis matters lisle

The book of Genesis is not simply a collection of moral stories or fables about our origins. It's a book that sets the foundation for the whole of Scripture and upon which all the other books of the Bible rest. Genesis is essential to understanding God our Creator, Judge, and Savior.

Every vital Christian doctrine finds its roots in the Genesis record. In Why Genesis Matter The book of Genesis is not simply a collection of moral stories or fables about our origins. In Why Genesis Matters, Dr. Jason Lisle points us to the very first book of the Bible to understand the foundation of Christian doctrines.

Which doctrines are first introduced in Genesis? How do we really know if we're interpreting Genesis correctly?

What about the debate over the age of the earth? And how does Genesis help us when we share the gospel with others? These and other questions are answered in this practical book about Genesis, Christian doctrine, and the gospel. Get A Copy. Kindle Edition , Kindle. More Details Other Editions 1. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Why Genesis Matters , please sign up.

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Sort order. Start your review of Why Genesis Matters. Excellent defense of the book of Genesis. If you're a Christian read this book. If you're not a Christian definitely read this book. Jun 11, Patrick Rice rated it it was amazing. Very good Book If you like, or, love the book of Genesis, especially the first chapter, then this book is a must read There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Be the first to start one ». Little did the Ancients know that this Milky Way would later be measured to span a distance of 1,,,,,,, meters. Do not worry if you cannot grasp this number nobody can, really. To wrap their heads around such numbers, astronomers have started thinking in units of light-years: the distance a ray of light can travel in one year.

Using the speed of light that scientists measured, it would take a ray of light , years to traverse our galaxy We will get back to the speed-of-light measurement issues later. When you look at the Milky Way, you are basically looking at the side of our disk-shaped galaxy. Our galaxy contains about a hundred billion! And our galaxy is just one out of billions in the observable universe.

Astronomers have pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at regions of the sky that had appeared to be empty before. Distances have been reliably measured beyond 40, times the size of our own galaxy. This is an awfully long and according to standard physics, impossible distance for light to cross within a mere 6, years. And yet we see light constantly arriving at Earth from these distant regions. If the YEC position is scientifically viable, a satisfying solution should exist to the distant starlight problem.

Of course, the first line of defense is to cast doubt on the measurement methods e. Such convergence has lead YECs to recognize that this matter should not be taken lightly pun intended.

However, Lisle and others have rejected this proposal because it would imply that God is a deceiver. Back in , Dr. However, it seems this theory has met its own demise under pressure of both theoretical errors and falsified predictions.

It is clear that this situation has left the YEC movement with a dire need for a fresh approach that is more convincing, both theoretically and observationally. A trained astrophysicist would be the most likely source of such a solution. This is where Lisle comes in. After finishing his PhD in solar astrophysics at the secular University of Colorado, Lisle went on to become one of the leading scientific minds in the YEC movement.

In , Lisle published a long-awaited article containing the details of a solution at which he had been hinting for years: the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention ASC. Say what? SR involves a mind-flip relative to our standard way of thinking about time and space.

For everyday life purposes we all fare pretty well by thinking in terms of absolute time and absolute space. In classical physics, all speed measurements depend on our own movement speed. For example, a train carriage stands still for the passenger inside, but moves for those waiting on the station.

In SR, we need to flip this classical mentality around. SR is based on one main premise: the speed of light is the same for every observer independent of location and speed. The speed of light is exactly the same whether measured by someone waiting on Earth or someone flying a spaceship. Now, how does one perform such a measurement? Imagine that every observer has a single clock.

Someone can determine the speed of light by measuring the time it takes for a ray of light to travel away, bounce off a mirror and travel back i. In classical physics, space and time were absolute, so measurement outcomes would change with the speed of the observer. However, in SR, only the two-way speed of light is absolute and to keep it absolute, time and space need to be stretched.

This results in all kinds of strange predictions that contradict our common-sensical way of looking at the physical world: different observers experience time and space differently. I do not expect you to be able to perform any calculation at this point, but it serves to give you a flavor of the weirdness of SR.

This is useful because this quantity can be measured with a single clock this clock just waits until the ray of light comes back. However, what if, for example, you want to make an appointment to do sports with someone very very far away , separately but simultaneously? Together you will need to decide on some kind of rule to synchronize both of your clocks at different points in space.

Einstein would advise you to do this such that your one-way speed of light is also constant, always equal to c. This means that it takes a ray of light as much time to go towards your friend as it takes to return to you.

If the light leaves you at PM and arrives back at PM, we set the clock of your friend such that it reads PM when the ray of light bounced off his mirror. Now comes the trick. Instead, one can choose the synchronization of clocks in such a way that the clock of your friend reads PM at the moment of reflection. Since on your own clock, the light signal left at PM and came back at PM, it seems like the ray of light took two hours to arrive at your friend, but zero hours to come back.

This means the measured one-way speed of light is two times slower in directions away from you and infinite in directions towards you. This is allowed within SR, since synchronization is essentially a matter of convention. The procedure of synchronization is visualized in the animation below, which also illustrates the difference between the two synchronization conventions. Then, the ASC describes a possibly young universe and the standard convention describes a necessarily old universe, while leaving the physical system unchanged.

So, did we stumble upon the means of unification between standard and young-earth creationist cosmology? Unfortunately, not quite. One of these two ways is more truthful to the actual physics that underlie our universe. Einstein chose a constant one-way speed of light. How exactly did he motivate this choice?

How does light travel? The best answer we currently have comes from James Maxwell , a devout Christian physicist from the 19th century. Initially, Maxwell was not focusing on the question of light.

He was trying to understand how electric fields interact with magnetic fields. Not everybody will be familiar with the concept of these fields, so I hope that the physics-minded among you will forgive me for shortly going over some basics.

An electric field may be visualized as a collection of arrows that indicate in which direction a positive charge would be pushed if it were placed in the field. Magnetic fields are trickier to understand. For our purposes, it suffices to say that magnetic fields 1 arise from moving charges and 2 bend the movement direction of charges.

I purposefully say bend because magnetic forces only act perpendicular to the motion of charges. This notion of perpendicularity will return later on. As these notions are sufficient for the purpose of our discussion, we will not study these fields in additional depth.

With this extremely concise understanding of these two fields, we can proceed with our treatment of their interaction: electromagnetism. Electric and magnetic fields have an intriguing reciprocal relationship: 1 changes in electric fields cause magnetic fields and 2 changes in magnetic fields cause electric fields. Now, imagine an empty universe with only a single perturbation in its electric field.

The magnetic field will respond by changing. Replying immediately to that, the electric field will also change. Essentially, the magnetic and electric fields will start dancing around each other. A visualization of this phenomenon can be seen in the figure below. Is this all we can say? Surely not. Maxwell would not be called a physicist if he had not examined his equations to study this phenomenon further.

His famous equations can be studied in vacuum i. This treatment results in the traditional form of the wave equation for both the electric and the magnetic field. The resulting wave equations then completely characterize the behavior of these waves. For example, they show that the electric and magnetic field waves travel perfectly perpendicular to each other, as can be seen in the animation this property is no coincidence, remember the perpendicularity described earlier.

At this point, the job was relatively easy for Maxwell. He was familiar enough with experimental results in physics to realize that this result corresponded very well with the speed of light according to the available measurements at his time. This led him to propose that, in fact, light itself is an electromagnetic wave.

God saw that the light was good. So now, let us come back to where we started. To these findings, Einstein applied the idea that the laws of physics are observer-independent.

This gave rise to his assumption of a universally constant speed of light. In turn, this led to his famous framework of Special Relativity which we introduced in the previous post. Now, Special Relativity still leaves space for the choice of a synchronization convention. In light of our current discussion, we now understand what drove Einstein to assume a constant one-way speed of light: it agrees with the electromagnetic nature of light.

Electromagnetic waves have a finite, constant speed. However, their trains suffer from physical limitations and have a maximum speed of about 50 miles per hour. To overcome this quandary, the railway company decides to change the synchronization convention of the clocks on all of its stations. The clocks are synchronized in such a way that trains into the city seem to arrive instantaneously, while trains out of the city travel at half the speed say 25 miles per hour. With such amazing advertisements, it does not take long before somebody starts a lawsuit against this company especially since we are talking about the US here.

In its own defense, the company might say that this way of synchronizing clocks is technically allowed, just like the standard convention. The judge is taken somewhat off guard by this unusual proposal and decides to consult with expert physicists on the issue. Their advice entails that the accuracy of the advertised claims should be determined using the synchronization which is truthful to the physical limitations of trains i.

The judge decides to follow this piece of advice and the railway company loses the lawsuit. Of course, our example is subject to simplifications. These differences do not change the point of our analogy that physical limitations should be taken into account when discussing speeds. Some may view God as some kind of engineer who has put together an extremely complex machine called the universe and then decided to step back to watch its development. All kinds of variations can be added to this picture, such as God predicting intended outcomes beforehand or throwing in miracles now and then.

By his divine will, he is continuously upholding physical order within his own Creation. He is keeping it all together, moment by moment. The resulting regularities are what make our world understandable. Nature appears to function according to a coherent set of physical laws. No matter what faith one has, everybody can marvel at this property. In the physics that underlie the created order, God provides us with a framework for comprehension.

He himself chooses to maintain it every single moment. The previous post clarified that the standard synchrony convention of Einstein respects the physical nature of light finite, constant speed , whereas the ASC does not. Therefore, while the ASC may potentially solve a single interpretive issue related to Genesis 1, it does so at the expense of the God-ordained regularities of nature.

Our imaginary railway company set the station clocks in such a way that all the trains seemed to arrive instantly in a certain city, say New York, no matter from which station they departed.

So, imagine passengers sitting on a train, checking the clocks on all of the stations. Halfway towards the Big Apple, there is a short stop at an intermediate station. Some extra passengers get on and the train departs.

The passengers who got on the train halfway measured the same traveling time as those who made the full journey. But in physical reality, those passengers who got on the train halfway experienced only half the traveling time of the other travelers. What all these passengers have in common is that they arrived in New York at the same time. Let us apply this to the ASC model. It has all rays of light departing from all over the universe and arriving at Earth at approximately the same time, during the fourth solar day of Creation.

That star would have been created almost 5 years before the Sun. As distances to objects become larger, the moment of their creation gets pushed back further in time to allow their light to arrive simultaneously with that of the Sun.

It results in a scenario in which God created the universe gradually , starting with the objects farthest away from Earth and proceeding inward with the speed of light. But all of them arrive on Earth exactly on the fourth solar day of the existence of the Earth. If you are having trouble with visualizing this, below I have produced a small animation.

The dot in the middle is the future location of the Earth, while the globe around it delineates the volume which remains to be filled with created objects. I can imagine that this leaves you with more questions than answers regarding the ASC model.

So, let us carefully summarize our results. While the ASC model may seem to provide a neat account of Creation within the ASC , it gives rise to a rather peculiar story on the physical level assuming a constant speed of light.

On that level, there are at least two remarkable features. Now, could God have created the universe in this particular way? Of course he could. If he desired so, he could also have created the heavens to revolve around Earth. He could even have created everything with the appearance of age. The scientific method favors models that produce coherent and parsimonious descriptions of Creation.

You must have noticed the spectacular image shown above. The purple haze shows the radio emission of relativistic jets belonging to the galaxy Centaurus A.

Here the object is projected in its actual size as it would be seen on the sky if its light were visible to the human eye.

This stunning example spans 1,,!!! But what causes those jets exactly? At the center of this huge flare of Centaurus A at the small dot in the middle with a higher intensity lies an object 55 million times heavier than our Sun. Black holes pull huge amounts of gas towards themselves mainly hydrogen atoms. As a result, the temperature around the black hole increases. Due to the heat, the hydrogen atoms start to separate into free charged particles protons and electrons. As the gas is being pulled inward, it starts spinning quickly around the center much like a ballerina pulls her arms towards her body to increase the speed of her pirouette.

Consequently, each black hole possesses a very dense, hot, rotating disk of free charged particles. This is what they call the accretion disk , because it consists of the matter that is being collected by or accreted onto the black hole. Hopefully, moving charges will remind you of something we discussed earlier, namely, that these charges are the necessary ingredient for creating magnetic fields. The charges in the accretion disk are moving at incredible speeds and are gathered in large numbers.

Since this can happen at both poles of the black hole, objects can have two jets in opposite directions ranging across humongous distances. In the image shown above, astronomers happened to observe such a phenomenon stretching across the sky. These jets are moving perpendicular to our line of sight. The blue cones are the jets, while the green ellipse shows the disk on its side. He proposed that all objects such as galaxies were created mature—instantaneously, and fully formed.

So our own galaxy would have been created approximately in its current state, complete with spiral arms and stars at different points in their development. After Creation, light needs about , years to traverse our galaxy. For stable systems such as most galaxies one might choose to be lenient towards such an assumption. However, take another look at the jets in the image above. In the ASC model, such relativistic jets including their discrete blobs were created midflight. This would give us human beings only the illusion of a causal relationship between the source the medium near the black hole and the astrophysical jet itself.

This illusion would include a fictional history of variable input from the source near the black hole. Even today, distinct parts of this particular jet would only be causally connected with very small surrounding regions only about 0. Lisle rejected the proposal of light being created in transit based on the principle of intelligibility.

His argument was that we would expect God to provide some way to understand his Creation. Otherwise, it would not be worth the effort of trying to make sense of everything at all anymore. The fact that Lisle and other young-earth creationists have rejected the idea of light being created in transit is what originally led to the need of a solution to the distant starlight problem.

It leads to a picture of the universe wherein God produced sequences of imaginary events in relativistic jets. It leads to the Omphalos hypothesis, which holds that God created nature with all the telltale marks of a distant past which it never had. Within the observable universe there are billions upon billions of galaxies.

Each of them contains up to hundreds of billions of stars. The light coming from these galaxies can tell us an awful lot about them. Among other things, it can inform us about their shapes, the typical age of their stars, whether they are forming new stars, and which elements they contain. It turns out that all of these characteristics of galaxies vary with their distance to us.

For now, it is enough to realize that such variation with distance fits well with the standard perspective in which light needs time to travel. Rays of light coming from different distances essentially provide our telescopes with photographs of different time points in the history of our universe. For astronomers it makes sense that the distribution of galaxies in the cosmos changed significantly over the billions of years that make up the history of our universe.

In this interpretation, distant galaxies can look different than nearby galaxies simply because we observe them as they were billions of years ago when their light started its long journey towards us. In other words, the light from very distant galaxies comes from the early universe, while the light from nearby galaxies was emitted more recently within the last few billion years.

These objects are the most important empirical constraints for current state-of-the-art cosmological models that aim to describe how the cosmic environment changed over the course of history. In his ASC model, the light rays of all galaxies in the universe arrived instantaneously on Earth after they were created. Therefore, differences in age cannot be invoked to explain any variation. His model can deal with these systematic differences only by positing either 1 that these differences do not actually exist [2] or 2 that God implemented all of them on the fourth hour day of the Creation week.

It should be clear that this geocentric option is unsatisfying, especially if more insightful explanations exist. As scientists, we cannot invoke God merely to keep our models from falling apart. So let us ask the following question regarding the observed differences between galaxies far away and close by: Compared to the ASC model, how insightful is the explanation provided in the context of standard cosmology?

The rest of this post will be devoted to an exploratory introduction, giving a partial answer to this question. The mere observation that important galaxy properties vary systematically with distance is problematic for the ASC model. Actually, our current understanding of galactic evolution not only allows for the presence of variation, but also explains why the variation is present. At the end of this post, I would like you to walk away with a rudimentary understanding of what underlies the differences between the galaxies.

Since most of the light of galaxies is produced by the little lamps we call stars, understanding those will be essential for grasping the galaxies. Our small crash course on galaxy evolution will be mostly constrained to that topic. During the birth of our universe, only the lightest elements were formed, mostly hydrogen and helium. After the universe had cooled down enough, those initial elements formed huge clouds of cosmic gas and dust.

Parts of these collapsed under their own gravity. This is how the very first stars were born. In fact, we still observe signs of new stars being born every day, such as in the awe-inspiring image of the Eagle Nebula shown at the top of this page. The light of a newly formed star in the middle, on the left is heating these pillars of gas and dust, while star formation is taking place inside of them.

For him, every single star is the product of a supernatural act of creation. However, there is an entire field of scientists who are experts in the phenomenon of star formation. How can a star be born from such a collapsing cloud? As more mass travels inward due to gravity, the center of the cloud becomes denser and hotter. At some point during the collapse, the pressure in the center becomes high enough for the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium nuclear fusion. The energy light released by the fusion then starts pushing the matter outwards counteracting the gravitational pressure.

Eventually, a stability is reached and the collapse comes to a halt completely as a new star is born. As such, every star is characterized by a balance between gravity pulls inward and nuclear fusion pushes outward.

More massive stars allow faster fusion rates, making the massive stars shorter-lived but able to shine hotter and bluer. Part of the light produced by nuclear fusion manages to escape the star.

Why does every baby star thrive on the fusion of hydrogen and not on other elements? Hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe. The smaller the weight of an atom, the better it lends itself to fusion into heavier atoms i. Most stars spend the largest part of their lifetimes burning hydrogen and become slightly colder and fainter as their hydrogen resources shrink.

Their light starts out being relatively blue and reddens as its temperature drops. Finally, the emitted light is filtered through the outer layers of the stars. After most of the hydrogen in the core of a star has been depleted converted into helium , the core can collapse further until the pressure is high enough for the fusion of the next lightest stable element helium.

If the star has enough mass, this cycle can continue towards heavier elements all the way up until iron. A runaway process ensues as all the matter is rapidly pulled inward. This excess of energy allows for the production of elements heavier than iron e. The core is left behind in the form of a white dwarf star.

This completes the lifecycle of a star. It implies that all atoms heavier than helium [4] with the exception of trace amounts of lithium were essentially the by-products of the lifecycles of stars. These same elements were the crucial building blocks of life on earth most notably: carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.

Now we are ready to harvest rough insights on why distant and nearby galaxies would be expected to differ in the four properties listed before: 1 color, 2 element content, 3 star formation rates, and 4 shape. I hope any trained astronomers reading along with this post will forgive me for the gross generalizations I am making here for the sake of simplicity. Our universe started out as a completely pristine environment containing almost only hydrogen and helium.

The red lining of our story is that, in the early universe, galaxies had a much shorter star formation history. Relatively little time had passed for stars to be formed and to complete their lifecycles.