Opinion:Victorious Biblical Astronomy Part 6

What happens when we accept the words of the Bible hermeneutically on the subject of earth-history? (A hermeneutic interpretation accepts how it was understood in the culture and language of the writer rather than our scientific culture). We see an entirely different earth-history. We are unaware of this earth-history because we are so convinced of the validity of our science that we use science to interpret the Bible. Yet no author of the Bible could have intended a scientific interpretation. The Catholic scholastics did not adopted Aristotle’s metaphysics as the foundation for Western reasoning until the thirteenth century. Metaphysics are speculative answers to fundamental questions that are unanswerable by science, mathematical analyses, or experiments. Yet Aristotle’s assumption was the metaphysic upon which our system of measurement, experiment and mathematical analysis was constructed.

Is a hermeneutical earth-history supported by evidence? The distant stars are the only place we can actually see the past. Everywhere we look, we see the words of the Bible confirmed with sight. What we see, however, is a clear contradiction of the scientific first principle, the assumption that Aristotle invented. We see, at many ranges, that primordial naked galaxies spread out. The stars continually came out of the core of the galaxy and fanned out to form the diffuse structures seen in local galaxies. We see that matter continually changes its visible properties. The Bible repeatedly states that the stars are continually spreading out. In contrast, the scientific universe is mostly invisible. The big bang, dark matter, cosmological expansion, dark energy and black holes are just-so stories woven out of invisible thread. All the invisible things were invented to protect their first principle that matter does not intrinsically change its properties. Intrinsic means belonging to a thing by its very nature. A hermeneutical interpretation is supported by the strongest evidence, sight. We can see with our eyes that matter intrinsically changes.

The Old Testament repeatedly states that the starry heavens are continually spreading out. Job says, “He spreads out the sky over the empty space; and suspends the earth over nothing.”  Job 26:7  The verb for “spreads out” is an active participle showing active action in unbroken continuity.   The center of the Milky Way is in the south so as the Milky Way grows, the stars move outward into the empty place which is in the north. The Milky Way is a logarithmic spiral, also known as a growth spiral. In nature such spirals grow, spiraling out, as we can see in many shells and horns. When we compare the most-distant spiral galaxies with local ones, we see that the stars and gas came out along lanes so that the galaxy grew into a logarithmic shape. What we see is a violation of the laws of physics yet it is simple, visible evidence for God Himself at work. Isaiah 44:24 He alone is stretching (active participle - unbroken continuity) the starry heavens and the earth.

The reader may think that distant evidence is inconclusive. Where is the evidence in the solar system?

'''Isaiah wrote, “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not You who cut Rahab in pieces, Who pierced the dragon?''' Isaiah 51:9 Rahab means mighty or stormy. Isaiah writes that the splitting of Rahab is a historical event that happened during the ancient generations. He refers to it as the piercing of tanniyn, a sea monster or aquatic dinosaur. Other verses that refer to the fragmenting of Rahab are: Job 9:13 Job 26:10 - 14 Psalm 89:8-10

In Isaiah’s day, all the neighboring nations recalled the shattering of a planet during the days of their ancestors. The tablets from the Canaanite seaport of Ugarit tell how Baal (Jupiter) crushed Leviathan the fleeing, twisting serpent. The Canaanites used the same imagery of a sea monster as the biblical Rahab passages. They called the watery planet Yam (the sea) or Latan the seven-headed sea monster. The Akkadians wrote about two great planets meeting in battle, Marduk versus Tiamut. Each had helpers that moved alongside them. Marduk had seven winds (moons?). The evil-wind, which was stationed behind him, smashed Tiamut and severed her inward-parts. The Egyptians said Osiris was cut into fourteen pieces by evil Seth. According to the Greeks, Zeus (Jupiter) filled the upper air with fire and rumbling earthquakes shook the earth when he battled the Titans.

Why would God, who forbids worshiping the pagan-gods, use planet-shattering imagery similar to the pagans? Deuteronomy 17:2 - 5 The Psalms 89 passage above says it was the LORD the God of hosts, the mighty Lord, who crushed Rahab. Job mentions the calming of the sea and the clearing of the heavens when Rahab was shattered. If a planet was shattered at close range, every ancient society would have remembered it. Indeed every pagan society did remember it. The Babylonians recited the poem about Tiamut’s destruction at their New Year festival where actors played out the parts of the planet-gods in the battle. Since the Bible uses similar language as the nations, we should interpret the passage as it would have been understood by ordinary people in that era. We should understand the texts as referring to a planet-shattering and not disregard or adjust the meaning to fit our science.

If a watery planet was shattered at close range, each piece would have a tail or vapor coma. Right after the shattering, the vapor tails would combine so that it could have looked like a seven-headed sea serpent to the seafaring Canaanites. We have seen several examples of shattered comets in which the vapors combined into a larger tail.

What evidence supports a planet shattering in the solar system?

1. The structure of asteroids and comets.

We have photographed several comets and asteroids at close range and mapped others with radar. Spaceships even landed on two asteroids. Asteroids and comets have many common geological features. They often have irregular shapes such as two large ends connected by a narrow waist. Eros has a 33-kilometer unshelled-peanut shape. It has long cliffs, long groves, global cracks, steep valleys and square craters. How do you get a square crater? Impacts in the vicinity of intersecting fractures may produce a square crater such as the square Barringer Meteor Crater on earth. The large Shoemaker impact crater on Eros is surrounded by a large smooth area. Directly opposite the impact on the other side of Eros is another smooth area. The smooth areas suggest that the core of the asteroid is solid enough to transmit the impact directly to the opposite side. It also suggests that the surface is loose enough to be ejected by the impact. Many craters on Eros also have a floor like a flat dust pond. The ponds have rings around them as though they once contained water that sublimed away leaving just the dust. The spacecraft, Near, landed close to a dust pond. The comet Wild 2 is covered with flat-bottomed depressions. The micro asteroid Itokawa has a low-area filled with regolith known as the Muses sea. '''Asteroids and comets have similar shapes and geological features. It would seem that asteroids used to have water, but because of their proximity to the sun their water has escaped into space. Comets spend most of their orbits far from the sun so some of their water has not yet vaporized.'''

2. The composition of asteroids and comets.

The Stardust spaceship captured dust from the comet Wild 2 in a gel mattress and returned it to earth for study. Some of the pieces are crystalline rock that formed at high temperatures. These include olivine, diopside, foresterite (magnesium rich olivine) and anorthite. These minerals are found in igneous and metamorphic rocks on earth. How can volcanos have existed on a frozen comet? During 2006 a copper impactor struck the comet Tempel 1 producing a flash which was analyzed at many frequencies. The spectral signatures showed limestones and clays that form in the presence of liquid water. They also detected the signatures of metallic sulfides and crystalline silicates that form at high temperatures. The near infrared spectroscope that scanned the micro asteroid Itokawa at close range showed chondritic and olivine rocks. Chondritic rocks often have inclusions that contain high temperature calcium-aluminum minerals. The comet Hale-Bopp had spectral signatures that showed crystalline olivine. On earth olivine is associated with high temperatures and pressures from volcanos. The volcanic big island of Hawaii has green olivine sands. '''All of this is evidence that asteroids and comets are shattered remnants of a great watery planet, which contained sedimentary rocks and volcanic rock. This simple evidence fits a hermeneutical interpretation of biblical earth-history.'''

3. Millions of impact craters cover the planets and moons.

These craters are often used to estimate the age of surface features in billions of years. Yet every ancient society remembered the Great Years when chaos and fire would rain down on earth. They calculated when a great year would return and their estimates involved the passages of planets. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity found three large nickel iron meteorites lying on the surface of Mars. It is generally believed that the cores of large planets are made of nickel iron. For two rovers to encounter three meteorites on opposite sides of Mars, after wandering only a few kilometers, suggests that Mars must have ploughed through a cloud of debris from the metal core of a shattered planet.

4. Many asteroids have moons.

A significant number of asteroids have moons. Even very small asteroids, with micro gravity, sometimes have a moon. If an asteroid and its moon were once part of the same planet, they would have been next to each other from the moment of impact and would have interacted as they moved off together after the shattering. The asteroid Ida and its moon Dactyl are made of similar materials. Why do scientists have difficulty accepting a historical planet-smashing?

Planets can’t collide unless they were much closer to each other in antiquity. The geometrical spacing of the planets was discovered over 200 years ago and popularized as Bode’s Law. How could the earth and all the planets have been closer to the sun? Wouldn’t the earth have roasted? Yet we can see the past in the distant galaxies. Galaxies started out as tiny compressed objects crowded with stars. Fully formed spiral arms are only seen in closer galaxies. These arms have an orderly, logarithmic spacing, not unlike the spacing of planets and moons in the solar system. The early astronomers measured with angles a much smaller solar system just a few centuries ago. What causes stars (and planets) to spiral out in defiance of every principle of gravity and physics? Matter continually changes its inertial and quantum properties. This is not some mathematical conjecture. It is visible with optics. We can see that the quantum frequencies of primordial atoms were minuscule ratios of what we see locally. We see the orbits spiraling out. The Bible clearly states that everything in creation changes. It even uses the word phthora that the Greek philosophers used for matter itself changing. The Bible even uses the word hupotasso, an arrangement, for this degeneration.

'''Notice that the distant visible evidence (the past) fits the words of the Bible. We can also see the evidence that supports a biblical earth-history in the thousands of comets and asteroids in our solar system. However, the evidence conflicts with the modern first principle. Which should you believe - the Bible or the Western first principle?''' One of the greatest challenges creationists struggle with is how to fit the earth’s 6,000 year biblical age with the scientific evidence for a very old universe. Peter said the first thing to know is the arche, the first principle of the last days. He even quoted it as “all things diamenei.” Diamenei, in the context of physics, means to stay the same in being. He even mentioned that they will use this first principle to ignore that the heavens are ekpalai - of old. In the next article in this series, I will deal with how a hermeneutical interpretation is supported by simple astronomical evidence for an earth young in “years” yet old in “age.”