Genesis 1, 14 to 19 tells us about the moon. And God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night. Let them be for signs and for seasons, for days and years. Let there be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also and God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good and the evening and the morning were the first, excuse me, the fourth day. So our topic this afternoon is that lesser light mentioned in verse 16, our moon, same moon that Adam and Eve looked at, quarter of a million miles away. or mere light seconds if you prefer, quarter of the size of the Earth, a lunar baseball compared to the Earth's basketball. And so the question is, where did the moon come from? Oh, there we go. Where did the moon come from? Okay, there we go, all right. Genesis not only tells us directly, but the moon provides one of the strongest evidences we have for creation. But what if you don't believe the Bible? Many careers, many dollars have been spent trying to figure out how the moon came to be circling the earth. When I was a lad, when I was in junior high school, we had, I had a picture in my science textbook and it showed the earth like a blob of hot molten lava and the, It's spinning fast, and the moon comes out of the Earth, and where it comes out of the Earth, that's where the Pacific Ocean was. It must have been true, because there was a picture in my textbook that showed it. That's what we call the fission theory of the Earth. Taught that in 1960s to me. And there's a problem with the fission theory. First of all, the Earth doesn't have enough turning energy. We call that angular momentum. for that to take place. The Earth day would have to be more like two hours long than 24 hours long in order to have enough turning energy, get the moon to come out like that. Second problem is something called the Roche limit. That's spelled R-O-C-H-E. If you're taking notes, R-O-C-H-E. That's the breakup limit. Because of the tidal forces on the front and back of the moon, if it's too close to the Earth, it just rips the moon apart. and you get a ring, you don't get a moon. And the third problem was is that we went to the moon. You may have realized 50 years ago we went to the moon and we picked up some rocks and brought them back and those rocks, we found moon rocks don't contain very much iron. Earth rocks contain lots of iron. And so we realized that earth rocks and moon rocks were different. So they gave up on the fission theory of where the moon came from. So I suppose they took that book out of the textbook that picture out of the textbook then. And then they came up with the capture theory of the moon. There's a moon, there's a wandering moon out there in the solar system somewhere and somehow it comes close to the earth and it's inserted almost exactly into a perfect circular orbit around the earth. Now how it did that, that's a real problem. Now when I was a kid growing up, I mentioned my father came from the old country and came through Ellis Island, so we settled pretty close in New Jersey, right across the river from Philadelphia. I used to go to the Franklin Institute to their public lectures. This is before video games. I know kids say, how's it possible there could be life before video games, but there actually was. But they had kind of a proto video game where you'd have a joystick and all, and the idea was to get a rocket ship to go insert itself in an orbit around a planet. And I tried and tried and tried on that thing. You had to get the speed right and the angle right and so forth. But every time I did, the spaceship would go, you know, out of space somewhere. I never could get the thing to work. And it impressed on my mind as a kid how hard it would be to insert a moon around a planet in almost perfectly circular orbit. And so that really told me this is a hard thing to do. Anyway, they gave up on that because nobody could figure out how that would work. So then they came up with the condensation theory. Condensation theory was the idea that you have this cloud of dust and gas, and it's kind of like the nebular hypothesis for the sun, the idea that it started rotating around and it congealed into Earth and the moon. But nobody could figure out why you didn't just get one bigger thing. Why did you get two things? So they gave up on that. And they came up with the collision theory. So now if you Google it, where did the moon come from, go to the NASA website, they'll give you this story. And so here's a picture of it. Again, it must be true because we have pictures of it. They even gave it a name. You have this planet the same size as Mars. They call it Theia. And Theia collides into the Earth, early Earth, and it throws up this debris, and we get the moon. And the problem is that the angular momentum doesn't work out again. I call this the big whack, okay? But actually, in order to get it to work on a computer, you had to have two big whacks. You gotta have a whack from this side and a whack from that side to get the angular momentum, because angular momentum is conserved in physics, okay? And they know it doesn't work, but they still teach it in the public schools today. And if you went to any public school in this area, you'd find the textbook would talk about the big whack. Well, another problem with the big whack is that the moon is getting further from the earth every year by 4 centimeters, actually 3.8 centimeters at this point. It's getting further away from the earth. Well, that's not a problem if the Earth-Moon system is only 6,000, 6,000, 7,000 years old, that's like 12 miles, big deal, who cares, okay? But if the Earth-Moon system is more than a billion years old, that puts the moon within the Roche limit and it gets torn apart again and you get a ring. So how do you keep from getting a ring? They have no answer. And there's something fundamentally dishonest about the scientific community teaching children that this is where the moon came from when they know it doesn't even work on computers. It's just wrong to do that. Why not just admit you don't know, all right? That would be better. So, they've come up with new things. This was in Science News, April 15, 2017. It's called the Moonlit Theory. And the Moonlit Theory said that there was 20 impacts. They have wax from all different sides. And they can get it to work on a computer maybe 10% of the time. And it hasn't really got any traction at all, but that's one of the later theories. You won't find that anywhere because nobody believes it. And then they came up with the synesia theory. This is the latest one. You won't find it in any textbooks yet. There's actually a TED talk on this you can listen to. And so they thought, you know, this problem with the Roche limit and the moon going away from the earth, you know, is a real problem. What they did is they put all the information to a computer and told the computer, you figure it out. Come up with something that works that gets us around this Roche limit problem. And so the computer constructs this thing called a synasia. Now, it doesn't matter, apparently, that we've never seen anything that looks like that in the universe, okay? We have no observational evidence at all. It's entirely constructed. by a mathematical function. And what they do with this, they have the moon forms first and then the earth. And that's how they get away with the. with the Roche limit problem, okay? This hasn't really, there's still problems with this theory, things like the concentration of magnesium in the moon compared to the earth and all doesn't work out and so forth. They got other problems with it. The point is that even though the moon is, well, how much closer is it to the nearest star? Let's see. Yes, let's see, I have that figure here. 100 million times. The moon is 100 million times closer to us than the nearest star. We don't have convincing scientific theory of where it came from. Bible-believing Christians have a better idea. It's called the fourth day of creation. That's what Isaac Newton believed, one of the most influential scientists of all time. That's what I believe. I was giving this talk, similar talk, in a Romanian church in Australia. and speaking through an interpreter. And I was doing the Q&A, like I'm going to do today, and this lady, tall lady, stood up, and she was bilingual, and she was speaking in Romanian and translating herself in English. And she said, I want you to know, she says, I have a PhD in astrophysics, and I want you to know everything this man has said, she pointed to me, is false. Okay, my wife said my smile disappeared. when she did that. And so I said, let's talk afterwards. And so I said to her, I said, I'm just trying to be, you know, true to what the Bible says. I said, why do you believe that it's wrong? She says, well, the ingredients of the moon, what the moon's made of is made up of stardust. In other words, you can't get any elements that are heavier than iron unless they come from exploding supernova, okay? And so there had to be all these billions of years, billions of years take place before the moon was formed, otherwise you couldn't have a moon because we're all made up of stardust. I said, why couldn't God have just spoken it into existence, like he says in the Bible? And she thought about it, she said, well that would work. And that was it, that was it. We smiled and shook hands and that was the end of that. And so you never know what you're gonna encounter with that. Well, you know, there's some people who understand that the moon is so special, so different, that, and they're trying to explain it without using the Bible, though. They realize that there's, you know, that there's some really odd things about the moon, that they've come up with the artificial moon theory. Here it is. So there's a book by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler called Who Built the Moon? Oops. So you think the moon is kind of like the Death Star. That's my Death Star watermelon there, okay? Death Star watermelon. So the moon is so odd, and they have a whole book, I'm not gonna give you all their arguments, but one of their arguments has to do with this, the fact that This is what Isaac Asimov said. He was an atheist and head of the Humanist Association and so forth, and he said, the most unlikely coincidence imaginable. What he's talking about is a solar eclipse. He's talking about the fact that the moon and the sun are the same size in the sky for a person standing on the earth. There's no other There is no other planet in our solar system or any of the other solar systems we've found where a person standing on the surface of that planet would see the moon of that planet and the sun of that planet the same size in the sky. Now, how is that possible? Well, the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but the moon is also 400 times closer to us than the sun, and so they appear the same in the sky. And coupled with that, the fact that the moon is is moving away, it's only this time, if you believe in billions of years, it's only this time in the Earth's history where the moon and the sun would be the same size in the sky. It's just like God signed it and said, I did this. Another odd thing about the moon is our moon circulates in the ecliptic. Ecliptic is how a plane is defined by three points. So the Earth, Moon, Sun, that's the ecliptic, okay? That's why we get solar eclipses. Whereas most moons of most planets, they circulate in the equatorial region. And so that ecliptic is really important as far as stabilizing the tilt of the Earth, by the way. And so they see that, and there's a lot of other arguments that they use, and they said, well, aliens built the Moon, okay? And once we get smart enough to know that aliens built the Moon, it's not a natural object, then the aliens are going to come back and they're going to invite us to join their parliament or whatever aliens have, okay, in the nation of aliens. Okay, so that's another way of dealing with this issue. They say that the moon, the earth was seeded with DNA at the same time the moon was put up there and then that started evolution and we're all evolved enough to meet the aliens and understand them and so forth. Well, anyway, that's no silliness. Here's a picture, maybe you've never seen this picture. This was taken by the DISCOVER spacecraft. This was taken on July 16th, 2018. And it's taken, it's a million miles away from the Earth toward the sun. Okay, so the picture of the spacecraft between the moon and the sun, and so it's looking at the moon crossing across the disk of the Earth. And what really impresses you with that picture, not only do we see the backside of the moon, but notice how dark the moon is. We never see it like that. You know, the moon has the reflectivity of used weathered asphalt, like in your parking lot out here, okay? And so it's very dark. And we realize that if the moon was actually brighter, if it reflected more light, it would throw off a lot of the organisms on the earth that depend upon the moon's light in order to, you know, for their cycles, biological cycles. So God even designed the moon to be dark like that for a particular purpose. But I just think that's a wonderful picture of the moon in front of the earth, the way that we never see it, okay? This also tends to help if I have any flat earthers in the congregation, okay? And we have had, I've had three now so far, Flat Earth folks, Q&A and so forth. So I'm ready for you. If you're out there, I'm ready for you, okay? So can you tell where this picture was taken? So that's the moon, the disk going across the Earth. And you can see that the moon looks smaller than the sun there. And so we know that this was actually taken not from the surface of the Earth, it was taken by a spacecraft behind the earth, further away from the moon than the surface of the earth is. So it's only standing on the surface of the earth you see the moon and the earth the same size in the sky, and only there, okay, which is interesting. Okay, so why did God, oh, let's stop here, see if there's any questions before we go on about why God created the moon. Yes, sir? Yes, here he is. Why is it not? Because the moon has such a low reflectivity. Okay? So it doesn't reflect light very well. Like I said, like worn asphalt. Okay? So it just has a very low reflectivity. Right, so when we see it, we're seeing it at night, and we're seeing the light reflected from the sun, but here you're seeing it against the true light of the earth. See how much brighter the earth is than the moon is. We don't ever see the moon like this, because you have to be a million miles out in space toward the sun to see it this way. It's just a remarkable picture. I'm surprised we don't see it more often in publications and all. It just really helps me understand what's going on. Any other questions? Okay, let's talk about where the moon, why God created the moon. So Genesis 1, 14, 15 gives us important information. God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night. Let them be for signs and for seasons, for days and years. Let there be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. Or Jeremiah 31, 35, thus saith the Lord, which giveth sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon, and for the stars for a light by night. So it's a night light. And moonlight is also critical for agriculture and biorhythms. Deuteronomy 33, 14 says, and for the precious fruits brought forth by the sun, and for the precious things put forth by the moon. He said, well, I understand how the sun's important for agriculture. We all got that. Can't have agriculture without the sun. But does the moon have effect on agriculture? Now, my first name is George, and George means farmer. I am as far from a farmer as you could possibly get. I kill plants, okay? And I grew up in the city, just, you know, a couple blocks from the subway, all right? So I'm not as, we actually took a field trip when I was a kid to go see a cow. because I had never seen a cow close up, okay? So I really am a city boy. But I've talked to a lot of farmers as I've gone around the world, talked to sugarcane farmers in Australia and other farmers, and they tell me that the moon has an effect on agriculture. And I even dug up an article published in the Biological Agricultural and Horticultural Journal about lunar influences apparent in the crude protein content of rye grain, for example. So there are influences of the moon. How does that work? How does the moon influence protein content and rye grain? I have absolutely no idea. But the Bible speaks of it as having an effect on agriculture, and so I believe it. I'm not gonna discard it just because I don't understand it. Does it have any effect on people? Psalm 121 verse six, the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. Well, as a ball-headed individual, I can understand how the sun can smite me. You ever been smitten by the sun? I have been. And so I wear a hat, as you notice, because I've had skin cancers taken out of my noggin. But how does the moon smite someone? Well, again, I've talked to mental health workers and policemen and educators around the country, and they all tell me it does. In fact, I've even been in a mental hospital, not as a patient, as a visitor. And the inmates tell me, oh, there was a full moon last night. We could hardly sleep because, you know, the other people were climbing the walls and rattling the bars and so forth. They had to put extra staff on and so forth. It appears from the research I've seen that the effect of the moon has more to do with the luminosity of the moon rather than any kind of gravitational effect, because it seems to go away when it's a cloudy night as far as that's concerned. So again, here's something I don't fully understand. Science hasn't completely elucidated the mechanism and so forth, but I believe the Bible when it says these things even though I don't understand them. It's interesting how the commentators try to explain these kinds of things away. Here's one commentator says, it's likely that this verse reflects an ancient primitive belief that the moon could have an adverse effect on the mind. Note the English expression, moonstruck, which reflects such a belief. Well, before you get on that road, I think you need to be very, very careful. A lot of times the Bible's ahead of us scientifically rather than behind us. And so they're taking a certain presupposition about the authors of the Bible. The Bible was written by the Holy Spirit through holy men of God, who the God inspired. And then we see in Matthew 4.24, it's talking about Jesus, his fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with diverse diseases and torments, those which were possessed of devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy and he healed them. Lunatic. So the Greek word is actually literally moonstruck. Now, I don't know if you have any modern translations there on your phone or anything. If you look at a modern translation, they often translate it epileptic. But there's nothing in the word that says epilepsy. I mean, it's a modern gloss. the modern translators decide to make it epilepsy, but there's nothing in the word that says epilepsy, and that's one of those cases with something they don't understand, and so they change it to sound better to modern ears, okay? So again, we need to be careful about these kinds of things. I have some data here for mental health data, the effect of moon phase on schizophrenic patients and so forth. I won't go into all that. If you're interested, you can ask me afterwards. So it functions as a clock, a calendar, a compass. It also gives us stable seasons, as we said before, because it stabilizes the tilt of the earth. So Psalm 104 verse 19, he appointed the moon for seasons. That's pretty clear, isn't it? So what causes the seasons? Some people incorrectly think the seasons are caused because the earth is closer or further away from the sun. Actually, In the wintertime, we're actually a little bit closer to the sun, but it's not that much to make a difference. And so what gives us the seasons? The seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth. Again, if the earth was straight up and down, all the water on the earth would freeze at the poles and there'd be nothing left in between, just be a desert in between. Life would not be possible. And so we think about God, appointing the moon for the seasons. And Mars, for example, it's got a couple small moons. Its tilt is about the same as ours right now, but it varies between zero and 60 degrees. Not a good place to live on Mars. There's no stable seasons on Mars. And because the moon is in the ecliptic instead of the equatorial, it's because it's in the ecliptic, it actually stabilizes the tilt. of the earth, and that picture of the moon and the earth, you could actually see the tilt there as we saw it from the sun's perspective. And then he created the moon to glorify himself. Psalm 8.3, when I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon, the stars, which thou hast ordained, goes on to praise God. Psalm 148.3, praise ye him, sun and moon, praise him, all ye stars of light. Well, how do we praise God? Well, we usually praise God with our words. We sing, praise God. But how does the moon praise God? It doesn't have a mouth. How does it praise God? What praises God? The same way we're supposed to do by doing what we're designed to do, okay? To use our talents and abilities for his glory. So let me give you an example. The moon produces tides, right? The tides cause ocean currents. Those ocean currents pick up dead organic matter from the bottom of the ocean and they up well at the margins of the continents, okay? And that dead organic matter acts as food for plants in the ocean, like algae, okay? And those green plants in the ocean produce oxygen. In fact, most of the oxygen you're breathing right now came from the ocean, okay? Some people say, well, you know, the oxygen comes from the lungs of the earth from Brazil or whatever and so forth, but that's not true. Most of the oxygen comes from the ocean. And so if the moon praises God by producing the tides, which produce the currents, which produce the upwelling, which produces the, which feeds the green organisms, which produce oxygen and keeps you from dying, okay? Without the moon, you'd be dead. You wouldn't have oxygen to breathe, okay? So that's how the moon praises God. And we praise God the same way by doing what we're designed to do. So my wife is a very organized person and she, helped us all those 32 years of summer mission teams. You find at the bottom of any summer mission team, you'll find a very organized woman, okay, who can make those things work. So she used her organizational abilities to serve God. I have this science thing that I do, okay, and I'm trying to use it right now to glorify God. You have something else, okay, you have some other talent or ability that can be used for the benefit of God's people in the church. and to be a blessing to them. And that's how you glorify God. And so if we'd all do whatever it is we do, the earth would be a better place, okay? Just rather than standing back and let somebody else do it, you need to do whatever it is that God gave you that you can do. And the earth is beautiful. Tomorrow we're gonna talk, Sunday morning service, we're gonna talk about the beauty that God created, the beauty that reflects the beauty of the creator. Albert Einstein said, I like to think that the moon is there even if I'm not looking at it. Oscar Wilde said, beauty is a form of genius, a higher indeed than genius as it needs no explanation. It's of the great facts in the world like sunlight or springtime or the reflection in a dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. Mahatma Gandhi said, when I admire the wonder of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in worship. of the Creator. So here's all men, as far as I know, are not Christians, but they recognize the beauty of the moon. We see it in the Bible, Psalm 610, describing the beauty of his beloved, his first wife, Solomon says, who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair or beautiful as the moon, clear or bright as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners. Now the terrible with army is banners, it doesn't really work well on a Valentine's card. But what it means is he's talking about, as he sees the stars go across the heavens at night, he's thinking about them as rows of soldiers marching in the battle. So we would say all inspiring as the stars in procession. The beauty of the heavens. And the moon has a glory all of its own that ultimately reflects the creator's glory. 1 Corinthians 15, 41, there's one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, another glory of the stars, for one star differeth from another star in glory. I think of the verses of the song, fair is the sunshine, fair still the moonlight, and all the twinkling starry host. Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer than all the angels heaven can boast. Now when I say that Jesus is fairer, more beautiful than the moon, is there anything within you that resonates to that? Does that make any sense to you at all when I say that? I'm sure there's pastor and other Christians that are here be happy to talk to you about why we think Jesus is more beautiful than the moon. And it goes back to the gospel, the fact that he came down from heaven's glory, died on a cruel cross for us so that we could be with him forever. He shines brighter and more beautiful than the moon. What does the moon symbolize? First of all, we see the enduring nature of God's promises. Psalm 72.5, they shall fear thee, speaking of Solomon as a type of Christ, as long as the sun and moon endure throughout all Generations. So Solomon's dead, but his heir, Jesus Christ, will sit on the throne of Solomon and the throne of David in time to come. So as long as there's a moon there, we know that promise is still good. It, the throne of David, shall be established forever as the moon, as a faithful witness in the heaven. So that throne is gonna have an occupant. Jesus comes back to rule and reign on the earth for 1,000 years. Jeremiah 31, 36, if those ordinances depart from me, that's the ordinances of the sun and the moon, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me forever. So think about that. Where should the ancient nation still exist today? You know, where did the Edomites go and the Ammonites and the Philistines and, you know, all these people we read about in the Bible, where did they go? Yet there's one ancient nation that still exists today. What is it? It's Israel, right? Why does Israel still exist as a nation despite all the persecutions and upheavals they've experienced in their national life? Because the moon is still in the sky. As long as the moon's still in the sky, you can be sure that Israel is still gonna be there on the earth until the end. We see in Isaiah 66, I have to get the theologians to make sure that I'm right about this, but it looks like there's going to be a new moon in the new heavens and the new earth. It says, for as the new heavens and the new earth which I shall make shall remain before me, saith the Lord, so shall your seed in your name remain. It shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. So this is a new moon indeed, not the kind of new moons we have that are dark on the sky, but here we're talking about a new moon and a new heaven and a new earth that we're gonna see in the future. And then we see it's also a symbol of coming deep calamities and judgments. Luke 21, 25 is an example. There should be signs in the sun and the moon and the stars upon the earth, the stress of nations. With perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring. The sea and the waves often refer metaphorically to the turmoil of the nations, political upheaval. Let's see, do we see any political upheaval in our world today? What's going on in Hong Kong? What's going on in Ecuador? What's going on in Great Britain with Brexit? And we could go, what's going on in Syria right now with the Turkish army invading Northern Syria and killing the Kurds and so forth? And all over the world, I could pick any place, almost every country, and you'd see the sea and the waves roaring, this perplexity of nations until the end, until the Lord comes back and sets everything straight again. Matthew 24, 29 says, immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened and the moon shall not give her light and the stars shall fall from heaven and the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And so there's coming calamity that this speaks of. And then it's also illustrative of the glorious future with Christ. Sun shall no more be thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee. It's not saying there won't be a sun and moon, it's saying that in comparison to the glory of Christ sitting on his throne in the new Jerusalem, sun and moon will be inconsequential. But the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, thy God, thy glory, the sun shall no more go down, neither shall the moon withdraw itself, but the Lord shall be thy light, everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Or Isaiah 30, 26, moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun. The light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of his people and healeth the stroke of their wound. So here in this verse, sun and moon refer to the Lord's light. It's replaced the sun and moon in that sense. Light here symbolizes the restoration, a divine blessing and prosperity in conjunction with the Lord's presence. So the next time you look up at the moon, it should not only be Overwhelmed with the Creator's wisdom and creating such a beautifully functional object, but also of a promised glorious future with our Savior forever. My daughter Katie lives in Australia, married a pastor, Australian pastor. So when she was two years old, we went to Nova Scotia with mission team from the university in the summertime. And my co-worker, Nelson McGue, I picked her up off the ground. There was a beautiful aurora in the sky, beautiful shimmering blues and greens and so forth. And I had never seen anything so spectacular. And he was trying to show her, show Katie the beautiful colors. Look, look, look at that, you know. And when he picked her up, she had a stick in her hand and she dropped it on the ground. And she went, stick, stick. And she couldn't get her eyes off that stick. He was trying to show her the glories in heaven. that she should have been amazed at. And all she could think about was that stick that she had dropped on the ground. And that's the way we are. Okay? The moon comes out. And when we see the moon, we're supposed our whole hearts and our souls should expand in praise to the creator who made such a beautifully functional object. And yet, our minds are filled with the sticks of this world. You know, your job. your relationships, your broken car, whatever it is, okay, the sticks of this world. Sometime, forget the sticks and look up in the sky and look at the moon and think about that glorious future that we will have with Christ forever if we trust him as our savior. Okay, what, oh, my wife said I didn't do my demonstration, did you? She wants me to do a moon demonstration. Before the question, hold on to that question. My wife remembers things I don't remember. So in honor of the moon here, I'm going to do my centripetal force demonstration. Gonna put some water in the cup. And centripetal force for the moon comes from gravity. I'm gonna use these strings. So the strings push on the platform. The platform pushes on the cup. Cup pushes on the water. And water, because it's unique, has high surface tension because of the hydrogen bonding. And so if I do this right, I don't want it to hit the piano or this. Well, how about it goes the other way and hits the pastor? Or we can do it like this, so it'll hit you instead. So anyway, that's my moon demonstration. I think applause would be appropriate. OK. What questions do you have? I saw a hand, yes. Okay. Yeah. Yes. So the Jews, you know, had a lunar calendar, you know, based on the movement of the moon, rather than our calendar, which is doesn't pay attention to the moon. And so that using a lunar calendar, you would see that interaction between the agricultural cycle and the moon more directly than we do today. So that's a good point. Yes. These things full moon? Oh, is it? Okay. Okay. Very good. Well, hopefully the clouds will clear and we'll be able to see it. So think about our glorious future with Christ forever, rather than the aliens who made the moon. Did it happen in Rosemont too? Oh yeah. Oh, that's right. It was same. We spoke on the moon at the same time. Good. Have to hit it right once a month. Okay. Any other questions? Anything we talked about or anything we talked about this morning, any questions about? We'll have a Q&A at the end here, but feel free to ask questions now. We got some time. Yes? Yes, that's right. And the Bible in Psalm 19 talks about the light of the sun being seen by everybody on earth. And what it says, and Paul picks up that theme in his letter where he talks about You know, have they not heard? Have they not seen? And what he's saying is everybody who's seen the light of the sun has seen witness to the creator. Okay? Babies are not born believing in evolution. Okay? You have to be very educated to believe in evolution. And they've done surveys. And so the higher educational level, the more likely you are to believe in evolution. You have to be taught it. It's not something that comes naturally. It doesn't correspond with common sense either. And so what you said is true. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Oh, they found some more moons, yeah. Saturn's interesting. You know, we sent up a spacecraft, the Voyager spacecraft to Saturn. and we measured the day on Saturn. It's 10 hours and 35 minutes or something, okay, for a day on Saturn. And then we sent up the Cassini spacecraft 20 years later, and we found that the rotation of Saturn declined by 1%. 20 years, it slowed down by 1%. Now, you think about that. Think about 1% in 20 years. After 4 1�2 billion years, Why is Saturn still rotating? It's being braked by the charged particles from the Sun act as a magnetic brake on the Saturn. That's what's causing it to slow down. But, you know, they're trying to come up with some explanation and they don't have any explanation. Or like Mercury, Mercury has a magnetic field. Mercury's about the same size as the moon, and it shouldn't have a magnetic field. It should have died years ago, but they find, if it's billions of years old, but it has a magnetic field. So what they did is they did some experiments in the lab, and they found out they could keep the magnetic field going if they put a lot of iron sulfide along the border between the molten core of Mercury and the rock part of Mercury. and they found in the laboratory that maybe they could keep it going for billions of years that way. So they said that must be the case. Now, there's no way we can actually get to bore in the mercury to find out if there's any iron sulfide there at all, but they accept that as the explanation, even without any observational evidence whatsoever, because they did it in the laboratory. So they come with these presuppositions about how old the solar system is, and then they build everything around that. and it's just not an honest way to do science as far as I'm concerned. Yes, sir. Okay, so the problem, I was talking to a young man this morning and he was saying that his teacher beat him over the head with that in his class. He was an engineering student, I guess, and he was saying that this problem about how does the light get here from the stars? if the stars are so far away from us and so forth. Okay, so there are a number of creation theories about that that would be hard to prove one way or the other. And Danny Faulkner has one from AIG and Jason Lyle has another one. He's another creation astronomer. What I like is Russell Humphrey's theory. He's a physicist from Sandia Lab, creationist. And so his idea is that when God created the, universe he created in a relatively small area, like two light years across. And then it expanded. And there's a lot of verses, like 17 verses in the Old Testament talk about God expanding the heavens. And so he expands the universe at relativistic speeds, which means it's going faster than the speed of light. And so as a result, time in deep space is not the same as time on Earth. So we have six literal days on Earth, but you have millions and billions of years going on in deep space. And so that neatly solves the problem. Another reason I like this theory is because it explains the cosmic background radiation, which is the main support for the Big Bang. So it explains that as well. So I don't think young people generally care which of those theories is right, Jason Lyles or Danny Faulkner's or Russ Humphrey's theory. What they wanna know is have we thought about the problem. So we have three perfectly good explanations for how the light got here from the stars. Now, that being said, it's really a hard thing to talk about to a lay audience in a church situation. So when I taught relativity, At the university level, it would take me a whole week to teach it to university students. So what hope do I have in a congregation to try to explain that? Plus, I found Christian people don't even like the word relativity. It's too close to the word relativism to them. And so they don't even like the word. And so I'm really behind the eight ball on that one. But suffice it to say that Relativity helps us understand how time can be different in different places. So those distant stars could actually be billions of years old, even though we've only had six or 7,000 years here on the Earth. And evidence I've seen seems to correspond with that. Whether I'm right or not, we'll have to find out for eternity. Yes. Yeah. Magnetism. Okay. So day one of creation. So it said, God said, let there be light. And there was light. You notice he waits all the way to day four to create the sun and the moon. Okay. So God created a light. We're not told what it is. and you have a rotating earth, so you have day and night going on. So once you have light, that means the whole electromagnetic spectrum, okay? So the light implies magnetism, yes. Well, even ancient people knew that there were lodestones, lodestones, there were iron ore that they would find in the ground that had magnetic properties. We have some examples like some priests in Egypt, we found evidence that they had magnets, you know, naturally occurring magnets, you know, that they used for their magic rituals and that kind of thing. So, yeah. So magnets were known by ancient people, not just us. Yes? exploration of the moon, space travel, should the Christian worldview support that? Okay, so question is, should we support exploration of space? And because we are made in the image of God, Johann Kepler, who was the father of astronomy, he said that he believed because we're made in the image of God, we essentially are thinking God's thoughts after him. In other words, we're curious by nature because of the way we're made. And so, what I would say, yes, it's a natural function of the creation mandate that we press nature to a useful end in order to glorify God and to benefit humanity. The other flip side of that is it's very expensive to send humans into space. If you send humans into space, you gotta send water and light and heat and air and so forth. We have to take part of the Earth with us to get there. And it's extremely expensive and wasteful in my estimation. So as far as space travel is concerned, I support sending robots into space. I don't support sending people there. The trouble with their motivation for it is they're trying to find life on places like Mars. And that seems to be the main driving force. Rather than to glorify God, They're trying to show that evolution could occur naturally and easily and so forth. Mars is a terrible place for life. Number one, you don't have a magnetic field. The ground is made of, has a lot of perchlorates in it, think rocket fuel, all right? And so it's toxic, so you got all this hard radiation hitting it, and there's very little atmosphere, very little oxygen and so forth. So if there was life on Mars, it's certainly dead by now, okay? It's going to be a problem. Yes, ma'am? you know, why not go and explore his universe? I think it's very amazing that we even have a universe to explore. I mean, we could war down here again. In context, though, I think it's speaking about doing greater deeds than Christ. It's talking about, you think about all the untold millions of people who have come to Christ by the witness of Christians, you know, since then. So numerically, more people being born again. I don't think it's talking about scientific endeavors in that case. Okay, we're out of time, so let's gather again at 2.30 and we'll talk about.