Exposing the Great Myth: Evolution of the Solar System
The Solar System is really old. The Sun and all of the planets came from a big cloud of stuff in space. Do you know that raindrops come from clouds in the sky? Well, it turns out that stars and even planets can come from clouds in space. Our Sun came from the middle of a big cloud in space, and the planets of our solar system also formed from that same cloud, moving around the Sun in the same kind of pattern that they follow today.
A Big Fairy Tale
The paragraph above is taken from the “Astrobiology at NASA” website, specifically found within the educational section aimed at grades K to 2. It is a response to the question, “How did our solar system form?” The above secular answer appears in almost every textbook as the prevailing scientific understanding of the origins of our solar system.
The idea that the solar system and the millions of observable objects within it—including planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and everything else—came from a “big cloud in space” seems like a naive fairy tale sprinkled with pixie dust; yet, it persists without any significant challenges. Even the comparison between clouds made of vaporized water droplets that produce rain and the cosmic clouds that form stars like our Sun and planets is a poor example. It is misleading and deceitful to present this analogy to young minds. Our lower atmospheric clouds can be easily observed, and the water molecules on Earth have been thoroughly studied due to their exceptional physical and chemical properties. Water is plentiful on Earth, covering 71% of its surface, and is one of the most essential resources for life to exist.
At the same time, the cosmic clouds are extraordinarily different and cannot be carefully observed and understood like water. These clouds in space are so far away, so different to us, and have never been observed condensing together to create objects like our planet, the Earth, that support life. To see the uniqueness of each planet, each having a different tilt on its axis, Venus and Uranus rotating backward as they revolve around the sun, erupting volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon, and decaying magnetic fields around some of its planets all coming from condensing of cosmic clouds is highly abstract and fails objectivity.
It seems absurd to jump so quickly to the example regarding the solar system’s origins and the formation of water droplets condensing from their associated vapor that we all witness. There is immense speculation about how all things came to be without an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator who exists outside of our time.
These cosmic clouds are nebulae that contain luminescent hydrogen molecules, ions, cosmic dust, and leftover material from objects like asteroids. When viewed through a telescope, nebulae appear as wispy clouds occupying vast spaces measuring hundreds of light-years (a light year = 5.8 trillion miles). Nebulae are usually easily viewed with a telescope because they stand out as an array of bright fluorescent colors against the dark cosmos, with images like tall pillars called the Pillars of Creation, the Horsehead Nebula shaped in the dark shadow of horse heads, and the eloquent, flowing, stringy veils made of bright blues, oranges, and reds called the Veil Nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope and, more recently, the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed these glowing wonders in great detail, which are believed to have formed recently and are much bigger than our Sun. The radiation from these new stars ionizes the surrounding area, making them noticeably bright.
Evolutionists believe the universe is about 14 billion years old based on naturalistic assumptions that exclude God’s Word as proclaimed in Genesis. God created Adam and Eve as mature humans with the appearance of age, just as He did with all of creation, including the cosmos. Because of their philosophical belief that all things originated from a big bang cosmology, they continue to interpret the immense variety of stars—like our Sun and its planets—as having long ages in the millions and billions of years. The mechanism for the universe’s beginning presents serious problems that fall into the realm of metaphysics, as it goes beyond human observation and understanding. The nebulae that we have the privilege to powerfully observe with the Hubble and now the James Webb Telescopes reveal images that showcase the beauty and majesty of our Creator for all to witness. At the same time, evolutionists are blinded by their arrogance.
Because of the uncertainty of their origins model, most modern astronomers are always searching for a natural explanation for the origins of our solar system. One of the most popular theories is the Nebular Hypothesis, which suggests that about 4.7 billion years ago, a section of a nebula cloud separated, rotating on its axis, cooling, collapsing, and condensing upon itself, with the most mass in the center forming a Protostar—our Sun. The leftover gas then flattened out, producing rings that eventually formed the planets moving around the Sun. Our Sun’s mass occupies 99.86% of the solar system and is mostly hydrogen and helium gas, leaving just a tiny fraction for the planets to form.
A New Fairy Tale
Many astronomers who adhere to evolutionary theory had not settled on a satisfactory unifying theory for the solar system’s origin for much of the 20th century until the early 1970s. It was the Soviet astronomer Victor Safronov who introduced a new model for the nebular hypothesis, proposing that inside the nebula, smaller, disk-shaped low-mass clouds are where stars and planets are born. The Sun would be found in the center, while the planets would be located in the flattened disk. This was called the Solar Nebular Disk Model (SNDM).
The primary reason this model became widely accepted is that these solar nebula disks are easily observed in nebulae, containing particles within them. They believe that particles of dust floating in the disk attract each other through static charges. Eventually, gravity takes over, forming clumps that grow larger on their way to becoming planets. As these clumps attract and reach the size of asteroids, termed planetesimals, they combine with other planetesimals to form the planets we see today.
Facing Reality
Astronomers have made significant progress with theoretical computer models of asteroid formation, but these are hypothetical. The underlying problem is that once these particles become giant asteroids, they will not grow anymore but will be subject to other asteroids colliding with them and making them smaller. It requires a mechanism to explain how all that cosmic dust and gas came together to produce massive giants in the sky. For example, the earth’s mass is 5.97 septillion kg or one followed by 24 zeros. Making planets requires enormous amounts of mass; the smallest is Mercury, which is 5% of the mass of the earth, while Jupiter is 318%. How a cosmic cloud and dust can consolidate to make a sizeable, massive planet is still a mystery.
Our knowledge of the solar system has grown exponentially with our advanced technology. However, when it comes to going back 4.6 billion years, we must rely on speculation since we cannot reproduce the exact conditions. This leads to complicated mathematical models that many astronomers have worked on earnestly because they understand the importance of this issue. Their goal is to produce a theory that shows without any question that our Sun and its planets came from natural causes. This will persist as they avoid the truth found in Genesis 1:14-16:
Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; “and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then 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.
