Miracles of Astronomy?

Miracle is an overworked and sometimes misunderstood word. In everyday usage, the term is applied to many everyday events, including personal health events in which we observe extraordinary recovery from various maladies. Everyday events are described as miracles if the events are significantly out of the ordinary. In 2012 I submitted a blog post entitled “Mundane Miracles:” In retrospect, the post could have been labeled using a less suggestive title. I meant to imply that truly unusual, noteworthy, and thankworthy events occur in our lives virtually every day. With this meaning, the title was appropriate using the term miracle rather loosely.

http://jasscience.blogspot.com/2012/05/mundane-miracles.html

Similar flexible usage of terminology is sometimes used to describe the formation of our Solar System. When we describe our Sun and its family of planets, we describe a truly unique assemblage. Hundreds of parameters must be individually finely tuned to an unimaginable degree in order for life as we know it to exist. The probability that all of those factors could be collectively present to produce a life-sustaining solar system like ours is exceedingly remote. The use of miracle to describe the system is subject to linguistic debate. The impression of design, however, is not.

Our previous post, “Order-keeping Jupiter,” presented opportunity to assign very special status to the role of planet Jupiter in our early and current Solar System. Theologian John Jefferson Davis proposed the term “extraordinary providence.” Davis may call the special role Jupiter plays in the formation of our Solar System “extraordinary providence.” By this he means God works through “secondary causes” to bring about a result exceeding its ordinary potential. In the formation of Jupiter, God foreknew the potential of Jupiter to maintain planetary order through the ages and to fulfill its special assignment up to the present day.

Earth’s Moon is also a candidate for “extraordinary providence.” Some authors have used another term: “non-transcendent miracle.” This phenomenon falls short of New Testament miracles involving the instant reorganization of molecules in the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ, as well as in healing miracles such as healing of the blind and lame. These are transcendent miracles involving unusual and unique actions of divine origin.

How does our Moon demonstrate “extraordinary providence?” A widely accepted and credible theory tells the story. Early in our Solar System’s history prior to 4 billion years ago, the early planet Earth was struck obliquely by a giant colliding body the size of Mars. Some of the material was absorbed into the mantle of the earth as other material was thrust into space by the collision. The impact transformed the thick, stifling atmosphere to more life-favorable conditions in the ages to come. Discoveries by the Apollo astronauts from their visits to the Moon in 1969-1972 revealed the moon formed later than earth. The earth’s iron content, gained from the collider, later proved favorable for permitting a huge abundance of ocean-dwelling phytoplankton to support the oceanic food chain and generate oxygen for the arrival of advanced earth life. The debris scattered by the collision later condensed into a solid body, Earth’s Moon, which now acts to stabilize the obliquity of the earth’s axis at 23½˚. Today’s constant axial tilt provides for seasons and climate stability. This is an example of “extraordinary providence.”

Did God know how the “extraordinary providence” during Solar System planet formation would nourish the lives of creatures on this earth millions of years in the future? We believe God knew. God is the author of ordinary providence sustaining each everyday event, extraordinary providence of visualizing and authoring a future result for a special purpose, and occasional miracles of true transcendence which soar far beyond the ordinary laws governing nature. Such miracles have provided the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As God’s redeemed people we look forward to transcendent miracles when humanity’s earthly life is complete. Scripture refers to this future time as the New Creation in Revelation 21.

Order-keeper Jupiter

The recent meteor explosion over Russia has triggered more inquiries than usual concerning the hazards of living in our Solar System. There are countless multitudes of objects whirling through our Solar System apart from the familiar planets. Uncounted millions of meteoroids and asteroids larger than the Russian object inhabit our region of the Milky Way Galaxy. Many tiny objects strike each year adding thousands of tons of meteor dust to Earth’s mass. Asteroids and meteoroids are closely associated with the orbit of giant planet Jupiter which marshals the movement of these extra-planetary bodies.

Jupiter has .001 times the mass of the sun. Next to our life-giving sun, no Solar System object is more important for past or present life on earth. When the Solar System formed 4.5 billion years ago, the planet Jupiter was “assigned” a unique role in organizing the developing planetary system. Its structure and the eventual hospitable conditions on our planetary home owe much to the gas giant Jupiter. Its beauty and its fourth-ranking brightness in our sky, behind the Sun, Moon, and planet Venus, serve to remind us of its importance in terms of our survival.

Based on knowledge that our Solar System is absolutely unique with its assemblage of four small inner terrestrial planets and four larger outer gas giant planets, the evolution of our Solar System was a divinely ordained process. Other planetary systems in our galaxy have been observed and many more are developing as the eons of time pass. Many stars in the Milky Way Galaxy possess one or more planets. Theories of star and planet formation posit that great, diffuse clouds of cosmic dust condense under their own gravitational attraction, spinning more rapidly as condensation proceeds. A flat disc of material forms around a central star and accretion eventually occurs, forming planets. This event sequence in our home planetary system has been generally deduced. Our system formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Some of the most interesting scenarios occurred between 4.1 and 3.8 bya.

Jupiter, and to a lesser degree Saturn, were responsible for a dramatic rearrangement of the developing solar system about 3.9 billion years ago. Rocky and icy bodies were flung inward toward the entire retinue of inner, developing planets. The event was termed the “late heavy bombardment.” Pictures of a heavily crated moon and information gathered from the Moon by visiting Apollo astronauts from 1969-1972 attest to the ancient bombardment. No atmospheric and geologic events were ever present to erase the ancient impact features on the Moon as have evidences of impacts on Earth. Jupiter has supervised the reigning in of “errant” solar system impactors since that time. At present we encounter very rare strikes of asteroids such as the Russian meteor of February 2013. Jupiter has become an “order keeper.”

One theory concerns the ability of Jupiter to “take a punch” in boxing parlance. The famously publicized 1994 comet strike on Jupiter joins with the July 19, 2009 asteroid impact which left behind a sizable dark bruise on the planet’s face. From 2009 to 2012 there have been four additional Jupiter impact events observed. Science writers have made reference to Jupiter’s “vacuum cleaner” role in protecting Earth from potential harmful impacts of meteoroids and asteroids.

Both Jupiter and Saturn possess unusually regular orbits. Astrophysicist Jacques Lasker in 1994 determined that if the outer planets were less regular in their orbital characteristics, the inner planets would be orbitally chaotic. Planet Earth would suffer from climatic instability as a result. Hundreds of factors affect the welfare of life on our planet. Climate stability, however, is one factor without which life on earth could not exist to sustain our existing seven billion souls.

There are hundreds of other parameters known concerning a planet’s capacity to support life. Naturalists ascribe the finely tuned adherence of our planet to each of these parameters, along with many other finely tuned physical constants governing the operation of physical matter to a fortuitous cosmic accident of chance. The existence of thousands of separate evidences of divine design in our universe, from the micro cosmos to the macro cosmos presents a powerful case for the hand of the Creator. From the moment the time dimensions of this universe were put in place to the present instant of cosmic existence, we observe a world of incredible wonder. The feeling of certainty of the existence of divine design is difficult to dismiss as an illusion.

 

Solar System Stability

The recent 100-year meteor strike on February 15 may have triggered some apprehension about the stability of our Solar System, the abode of humans in the cosmos. By marked coincidence, Asteroid 2012 DA14 passed Earth from a different direction on the same day, coming within 17000 miles, closer than nearby earth communications satellites. The object was much larger than the Russian meteor but posed no danger to Earth dwellers. These two recent events cause us to reflect on the nature of our Solar system. How predictable and how stable is it? Do we live in a chaotic solar system characterized by space debris bombarding Earth like a target at a celestial shooting range? The two recent events notwithstanding, let us consider the remarkable stability of our multi-billion year old Solar System.

The picture of our Solar System with its central Sun surrounded by eight orbiting planets and millions of much smaller objects has been presented to us from our childhood as an orderly and predictable system. Modern man, created uniquely in the image of God, has inhabited planet Earth only for a few tens of thousands of years. The Solar System as part of the cosmos, however, has been present for the last several billion years, roughly one third of the time elapsed since the event described in Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The events of the six creation “days” of Genesis 1:3-31 followed long after the verse 1 beginning.

Let us answer the questions posed in our first paragraph. Is our Solar System a chaotic system? One common definition of chaos is “complete disorder and confusion.” On February 15 some may have answered, “Yes,” but that would be completely false. Mathematicians have attempted to answer the question for centuries, including French astronomer Laplace in 1773. He made a serious attempt to offer mathematical proof of the fundamental stability of the Solar System. He came close in his attempt. Isaac Newton in 1687 “believed that divine intervention might occasionally be necessary to put the solar system back in order and prevent its dissolution.” Ivars Peterson’s volume Newton’s Clock…Chaos in the Solar System states, “The Solar System has apparently survived for more than four billion years in some semblance of its present form…None of this work (speaking of computer modeling) provides evidence that the Solar System is falling apart.” (italics mine)

Another modern usage of chaos gives a different picture. “Chaos theory” describes the underlying order of a complex system in which even tiny initial changes could yield a widely diverging result far down the road. For example, the popular example of the fluttering butterfly wing at one geographic location (the Butterfly Effect) triggers a chain of events which ultimately could generate a hurricane at some distant place on the earth. In theory, The Butterfly Effect may be more than science fiction. A chaos theory scenario involving our billions of years old Solar System may be worth contemplating without being accused of bowing at the altar of pure science fiction. Ivars Peterson writes: “In the case of the Solar System, the question is whether the multifarious influences of every body on every other body shift the planets from their essentially unchanging orbits only slightly and temporarily, or whether these effects can eventually lead to radical, irreversible changes…”

Peterson’s most significant observation relates to the ongoing mystery surrounding the long standing stability of the Solar System: “…The problem of the Solar System’s stability has fascinated and tormented astronomers and mathematicians for more than 200 years. Somewhat to the embarrassment of contemporary experts, it remains one of the most perplexing, unsolved issues in celestial mechanics.” Our current vision of this apparent stability could relate to our intuitive recognition of the initial and ongoing work of God.

Whether or not we believe, as Isaac Newton believed, that God’s ongoing intervention was necessary to periodically restore planets’ orbits to their places, virtually everyone could agree that our universe is a divinely ordered place. In over four billion years, the potentials of chaos theory have not brought about disaster on our planet. The Solar System in which we reside is a beautiful and unique place.