Good Heavens! The Human Side of Astronomy

Venus is the morning and evening star, often mistaken for a plane or UFO. Named after the Greco-Roman goddess of love, Venus is anything but hospitable to human life. Tornado-like windspeeds in the upper atmosphere, a crushingly suffocating and poisonous atmosphere, a harsh, volcano-covered surface, all make us marvel and wonder. What exactly is Venus? Here on this month's Good Heavens! episode Wa...

Mountain peaks and summits make for excellent platforms for observing the glory of God. How might the summit of the dormant volcano of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, with its thirteen active telescopes operated by 11 different countries, point us to the glory of God and what God has done for us in Jesus? Thumbnail image: The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The telescope is operated by...

This month, Wayne and Dan go to the moon (sort of)! We talk about the historic Artemis II mission, discuss some scientific mysteries about the moon, read some moon poetry and scripture which mentions the moon. We also, hopefully, make sense of how we see the moon pointing us to the glory of God in Christ. Image credits in the thumbnail. Moon and Earth - Artemis II crew and NASA. Astronaut cake top...

Come and see! Yet another discovery courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, something over which astronomers are presently puzzling! A star? A quasar? A galaxy? It's not something that astronomers have ever seen before.  Like the Platypus, these objects are hard to categorize. How does this latest curious heavenly object remind us of the One who created them? Wayne and Dan have some ideas! Joi...

Recently, cosmologist Dr. Sean Carroll suggested that the amount of galaxies in our universe is not something we would expect if God created the universe. But how does Dr. Carroll know what we should expect a God-created universe to look like? That's a question we explore on this month's episode of Good Heavens! Come and see! The thumbnail image of this month's episode is an enormous field of gala...

What do meerkats and comets have in common? Well, besides both being created by God, which is no small thing, you'll have to just listen to this month's episode of Good Heavens! to find out the answer! If we told you everything in the show notes, you might not end up listening! This month, Wayne and Dan give some updates on the science of interstellar comet 3i-ATLAS, talk about meerkats, stars, an...

We have another interstellar visitor in the solar system, something truly out of this (particular) world! Is it an alien spacecraft? Is it a comet? A sign of the end of the world? An asteroid? Demons just messing with us?  What's All the Gas About? Here on this episode of Good Heavens! we cut through all the viral hype and make some biblical sense of this wondrous interstellar object. Come and see...

This is Mark and Rita's first-ever podcast interview! The Schrocks are fellow Christians and engineer specialists at NASA's Mission Control in Houston, Texas and share with us what working at Mission Control is like. We talk about everything from landing on the moon, to Space Shuttle missions and even what they think of aliens! And of course, we talk about how we believe it all points to the glory...

How does a short passage in Mark chapter 2 point to Jesus as Lord and God? And what might Jesus' healing of the paralytic say about the nature of the universe and our place within it? Can we trust Mark's account as real history? This is a short audio essay examines these questions in greater detail and hopefully provides us with some encouragement not to be discouraged in times when God seems sile...

Atheists have often claimed that the Bible makes no scientific predictions and therefore cannot be a valid source of knowledge about the universe. But this is simply unfounded. First, modern science as we understand it today did not exist thousands of years ago. To demand that our modern expectations should be imposed upon the text of Scripture is anachronistic eisegesis. It is our imposing our ex...

How does philosophy inform modern physics? And how do physicists incorporate philosophy into their research? On this episode, we dive into those questions with philosopher Dr. Timothy McGrew and astrophysicist Dr. Luke Barnes in order to help you fine tune your thinking about the fine tuning of the universe. Critics of the fine-tuning argument will often invoke probabilities in order to get around...

The brand new Vera Rubin Observatory recently opened its 28-foot diameter mirror and snapped a few stunning images that astronomers displayed to the public for the first time in June. You can explore the amazing imagery of the heavens at the observatory's website at this site:  https://rubinobservatory.org/news/first-imagery-rubin Why so many stars? Why is the universe so immensely enormous, beyon...

Despite how secular most disciplines in the physical sciences are today, those who study nature assume that nature is intelligible and that it should be explored. But how does modern science actually explain what nature is saying to us? How do the explain that nature is intelligible to us at all? Is science the only way to understand the physical universe and everything it contains? From silvery m...

The Bible tells us that we can see and understand "God's invisible attributes" through what He has created. And this is precisely what former atheist Michael Ray Lewis discovered as he spent three years examining the evidence for Christianity. One of the most impressive arguments he encountered during his time of searching was that of the fine tuning of the universe. Jesus eventually got hold of M...

This is why we produce Good Heavens! God's creation shows us His invisible attributes. He uses His creation to lead us to Christ, through whom and for whom the entirety of the heavens and earth were made (Colossians 1). Dan recently met a former atheist who became a Christian and has recently completed the final edits on a remarkable docudrama film about the cosmos and how it all points us to Jesu...

Neptune is the Roman name for the Greek god of the seas and of earthquakes. Poseidon, in Greek mythology, is the father of Polyphemus, the tyrannical, man-eating cyclopes of Homer's Odyssey. Because the Odysseus blinded Polyphemus, it was Poseidon and his wrath which ultimately made Odysseus' trip home a little more circuitous than was to the Big O's liking. Thankfully, Poseidon and his offspring...

You don't hear much about Uranus these days. Probably because it's 1.8 billion miles away, or maybe because the last time an Earth-launched satellite probe visited the enigmatic ringed world was in 1986. A few years ago the James Webb Space Telescope took the beauteous portrait of Uranus you see in the thumbnail, but for the most part, most folks don't think much about the quirky planet that orbit...

What does the Bible say about the sun? What is the purpose of the sun? Why did God create it? How does the sun remind us of God's invisible attributes? How could there have been life on earth before the sun? How can we best understand both what the Bible says and what science says about our sun? The sun was designed and created for God's glory; for signs and for seasons, for days and years, to gov...

Our thumbnail image this week is not a doctored or photoshopped image, but a genuine picture of the sun from October 2024. Taken in 193 angstrom light on Oct. 26, 2024, NASA captured our sun in a state of rejoicing, or so it seemed (image credit NASA/GSFC/SDO). The darker regions you see that comprise the eyes and mouth are actually regions of the surface of the sun that have been blasted off by c...

How might things like "spooky action at a distance" or mysterious as "dark matter" point us to the glory of God? Whether you are a theist or a non-theist or a Christian who believes in a young or an old universe, we can all agree on at least one thing. The universe is a fascinating place in which we find ourselves. That the universe is intelligible to us is even more remarkable. But here at Good H...

As human beings we occupy a wondrously peculiar size in the cosmos. With our unique stature, we are able to see and comprehend scales of the universe at the inconceivably huge and the unimaginably small. We here at Good Heavens! believe God has arranged this peculiar state of affairs and wants us to know and delight in what He has made.  The heavens are telling of His glory and we want to be a par...

Black holes continue to amaze and surprise us. Just when it seemed the scientific community was settling in on how black holes form, a string of recent discoveries has begun to call those assumptions into question. How about a triple black hole system? Or how about a black hole that is "feeding" itself many times faster than astrophysicists thought possible. Here on part two Wayne and Dan delve in...

Black holes remain one of the most enigmatic and wondrous entities in the cosmos. We have only known about them for less than a century. And just when you think you've got a handle on what exactly they are, new discoveries begin to challenge these assumptions. Just in the last decade, astrophysicists have not only photographed a black hole but have detected gravitational waves, the ripples in spac...

The telescope technology of our time has revealed wonders in the cosmos our ancestors could only dream about. But have these discoveries in any way undermined the biblical account of creation? Our guest again this week, astrophysicist and author at Reasons to Believe, Dr. Jeff Zweerink tells us that we have nothing to fear, not even the multiverse! Many atheists and skeptics have tried to employ t...

The universe is a fantastically wondrous place. There are more things in heaven and earth than are often dreamt of in our philosophies, to paraphrase Hamlet a little bit. And for the many things we can observe in the physical universe, science sometimes struggles to come up with an explanation as to what is really going on. How much more mysterious are those things which we cannot see? How should...