Good Heavens! The Human Side of Astronomy

"Everything that begins to exist has a cause."  So begins the classical argument for God's existence known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Contemporary sciences of the heavens have, at least for the time being, confirmed that the universe we currently inhabit did indeed have a beginning.  But what caused our universe to come into existence? The secular literature on the origin of the universe...

The Bible describes Jesus as "the Lion of the tribe of Judah." God asked Job if he can hunt the prey for the lion, suggesting that it is God Himself who does the "hunting." And in the Gospels, Jesus calls His disciples to "come" as He will teach them to be "fishers of men."  Our God is a Hunter and a Fisherman. C.S. Lewis described Jesus as the "Hound of Heaven" who unrelentingly came after the sk...

While the search for extraterrestrial intelligence outside of our planet and solar system has not turned up a single bit of evidence, since the mid 20th century, there has been an increasing number of people claiming to have been abducted by aliens. Are these abduction stories just the byproduct of watching too many science fiction shows? Is there life out there in the cosmos, intelligent aliens w...

We have all probably wondered at some point if there is life in the universe outside of Earth. Our ability to land probes on distant worlds and send satellites outside our solar system, coupled with the over 5,000 exoplanets discovered since the early 2000s have inspired scientists to speculate more seriously about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  But even more fundamental than space pro...

In celebration of the Fourth of July and as 2022 is the year of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 moon landing, Dan sits down  for a conversation with Apollo 16 astronaut, the tenth man to walk upon the lunar surface, Charlie Duke.      Duke is a retired Air Force Brigadier General and the CAPCOM "voice" of Houston for the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July of 1969.      It was suc...

In celebration of the Fourth of July and as 2022 is the year of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 moon landing, Dan sits down  for a conversation with Apollo 16 astronaut, the tenth man to walk upon the lunar surface, Charlie Duke.      Duke is a retired Air Force Brigadier General and the CAPCOM "voice" of Houston for the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July of 1969.      It was suc...

In celebration of the Fourth of July and as 2022 is the year of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 moon landing, Dan sits down  for a conversation with Apollo 16 astronaut, the tenth man to walk upon the lunar surface, Charlie Duke.    Duke is a retired Air Force Brigadier General and the CAPCOM "voice" of Houston for the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July of 1969.    It was such an...

In celebration of the Fourth of July and as 2022 is the year of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 moon landing, Dan sits down  for a conversation with Apollo 16 astronaut, the tenth man to walk upon the lunar surface, Charlie Duke.    Duke is a retired Air Force Brigadier General and the CAPCOM "voice" of Houston for the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July of 1969.    It was such an...

In celebration of the Fourth of July and as 2022 is the year of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 moon landing, Dan sits down  for a conversation with Apollo 16 astronaut, the tenth man to walk upon the lunar surface, Charlie Duke.  Duke is a retired Air Force Brigadier General and the CAPCOM "voice" of Houston for the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July of 1969.   We will be releas...

The best science of the universe seems strongly to suggest our universe did indeed have a beginning. Why are the best minds in astrophysics trying to create models of the universe without a beginning? Are these models anywhere close to explaining a beginningless universe?  As we heard last week, there is indeed an anti-supernatural bias in the sciences today against the idea of God having anything...

Moses knew it long before any of the best minds in physics and cosmology knew it. And what did Moses know? That "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  Just a hundred years ago, the sciences of the heavens had stumbled across what appeared in the mathematical and observational data as evidence that our universe did in fact have a beginning.  But like Moses, philosophers and theo...

A special edition of Good Heavens! There is a video version of this that will be available Friday (6-3-2022). https://youtu.be/BIpyvSiUgZM A theist wrote a 2017 article suggesting the fine-tuning argument is not evidence for God.   We take a look at the basics of the fine-tuning argument, how it began, what it is, and why  it remains a good argument, despite the article's conclusions.    Original...

No one in the observatory on that increasingly foggy London evening had even imagined they were all about to be a part of an unexpected discovery of a supernova. But as students were munching away at their pizza, they decided to aim their telescope at a target near the Big Dipper  Boom.  That's when they saw it.  You just never know. While most of us will likely never be the first to discover a su...

God's fireworks! Stars that explode. What could be more exciting? What are supernovae? Why do stars explode? And how do such wonders point us to God's glory? Find out on the next two episodes of Good Heavens!  Wayne's article on supernovae.  https://creationanswers.net/answersblog/2022/05/02/stellar-fireworks/ Some spectacular supernovae What is a supernova? https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentia...

From now through the beginning of June, you can see four planets closely aligned - Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Saturn.  On this special episode, we give you some pointers about how you can see these celestial diadems just before sunrise and we offer some thoughts about how they remind us of God's glory.  One may not agree with Lewis's use of medieval symbol and pagan mythology as imaginative symbols...

No, we aren't talking about the Internet! But about the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), now roaming about the heavens a million miles from planet Earth.  It was launched Christmas morning, December 25, 2021 from a European spaceport in French Guiana, in South America. A brand-new, ten-billion-dollar telescope venture, the James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared telescope and wi...

As you know, we here at Good Heavens! can't stop talking about the heavens. So when a beautiful picture book comes out with the title The Heavens, how can we not talk about it!  The heavens declare the glory of God. They are His creation, attesting to His invisible attributes of faithfulness, wisdom, love, power, and glory.  Come and see the wonders of the heavens in a magnificent new pictorial bo...

Spoiler Alert!  On this episode Wayne and Dan debunk the "ancient alien" idea!  What are some modern prejudices we hold about the ancient past? Were ancient people not as smart as we are? Did their civilizations require the intervention of highly advanced alien beings? Has modern scientific knowledge fully debunked the idea of God? Is God just a myth created out of the ignorance of our ancestors? ...

Was there a first star? If so, how did it form? Believe it or not, the secular material sciences have no real evidence to support theoretical models of how the first stars came to be or how the stars we see today came into existence.  How then should we as Christians best understand naturalist models of the cosmos that take no account for God's glory?  On this special episode of Good Heavens! Dan...

This is a special combined Christmas episode with our sister podcast Apologetics Profile.  The wondrous gift is giv’n! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heav’n. No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in. How silently, how silently, You have likely heard or sung these very lines over the course of the l...

The ancient way of understanding creation included a harmonious relationship between man and the cosmos we inhabit. This included the wonderful notion of creation being able to “sing” and declare the glory and radiant praise of the One who created everything, the Lord Jesus Christ. Music and song are as much an integral part of creation as are the air we breathe and the food we eat.  But this ench...

This is a special combined Christmas episode with our sister podcast Apologetics Profile.   When we think of stars today, the first thing that may often come to mind are celebrities, Hollywood stars. If one evening you found yourself underneath the glowing industrial-scale light pollution of Los Angeles, you're probably more likely to see a famous celebrity than any single star in the sky. We are...

The sun is blinding and deadly (if we got too close to it) yet it is also life-giving and sustains the planets in their orbits. How can something so lethal to our existence also be so necessary for our existence?  The sun reminds us of God's attributes in this regard. God is holy and dwells in unapproachable light. No human being can look upon or be in the presence of God's unmitigated holiness an...

How does our sun point us to the glory of God? It's massive! It would take 109 planet Earths to cover the 864,000-mile diameter of the sun. It's blinding, powerful, and according to modern science, the sun sits on an invisible, fireproof canvass of space-time fabric!  It is truly a wonder to behold. As long as man has lived and moved upon the Earth, humans have studied our nearest star, worshiped...

You may have mistaken them for the Little Dipper - a small little bluish-white cluster of stars that look like a cart, a plough, or to some even a question mark. It is the asterism (stars that are not a constellation but a smaller group of stars within a larger constellation) of Taurus the Bull, visible in the early fall mornings and clear wintry nights.  Poems, stories, songs and myths surround t...