The Faint Sun Paradox

Genesis 1:16
“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.”

Let’s assume for a moment that the evolutionary explanation for the origin of the Earth and sun is correct. The sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Let’s imagine that evolutionists are right in saying that life originated on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. This scenario creates many scientific problems, but today we want to focus on one problem that is seldom mentioned.

One implication of these assumptions is that the sun today is about 40 percent brighter than it was 4.6 billion years ago. This means that 3.5 billion years ago, the sun was bathing the Earth with considerably less energy than we receive today. Under those conditions, life as we know it today could not have existed on Earth. Yet, we are told it was under these conditions that life supposedly evolved. Evolutionists are aware of this problem. In an attempt to solve it, they theorize that the early Earth had more greenhouse gases that would have held the sun’s heat more efficiently and produced the same temperature range that life enjoys today. They then theorize that the mix of these gases gradually changed to the atmosphere we have today, perfectly matching the increase in the sun’s energy output to Earth. This explanation is so unlikely that one scientific paper actually referred to it as the “Goldilocks syndrome”!

There is a much less fantastic solution to this problem. The Earth and sun are not billions of years old and life was created relatively recently to live under the conditions we enjoy today.

Prayer:
With all that You have made, dear Father, I glorify You. Amen.

Notes:
Impact [ICR], 6/98. Photo: NASA image of the sun reveals the filamentary nature of the plasma connecting regions of different magnetic polarity.