As many Christians interested in the science of creation know, Dr. Mary Schweitzer is the paleontologist who published a 2005 article in Science magazine, “Soft-tissue vessels and cellular preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex,“ 1 that has perceptively altered what scientists think about fossils and the history of life on earth. Many also understand that she is a steadfast defender of the theory of evolution. What most may not know, however, is that Dr. Schweitzer is a Christian with interests and convictions about God that many of us share, including myself. In a 2014 interview with Biologos, 2 she made the following statement (emphasis added) about her life as a Christian to which I hope we can all agree:

The creation/evolution debate is a critical battle ground for the hearts and minds of everyone. What we think about our origins impacts everything we think about the world and ourselves. If human beings are merely the result of natural law working over billions of years as materialists claim, then any action we “choose” can be justified since we become the arbiters of right and wrong. Our culture is becoming increasingly secular in its thinking and policies. Moral relativism, situation ethics, sexual permissiveness in all its forms, abortion, theft, senseless mass murders, tolerance and even justification for dishonesty, are on the rise. We are at a critical time, a tipping point, in the history of our nation.

The following article is reprinted with the author’s permission posted by Terry A. Hurlbut on November 4, 2016 at the Creation Science Hall of Fame, http://creationsciencehalloffame.org/2016/11/04/astronomy-2/space/pluto-new-horizons-review/. The reader is directed to the Creation Science Hall of Fame web site for additional videos related to this article.

On 27 October 2016, controllers for the New Horizons deep-space mission achieved a milestone. They got back the last data from their spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto. Alice Bowman, head of the mission team, said the team would first verify the data. They then will order New Horizons to erase its memories. New Horizons must do this ahead of a planned rendezvous with another Kuiper Belt object (2014 MU69). It will make this flyby on or about 1 January 2019).

New Horizons flew past Pluto on 15 July 2015. Now NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) have all the data it gathered in that passage. So now would be a good time to review what New Horizons found, and what it means. In fact, the Pluto findings mean a great deal, not only for Pluto, but also for Earth.

What New Horizons found in the Pluto system

New Horizons flew toward a body everyone thought was 4.6 billion years old, like the rest of the solar system. So the mission team expected to find signs of great age. Instead they found signs, not of age, but of youth. They also found or confirmed several things they still cannot explain.

One of the first articles from JHUAPL discussed the first shocking findings:

1. Equatorial mountains on Pluto, made of water ice, rise 3500 meters (11,000 feet) above the surface.
2. Charon, largest moon of Pluto, has cliffs, troughs, and a seven- to nine-mile deep canyon.
3. Methane ice abounds on Pluto, in some places far more than others.

Fig.1:, showing mountains rising to 3500 feet above mean ground, and standing out in stark relief. Source: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Figure 1

In a previous article, The Big Stretch - Part 1, http://tasc-creationscience.org/article/big-stretch-1, a cosmological model was introduced, the Setterfield Plasma-ZPE model.

There have been various arguments raised against this model. In this article, we will examine some of those arguments, to try to determine if they are valid or not. 

We will start with a brief overview of the model; for more details, refer to The Big Stretch - Part 1 or to www.setterfield.org.

In today’s world, both the book of Genesis and the Biblical creation model of origins that flows from it are mocked by the main-stream media and the scientific establishment as nothing more than fairy tales. These entities have no more connection to reality than do Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. They are never given serious consideration as alternatives to the ruling paradigms of the Big-Bang theory for the origin of the universe, spontaneous generation for the origin of life, or of some form of biological evolution for the progression of life from molecule to man. Why is this? Is it due to the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of the ruling paradigms? One would certainly assume that would be the case in light of the confidence exhibited in the secular media about the certainty of evolution. That confidence, however, is badly misplaced. Agnostic microbiologist Michael Denton agrees:

Neither of the 2 fundamental axioms of Darwin’s macroevolutionary theory—the concept of continuity of nature, that is the idea of a functional continuum of all life forms linking all species together and ultimately leading back to a primeval cell, and the belief that all the adaptive design of life has resulted from a blind random process—have been validated by one empirical discovery or scientific advance since 1859. 1