James Webb Telescope and the Bible

And I have to begin telling you what happened 10 months ago that was mentioned around the world, and it's still not given enough tribute what happened 10 months ago. Back in July of 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope was ready to begin capturing the most distant photos of galaxies. And I want to tell you a little bit about this James Webb Telescope and the discoveries that they have made in the next, well, these last 10 months, which basically are, they're going to now extend it out, but the basic discoveries are fundamental.

I have here a NASA model of the James Webb Space Telescope. This was designed by NASA and a company, the Geek Club, and it's actually, though, very authentic, the entire space telescope. They actually even covered it just like the James Webb Telescope, the main mirror that it has. It's 18 parts to the telescope, hexagonal shape, and it's covered by gold. Well, this has the same type of gold covering because gold is a very good reflector of infrared light, and this telescope can peer through dust. It's like a night vision type goggles. It can go through and see the most distant galaxies that are out there. It has a protective shield that you see at the bottom, and it's got five layers to it, and it's actually made from a material that is a great insulator.

It's a type of thing. It's paper thin, each one of these layers that we see. It's as thin as a sheet of paper, but it's very strong. It's made out of carbon and then coated with aluminum.

And in a way, it's similar to some of these windshield covers. It just spreads out, just like this. This is the way the James Webb shield, the sunshield, spreads out. What's remarkable is that it took 25 years to design this James Webb telescope, and it cost ten times more than the original price. Sounds like it was made by the government, right? Supposed to be worth one billion, it ended up being ten billion. And of course, the can was kicked down the road, but it finally got there ten months ago.

I'm going to let you see it for yourselves. I want to thank Bob Harrington, who helped. He did basically the assembly. It was beyond my pay grade. So he's a Boeing engineer. So I'm very happy he was able to help out, because I wouldn't have gotten to first base, but he was able to get it all done. Now, this telescope, and I'm going to go ahead and get that. Let's see, where do I have the photograph? Is the photograph there? I don't see it here. Oh, here it is. Here it is. This is the photograph. I want to hand out the photograph first of the James Webb telescope. And here you can see the distance. It's three times as far as the moon. It is one million miles away from the Earth, because it's protected then from a lot of the space, micro, meteorites and things. And also, it's not influenced so much by the attraction of the Earth. The Hubble telescope, which used to be the most powerful, is basically a third of the distance. It's much closer to the Earth. And so, Ray, you can go ahead and start passing this out. I'll just give you a little more information about how this spaced telescope works.

Because of that gold mirror, this is called a reflective telescope. The way it was invented back in the 1600s by Isaac Newton was the first one that developed what is called a reflective mirror. Because it's a telescope. It uses a mirror just like the Hubble also does. And as the light from the stars and galaxies, when they hit that mirror, the mirror concentrates to a secondary mirror, which is this one here.

And then, it all concentrates in this little hole in the center of it. And then, it has all the equipment to process it. Basically, four different types of telescopes are being used to amplify. Two are the infrared, near-infrared telescopes. And then, there's a middle, which is a mid-distance infrared as well. And then, it has a spectrum type of a mirror.

And underneath... Now, I want to tell you how ingenious this is. Why do you need this protective shield? Because if it didn't have it, you couldn't protect all the equipment. And so, the shield on the back side is the one where it's always facing the sun. And it grabs all the heat from the sun. It had four solar panels that energizes the whole satellite. And the temperature gets to 230 degrees Fahrenheit. So, you can imagine the heat involved. And this shield protects it. And at the other side, it's minus... Let me get it here... 370 degrees. 370 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, below zero. And so, you've got a swing of about 500 degrees, just from this little layer, these little... the shields. Because the infrared light is very sensitive to heat. And so, it has to be remaining that cold, so it can sense even the most distant heat from a galaxy. And then it's got, at the bottom, it's got the little radio antenna. You can see it's a little round. That's where it communicates with the Earth. So, Ray, go ahead and just please pass it out.

So, this telescope is a hundred times more powerful than the Hubble. And, of course, the Hubble telescope is about a hundred times more powerful than the other telescopes on Earth. So, you've got just this amazing instrument now in space.

And what it has discovered in these past 10 months, I want to explain to you, five of these great discoveries that this James Webb telescope has found out. It has now discovered.

The main finding is that the universe has been tampered with. It did not evolve just like randomly, like they said, that, well, you had all of this gas, and eventually it just slowly concentrated. And then it became a star. And then another gas, cloud of gas, concentrated after billions of years. And then you finally have enough stars where the gravitational pull will pull them together and create a galaxy. So they're talking about, oh, billions of years that it takes for that to happen. And then that's the first generation. And once all of these get together, and finally when you have the massive stars explode, those are called supernovas, and the heat generated creates atoms that are heavier than hydrogen or helium. And then you start. So it's just, they say, all this just sort of evolved. And it just took such a long time. Nobody was involved. It just evolved on its own. Well, that's not what they found. They found that everything really got started very fast, very well designed. Let me read to you a couple of these quotes.

This is from USA Today, February 23rd of this year. It says, because of the galaxy, because of the galaxy's age and massiveness, that James Webb's telescopes team discovered findings that conflict with 99 percent of the existing models for the origins of the universe. So you see, scientists just think, oh, there's no creator to intervene, to accelerate the process. And what they found is that this is an organized universe that came very quickly. Why? They don't know. Look what they say here. He said, we looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find.

Astronomer Joel Lea said, it turns out we found something so unexpected, it actually creates problems for science. Yeah, science where they don't want any creator, hands off, it just sort of had to evolve. Doesn't matter how much time. He says, it calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.

And what you find is that it's much more beautiful, much more developed. It's almost like coming to the Earth and finding the Garden of Eden. Scientists say, well, this must have taken billions of years to come. It must have been how long did all of these biological forms develop? No! God created the Garden of Eden from one day to the next.

And God intervenes. He has the right and reserves the right to intervene. He is an active God. And so, we find that the James Webb satellite shows us the universe started with very developed galaxies and stars. Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science, says, if the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning, as observational astronomy and theoretical physics suggest, it's hard to envision a physical cause for such an event. So, the James Webb confirmed that the universe had a beginning, but that everything is so much better organized than they could ever imagine. He says here, after all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang, which is the initial expansion of the universe. Before that, no matter or energy, in other words, no physics would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin. So, you see, you can't have matter and energy and the physical laws until it starts. Before that, there's nothing there. And that's where the Bible comes in. And I would like to go ahead and show how the biblical model is actually even more accurate than the scientific model for things. This isn't something that I'm just saying. I want you to listen to some top scientists about this.

Stephen Meyer goes on to say, the vast majority of physicists and astronomers have followed the evidence to its logical conclusion. The universe had a beginning. There was a Big Bang, the initial expansion. Certainly, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed nothing to overturn this consensus or the considerable body of evidence supporting it. So, actually, the James Webb Telescope just confirmed this first great truth that the universe had a beginning and that it started from nothing. It didn't start from pre-existing matter or energy. Of all the ancient writings, the Bible is the one that mentions a beginning of the universe out of nothing.

Notice in Genesis 1.1, it says, in the beginning, talking about the universe, God created the heavens and the earth. That includes everything. The heavens includes all the galaxies, all the universe, and of course, the earth. That's why I want to emphasize the purpose of the universe, of the creation, according to God's Word, is that He's creating children of God through human beings.

He's going to have a family that are going to be with Him for eternity, with Jesus Christ as the elder brother, God the father, and then all of these children of God that are going to be with their personalities as you see them now, but made out of glorious spirit that will be able to travel through the universe at the speed of thought. You don't have to take a spaceship someplace. You just imagine it because God's spirit is we're going to share that, and it permeates all things, and so we can travel through that spirit to wherever you need to, just by the speed of thought.

In Genesis 1.1, when it says, in the beginning, God created the heavens, the word created comes from the Hebrew word, bara, and bara as the Colin Delish commentary, very authoritative Hebrew expert. It says, bara in the Hebrew always means to create and is only applied to a divine creation. In other words, God is involved in bara, the production of which had no existence before. So you are bringing something that had no previous existence, whether it's matter, energy, and it tells us in Hebrews 11.3, by faith, we understand that the entire universe was formed at God's command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.

So spirit is invisible, but it started every... spirit was there, and then matter and energy were created. But underlying everything is the spirit world. The physical world did not just come about by itself. Notice what it says in Isaiah 40, 25, and 26.

God is talking, and he says, to whom will you compare me? Who is my equal? Asks the Holy One. Look up into the heavens. Who created all the stars? He brings them out like an army, one after another, calling each by its name. So just like an army comes out with ranks, very orderly, he brought all the stars to existence, and he brought them out in an orderly way. Well, that's what the James Webb telescope says. We can't figure out how all of these enormous galaxies started so early in the time of creation.

And not only are they made out of helium and hydrogen, it's got all the metals, carbon, nitrogen. All of these advanced elements are already there. So you see, it throws down the theory that all of this is sort of slowly evolved from condensed clouds. Now, the purpose, God, his purpose wasn't to create a universe, just to entertain. It's a place, it's the crib, the baby crib of mankind. His purpose was to create mankind. And then, this whole universe is there awaiting the glorification of God's people.

Because one day, these planets that are out there, they've already discovered 5,000 of them. That's real estate for the future, because God wants his children to create, to beautify, to use their imaginations. One of the NASA astronomers, and he was actually even in charge of the Mount Wilson here, observatory for some time, Robert Gastro. And after they found out that the universe had a beginning, this is what he says.

A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our universe, but if it does, science cannot find out what that explanation is. The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation. So, that way, you can go all the way to the creation, and actually a little bit before the creation. He says, this is an exceedingly strange development for scientists, unexpected by all but the theologians.

The theologians are the experts in the Bible. They have always accepted the Word of the Bible. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. It is unexpected because science has had such an extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backwards in time. Oh yes, here they got the James Webb telescope and it can go back to not explain how all of these galaxies and stars actually began, already designed and organized. Jastrow continues, he says, now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable.

It's not a matter of another year of scientific progress, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory. At this moment, it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain of the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. See, Jastrow himself, he calls himself an agnostic. So he doesn't believe in God, but he still isn't sure God doesn't exist either. He says about the scientist, he has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak, and as he pulls himself over the final rock, he's greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Yeah, yeah, that was here. The Bible told us it was going to be that way. People didn't want to believe it.

Now that's all confirmed. Another discovery of the James Webb telescope. It has confirmed that the universe has been expanding since its beginning, and the James Webb telescope has been able to measure all the way back and and see how the universe is stretching out. Now, isn't it amazing that the Bible says that God stretched out the universe? Notice what it tells us in Isaiah 42.5. It says, "'Thou says the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out.'" So it wasn't just stationary. No, he stretched them out. "'Who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it, and spirit to those who walk on it.'" We all have the spirit in man. That was given as a gift to God. That's why we can reason. That's why we're different than animals. Animals do not have the ability to have abstract reasoning. We can have mathematical formulas that we can examine things. Apes can't do it. Apes are more interested in bananas. It's about as high as they'll go. Or maybe picking out the fleas from somebody, you know, somebody back for Jeremiah the prophet says in chapter 10 verse 12, "'He has made the earth by his power. He has established the world by his wisdom, and has stretched out the heavens at his discretion.'" So he decides the rate of expansion, everything is this way. Because, you see, as it expands, you don't have to worry about the gravitational forces just pushing everything together. If you don't have that expansion rate, eventually it would all conglomerate, and it doesn't.

Another great discovery of the James Webb telescope is that the universe is finally tuned for life. The universe is finally tuned for life.

A U.S. Cornell University team of astronomers explained, most surprising about these galaxies seen by the Webb telescope, considering their age and mass, was their mature metallicity, which means how many of these advanced elements it had. They could tell what was inside of these different stars, and it says, "'A bounce of elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, which the team estimated to be similar to our Sun.'" So, you see, this is overturning a lot of ideas, because they thought, oh, no, this kind of gradually evolved, but no, it's...they're finding that things are already mature. We're in a mature universe, and that it started very mature. I have a little creature here.

It's a fossil, and I have here what's called a trilobite. Now, this trilobite, if you dig under the Earth, and basically the fossil record is about one mile deep, you go and you find these little trilobites. These trilobites do not have a previous ancestor. It has never been found in any of the seven continents. This little creature that just begins...when it's created at that time, it has compound eyes, about 700 different lenses. This little trilobite can not only see front, but it can see sideways, and it can see back. Just like a compound eyes of a fly. That's why it's so hard to kill a fly. That's why you can't creep up on it, because it's looking at you from one of these lenses. Well, there's no such thing as trilobites with whole eyes. These are much more complex. These different lenses are all connected to the neural nerve, the system, the optic nerve that goes through the brain. It has three different lobes. That's why it's called trilobite. It's got a digestive system. It has a reproductive system, and all of this just shows you what happened here at this time. God intervened and infused creation with new genetic information and new physical structure. So God does have the right to intervene when he wants to. It's called a miracle. If you had been living during the time of Jesus Christ, and you would have been there in the area of Bethany, and been there that time when Lazarus died, and he was there for four days, and Christ wanted to wait for four days. Now, they put him in the tomb, and that man, after the third day, you start rotting. The whole system just is going to pieces. And so Christ wanted to make sure that nobody thought that this person was still alive. And they opened up the tomb, and he said, Lazarus, come out! And Lazarus came out, and he was completely healed. So there was an infusion of biological information and new physical structure. God has a right to do that at the cosmic scale, or he can do it with divine healing at the personal scale. Because, you see, again, God's Spirit is diffused, and it can intervene and act. Now, you have regular laws that God has established, but he has a right to intervene and change things, as he does with this little trilobite that I got from the Bolivian Mountains, way up there at the top. And it is one of these times when God intervened at that time. The Cambrian level is the beginning of our modern fossil record that we have of the earliest types of complex creatures. So we see now that the universe is much better designed than anybody could have imagined. And I want to take you to the last point. Did you know that an unknown and invisible force sustains 95% of the universe? The James Webb Telescope confirmed this as well.

This was in the 60 Minutes TV interview, April 9, 2023. They were talking about the James Webb Discoveries, and they were interviewing the astronomer Matt Mountain.

And he says, the whole of the sky were filled with galaxies, so much more than what people imagined even before. There was no empty sky, so God has just filled this universe, and it has a purpose behind it.

He says, galaxies are rushing away from each other at greater and greater speed, defying gravity. It makes no sense!

So scientists infer that there must be unseen elements at work. They call them dark energy and dark matter. Whenever you hear the term dark energy or dark matter, says this astronomer, this means we don't know what it is. We're not that imaginative. We can't even come up with an idea what it could be. But it is a force that is 95% of our universe, and we have no idea what it is. We are lucky if we even understand 4% of our universe. Astronomy is a very humbling science. And yet, you don't hear astronomers talking about a creator God very often.

You know, in the Bible, God once asked Job when Job thought, oh, he was very smart. He was very successful, man. And just like the first message about pride, well, God met Job, and he asked him a couple of interesting questions, and he could ask those same scientists today, astronomers, and you'd get the same answer. This is what God asked him.

In Job 38, 31 through 33, Job 38, 31 through 33, I'm going to read it from the contemporary English version. He asked Job, anybody really feels, boy, I'm important, I'm successful, see how you feel if you don't feel deflated by this. He says, can you arrange stars in groups such as Orion and the Pleiades? Do you control the stars or set in place the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper? Now, those are key stars and constellations, because you can find star Polaris, which is in the north, by the Big Dipper. He goes on to say, do you know the laws that govern the heavens? And can you make them rule the earth? Do you have the power to bring things into existence and control how they work? The answer is still the same. Job and the rest of all of us, we are way out of God's lead.

Regarding this invisible force that powers 95% of the universe and has scientists stumped, God's Word appears to give a solution when it says in Colossians 1.15-17, Colossians 1.15-17, the contemporary English version, it says Christ is exactly like God, talking about God the Father, who cannot be seen. He is the first-born Son, superior to all creation. Everything was created by Him, everything in heaven and earth, that's all the stars, all the galaxies, everything seen and unseen. So He actually created spiritual beings, like angels as well, including all forces and powers and all rulers and authorities. All things were created by God's Son, and everything was made for Him. Remember He's the heir of the universe? And He says we're going to be coheirs with Christ. Romans 8, verse 15. God's Son was before all else, and by Him everything is held together. So there's a spiritual force that is holding all of these things together. So in conclusion, perhaps the findings of the James Webb telescope can be compared to the answers from a remarkable interview given by the New York Times to this physicist, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. His name is Arno Penzias. He worked at the Bell Laboratories here in California. He spoke about the discovery of the universe having a beginning and also expanding, something the James Webb telescope has now confirmed. He said, it seems to me the data we have in hand right now, talk about astronomy and physics, clearly show that there is not nearly enough matter in the universe. We're talking about just basically four or five percent of matter and energy. Not enough by a factor of three for the universe to be able to fall back on itself ever again. My argument, this is what he concluded, is that the best data we have, all these scientists, all the James Webb and Hubble telescopes, are exactly what I would have predicted had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole. So these men are coming to that. Some are actually coming to conversion because of what they're discovering. So the James Webb telescope has so far confirmed the basic account of the cosmos described thousands of years ago when telescopes didn't even exist. How could that happen? I'm going to finish with Isaiah 46, verses 10 and 11. This is his answer, God's answer in Scripture. Remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things that are yet not done, saying my counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure. So, brethren, we're so blessed. We're not in this type of a maze that science is trying to figure things out just on physical level and not taking account the Creator God. That is what the James Webb telescope confirmed.