Giant Impact, Secular Miracles, and Bad Science
There are several secular models for the formation of the moon. Co-accretion (condensation) concept is that Earth and the moon were formed at the same time from the same nebula that formed the rest of the solar system. Another is the fission (spin-off) idea, where a molten Earth threw out a chunk of matter before it had cooled, and that became the moon. Then there's the giant impact hypothesis, where some cosmic wanderer about the size of Mercury smacked into Earth and the debris formed the moon, which was lassoed by gravity and yee haw, we got us a moon! None of these fit the data.
Of the three main cosmic evolution failures, the least dismal failure is the impact hypothesis. Rather than give credit to the Creator, some owlhoots getting grant money spin yarns to keep that idea going. Problem is, they're being disingenuous. They invoke their version of miracles, and they tamper so much with the data, it has no basis in reality. Then this stuff is passed off as "science", and gullible anti-creationist tinhorns point to it and say, "See? Science is smrt! Yahyuh!" It happens far too often.
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| If the impact had happened, maybe it looked like this. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech |
You can’t get Earth’s moon from a planetary collision without quasi-miraculous tweaks to the models.You can read the rest by clicking on "Moon Origin Models Require Cheating".
Science TV shows often make the moon’s formation look simple: a body flies into the Earth, breaks it up, and out of the pieces the Earth-moon system forms. This accident of nature was unique to the Earth, since it didn’t happen for the other three rocky planets. Viewers of the animations may not be aware that the simple picture is false. Specifically, the materials making up Earth and the moon are too similar to be explained by some third body, which likely would have been composed of different materials.
A recent paper in Nature by Israeli and French astrophysicists reveals what secular naturalists are up against trying to explain Earth’s moon by purely physical processes, without design.