Faint Young Sun Paradox Solved?

A major mystery for materialistic planetary science is solved—if you can swallow the miracles required.

For decades, evolutionists have faced a major obstacle in their story. Life is thought to have originated on the Earth within a billion years of its formation, but at the time, astronomers tell them the sun was fainter than it is now. It would have been too weak to keep water liquid in Earth’s orbit. A frozen Earth might never come out of its deep freeze even as the sun warmed. This “faint young sun paradox” has troubled many materialists wishing to weave a seamless scenario from big bang to man.

Now, Astrobiology Magazine has a “possible solution to the faint young sun paradox” (also posted on Science Daily). It’s possible, that is, if you can keep these factors happening in the right order in the right quantities:

1. Bring in lots of asteroids to heat the surface. You need some big ones, 100 km in diameter.
2. Make sure the asteroids have lots of sulfur. This will be needed for life.
3. Let the asteroids cause outgassing of lots of sulfur and carbon into the atmosphere to provide global warming (but not too much).
4. Keep the impacts from being too big or frequent to destroy the life that is trying to emerge.
5. Reduce the impact rate as the sun warms up.

Why didn’t Venus profit from the scenario? Perhaps it’s because so many other factors are required for habitability (see commentary from 6/23/16).

Those finding this sequence looking suspiciously fine-tuned will notice that the storytellers at Southwest Research Institute acknowledge the problems:

In the first billion years of Earth’s history, the planet was bombarded by primordial asteroids, while a faint Sun provided much less heat….

The early impacts caused temporary, localized destruction and hostile conditions for life….

The paper addresses a major problem, one of the outstanding mysteries in the history of the solar system and Earth — the faint young Sun paradox.

“Atmospheric and surface conditions during the first billion years of Earth’s history are poorly understood due to the scarcity of geological and geochemical evidence,” said [Dr Simone] Marchi….

The findings could be key to understanding how life started on Earth despite the faint young Sun and havoc caused by collisions. Studies of other stars, as well as theoretical modeling, have shown that Sun-like stars begin their life about 20 to 30 percent fainter in visible wavelengths than the Sun is at present. They gradually increase in luminosity over time….

When the Sun was much fainter, the Earth with its present atmospheric composition would have been frozen solid. If the oceans were frozen, life may not have formed.

Marchi knows that Earth sits right in a “Goldilocks Zone” today, but it could not have been habitable billions of years ago given a faint young sun. Her few extra tweaks to the models keep the dream alive of a seamless evolutionary story of a spinning gas cloud to life on a lucky planet.

In the philosophy of science, however, tossing in some ad hoc parameters to keep a model from getting falsified is frowned upon. That’s called special pleading. You don’t solve one miracle by invoking four or five others.

The paradox vanishes when you trust the Manufacturer’s word, that He created the Earth to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18-19). Paradox solved. Fits the evidence, too.