Astronomy Paper

Kara's Astronomy curriculum has three books.  For the first book, we did a classic homework questions with test approach.  For the second book, I had her read the whole thing and pick a topic to write a paper on.  I liked this paper so much, I plan to do it for the third book.

I think she did a great job, but I am not sure what middle schooler / high schooler writers look like.  Any moms out there want to tell me what age level this writing is so I know how to grade it?

Creationism vs. Evolutionism: Origin of The Moon

     Evolutionists and creationists have very different views on how things came to be - as the names suggest, evolutionists believe that everything evolved to their current form, and creationists believe that everything was created over a period of six days by God. Naturally, their beliefs and theories differ from each other, causing speculation throughout mankind. However, evolutionists have flaws in their theories; a good example is how they believe the moon was created.

     One theory throughout the evolutionary community is called the “fission theory.” It starts at the very beginning, where they say a big bang took place and spewed out all kinds of matter, some of which settled into a massive cloud in space called a “nebula,” in which stars began to form. After billions of years, the Milky Way existed similarly to the way it does now, and in one of its spiral arms was a star that had just ignited with a disk of dust around it. The dust around the star, which would become our sun, very gradually clumped together to form boulders, which then clumped together to form planets. Earth was, at the time, extremely hot from all of the impacts of rocks slamming into one another to form our home, and it was rotating very quickly - much faster than it does now. In this theory, the molten earth was spinning so quickly that part of it split off and formed the moon, leaving behind a “scar” that is now the pacific ocean. However, there are several major problems with this theory. First, the moon isn’t made out of the same materials as the earth - for example, the earth is 30% iron, while the moon is only 2%. Second, there is a very small amount of water on the moon, and would be more if this theory were true. Third, there is no historical evidence or reason for the earth to be spinning so quickly in the past. Fourth, the moon is orbiting around the earth on a plane not nearly as close to that of the Earth’s equator as it should be if this theory were true.

  Another theory that some evolutionists believe is called the “capture theory.“ According to this idea, the moon came close to the earth and was hooked by its gravity and captured permanently. The first problem with this is that this technically isn’t an origin theory for the moon, because it doesn’t explain how it came to exist. Second, there’s no reason that the moon would’ve slowed down and gone around the earth in a permanent orbit - why wouldn’t it have just changed its angle a little bit and kept going right on past? And third, if this theory were true, the moon would have a vastly elongated orbit around the earth instead of a roughly circular one.

     Yet another theory is called the “nebular theory.” In this theory, the earth and moon “formed” together from dust within a nebular cloud. However, why is there a nebular cloud? Its existence quite a large assumption, backed up by nothing definite. Also, the balance necessary for this is too critical for this to be likely - if the moon was ever too large, it would sling away from the earth’s orbit, and if it was ever too small, it would be sucked into earth and would collide with its surface. The odds are against this theory.

     The theory that’s widely accepted nowadays is the “collision” theory. This one states that the earth, when it was still molten, was hit with a Mars-sized object called Theia and the debris scattered around our home planet, eventually clumping together to form the moon. Many scientists use computer models to try to recreate this event to prove that it happened, but many versions require multiple collisions or would result in multiple moons. Some evolutionists claim that there actually were two moons and that one was orbiting faster than the other and smashed into it, molding around the entire side of the moon, which is why the moon’s crust is 30 miles thicker on the far side than on the near side. However, why did the moons orbit at different speeds? Why did they mold together instead of just destroying one another and sending debris back into a ring around the earth to start from scratch? If the moon’s side was hit, why did it rotate for the thinner side to face the earth and the thicker to face away from it instead of the left side being thinner than the right (or vice versa)?

     An idea that not many scientists believe or maybe even consider is that an all-powerful supernatural deity created everything. Creationists see this, recognize it, and can give quite a bit of proof coming from the Bible, whereas evolutionists are forced to fill their explanations of the origins of everything with “maybe” and “probably.” The debate still stands as to which is true - maybe one day in the future, mankind will universally agree, but for now, we believe what we believe and we know what we know.