Let's Educate Some Christians

When I was growing up, there was an expression circulated among Christian circles that says something like this:

"If you were to move Earth 10 feet closer to the Sun or 10 feet further away we would all die. God has placed us perfectly where we ought to be."

Recently I have seen someone post this, and then receive much rebuttal from people of the pseudo-scientific community. The problem really lies in that people don't actually apply critical thinking or analytic thinking, they merely see it for face value and demean people over this. It usually turns into the traditional "christian bashing" and someone usually starts talking about the Big Bang/Creation and what they believe to be the fallacy of the bible. Those topics are really for other blog posts. I have yet to attack the legitimacy of the bible, but I have a blog regarding the Big Bang/Creation titled "Jesus Believed in Evolution" if you want a long but actually somewhat thoughtful read.

Let me clear up this expression so we can put to rest the scientific community for demeaning Christians, and empower Christians to not make complete fools of themselves for not knowing what they are talking about:

First, let's get some of the basics out of the way with the facts:
1) The earth moves in an egg shaped ellipse around the sun.
2) Our distance from the sun changes by several million miles (3,106,855.95 miles to be exact) each year.
3) The earth is just under 8,000 miles thick on average
4) In science, the distance from the earth to the sun (92,956,000 miles) is referred to as 1 Astronomical Unit or 1 AU
5) In order for life to exist a planet must reside permanently within the Goldilocks Zone for it's respective star. This is the distance that will allow life to not burn or freeze to death. It varies for each star.
6) The Goldilocks Zone (clever name) for our sun is between .99AU and 1.7AU (http://io9.com/5980232/new-definition-of-the-goldilocks-zone-puts-earth-right-on-the-edge-of-habitability)

Okay, so now that we have the facts let's do some critical thinking. Using Facts 4 and 6 we can determine that the earth (which is at 1AU during it's closest time to the sun) has a margin of .01 to move from that point before we all burn to death. This is much more than 10 feet. To be exact, this is 92,956 miles.

Science Lovers: "Silly Christians. They really think that's true?! No wonder we have problems."

Hold on a second. That's not the end of the thought. Let's move to next-level thinking and not just the face value of the 10 feet. Clearly just the movement of 10 feet wouldn't immediately kill everyone. I've gone on roller coasters and not incinerated, but what happens AFTER the earth has moved this 10 feet?

Well, scientifically speaking, if you push an item closer to the sun it is subjected to a higher level of gravity, which ultimately will change the entire trajectory of the planet. If you figure the math out using Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_motion) this would actually happen to push us much closer over time than the 92,956 miles because the ellipse changes from an egg shape to more of a "0" shape where the long sides are significantly closer (we burn) and the short sides are drastically further away (we freeze). Conversely, the opposite happens if you push the earth out 10 feet. The gravitation is less and as a result the ellipse is still the same shape, but the bottom wide half of this "egg" shaped ellipse is MUCH closer than we are now. In either case, our planet burns and freezes.

TO SCIENCE LOVERS
If you really like science, stop trying to make Science fight God. Science will never disprove God. Science is not in the nature of disproving ANYTHING, rather Scientific thinking is used to discover new things and prove things to help us better understand the universe. When you posit God against Science you are already limiting your scientific thinking, not to mention that mathematically you can never disprove anything because until we know the entire infinite universe there is always the possibility that what you are trying to disprove exists beyond your reach. Aliens could very well exist beyond our reach, and so could people just like us.

CHRISTIANS
Science isn't the devil. Science is something we were given to help better understand our world and the Creator. As Einstein said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

If we as Christians are fearful of Science, it's much less of your contempt for Science and much more your fear that they may disprove something you believe. Here's a thought: If God created Science, do you really think that Science will ever be able to prove that He doesn't exist? Do you think that we would be able to prove in the universe things that He didn't intend?

God made the universe. Science is us coming to conclusions based on observation. If we believe both of those statements, then we should 100% support Science because it will 100% of the time verify the very hand of God and make him more tangible to mankind on a very basic level.

JUST FOR FUN:
The reality is that we wouldn't even need to move 93,000 miles closer because the earth is 8,000 feet wide. What this means is that really our planet only needs to move about 86,000 miles closer because even if only one side were too close, the earth rotates on its axis, and as a result we all die in a rotisserie-style apocalypse.

Outside of this, our gravity is what makes certain gasses like hydrogen and liquids like water able to exist on our planet. If we moved that much closer, the strong force constant (gravity) is disrupted to a point that hydrogen can no longer exist at the closest point in our ellipse to the sun, and as a result our atmosphere breaks down and we all die.