I was hoping I didn’t have to do this, but I came across this video and I just couldn’t let it go. I had tried to give Jason Lisle the benefit of the doubt when he was boasting about this young earth creation prediction for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But I have to conclude that he is just lying or at the very least he has convinced himself of that lie. I say this based on a YouTube video of him speaking to a church audience and his 2024 article in ARJ. ARJ is just a young earth creationist website sponsored by Answers in Genesis to promote young earth views. So, in this video he is once again boasting about this young earth prediction about what JWST will find. And ridiculing secular scientist with strawman arguments and misrepresentations.
“I thought I’m going to make some predictions too based on biblical creation because I don’t believe in the Big Bang. I’ve got the word of God and so I would expect to see lots of galaxies at Great distances even Beyond a red shift of 14 because I don’t believe galaxies evolved. … would you like to see the first image that James Webb sent back of the distant Universe? here it is Galaxy upon galaxies upon galaxies at unprecedented distances and they found that some of those galaxies were Way Beyond red shift to 14 some of them possibly out to Red shift of 20 so here’s the results lots of galaxies at Great distances even Beyond red shift 14 as we creationist predicted farthest galaxies fully formed” – (emphasis mine)
I am not sure what is the exact image he showed on the screen but it is probably the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.
He’s right. I see “Galaxy upon galaxies upon galaxies at unprecedented distances and they found that some of those galaxies were Way Beyond red shift to 14” Oh, wait… except! Lisle isn’t telling you the whole story but maybe he just doesn’t know what he is talking about. Lisle, not being a real astrophysicist, and haven’t work a single hour as a professional astrophysicist, and the minute he got his Ph.D. he went into full time young earth apologetics. So maybe he is not lying. He is just ignorant. The vast majority of those bright beautiful stars and galaxies upon galaxies are visible images from nearby galaxies with a distance of about 4.24 billion light years, redshift of z=0.39. That would mean these objects are only about 4.24 billion years old as we see them today.
No, but Lisle told us these are at redshift of 14 and beyond. Maybe but they are more like z∼11–13. If Lisle actually worked a couple of days as a real astrophysicist he would have known this is a composite image from JWST’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey. That image he showed was a composite of at least 6 different images of visible and infrared lights, using NIRCam (near-infrared) and MIRI (mid-infrared) cameras. These images isolate specific infrared wavelengths without combining them into a full-color composite. These infrared-only images are not color composites — they’re either grayscale or false-color representations of single wavelength bands. They allow astronomers to isolate specific physical features like dust, star formation, and galaxy age.
So, what do some of the more distant galaxies look like?
When you zoom into one of these spots all of a sudden, those galaxies upon galaxies disappeared. No well-defined spiral arms, just blobs, blobs of light. At redshifts , galaxies are extremely faint and their light is highly redshifted into the infrared. JWST uses NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to detect this light. The resulting images are composite reconstructions, often color-coded false color blobs built from multiple filters and long exposures. These blobs are not direct photographs like Hubble’s visible-light spirals. They often lack clear structure, no resolved spiral arms, bulges, or disks. They are subject to instrumental noise, point spread function artifacts, and deconvolution assumptions.
Why didn’t Lisle tell his audience what is really going on if he was so cocky about his prediction? Why did he misrepresent the data and mock the secular scientists of trying to change their story. What ever he thinks the real scientists would say, at least they have they integrity to show all the data. They are not hiding anything even if it contradicts their predictions.
Scientific knowledge is not God breathed. It is human beings gifted by God with intellect and reasoning, in the pursuit of truth as God has created and placed in nature. Can human beings get things wrong? We often do but that doesn’t mean that the whole of scientific knowledge is wrong. Lisle created his god of the gap science based on the knowledge of his own twisted understanding of Scripture. He refuse to allow facts to confuse his own erroneous understanding and make himself the hero of the story. He becomes the true Christian fighting against secularism while attacking the windmill.
I will get to the Lisle article I mentioned in my next post. I want to conclude with this. Why am I so passionate about this? It is true I had YEC question my salvation because I hold to an OEC view, but that’s not the reason. I used to be a YEC. I subscribed to the CRSQ, Acts and Facts, Creation Matters and some I even forgot their names. I bought YEC books. I was fully onboard. It wasn’t until I started finding all the so call science put out by AiG and ICR were wrong. Many times, they don’t tell the whole story like Lisle here or just out right wrong. It created a crisis of faith for me. Because AiG and ICR got me convinced that if they are wrong about a young earth then the Bible is not reliable. And if the Bible is not reliable then everything, we believe from the Bible is not reliable. It wasn’t until I start to dig into the Bible myself and not just accept what YEC insist what they said is true. I started to see Genesis doesn’t really say what they say it said. And I started to find help like people from Reasons to Believe. But more importantly, YEC is a barrier to belief. When people see reality contradicts what YEC is telling them they stop listening. When they read the Bible and see that YEC interpretation of Genesis is not rational they can’t believe. Kids that have been force fed a diet of YEC then they enter college and find out that there is more to food than eating kale every meal, they stop believing. This is why I am passionate about this.