Bible Related

Blindness and Sight

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The following looks at spiritual blindness and physical blindness. God can heal both kinds of blindness. But, in these accounts from the New Testament, God’s purpose seems to be to expose the spiritual blindness of hypocritical religious leaders in first century Israel. But God can use physical maladies or handicaps for His own good purpose as well. So God always wants to heal spiritual blindness. But He may not always want to heal a physical ailment. It all depends on His purpose.

Blindness to Sight

In John 9:1-41 Jesus heals a man who was born blind. It is worth noting that this man was not asking for Jesus to heal him. Rather, it was Jesus’ disciples who saw the man and asked Jesus about him. This is a fascinating miracle from Jesus because of how he used it to confront hypocrasy. Another interesting thing about this case is that Jesus put mud in the blind man’s eyes and then told him to go to the pool of Siloam to wash. This seems like an odd thing to do, and it was not something Jesus did in other healings of blind people. It is also an interesting account because this man was questioned afterwards by the Pharisees. The account in John addresses a misconception the Jews seemed to have about someone born with a birth defect. It says as they went along and encountered this man born blind, the disciples asked Jesus (John 9:1), “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus said “neither.” Jesus said it was so the work of God could be displayed in his life. Jesus went on to say (John 9:5), “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Then Jesus spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. Then he told the man to go “wash in the Pool of Siloam.” So the man went (presumably people led him there). The man washed and it says he came home seeing (John 9:7). An important thing to notice is that even after the man went to the Pool of Siloam, he had not yet seen Jesus. In this case, Jesus seemed to make the man’s reaction to seeing more visible to others. It seems that Jesus wanted to delay the man’s initial reaction to seeing for the first time in his life. So, this was handled to deliberately make some “public exposure” of a man who had been born blind being healed. The man’s first experience seeing in his entire life happened in a very public place where people gathered.

In verses 8-12 it tells about the reactions of neighbors and other people who had seen him begging before. Some people said he was the same man and was healed but others didn’t believe he was the same man, even though the man himself told them he was the man! The blind man knew that the one who had put mud in his eyes was called Jesus, but he didn’t seem to know much about Jesus. Also, when people asked him where this Jesus was, he didn’t know. Then people who knew of this took the man who had been healed to the Pharisees. It was something unheard of for a man born blind to be healed (John 9:32-33).

John 9:14 says that it was on a Sabbath that Jesus put mud on this man’s eyes and healed him. So Jesus used this to confront the Pharisees and help people to realize their corruption and unbelief. So, the Pharisees questioned the man. It says “the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. ‘He put mud on my eyes,’ the man replied, ‘and I washed, and now I see’.” The corrupt misguided reaction of the Pharisees is evident in that when they heard the man’s testimony, their reaction was not to acknowledge the healing, or to praise God, but it was to accuse Jesus. Verse 16 says, “Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.’ “ So the man realized this was contradictory. If he was a sinner, how could he do a miraculous sign? So the man told the Pharisees he was a prophet. This reflects an Old Testament kind of understanding, that if God sends a prophet, some prophets could do miracles. Now in verses 16-18 the passage switches from referring to the Pharisees to referring to “the Jews” not believing the man had been healed. So they sent for his parents. The parents were afraid of acknowledging Jesus to the Jewish leaders, because the leaders had decided that whoever believed in Jesus would be put out of the synagogue. Thus, the parents said that he was their son and that he was born blind. But they essentially “played dumb” about Jesus. It is not clear if the man’s parents believed in Jesus or not. The parents also said that he was of age, so their son could speak for himself. This suggests the man was a young man, but an adult.

The Jewish Pharisees again questioned the man. Again, they said that Jesus was a sinner. The man said he didn’t know if Jesus was a sinner, but he knew he had been healed. Then they claimed to be disciples of Moses, not of Jesus. They also said they didn’t know where Jesus comes from. The man’s answer is powerful in showing the contradictions of the Jewish leaders thinking. Verses 30-33 have the man’s reply, “The man answered, ‘Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’ “ The Jewish leaders reacted to this wrongly again, saying “ ’You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!’ And they threw him out.” So the Jewish leaders were stuck in a wrong way of thinking that said that the reason someone was born blind was because of the sin of their parents. Thus, this man was put out of the synagogue; it’s also possible his parents were put out also because they would have been blamed for his blindness. The Pharisees thinking that the man was blind because of the sin of his parents was wrong and this is not a concept from the Old Testament at all. The Pharisees added rules to the Old Testament law that were not necessary, in order to make themselves seem superior to others.

Only after all this happened did Jesus speak to the man about being “the Son of Man.” The man apparently had some time to deal with the whole thing and probably heard from others about Jesus. So in verse 38 he tells Jesus, “Lord, I believe.” Then Jesus’ response (verse 39) is profound. “Jesus said, ’For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.’ ” Jesus’ exposed the real spiritual blindness of the Jewish leaders who claimed to be spiritual guides to the allegedly spiritually blind common people. But the average Jew knew the truth better than the Pharisees. So the person that the Pharisees and Jewish leaders threw out of the synagogue as being “steeped in sin” was actually the one who was in the light from God’s perspective. The blind man didn’t know much in the beginning. But over the course of these events, you can see how his understanding of who Jesus is grew. By the end of the account (John 9:38) the formerly blind man said he believed to Jesus and he worshiped Jesus. Jesus judged very differently than the phony spiritual leaders of the Jews of the time. Some Pharisees heard about this statement Jesus said, and he told them their guilt remained. What a good lesson on spiritual blindness! Jesus was very effective at exposing the corruption and unbelief of the Jewish religious leaders. Also, Jesus exposed the Pharisee’s hypocrasy to the common Jewish people, without even being present for most of it. The people were able to see for themselves the unreasonable reaction of the Jewish leaders. They clearly hated Jesus and they worked to suppress faith in Jesus. This helped the people understand better who to follow and who to believe.

Sight to Blindness

Jesus said the blind would see and those who see would become blind. This is literally what happened in the life of Saul of Tarsus who became Paul the Apostle. But as it says in the Pilgrim’s Progress story, the bitter comes before the sweet. Saul was a Pharisee, so he likely would have thought that a blind man was blind due to sin as the Pharisees in John 9 thought. He thought that he had to oppose the early Christians spreading the gospel about Christ. He was working to get Christians arrested. But, Saul’s thinking was totally unraveled and rewoven by his encounter with the risen Jesus.
Saul’s case is very different from the man born blind. Saul was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians (see Acts 9:1-19). Then Jesus appears to Saul on the road. Saul must have had some guards with him, likely temple guards I suspect. But the experience of speaking with Jesus left him blind. So in this case Jesus made a seeing man blind. It says in Acts 9:8 that when Saul got up from the ground, he could see nothing. So he was totally blind for 3 days. He must have depended on the guards to lead him into Damascus. The guards did not see or hear Jesus as Saul did. But Jesus told him to go into the city (Damascus). There, a man name Ananias found him and helped him. In this case, Jesus had a believer heal Saul of his blindness. Paul was likely in turmoil and was undoubtedly fasting and praying for some time. But Ananias healed Saul, placing his hands on him (Acts 9:17-18).

Thus, Paul’s sight was restored but most Bible scholars think it was not restored completely. Galatians 6:11 may support this because in this verse Paul mentions that he writes with large letters when he writes with his own hand. In 2 Corinthians 12 he writes that he was given a “thorn in the flesh” to torment him. Bible scholars have long suspected the “thorn in the flesh” was an eye problem that remained for the rest of his life. From 2 Corinthians 12 it seems it was to humble Paul, a permanent reminder of how the Lord humbled him. God has a purpose for both the abilities and the disabilities that we have. You could say we all have “disabilities” but some disabilities are more visible and more difficult than others. Saul went through a process so he could experience the changes from physical sight to physical blindness, physical blindness to physical sight, and spiritual blindness to spiritual sight. God was sovereign through it all and He gives us every ability we have.

Science Related

JUMBOs in Orion

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Modern science, with today’s technology, has accomplished a lot in exploring the universe, but now and then something happens that reminds us we don’t know everything. In October 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope, which detects infrared light of faint objects, found some objects in Orion that were surprising. It found objects that seem to be planets but they are not orbiting stars. Actually 540 of these objects were found in Orion. But the amazing thing was that 40 of them are planet-planet binary pairs. Planets orbiting each other instead of orbiting a star. There are also two cases of trinary objects that were found in Orion, with three objects orbiting each other. They were found in a star cluster called Trapezium, which is within the Orion Nebula. The Orion Nebula is the subject of many beautiful pictures. But a nebula is a hot inhospitable place. Star clusters may be made up of hundreds to thousands of stars (such as the Pleiades for instance). In star clusters the stars are relatively close together, which means they can affect each other. So what if the stars in a star cluster have planets? This puts those planets in a kind of danger zone, a high traffic region of space.

A few definitions are in order to appreciate how unusual these objects are. There are many stars in our galaxy that have extra-solar planets orbiting them. It is generally accepted by most planetary scientists that planets form from a spinning disk of gas and dust that spins around a star that recently formed. But, it is generally accepted that when exoplanets form, they can sometimes get kicked out and escape the gravity of their star. This could happen perhaps if two planets got too close to each other. Or perhaps if an exoplanet were in a long orbit that puts it a long distance from its star and then another nearby star comes close to the planet, pulling it away. Planets that escape their stars like this are called rogue planets, or unbound planets, or sometimes FFP’s, for Free-Floating Planets. In fact the word “planet” came from a Greek word that meant “wanderer.” It can be a challenge to determine what a “free-floating” object in space is. If an object is not giving off energy like a star and it is about 14 Jupiter masses or more, it is generally called a Brown Dwarf star. It was generally believed that an object smaller than that cannot form by compression of gases and material from its own gravity. Scientists generally believed for years that it was only near a star that gas and dust could become dense enough to form planets. But today some scientists are questioning this.

The objects found in Orion have one of two new acronyms. If they are wandering alone and not orbiting any other object they are called Jupiter Mass Objects, or JMOs. If they are in pairs they are called JUMBOs, which means Jupiter Mass Binary Objects. The trinary objects don’t seem to have their own acronym. I would say to be consistent you could call them Jupiter Mass Trinary Objects, or JUMTOs. The ones found in Orion range in mass from 0.6 Jupiter mass to 14 Jupiter masses. Again, 40 of them are binary pairs. There are some amazing photos showing these planet pairs in Orion. There are a number of puzzling questions raised by these objects.

For pictures, see this article from Scientific American. Title: Stunning Images Reveal Rogue Planets of the Orion Nebula

  1. Why are there so many JMOs in Orion?
  2. Why are there so many JUMBOs in Orion?
  3. How did they get there?
  4. Did they once orbit stars, or not? If they did orbit stars, what happened to those stars?
  5. Could JMOs become JUMBOs? Or, could JUMBOs become JMOs?
  6. How stable are the JUMBOs?

The James Webb telescope detected these new objects from their heat given off in infrared energy. You might expect that if they are not orbiting a star they would be cold objects, but not usually. They are hot; they would not be detectable if they were not. Two scientists from Leiden University in the Netherlands published on the internet a technical paper describing simulations they did examining four possible scenarios that might explain the JUMBOs. The paper is not peer reviewed and is not yet published in any scientific journal as far as I can tell. The copy I found was dated March 12, 2024 (search for arXiv:2312.04645). So, this is very recent. Their last names are Zwart and Hochart. When such things are detected, if you know the distance to them you can estimate their size and mass from how bright they are. Then, for the binary ones the distance between the bound objects can be estimated. Since these objects are in a star cluster near known stars, their distances can be determined well. So Zwart and Hochart estimate that the separation distance between the binaries ranges from 25 to 380 A.U. Recall that 1 Astronomical Unit is the distance from Earth to our Sun, or about 93 million miles. Zwart and Hochart argue that these binary objects are likely to be in very elliptical orbits.

What Ifs

Zwart and Hochart look into four scenarios for where the JUMBOs came from. Note that their models do not actually handle the formation of the objects. They seem to assume they formed either around a star as conventional secular theories say, or they formed in the star cluster with the stars. For them to form around a star is the conventional notion of naturalistic formation by gravity. The second option of forming in the nebula as the stars are believed to have formed is unconventional but still naturalistic. So the computer simulations of Zwart and Hochart only look at if you start with one arrangement of stars and planets and let it run, what happens? Then if you start with a different arrangement of stars and planets and let it run again, what happens?

The four scenarios modeled in the simulations were referred to with acronyms SPP, SPM, FFC, and ISF. SPP represents Star Planet-Planet. This assumes that in the star cluster some of the stars originally form with two planets orbiting them. Then something happens causing both planets to escape the gravity of their star. Of course, this would have to have happened for at least 20 different systems to explain 40 binaries. Then there is SPM, which means Star Planet-Moon. In this case stars in the cluster form with a planet that has at least one moon. Then the planet with its moon is ejected away from the star somehow. So, in this scenario, the moon continues to orbit the planet, though the planet moves away from the star and the orbit of the moon around the planet would change. The authors pointed out that in their simulations, for this to explain the number of Jupiter Mass Objects and JUMBOs, the planet would have to start a long distance from its star as it formed (such as up to 200 A.U.), so that it would be relatively easy for the planet to be pulled away from the star. Thus, this scenario is unrealistic for explaining so many JUMBOs.

The third scenario examined by the authors was FFC, for Free-Floating Capture. In this scenario, the planets initially form from in a disk surrounding a star by the conventional concept. But, then the planets become separate from their stars later. Then the separated planets come near enough to each other to capture each other and start orbiting together. This requires two mysterious events, first something making the planets escape their star and then another chance interaction where two planets come near enough to capture each other. In this scenario, the planets start conventionally, become JMOs, then become JUMBOs. Note that this is all happening within a nebula and within a star cluster, not in empty space. The authors made the following comment about the SPP and FFC scenarios: “The SPP and FFC models systematically fail to reproduce the observed population of JuMBOs by a factor of 50 to 400.”

This leaves the ISF scenario, which represents “In situ” formation. This is where the planets are assumed to form in the star cluster in the same manner as the stars. However, in this scenario, many JUMBOs exist at the start. So many of the planets initially form as planet-planet pairs in the star cluster. How this would happen is left a mystery and not addressed by the authors of the paper. The authors also looked at what happens to the JUMBOs over time. They tend to break up and do not last long. They made the following statement about this: “Overall, the JuMBO survival rate decreases rapidly with a half-life < 1 Myr.” So after the star cluster formed, there would be many JUMBOs and the number of JUMBOs would decrease over time. Presumably some JUMBOs that separate and become JMOs could reform into binary pairs again. But the authors conclude that the ISF scenario best explains the large number of JMOs and JUMBOs. I was surprised the authors came to this conclusion.

It will be interesting to see how this is received by the scientific community. I suspect that planetary scientists will react against the authors ISF scenario because it raises difficult questions of how could planets form as binaries without a star? There is not a accepted scientific model for formation of planets like this. However, a variation on the ISF idea could be what you might call In situ Creation, or ISC. This would be to assume the binary planets were supernaturally created in the beginning with the star cluster (along with some JMOs). Then the number of JUMBOs decreases over time to the present. This would work in a young universe approach. Another possibility might involve some catastrophic scenario for the nebula or the star cluster that could explain how many planets could be pulled away from their star in a relatively short time. NASA has indicated the age of the Orion Nebula is only 2 million years. What effect would a supernova have if it were near a star cluster containing planets?

There will undoubtedly be more investigation of the possibilities to explain these surprising objects. There have been rogue planets found in other nebulas. What will the James Webb Space Telescope find in other nebulas? What other models will be put forward to explain objects like this? The density of stars in the cluster could be important in these models as well as the kind of matter in the nebula. I believe in not jumping to conclusions too quickly, as Treebeard said in Lord of the Rings, “Now now, don’t be hasty.” But I think belief in God is not undermined by new discoveries. Fortunately for us, our dear planet Earth was not placed in a star cluster like Trapezium. As we learn how to interpret the scientific evidence, new discoveries can actually validate a Biblical viewpoint.

Christianity and Reasons for Faith – by Wayne R. Spencer