Thanks, Mark, for firing up this thread - my procrastinating ways (and book 5 of Harry Potter) kept me from doing it myself. But I've got an item or two for Theologian63 to chew on, and this thread has about the correct title.
First, Theo said, over in message 229 of the "Biblical contradictions II" thread:
A body set in motion will continue in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. If a body is spinning clockwise and continues spinning in that direction and explodes all pieces from said body will ALSO spin clockwise. If the Big Bang is true, why do two of the nine planets spin the opposite way of the others?
Percy addressed some of the flaws in this old chestnut in post 244 of that same thread, but I'd like to review them and add a little more information.
1) As Percy pointed out, the Big Bang was nine billion years and at least two generations of stars prior to the condensation of the Solar System. Any rotation inherited from the BB might conceivably be seen in the rotation of superclusters of galaxies today, but early turbulent motion seems a far more likely source of any rotation below that scale - a clockwise eddy in one lump of gas gave rise to a clockwise rotating galaxy, but the rotation of the Solar System is due to a micro-eddy many years, and many collisions of gas clouds, later.
2) Three, not two, of the planets can bu sain to spin "backwards" or retrograde: Venus, Uranus, and Pluto. Uranus' retrograde rotation is just a matter of definition, really, as its spin axis is almost in its orbital plane. A fairly recent paper (Alexandre, et al., Nature, v 411, pp 767-770, 2001) concludes that a planet with an atmosphere as thick as Venus's can only end up with a few modes of rotation, half of them retrograde:
Venus rotates very slowly on its axis in a retrograde direction, opposite to that of most other bodies in the Solar System. To explain this peculiar observation, it has been generally believed that in the past its rotational axis was itself rotated to 180 as a result of core—mantle friction inside the planet, together with atmospheric tides. But such a change has to assume a high initial obliquity (the angle between the planet's equator and the plane of the orbital motion). Chaotic evolution, however, allows the spin axis to flip for a large set of initial conditions. Here we show that independent of uncertainties in the models, terrestrial planets with dense atmosphere like Venus can evolve into one of only four possible rotation states. Moreover, we find that most initial conditions will drive the planet towards the configuration at present seen at Venus, albeit through two very different evolutionary paths. The first is the generally accepted view whereby the spin axis flips direction. But we have also found that it is possible for Venus to begin with prograde rotation (the same direction as the other planets) yet then develop retrograde rotation while the obliquity goes towards zero: a rotation of the spin axis is not necessary in this case.
This trend to only a few states is due to an interaction of tides in the atmosphere and internal (core-mantle) friction.
In the cases of Uranus and Pluto, it is entirely plausible that each was formed by collisions between large planetesimals. Nearly any spin can result from a collision of near-equal bodies that "stick" - orbital angular momentum is a larger quantity than spin angular momentum anyway, and the conditions of collision determine direction and speed of spin in the final object.
Billiards players are very familiar with a variation on this phenomenon - but if the balls stick, you need to find a cleaner pool hall.
3) Age of the Universe. Another paper, Herrnstein, et al., Nature, v 400, pp 539-541, (1999), uses geometry to measure a distance of 23.5 million light years to the galaxy NGC 4258 (or Messier 106):
The accurate measurement of extragalactic distances is a central challenge of modern astronomy, being required for any realistic description of the age, geometry and fate of the Universe. The measurement of relative extragalactic distances has become fairly routine, but estimates of absolute distances are rare. In the vicinity of the Sun, direct geometric techniques for obtaining absolute distances, such as orbital parallax, are feasible, but such techniques have hitherto been difficult to apply to other galaxies. As a result, uncertainties in the expansion rate and age of the Universe are dominated by uncertainties in the absolute calibration of the extragalactic distance ladder. Here we report a geometric distance to the galaxy NGC4258, which we infer from the direct measurement of orbital motions in a disk of gas surrounding the nucleus of this galaxy. The distance so determined7.2 0.3 Mpcis the most precise absolute extragalactic distance yet measured, and is likely to play an important role in future distance-scale calibrations.
A distance like that means that the light from that galaxy took 23,500,000 years, plus or minus a million, to get here. A 6000 year old Earth would allow for that, I guess, but not if the stars were created on the fourth day of those 6000.
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