Shadow Wraith

This is something I've heard only a little about. It appears that for some odd reason creationists hate the Big Bang theory. I suppose it is just the YECs, though, since it conflicts (obviously) with the 6000 year limit they give to everthing in the universe. However, it seems readily reconciliable with OECs. The BBT (not coined that until later by Fred Hoyle) was, after all, originally formulated by the priest Lemaitre, who drew upon relativity theory and the Doppler interpretation of the Hubble shift to reconcile Boltzmann's interpretation of entropy with the church doctrine of creation ex nihilo (Note: if the BBT had been formulated more recently in the same manner [i.e. mixing up religion and science], it'd probably be dismissed as a crackpot theory. Just a thought.).

Some YECs have instead been adopting other cosmologies such as the quasi-stead state and plasma cosmology. They claim that those are "more in agreement" with a young universe. What they failed to notice, however, is that both of those cosmologies imply a universe that is most likely infinite in time and space, much more conflicting with YEC thought than the BBT. It helps to better research which cosmological theories you want to reconcile with your beliefs.

In any case, YECs will have to do one of several things for a 6000 year old universe to work. The universe would either have to be about 6000 light years or smaller in radius (I've seen one YEC claim that the universe is only 16 ly in radius) or either light would have to move much faster. This causes several problems. Confining as much mass as we see (even low measures such as Omega=0.02 by Valtonen and Byrd--the highest measure is about 0.3) into a small radius would cause immense gravitational effects which are just not observed. For this explanation to work, they would have to come up with a way to explain away this problem. For the other explanation, they would have to prove how light could move faster than c (300,000 km/sec). It would have to move very fast and then slow down once it gets to Earth for it to measure as c (really frickin' tired light). This would also would probably cause things that just aren't observed. So until advocates of this idea can come up with a viable explanation, observations such as the 170,000 ly distant SN1987A disprove this hypotesis.

Any comments?

PS: I suppose this has been discussed here before, but I haven't seen anything before myself.

Kevin Dorner

Your friendly neighbourhood creationist might as well claim 6,000 light years in order to not sound foolish, because distances to astronomical objects of three hundred light years or less that lie close to the plane of the ecliptic can be directly measured via parallax (0.01 arcsecond precision from the finest telescopes, 3.26 ly in a parsec or parallax second ie an object 3.26 ly distant will show 1 second of parallax) instead of by indirect methods such as doppler shift, etc.

To claim this one has to deny mathematics, never mind science. Of course, the counter-claim would be that we are closer to the sun than the scientists think, but there's plenty of math for that distance too... might as well go all out and be a geocentrist flat-earther if you're going to go in that direction. (Back of a giant tortoise, perhaps?)

[ April 10, 2002: Message edited by: Kevin Dorner ]</p>

Abacus

I once knew a YEC who claimed that the universe cannot be older than several thousand years because the astrophysicists do not understand the structure of the whirlpool galaxies (such as the Milky Way or Andromeda-distance 2.9 mil lys) based upon observations of visible matter. Of course, if the universe is only a few thousand light years old, we shouldn't even be able to see most of our own galaxy, much less the billions of other galaxies which are millions or billions of light years away. So I don't think an honest YEC can use light gathered from distance galaxies as evidence against an old universe. It makes no sense.

Now what was this particular YEC's response to the conundrum thus posed? God created the light from the distant objects! Apparantly, most of what the astronomers observe is nothing but an elaborate optical illusion. Who knows, maybe nothing outside the earth exists. If God can deceive us with the distant astronomical objects, why not with those that are nearer? Maybe He created the light so that it looks like we have a sun which gives us light and warmth, and that we have ficticious planets which orbit the ficticious sun. Anything goes in the wacky world of creationism, right? Oh, the idiocy!

I think there would be more problems besides the gravitational effects. Would we even have a nighttime with something on the order of 10^18 stars within less than 6000 lightyears? Heck, with all of that radiation, this planet would be really cooking. And then think about all of the supernovas that would be occuring so near to the earth.

If this is so, one would need to ask why it is constant now when it was apparantly decaying in the past? And why isn't c still decaying. As far as I know, no change in the speed of light has ever been detected.

eh

You must understand that the Steady State model is much prefered because it comes with a twist. Though it could be infinite, it also could have been created, that is in it's present state, at any moment in the past. In such a case, we could not tell the difference between a universe trillions of years old, and one mere billions of years old.

A universe created though the BB and inflation, is the least impressive act of creation for a deity I can imagine. No wonder creationists hate it. Old earth creationists who support the BB are usually ignorant about the modern theories.

Answerer

It seems that the creationists have a lot of disproving to do. First of all, they have to disprove the existence of cosmic background radiation. Next, they have to explain why Quasar is so far away and of course, they are also required to give evidences of why Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong. Finally, they will have to show that all physicists are idiots.

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