Albion

And Kurt Wise says that there are no fusion processes going on in the Sun; it only looks as if it were. He says that since it takes photons 10,000 years to get from the Sun's interior to the surface, they must all have been created in transit so the Sun would shine right from the start. Therefore the Sun is good for 10,000 years total, of which only 6,000 have occurred. Guess that puts an upper limit on the End Times.

Wonder which Ivy League university will be the one to drop conventional astrophysics in favour of teaching that.

He has some, er, interesting rationalisations about why none of this is evidence that God's being deceptive.

Shadowy Man

And I guess God just threw in the neutrinos just for the heck of it!

Arvel Joffi

Asteroids.

God has also created huge rocks in space and set on a course for Earth? The Tunguska (sp?) meteor impact was just a rock that God decided to hurtle at the Earth? Is this Heavenly bowling?

Comets.

Halley's comet has swung around the Earth 79 times, but Shoemaker-Levy was created just outside the solar system and smashed into Jupiter. It was God's plan to smash Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter. Nothing better to do.

The Moon

The moon was created with all of it's tens of thousands of impact craters in place, just so we could wonder where they came from. Why, from God, of course. Just for fun.

The planets.

No reason. They just look cool.

Billions of galaxies

Again, no reason. He could, so he did.

Valentine Pontifex

Albion,

The fact that it takes so long for energy to travel from the core of the Sun to its surface is one of those facts that is suprising that our side does not bring up more often.

Tim Thompson

Albion: And Kurt Wise says that there are no fusion processes going on in the Sun; it only looks as if it were. He says that since it takes photons 10,000 years to get from the Sun's interior to the surface, they must all have been created in transit so the Sun would shine right from the start. Therefore the Sun is good for 10,000 years total, of which only 6,000 have occurred. Guess that puts an upper limit on the End Times.

Too bad. I would have hoped that Kurt Wise could be smarter than that. It actually takes anywhere from 500,000 to 2,000,000 years for a photon to walk from the center of the sun to the surface (depends on how you do the random walk). But 10,000 is way too short. Answers in Genesis is full of articles about how astronomy proves the universe is only 10,000 years old, all garbage. Too bad.

But, since the topic was astronomy and creation, I just thought I would chime in with a few links on the matter, most (but not all) by me.

• The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System. By me from the Talk.Origins Archive; AiG & Walter Brown both produce bogus arguments on the age of the Earth-Moon system.
• Meteorite Dust and the Age of the Earth. By me, from the Talk.Origins Archive; An old argument that still makes the rounds, but has become so bad, even AiG now recommends against using it!
• Is the Earth Young? and Is There Evidence for a Young Earth?, both from my webpages. The first is a list of 24 arguments refuted, and the second a list of 10 (with some repetition). Almost all of them are astronomy based arguments, including such classic weirdness as "the shrinking sun", "short period comets should boil away", "planetary rings can't last", and so on. A fairly handy set, if I do say so myself.
• Creation Science, Stellar Evolution, and the Age of the Universe. Me again. Directed primarily at Henry Morris' claim that there is no evidence that stars actually evolve.
• Supernovae, Supernova Remnants and Young Earth Creationism FAQ. By David Moore, from the Talk.Origins Archive. I was going to write something about this, but when I found Moore's extensive article, I figured "Why bother?" Directed primarily towards the creationist claim that there are not enough supernova remnants if the universe is really old. This one is a keeper, if that argument shows up.
• Missing Supernova Remnants as Evidence of a Young Universe? A Case of Fabrication. By Ken Harding, from the talk.Origins Archive. Along similar lines, but regarding a specific claim based on HST observations of a globular cluster.
• Solar Neutrinos and Other Solar Oddities. By Sverker Johansson, from the Talk.Origins Archive. I have a smaller page about solar fusion & neutrinos, but this one is bigger than mine, and maybe even better. Directed towards creationists (and others) who claim that the solar neutrino problem somehow proves that fusion does not happen in the sun (this is probably what Kurt Wise was thinking of).
• Answers in Genesis Gets it Wrong on Star Formation. By Me, from No Answers in Genesis. Refutation of AiG claims about star formation and stellar evolution.
• Answers in Genesis and Saturn's Rings. Me again, from No Answers in Genesis. Short refutation of the AiG claim that Saturn's rings are too young for an old universe.

That should do for now. Despite the flavor of self promotion, I think the material here is likely to be useful in facing astronomy based creationist arguments. I can't make the last link work right. Maybe the UB code can't handle the "'" in the URL.

Cheers.

Spaz

All of those galaxies are amazing, what sucks is that we'll never know what's on them, we're left to just ponder all the possibilities. If the human race ever advances enough to find out (if we don't kill ourselves off) we'll be long long long long dead, fucking sucks man

Albion

Well, here's a link to the page where that Saturn's Rings page can be linked from:

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/a...in_genesis.htm

Lobstrosity

I hear ya. It pisses me off to think about all of the things I'll never know! I know I'll never know I don't know them, but knowing that isn't such a consolation, you know?