How does creationism explain light years

In other words, Ross asks proponents of appearance of age why God would do something that would lead humans to believe something that is false. Both Wise and Whitcomb address the issue of deception. They both make it clear that God is capable of creating the earth with the appearance of age, and if He wanted to do so, He would. Wise states that God is not a deceiver and that creating the earth with the appearance of age is not deception because if it was, then all of the miracles of Christ described above would also have been deceptions.

Additionally, Wise claims, God gives humankind the truth about creation in the Bible, and it is up to them to have faith in His word. Wise concedes, however, that God "provides sufficient ambiguity in the creation for humans to conclude erroneously a history that never actually occurred. Whitcomb responds to claims of appearance of age being deceptive as being "an affirmation of atheism. If God actually created anything at all, even the simplest atoms, those atoms or other creations would necessarily have an appearance of some age.

There could be no genuine creation of any kind, without an initial appearance of age inherent in it Whitcomb and Morris And so, according to proponents of this theory, not only is it not deceptive for God to create with an appearance of age, but it is absolutely necessary for Him to do so. One important aspect of the appearance of age theory, perhaps the reason for its popularity, is that it is impossible to disprove. Under this model an old earth and a young earth are indistinguishable.

Appearance of age is a purely theological claim, so scientists have no way to test it or evaluate it. A problem, however, is that this theory does not actually explain much about creation, and if true, it makes attempts to learn more about the world around us futile.

Appearance of age seems to a be philosophically and theologically risky argument. The question still remains why God would want to create the earth in such a way as to mislead humans into incorrectly concluding that the earth must have formed several billion years ago. It becomes very difficult to reconcile Wise's claim that "God is not a deceiver" with his concession that He created "sufficient ambiguity" to lead researchers down the wrong path.

Even assuming the earth was created in six literal days and needed have at least some appearance of age, there are some things which have an appearance of age for seemingly no good reason. Examples include a large geologic and fossil record, the appearance of billions of years of radioactive decay in rocks, and the erosion of high mountains to expose the metamorphic rocks of their cores.

These natural phenomena which point to an old earth have been explained by the appearance of age, but unlike full grown plants in the Garden of Eden or light from distant stars reaching earth, they are not necessary to support life. In other words, God certainly could have created earth without a large fossil record, or without an apparent history of millions of years of radioactive decay, and life in the Garden of Eden would not have been affected.

If creating these phenomena with an appearance of age is not necessary for life on earth, then why did God create them that way? Creationists argue that if God wishes to create things with an appearance of age, then He will do so. Explaining potential problems with creationism by simply saying "God created it that way" seems to be too much of an "easy way out" for creationists. It appears to be a way to bypass science altogether, avoiding all of the mess of reconciling the Bible with what can be observed.

It does not incite any further curiosity to understand our surroundings, because they can all be understood by literal interpretations of the Bible. Of course this is a debasement of science. For this reason, appearance of age seems a weak philosophical argument in that it does not allow us to explain why things are they way they are, but only that they are that way. The turning of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is simply not something open to empirical check.

You cannot disconfirm religion or prove science by doing an analysis of the host. Likewise even with the resurrection of Jesus. After the Crucifixion, his mortal body was irrelevant. The point was that the disciples felt Jesus in their hearts, and were thus emboldened to go forth and preach the gospel.

Does one simply go to Lourdes in hope of a lucky lottery ticket to health or for the comfort that one knows one will get, even if there is no physical cure? In the words of the philosophers, it is a category mistake to put miracles and laws in the same set. Hume , is the starting place for these discussions.

Although somewhat dated, Flew and MacIntyre is still invaluable. Paradoxically, both of these then-atheist authors came to see the light and returned to the Christianity of their childhoods! What has Johnson to say to all of this? What Johnson does say is more in the way of sneer or dismissal than argument. At this point, the evolutionist will probably throw up his or her hands in despair.

In actual fact, many significant theologians of our age think that, with respect to miracles, science and religion have no conflict Barth ; Gilkey They would add that faith without difficulty and opposition is not true faith, either. Such thinkers, often conservative theologically, are inspired by Martin Buber to find God in the center of personal relationships, I-Thou, rather in science, I-It.

For them there is something degrading in the thought of Jesus as a miracle man, a sort of fugitive from the Ed Sullivan Show. What happened with the five thousand? Some hokey-pokey over a few loaves and fishes? What they deny, here or elsewhere, is the need to search for exception to law.

There are those who call themselves theists, who think that one can be a methodological naturalist, where today this would imply evolution Ruse Johnson has not argued against them. Let us move on now from the more philosophical sorts of issues. Building on the more critical approach of Johnson, who is taken to have cleared the foundations as it were, there is a group of people who are trying to offer an alternative to evolution.

These are people who think that a full understanding of the organic world demands the invocation of some force beyond nature, a force which is purposeful or at least purpose creating. For the moment, continue to defer questions about the relationship between Intelligent Design Theory and more traditional forms of Creationism.

There are two parts to this approach: an empirical and a philosophical. Let us take them in turn, beginning with he who has most fully articulated the empirical case for a designer, the already-mentioned, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe.

Now turn to the world of biology, and in particular turn to the micro-world of the cell and of mechanisms that we find at that level. Take bacteria which use a flagellum, driven by a kind of rotary motor, to move around. Every part is incredibly complex, and so are the various parts, combined. Near the surface of the cell, just as needed is a thickening, so that the filament can be connected to the rotor drive.

All, way too complex to have come into being in a gradual fashion. Only a one-step process will do, and this one-step process must involve some sort of designing cause. Behe is careful not to identify this designer with the Christian God, but the implication is that it is a force from without the normal course of nature. Irreducible complexity spells design. Irreducible complexity is supposedly something which could not have come through unbroken law meaning law that has no special divine guidance , and especially not through the agency of natural selection.

Critics claim that Behe shows a misunderstanding of the very nature and workings of natural selection. No one is denying that in natural processes there may well be parts which, if removed, would lead at once to the non-functioning of the systems in which they occur.

The point however is not whether the parts now in place could not be removed without collapse, but whether they could have been put in place by natural selection. Consider an arched bridge, made from cut stone, without cement, held in place only by the force of the stones against each other.

If you tried to build the bridge from scratch, upwards and then inwards, you would fail — the stones would keep falling to the ground, as indeed the whole bridge now would collapse were you to remove the center keystone or any surrounding it. Rather, what you must do is first build a supporting structure possibly an earthen embankment , on which you will lay the stones of the bridge, until they are all in place. At which point you can remove the structure for it is no longer needed, and in fact is in the way.

Likewise, one can imagine a biochemical sequential process with several stages, on the parts of which other processes piggyback as it were. Then the hitherto non-sequential parasitic processes link up and start functioning independently, the original sequence finally being removed by natural selection as redundant or inconveniently draining of resources. Of course, this is all pretend. But Darwinian evolutionists have hardly ignored the matter of complex processes.

Indeed, it is discussed in detail by Darwin in the Origin , where he refers to that most puzzling of all adaptations, the eye.

This process, which occurs in the cell parts known as mitochondria, involves the production of ATP adenosine triphosphate : a complex molecule which is energy rich and which is degraded by the body as needed say in muscle action into another less rich molecule ADP adenosine diphosphate.

The Krebs cycle remakes ATP from other energy sources — an adult human male needs to make nearly Kg a day — and by any measure, the cycle is enormously involved and intricate.

For a start, nearly a dozen enzymes substances which facilitate chemical processes are required, as one sub-process leads on to another. Yet the cycle did not come out of nowhere. It was cobbled together out of other cellular processes which do other things. Each one of the bits and pieces of the cycle exists for other purposes and has been coopted for the new end.

Readers who want to dig more deeply into some of the technical issues should start with the entry on fitness. What these workers do not offer is a Behe-type answer. First, they brush away a false lead. Could it be that we have something like the evolution of the mammalian eye, where primitive existent eyes in other organisms suggest that selection can and does work on proto models as it were , refining features which have the same function if not as efficient as more sophisticated models? Probably not, for there is no evidence of anything like this.

But then we are put on a more promising track. Rounding off the response to Behe, let us note that, if his arguments are well-taken, then in respects we are into a bigger set of problems than otherwise!

His position seems simply not viable given what we know of the nature of mutation and the stability of biological systems over time.

When exactly is the intelligent designer supposed to strike and to do its work? This is not a satisfactory response. We cannot ignore the history of the genes from the point between their origin when they would not have been needed and today when they are in full use. Mutations would accumulate in these genes at breathtaking rates, rendering them hopelessly changed and inoperative hundreds of millions of years before Behe says that they will be needed.

What is the alternative strategy that Behe must take? Presumably that the designer is at work all of the time, producing mechanisms as and when needed.

So, if we are lucky, we might expect to see some produced in our lifetime. Indeed, there must be a sense of disappointment among biologists that no such creative acts have so far been reported. More than this, as we turn from science towards theology, there even greater disappointments. Most obviously, what about bad mutations in the sense of mutations that lead to consequences very non-helpful to their possessors?

If the designer is needed and available for complex engineering problems, why could not the designer take some time on the simple matters, specifically those simple matters which if unfixed lead to absolutely horrendous problems. Some of the worst genetic diseases are caused by one little alteration in one little part of the DNA.

If the designer is able and willing to do the very complex because it is very good, why does it not do the very simple because the alternative is very bad? Behe speaks of this as being part of the problem of evil, which is true, but not very helpful. Given that the opportunity and ability to do good was so obvious and yet not taken, we need to know the reason why.

A comprehensive collection, edited by an Intelligent Design Theorist and an avid Darwinian evolutionist, contains arguments from both sides, by biologists and philosophers; see Dembski and Ruse eds. Behe is in need of help. This supposedly comes from a conceptual argument in favor of Intelligent Design due to the also-mentioned, philosopher-mathematician William Dembski a, b.

Let us first look at his argument, and then see how it helps Behe. Second, to put this into context, and show how we distinguish design from something produced naturally by law or something we would put down to chance. As far as inferring design is concerned, there are three notions of importance: contingency, complexity, and specification. Design has to be something which is not contingent. The example that Dembski uses is the message from outer space received in the movie Contact.

The series of dots and dashes, zeros and ones, could not be deduced from the laws of physics. But do they show evidence of design? Suppose we can interpret the series in a binary fashion, and the initial yield is the number group, 2, 3, 5.

As it happens, these are the beginning of the prime-number series, but with so small a yield no one is going to get very excited. It could just be chance. So no one is going to insist on design yet.

But suppose now you keep going on the series, and it turns out that it yields in exact and precise order the prime numbers up to Now you will start to think that something is up, because the situation seems just too complex to be mere chance. It is highly improbable. But although you are probably happy now to conclude on the basis of the prime-number sequence that there are extraterrestrials out there, in fact there is another thing needed.

This sequence of coin tosses will not, however, trigger a design inference. Though complex, this sequence will not exhibit a suitable pattern.

What is going on here? You recognize in design something which is not just arbitrary or chance or which is given status only after the experiment or discovery, but rather something that was or could be in some way specified, insisted upon, before you set out. You know or could work out the sequence of prime numbers at any time before or after the contact from space. The random sequence of penny tosses will come only after the event. I define a specification as a match between an event and an independently given pattern.

Events that are both highly complex and specified that is, that match an independently given pattern indicate design. Dembski is now in a position to move on to the second part of his argument where we actually detect design. We have a particular phenomenon. The question is, what caused it? Is it something which might not have happened, given the laws of nature? Is it contingent? Or was it necessitated? The moon goes endlessly round the earth. End of discussion. No design here.

However, now we have some rather strange new phenomenon, the causal origin of which is a puzzle. Suppose we have a mutation, where although we can quantify over large numbers we cannot predict at an individual level. There is no immediate subsumption beneath law, and therefore there is no reason to think that at this level it was necessary. Let us say, as supposedly happened in the extended royal family of Europe, there was a mutation to a gene responsible for hemophilia.

Is it complex? Obviously not, for it leads to breakdown rather than otherwise. Hence it is appropriate to talk now of chance. There is no design. The hemophilia mutation was just an accident. Suppose now that we do have complexity. A rather intricate mineral pattern in the rocks might qualify here. Suppose we have veins of precious metals set in other materials, the whole being intricate and varied — certainly not a pattern you could simply deduce from the laws of physics or chemistry or geology or whatever.

Nor would one think of it as being a breakdown mess, as one might a bad mutation. Is this now design? Almost certainly not, for there is no way that one might pre-specify such a pattern. It is all a bit ad hoc , and not something which comes across as the result of conscious intention. And then finally there are phenomena which are complex and specified. One presumes that the microscopical biological apparatuses and processes discussed by Behe would qualify here.

They are not contingent, for they are irreducibly complex. They are design-like for they do what is needed for the organism in which they are to be found. That is to say they are of pre-specified form. And so, having survived the explanatory filter, they are properly considered the product of real design. Given the explanatory filter, a bad mutation would surely get caught by the filter half-way down.

It would be siphoned off to the side as chance, if not indeed simply put down as necessity. It certainly would not pass the specification test.

Dembski stresses that these are mutually exclusive alternatives. The key assumption being made by Dembski is that design and law and chance are mutually exclusive. This is the very essence of the explanatory filter. But in real life does one want to make this assumption? Suppose that something is put down to chance. Does this mean that law is ruled out? Surely not! If one argues that a Mendelian mutation is chance, what one means is with respect to that particular theory it is chance, but one may well believe that the mutation came about by normal regular causes and that if these were all known, then it would not longer be chance at all but necessity.

The point is that chance in this case is a confession of ignorance not, as one might well think the case in the quantum world, an assertion about the way that things are. That is, claims about chance are not ontological assertions, as presumably claims about designers must be.

More than this, one might well argue that the designer always works through law. This may be deism and hence no true Christianity — some Christians would insist that God does sometimes intervene in the Creation. But truly Christian or not, a deity who always works through law is certainly not inconsistent with the hypothesis of a designing intelligence.

The pattern in a piece of cloth made by machine is as much an object of design as the pattern from cloth produced by a hand loom. In other words, in a sense that would conform to the normal usage of the terms, one might want to say of something that it is produced by laws, is chance with respect to our knowledge or theory, and fits into an overall context of design by the great orderer or creator of things.

If the designer can make — and rightfully takes credit for — the very complex and good, then the designer could prevent — and by its failure is properly criticized for — the very simple and awful.

The problems in theology are as grim as are those in science. The intelligent design theorists have provided work for many philosophers eager to refute them.

Pennock and Sober are good places to start. See the entry on teleological notions in biology. Let us now try to tackle the somewhat complex issue of the relationship between Intelligent Design Theory and traditional Creationism, as discussed earlier in this essay. In significant respects, they are clearly not the same. Most Intelligent Design Theorists believe in a long earth history even the scientific estimation of a universe of about 15 billion years in age and most accept overall common descent.

First, politically, the Creationists are more than willing at the moment to let the ID theorists do the blocking. Openly they support the ID movement, believing in taking one step at a time.

If ID is successful, then is the time to ask for more. A major funding and emotional support for the ID movement is the Discovery Institute, a privately-supported think tank in Seattle. One of its prominent members is University of Chicago educated philosopher Paul Nelson, who is a young-earth creationist and a strong believer in the eschatological significance of Israel. Second, do note that both Creationists and ID enthusiasts are committed to some form of non-naturalist account of origins.

The ties of course are stronger. ID enthusiasts pretend to be neutral about the Intelligent Designer, but they clearly do not think that he or she is natural. No one pretends that the earth and its denizens are a lab experiment being run by a grad student on Andromeda. In fact, in their own correspondence and works written for followers, they make it very clear that the Designer is the Christian God of the Gospels. Some ID enthusiasts are quite strong literalists. Johnson for instance thinks that Genesis Chapter Six might be right about their beings giants in early times — a point made much of in Genesis Flood.

Forrest and Gross do a superb job of ferreting out much of the unstated biblical foundations of Intelligent Design Theory. Third there is the moral factor. There is a very strong streak of anti-postmillennialism in the writings of ID theorists. They share the same concern about the moral values of the Creationists — anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, pro-capital punishment, pro-Israel for eschatological reasons and so forth. Phillip Johnson feels very strongly that the tendency to cross-dress, including apparently women who wear jeans, is a sign of the degenerate state of our society Johnson In short, while there are certainly important differences between the position of most literalists and most ID supporters, the strong overlap should not be ignored or downplayed.

Creationism in the sense used in this discussion is still very much a live phenomenon in American culture today — and in other parts of the world, like the Canadian West, to which it has been exported. Popularity does not imply truth. Scientifically Creationism is worthless, philosophically it is confused, and theologically it is blinkered beyond repair.

The same is true of its offspring, Intelligent Design Theory. But do not underestimate its social and political power. As we move through the second decade of the new millennium, thanks to Johnson and his fellows, there are ongoing pressures to introduce non-evolutionary ideas into science curricula, especially into the science curricula of publicly funded schools in the United States of America. In , in Dover, Pennsylvania, there was an attempt by the school board to introduce Intelligent Design Theory into the biology classrooms of the publicly funded schools.

As it happens, this was rejected strongly by the federal judge trying the case — a man who was appointed by President George W. Bush no less — and the costs of the case will surely deter others from rushing to follow the example of this board who were incidentally then promptly dropped by the voters. Darwin in Small-Town America. Philosopher Robert Pennock argued that IDT is not genuine science, and taking somewhat of a post-modernist stance, philosopher Steven Fuller argued that it as good science as any other.

Pennock and Ruse eds. The battle is not yet over and things could get a lot worse before they get better, if indeed they will get better. Already, there are members of the United States Supreme Court who have made it clear that they would receive sympathetically calls to push evolution from a preeminent place in science teaching, and with its turn to the right it would be foolish to assume that if a case came its way that Creationism or ID theory would be rejected as unsuitable for public school classroom use.

If additions are made, with present appointments, we could find that — nearly a century after the Scopes Trial, when the Fundamentalists were perceived as figures of fun — Creationism in one form or another finally takes its place in the classroom. Unfortunately at the moment, those opposed to Creationism are spending more of their energies quarreling among themselves than fighting the opposition. At least since the time of the Arkansas trial, many fighting Creationism including Gould , ; Ruse have argued that true religion and science do not conflict.

Hence, evolutionists including non-believers should make common cause with liberal Christians, who share their hatred of dogmatic Christian fundamentalism. Prominent among those so arguing include the author of this piece, as well as Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education.

It is to be hoped that this quarrel will soon subside. We conclude by noting four recent developments in the Creationism debate. First, a number of well-known philosophers have started to make encouraging sounds about Intelligent Design Theory. He hedges somewhat on alternatives, but gives a very sympathetic reading of the thinking of Michael Behe and clearly finds much in such a position that meshes nicely with his own theological concerns.

Coming from a very different perspective, as he is openly atheistic, Thomas Nagel likewise finds much in modern biology that worries and disappoints him—he makes special reference to what seems to him to be a total inability to give a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life—and although obviously he does not want to endorse Intelligent Design Theory, given the supposition that it is God who is doing the designing, nevertheless he argues that Intelligent Design Theory should be taught as an alternative in state-supported schools in the USA.

Backing Nagel, at least in his visceral dislike of Darwinism, is another prominent American philosopher Jerry Fodor, whose recent, co-authored book is titled What Darwin Got Wrong. Even if with reason Fodor might argue that he is no Creationist, his position is grist for their mill.

A more thoughtful critique of Darwinism might allay this worry. It is difficult to know how seriously one is expected to take these criticisms. Let it be said that one would have a great deal more respect for the arguments and conclusions put forward if they had been informed by contemporary writings on evolutionary theory, for instance, the brilliant and painstaking work of the husband and wife team of Peter and Rosemary Grant , who have spent decades studying the evolution and speciation of finches in the Galapagos Archipelago.

Or the groundbreaking work of people like Francisco Ayala as they study the molecular factors involved in ongoing development and change. Though Richard Dawkins can put people off when he holds forth on matters philosophical or theological, that is no good reason simply to dismiss without argument his scientific claims, as Plantinga often does. Until the criticisms put forward by Nagel, Plantinga, Fodor, etc. One observation to make about these criticisms is that they are put forward by philosophers in the analytic tradition, which in its early days involved some opposition to Darwinism Cunningham If the light leaves you at PM and arrives back at PM, we set the clock of your friend such that it reads PM when the ray of light bounced off his mirror.

Now comes the trick. Instead, one can choose the synchronization of clocks in such a way that the clock of your friend reads PM at the moment of reflection. Since on your own clock, the light signal left at PM and came back at PM, it seems like the ray of light took two hours to arrive at your friend, but zero hours to come back.

This means the measured one-way speed of light is two times slower in directions away from you and infinite in directions towards you. This is allowed within SR, since synchronization is essentially a matter of convention. The procedure of synchronization is visualized in the animation below, which also illustrates the difference between the two synchronization conventions. Then, the ASC describes a possibly young universe and the standard convention describes a necessarily old universe, while leaving the physical system unchanged.

So, did we stumble upon the means of unification between standard and young-earth creationist cosmology? Unfortunately, not quite. One of these two ways is more truthful to the actual physics that underlie our universe. Einstein chose a constant one-way speed of light. How exactly did he motivate this choice? How does light travel?

The best answer we currently have comes from James Maxwell , a devout Christian physicist from the 19th century. Initially, Maxwell was not focusing on the question of light. He was trying to understand how electric fields interact with magnetic fields.

Not everybody will be familiar with the concept of these fields, so I hope that the physics-minded among you will forgive me for shortly going over some basics. An electric field may be visualized as a collection of arrows that indicate in which direction a positive charge would be pushed if it were placed in the field.

Magnetic fields are trickier to understand. For our purposes, it suffices to say that magnetic fields 1 arise from moving charges and 2 bend the movement direction of charges. I purposefully say bend because magnetic forces only act perpendicular to the motion of charges.

This notion of perpendicularity will return later on. As these notions are sufficient for the purpose of our discussion, we will not study these fields in additional depth. With this extremely concise understanding of these two fields, we can proceed with our treatment of their interaction: electromagnetism. Electric and magnetic fields have an intriguing reciprocal relationship: 1 changes in electric fields cause magnetic fields and 2 changes in magnetic fields cause electric fields.

Now, imagine an empty universe with only a single perturbation in its electric field. The magnetic field will respond by changing. Replying immediately to that, the electric field will also change.

Essentially, the magnetic and electric fields will start dancing around each other. A visualization of this phenomenon can be seen in the figure below.

Is this all we can say? Surely not. Maxwell would not be called a physicist if he had not examined his equations to study this phenomenon further. His famous equations can be studied in vacuum i. This treatment results in the traditional form of the wave equation for both the electric and the magnetic field.

The resulting wave equations then completely characterize the behavior of these waves. For example, they show that the electric and magnetic field waves travel perfectly perpendicular to each other, as can be seen in the animation this property is no coincidence, remember the perpendicularity described earlier.

At this point, the job was relatively easy for Maxwell. He was familiar enough with experimental results in physics to realize that this result corresponded very well with the speed of light according to the available measurements at his time.

This led him to propose that, in fact, light itself is an electromagnetic wave. God saw that the light was good. So now, let us come back to where we started.

To these findings, Einstein applied the idea that the laws of physics are observer-independent. This gave rise to his assumption of a universally constant speed of light. In turn, this led to his famous framework of Special Relativity which we introduced in the previous post. Now, Special Relativity still leaves space for the choice of a synchronization convention. In light of our current discussion, we now understand what drove Einstein to assume a constant one-way speed of light: it agrees with the electromagnetic nature of light.

Electromagnetic waves have a finite, constant speed. However, their trains suffer from physical limitations and have a maximum speed of about 50 miles per hour. To overcome this quandary, the railway company decides to change the synchronization convention of the clocks on all of its stations.

The clocks are synchronized in such a way that trains into the city seem to arrive instantaneously, while trains out of the city travel at half the speed say 25 miles per hour. With such amazing advertisements, it does not take long before somebody starts a lawsuit against this company especially since we are talking about the US here.

In its own defense, the company might say that this way of synchronizing clocks is technically allowed, just like the standard convention. The judge is taken somewhat off guard by this unusual proposal and decides to consult with expert physicists on the issue. Their advice entails that the accuracy of the advertised claims should be determined using the synchronization which is truthful to the physical limitations of trains i. The judge decides to follow this piece of advice and the railway company loses the lawsuit.

Of course, our example is subject to simplifications. These differences do not change the point of our analogy that physical limitations should be taken into account when discussing speeds. Some may view God as some kind of engineer who has put together an extremely complex machine called the universe and then decided to step back to watch its development. All kinds of variations can be added to this picture, such as God predicting intended outcomes beforehand or throwing in miracles now and then.

By his divine will, he is continuously upholding physical order within his own Creation. He is keeping it all together, moment by moment. The resulting regularities are what make our world understandable. Nature appears to function according to a coherent set of physical laws. No matter what faith one has, everybody can marvel at this property. In the physics that underlie the created order, God provides us with a framework for comprehension.

He himself chooses to maintain it every single moment. The previous post clarified that the standard synchrony convention of Einstein respects the physical nature of light finite, constant speed , whereas the ASC does not. Therefore, while the ASC may potentially solve a single interpretive issue related to Genesis 1, it does so at the expense of the God-ordained regularities of nature.

Our imaginary railway company set the station clocks in such a way that all the trains seemed to arrive instantly in a certain city, say New York, no matter from which station they departed. So, imagine passengers sitting on a train, checking the clocks on all of the stations. Halfway towards the Big Apple, there is a short stop at an intermediate station. Some extra passengers get on and the train departs.

The passengers who got on the train halfway measured the same traveling time as those who made the full journey. But in physical reality, those passengers who got on the train halfway experienced only half the traveling time of the other travelers. What all these passengers have in common is that they arrived in New York at the same time. Let us apply this to the ASC model. It has all rays of light departing from all over the universe and arriving at Earth at approximately the same time, during the fourth solar day of Creation.

That star would have been created almost 5 years before the Sun. As distances to objects become larger, the moment of their creation gets pushed back further in time to allow their light to arrive simultaneously with that of the Sun.

It results in a scenario in which God created the universe gradually , starting with the objects farthest away from Earth and proceeding inward with the speed of light. But all of them arrive on Earth exactly on the fourth solar day of the existence of the Earth. If you are having trouble with visualizing this, below I have produced a small animation. The dot in the middle is the future location of the Earth, while the globe around it delineates the volume which remains to be filled with created objects.

I can imagine that this leaves you with more questions than answers regarding the ASC model. So, let us carefully summarize our results. While the ASC model may seem to provide a neat account of Creation within the ASC , it gives rise to a rather peculiar story on the physical level assuming a constant speed of light. On that level, there are at least two remarkable features.

Now, could God have created the universe in this particular way? Of course he could. If he desired so, he could also have created the heavens to revolve around Earth. He could even have created everything with the appearance of age. The scientific method favors models that produce coherent and parsimonious descriptions of Creation.

You must have noticed the spectacular image shown above. The purple haze shows the radio emission of relativistic jets belonging to the galaxy Centaurus A.

Here the object is projected in its actual size as it would be seen on the sky if its light were visible to the human eye. This stunning example spans 1,,!!!

But what causes those jets exactly? At the center of this huge flare of Centaurus A at the small dot in the middle with a higher intensity lies an object 55 million times heavier than our Sun. Black holes pull huge amounts of gas towards themselves mainly hydrogen atoms.

As a result, the temperature around the black hole increases. Due to the heat, the hydrogen atoms start to separate into free charged particles protons and electrons. As the gas is being pulled inward, it starts spinning quickly around the center much like a ballerina pulls her arms towards her body to increase the speed of her pirouette.

Consequently, each black hole possesses a very dense, hot, rotating disk of free charged particles. This is what they call the accretion disk , because it consists of the matter that is being collected by or accreted onto the black hole.

Hopefully, moving charges will remind you of something we discussed earlier, namely, that these charges are the necessary ingredient for creating magnetic fields. The charges in the accretion disk are moving at incredible speeds and are gathered in large numbers.

Since this can happen at both poles of the black hole, objects can have two jets in opposite directions ranging across humongous distances. In the image shown above, astronomers happened to observe such a phenomenon stretching across the sky.

These jets are moving perpendicular to our line of sight. The blue cones are the jets, while the green ellipse shows the disk on its side. He proposed that all objects such as galaxies were created mature—instantaneously, and fully formed. So our own galaxy would have been created approximately in its current state, complete with spiral arms and stars at different points in their development. After Creation, light needs about , years to traverse our galaxy.

For stable systems such as most galaxies one might choose to be lenient towards such an assumption. However, take another look at the jets in the image above. In the ASC model, such relativistic jets including their discrete blobs were created midflight. This would give us human beings only the illusion of a causal relationship between the source the medium near the black hole and the astrophysical jet itself.

This illusion would include a fictional history of variable input from the source near the black hole. Even today, distinct parts of this particular jet would only be causally connected with very small surrounding regions only about 0. Lisle rejected the proposal of light being created in transit based on the principle of intelligibility. His argument was that we would expect God to provide some way to understand his Creation.

Otherwise, it would not be worth the effort of trying to make sense of everything at all anymore. The fact that Lisle and other young-earth creationists have rejected the idea of light being created in transit is what originally led to the need of a solution to the distant starlight problem. It leads to a picture of the universe wherein God produced sequences of imaginary events in relativistic jets. It leads to the Omphalos hypothesis, which holds that God created nature with all the telltale marks of a distant past which it never had.

Within the observable universe there are billions upon billions of galaxies. Each of them contains up to hundreds of billions of stars. The light coming from these galaxies can tell us an awful lot about them. Among other things, it can inform us about their shapes, the typical age of their stars, whether they are forming new stars, and which elements they contain. It turns out that all of these characteristics of galaxies vary with their distance to us. For now, it is enough to realize that such variation with distance fits well with the standard perspective in which light needs time to travel.

Rays of light coming from different distances essentially provide our telescopes with photographs of different time points in the history of our universe. For astronomers it makes sense that the distribution of galaxies in the cosmos changed significantly over the billions of years that make up the history of our universe. In this interpretation, distant galaxies can look different than nearby galaxies simply because we observe them as they were billions of years ago when their light started its long journey towards us.

In other words, the light from very distant galaxies comes from the early universe, while the light from nearby galaxies was emitted more recently within the last few billion years. These objects are the most important empirical constraints for current state-of-the-art cosmological models that aim to describe how the cosmic environment changed over the course of history.

In his ASC model, the light rays of all galaxies in the universe arrived instantaneously on Earth after they were created. Therefore, differences in age cannot be invoked to explain any variation.

His model can deal with these systematic differences only by positing either 1 that these differences do not actually exist [2] or 2 that God implemented all of them on the fourth hour day of the Creation week. It should be clear that this geocentric option is unsatisfying, especially if more insightful explanations exist. As scientists, we cannot invoke God merely to keep our models from falling apart.

So let us ask the following question regarding the observed differences between galaxies far away and close by: Compared to the ASC model, how insightful is the explanation provided in the context of standard cosmology? The rest of this post will be devoted to an exploratory introduction, giving a partial answer to this question. The mere observation that important galaxy properties vary systematically with distance is problematic for the ASC model. Actually, our current understanding of galactic evolution not only allows for the presence of variation, but also explains why the variation is present.

At the end of this post, I would like you to walk away with a rudimentary understanding of what underlies the differences between the galaxies. Since most of the light of galaxies is produced by the little lamps we call stars, understanding those will be essential for grasping the galaxies. Our small crash course on galaxy evolution will be mostly constrained to that topic.

During the birth of our universe, only the lightest elements were formed, mostly hydrogen and helium.