Possible Explanations for Distant Starlight in Creationist Cosmology

 There are two relativistic problems in explaining why observations in the universe are the way they are. One is for the evolutionary model of cosmology, resting on the Big Bang hypothesis, which is called The Horizon Problem. The other is for the main opposing view, which, due to its affirmation of a young age to the entire cosmos needs to somehow explain why light from sources billions of light-years away can be seen on earth if only c. 6,000 years have passed since the beginning. This is called the Distant Starlight Problem. There are various solutions proposed for each problem, by the proponents of each view of the universe: the evolutionary model and the 'creationist' model. Below are short quotations from scientific articles in Creation literature to introduce you to the main proposed solutions and give enough of an explanation of each to give you the big idea of how they deal with the issue. Links to the articles themselves are included for your convenience and to give you the opportunity for further in-depth study.

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"...the speed of light may have been much greater in the past (Norman and Setterfield 1987), that Einstein’s general relativity with appropriate boundary conditions (Humphreys 1994, 1998, 2007, 2008) or with appropriate extensions (Hartnett 2007) can accommodate a young Universe, and that the problem itself assumes an arbitrary choice of convention for synchronizing clocks (Lisle 2010; Newton 2001)."
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"The idea that time may have run at different rates in different places in the universe (“time dilation”) is a central feature of some recent creationist cosmological models (Hartnett 2007; Humphreys 1994, 1998, 2007, 2008). This is used to solve the distant starlight problem, and further investigation into these models may conceivably lead to explanations for some of the phenomena described above. For example, many of the observations relating to galaxies and their stellar populations could be explained by a model that has billions of years passing within those galaxies before the light that we see was emitted."
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Humphreys explaining his model:

"Again, let’s imagine that God sets the values of the three factors in eq. (24) to give a contraction speed of –c. As each galaxy emerges from the receding timeless zone, it resumes emitting light. Some of the emitted light will be going inward toward the centre. Because the timeless sphere is moving inward at the speed of light, the inbound light will follow right behind the sphere as it shrinks. When the sphere reaches zero radius and disappears, the Earth emerges, and immediately the light that has been following the sphere will reach earth, even light that started billions of light years away. The stretching of the fabric of space has been occurring continuously all along the light trajectory, thus red-shifting the light wavelengths according to eq. (21).

On Earth, it is still only the fourth day. An observer on the night side of the earth would see a black sky one instant, and a sky filled with stars the next instant. With a telescope he would be able to see distant galaxies having suitably red-shifted spectra."
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"The new metric I derived in 2007 has yielded several interesting results. One is a straightforward explanation of the Pioneer anomaly. In this paper, it has revealed a new type of time dilation, achronicity. The fundamental cause of achronicity appears to be that gravitational potential becomes so negative that the total energy density of the fabric of space becomes negative. That stops the propagation of light, all physical processes, and all physical clocks, thus stopping time itself."
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The Pioneer Anomaly:

"A broad class of creationist cosmologies offer an explanation for the ‘Pioneer effect’, an apparent small Sunward anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. If a large volume of empty space surrounds the matter of the cosmos, so that the cosmos can have a centre of mass, then the matter is in a deep gravitational potential ‘well’. If space is expanding and spreading the matter outward, then the depth of the well is decreasing. According to general relativity, especially a new solution of Einstein’s equations derived in the Appendix (which also deals with Birkhoff’s theorem), the decreasing depth continuously shortens ‘radar’ distances within the well, causing the observed apparent acceleration. The magnitude of the anomalous acceleration implies the bottom of the potential well has not yet risen very far above the critical depth for gravitational time dilation. Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies: a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation. Big bang theorists, whose cosmology does not have a centre of mass, cannot use this explanation. As yet, they have no alternative theory upon which they agree." [emphasis added]
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Discussion of Light Speed. Excerpt is about measuring the speed experimentally.

"We try another experiment. This time we will have a clock at both ends of the hallway. We will send the light pulse when the clock at our end reads exactly 12:00. The clock at the end of the hallway is designed to stop when the light hits it. We then read the time. This experiment avoids a return trip altogether, and so should give us the oneway propagation speed. But there is a problem. Before we start this experiment, we must make certain the clocks are synchronized. But how do we do this? We can ‘see’ the time on the other clock, but that is because light has travelled from there to here. How long did it take to do that? There is no way to determine whether or not the clock at the end of the hallway is synchronized with the one at our end without assuming how light propagates. So this experiment must assume the answer to the question being asked and so is of no use to us."
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Riemannian Space-Time implies light could take shortcuts through space.

"This is difficult to illustrate, but suffice it to say that there are two concepts of the "shape" of outer space. One is that it is straight-line (Euclidean), and the other is that it is curved (Riemannian). Based on observations of 27 binary star systems, it appears that light in deep space travels in curved paths on Riemannian surfaces. 2

The formula for converting straight-line to curved space is:

where r is the Euclidean or straight-line distance, and R is the radius of curvature of Riemannian space. Using this formula, and a radius of curvature of 5 light-years for Riemannian space, the time for light to reach us from points in our own solar system is practically the same for either Euclidean or Riemannian distances, and there is not much of a change even out to the nearest star (4 1/2 light-years). But if we insert an infinite Euclidean distance for the farthest conceivable star, it would take only 15.71 years for light to reach us from that distance!"
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These are 3 fundamentally different categories of explanations for how distant light could get to earth within a short time-frame (as measured on earth). 

~ Rak Chazak

Treatise: What Made the Red Planet Red? A Theory of Planetary Colonization and What Could Have Been

I have an idea about the possible explanation for how distant, habitable, yet lifeless planets fit into a Biblically Christian framework of cosmic history. It’s based on the three points I mentioned already—the distance, the habitability, and the lack of any evidence of other sentient life among them. I’ll unpack them. First, why should there be any planets that could be habitable by humans, other than Earth, if humans were only planted on Earth initially? It seems like a simple conclusion that, given enough time, we were expected to live on them as well. Otherwise there would be no point in them being habitable, from a purposeful-universe-by-design perspective. But why should they be so far away? Well, the universe itself is vast, so if there were no habitable planets in distant reaches of the universe, then large parts of it would by definition be uninhabitable. And how then could mankind fulfill its role of exercising dominion over all creation?—assuming, with reason, that the Dominion Mandate would be extended from just the Earth to encompassing all of the universe, at some point. It does appear to be the intention that humanity would have,upon fully developing the Earth, have been given dominion over the stars as well, and told to spread out to distant planets so as to govern the entire universe that God created. But something prevented this from happening.

The reason that other planets don’t have life is very simple. It’s not just that we haven’t found it, or that it’s sparse throughout the universe, but that it isn’t there. There are very good reasons for believing that no intelligent aliens exist, or life of any kind beyond the Earth for that matter. Here are a few:

* Sentient aliens would either have spirits or not. If they did not, they would have no hope of life after death. Why would God create self-reflective beings like humans but make them otherwise just like an animal, denying them eternity? And if they did have a spirit, then are they perfectly sinless or sinful? If they are sinless, then they suffer from the Curse which is over all creation, which is unjust to them—what did they have to do with Adam’s sin? And if they are sinful, then they are also fallen, and according to the developed concept of a kinsman-redeemer, needed God the Son to be born as one of them, live a perfect life on their behalf, and die in their place for their sin. So Jesus would suffer and die an untold amount of times for an untold amount of aliens. But the Bible said He died once for all. Is this reasonable? Alternatively, if the Bible doesn’t only restrict the Atonement to humans, (though none of the language implies this to be true), then how would aliens learn about it so as to believe and be saved? And why should humanity have been the one place where Jesus came to be incarnated, and not one of the multitudes of other alien races? These are all important questions to consider before accepting that alien life can coexist, even as a concept, with orthodox Biblical Christianity.

* The Bible strongly implies that everything that was created is for the benefit of mankind. If there were unknown lifeforms on other planets, what good would these do for Man if he couldn’t even know that they were there, much less utilize them? If this doesn’t sound convincing, then what do you make of the utter lack of any mention of other planets or life forms in the creation account in Genesis? The Earth is the only place described where plant, animal and sentient life were created, and at the end, the record concludes with the declaration that ‘thus was (the heavens and the earth, that is, everything) created, in all its vast arry,’ which means that no other life was created elsewhere afterwards. The circumstantial evidence is strong that there are no aliens anywhere. And it is such a strong implicit case, like the Trinity is also, that a scientific test to prove or disprove Scripture would come down to the question of whether alien life will be found outside of earth. If our faith can’t be disproven, it isn’t meaningful. A faithful Christian can with confidence say that the discovery of sentient alien life, such as that in Star Wars, Halo, Star Trek, etc, would invalidate the Bible. And that same Christian would have no fear because of his confidence that that will never happen, because of the strong Scriptural case against it, and his preeminent trust in the Bible as the word of God.

So what prevented mankind from being given the commandment to spread out among the stars and have dominion over them? It’s the same reason Mars is red. Key to the understanding of the universe as it is today, is the knowledge that “all creation groans and travails in birth pangs together,” and the knowledge that that is happening because of Adam’s sin as recorded in Genesis 3. The entire universe is wearing down and breaking to pieces. There is some aspect in which this has to do with the second law of thermodynamics, since it concerns the increase in entropy, that is, disorder, which means that energy tends from more usable forms to less usable forms over time. Stars become dust. Buildings become rubble. It takes energy to maintain things in a specific condition. It takes no energy at all for things to fall apart. It happens on its own. There is one form for a wineglass when its molecules are all ordered together, but an infinity of ways for those molecules to be arranged if the glass is destroyed. Pure statistical probability, then, guarantees that, given the opportunity, things will randomly break down rather than remain in “high energy conformations.” But please note that the second law of thermodynamics describes things like friction and the release of energy due to food digestion. It would be incorrect to say that the law was not in effect at all in the initial creation that God made. But there appears to be some aspect of the universe now—a general trend of decay—that wouldn’t have been the case before.

What’s my point in saying this? Fairly simple. Mars is red because it is rusted. The whole planet is rusted, which means that the whole planet at some point was covered in water. It is an amusing irony that astronomers are willing to posit a global flood on Mars, a planet with nearly no surface water, and none in liquid form, but unwilling to accept the claim of a global flood on Earth, a planet 75% covered in water, to depths of several miles in places. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and it’s posited that it was blown away by solar winds that were undeterred by the planet’s weak magnetic field. Earth’s field reflects charged particles from the sun all the time, which “keeps the atmosphere safe,” and intact. Water evaporates and becomes part of the atmosphere, given temperatures above freezing point. The Red Planet’s water would then have blown away also, and any water that now remains would be the amount that had not yet evaporated when the temperature permanently plunged below zero degrees Celsius.

What’s the point, you ask again? Simple—Mars is red because its magnetic field decayed and its atmosphere was blown away by the intense radiation given off by the sun. And why should the field have decayed rather than maintained at its primeval initial state? May I suggest that God is the one who ‘holds all things together,’ and that while He keeps everything material in existence to this day, has as one consequence of Adam’s sin chosen to remove, partially, His activity of maintaining the creation in pristine conditions? Mars used to have more water than it does today. How much, we can’t be sure, but the channels on its surface are considered evidence of gouging by large amounts of fast-moving surface water. We could have eventually settled on that planet, but even if we can now, it seems like it’s going to be much more difficult on a frozen rock with nearly no atmosphere.

Because of the Fall, the universe is in decay. Because of the Fall, we no longer have the opportunity to settle the universe this side of eternity. We could try, but the end of history as described in Revelation will come long before we get very far at all. What remains is the evidence of the planets that could have been colonized if we had been obedient to God. What remains is a faded picture of what could have been, and what one day may be the reality yet again, for those who repent of their sin (since sin is, after all, why our universe is so uninhabitable and generally messed up) and put their faith in Christ—they will one day live in a new universe, one that won’t see decay. Maybe we can have fun playing a game of galactic colonization with the other saints. Who knows what God has in store for us. But make sure you don’t miss the boat. The Ark was the ‘door of salvation’ to those who survived Earth’s global flood. Now it is Jesus who says, “I am the door…” and will save you from the second and final time that God destroys the Earth. Mars is red, because we sinned. Who would have thought?

~ Rak Chazak

Related reading:

Is the Bible Falsifiable? And Would a Real Live ET do it?
Did God Create Life on Other Planets?
Will We Have Any Work to do in Heaven?
What is a Kinsman-Redeemer? - GotQuestions
The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields - CRSQ
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Journal Treatise: Oort Cloud

Treatise: Oort Cloud

                        In my three years so far as a passionate apologist, I’ve had a number of varied interactions which I imagine fairly well represent the gamut, though obviously not constituting the whole spread of relationships that Christians can have with unbelievers. I’ve dealt with false converts of Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish and Lutheran persuasion, among others unstated. Homosexual ministers, Sadducees (which I take to be Jews who don’t believe in God or an afterlife—the Pharisees were the conservatives from which the modern Orthodox Jewish religion stems), muslims, mormons and jehovah’s witnesses (I refuse to capitalize these as if to indicate that they are credible or honorable, as with the Bible and Christianity). Of atheists, there are also many different kinds of individuals. One of them, whom I shall refer to as Oort Cloud, for a number of metaphorical reasons, was someone I met very early in my study of Biblical Creation and who, despite his mannerisms and facial expressions, came across to me as quite jovial and easy to get along with. Don’t judge someone as being angry just because they look like it. Some of the least pleasant people to talk to – or, some people you might not even be able to talk to – are people who put up a feigned air of politeness. People who are deceitful about their emotions and attitudes anger me much more easily than those who are straightforward.

                        Oort Cloud’s first encounter with me, that I remember, consisted of him showing the “Ray Comfort: The Banana, the Atheists’ Nightmare” video on youtube and asking what I thought of it. I answered that of course the banana wasn’t made in its current form at the very beginning. What I would have said if it had been today, however, would be that despite this, Ray’s statements are no less true about how the banana is an example of God’s care for human beings in how He designed the world. This is because even though the banana as we know it today likely did not exist 4,000 years ago, the genetic information which codes for the variety we see in grocery stores was nevertheless present in the original ancestral variety. The banana is an excellent example of directed selection, where certain qualities in an organism are “hand-picked” and used to develop the next generation, and of man’s stewardship for the earth, wherein he exercises his creativity to utilize the natural world for the benefit of mankind and nature alike. But as it were, my response surprised Oort Cloud, who apparently expected something more ignorant, and it, and a few other subsequent interactions of a similar sort, impelled him to search for “stumper” questions to try to debate me with, and see if he could shake my resolve and get me to relent of my confidence in the Bible.

                        Oort Cloud would see me on occasion and would over time begin to act as if, and tell me that he was angry with me for always having answers. This is not to say that they necessarily convinced him at any point, or that they even seemed to be an impressive argument, but I think his perception was that my answers did not fall to the level of being transparently illogical, and my views were internally coherent. He would often wear a contemplative frown when listening to my responses to his questions. His animated reactions to things that shocked him were amusing and will probably remain in my memory for some time. But as far as I can recall, he never made any effort to slander or attack me as a person, or to spread damaging lies about me to others, as a different group of people attempted to do roughly a year after I first met him.

                        I probably would have forgotten about the Oort Cloud if it wasn’t for a moment in late spring 2012. I hadn’t seen him for a while, but I encountered him suddenly in my campus dining hall. He was either graduating or transferring, and so he had come up to me to say goodbye. It was a curious occasion. Dejectedly is not quite the right word, but it was with a flustered insistency that I understand his reluctance to acknowledge what he was telling me,  that he told me, in effect, that he’d miss me, essentially. Not that he said those words. No, he said something akin to that he was bothered by my strong faith AND mastery of scientific facts and logic, that he thought in his heart that such a thing should not be—that a person of faith could believe without misunderstanding or rejecting science. He said in essence that he was impressed that I was a ‘worthy opponent,’ and expressed a wish to not be reminded of his confusion by meeting me or a person like me again. He would go on to grumble about these things for some time. I am glad to have served as a challenge to his presuppositions, and I hope that down the road, Oort Cloud will encounter something or someone that sparks the seed implanted within him to germinate, and that he does not stifle his discovery of the truth. The fact that he alone of the atheists I’ve spoken to came to me and gave me a verbal handshake is a good and hopeful sign, in my eyes. But you can never be sure. So if you read this and feel motivated to pray, I encourage you to pray for Oort Cloud and others like him to not seek relief from the challenge that they’ve encountered, be it in an intellectually savvy Christian or something profound in Scripture that just won’t let them be, but that they would struggle through it until they come to the foot of the Cross in humility and defeat. They may come unwillingly, as Oort came to me, but God’s Holy Spirit has the power to change a human heart. In time, we won’t want anything but to come to Him, whether we once struggled with it or not.