Relevant quote:*
Many creationists in the past have proposed a solution for the distant starlight problem: that God created not only the stars but also the light beams in transit. But this is reminiscent of Gosse’s Omphalos idea. It fails for the same reason: while neither Gosse nor these creationists intend this, it would make God into a deceiver, by showing ‘evidence’ of events that have not happened. That is, this light pattern would show events that under this theory have never happened.
For example, a supernova is an explosion of a massive star that temporarily outshines its entire galaxy. But in ‘core collapse’ supernovae, this explosion is preceded by a collapse of the outer layers. This results in huge amounts of fusion reactions that produce enormous numbers of neutrinos. These are ghostly particles that interact only by the ‘nuclear weak force’, so mostly pass straight through matter. Then this implosion ‘bounces’, creating the ex plosion that we see. But because neutrinos pass almost unimpeded through matter, while light doesn’t, we detect the neutrinos from a supernova several hours before the light.
But the ‘light-created-in-transit’ model would entail that a neutrino stream was created followed by a light stream, and just appear as if a supernova had exploded according to the laws of physics.
Omitted statement of presupposition : Heliocentrics generally accept the inflated distance "measures" of where stars and supernovas are. Some of the supernovas are according to these "millions of lightyears" away. Thus, the supernova, for its neutrinos and light to reach us now would have had to happen millions of YEARS before now, and hence also millions of years before the Biblical distance back to Creation.
So, shall we say light outside the Solar system doesn't take any time to travel? In that case, it slows down within solar system (and yes, some measures of speed of light are through observations of Venus around Sun or of Moons of Jupiter around Jupiter - like the one by Rømer so it would really be a finite speed in solar system, unless we can find away around the argument of Rømer and reinstall light as instantaneous, as "infinite speed" as travelling one end of the universe to the other without taking up time at all). And a slowed down light means a light congestion, like if all cars travelling at 100 mph on a motorway get out on one same outlet with 50 mph, there is a congestion.
Or shall we rather say, distances are wrong.
Now, that involves for instance saying the conventional analysis of parallax (as also restated with other explanation in detail by some Neotychonians) that this analysis is wrong.
So, if parallax were something else, like angels carrying certain stars along a comparatively small distance (max 0.76 arc seconds of a circle - the kind of arc which at surface of earth is 30 meters wide), parallax is not a sign Earth is moving and thus not a sign we have a triangle involving the distance of Earth to Earth (it obviously has nothing to do with the distance Sun to Sun over the year, in a Geocentric universe). But wouldn't that make God and these angels fraudulent?
No. I leave the word to Jonathan again :
A hypothetical modern observer who travelled back in time to see Adam and Eve at the end of Day 6 might infer that they were 20-year-old adults, but in reality they were less than a day old. However, they were mature adults. Also, when created, the blood in their arteries was already oxygenated so it could power the cells in the body. Nowadays, the oxygen comes from the air through the lungs into the blood. ... [headline:] Does ‘mature creation’ make God a deceiver? [end of headline] By no means! Since age is an inference based on assumptions, there is no deception involved when people make the wrong assumptions about the starting conditions. Indeed, how could God be deceiving when He has told us plainly when He created? Rather, those who deny His word are deceiving themselves. A charge of deception could only apply if the appearance of a false history were created, one which was totally unnecessary for functional maturity.
Similarily, if God gave us very clear indications in the book of Joshua that Earth neither stopped nor restarted a movement but stayed still all the time, since it was to Sun and Moon that Joshua adressed his words, then no explanation of distances involving a supposed annual movement of earth is in court. And then, in its turn, distant starlight problem is no more a problem.
A supernova one or two light
But wouldn't angels effecting what we take as "parallax" be a kind of deception?
No, not if sufficient counterindications were also given, against that interpretation.
"Annual aberration" was first observed in the constellation of Draco. To a Chinaman this might read as a recommendation, but to a Christian, it should be a red light. Even more, Ophiuchus has one star, 63 Ophiuchi, with negative parallax - a phenomenon which reasonably negates the parallactic interpretation or at least by making the positive angles of parallax bigger reduces the distances. And Ophiuchus means "the one who fights agains the serpent". That should be a recommendation to a Christian.
So, the "parallax" indicating to certain of its interpreters stellar distances of several light years, and why not millions of them, does not make God a deceiver. God has instead given us over a few centuries a history of astronomic observation, where at first one could consider the Modernist interpretation of the evidence so obvious that one "had to" consider God as either deceiving in stars (impossible) or as deceiving or not involved in Holy Bible, but newer observations have shown their interpretation was somewhere wrong, and so they did not really have to consider it so. Kind of reads like a lesson of trusting Holy Writ over purported and seemingly very realistic scientific conclusions.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Forty Martyrs at Sebaste
10-III-2015
* From : CMI : God created with functional maturity, not ‘appearance of age’
by Jonathan Sarfati, Published: 10 March 2015 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/is-apparent-age-biblical
PS: This other site, TalkOrigins, has a page on the matter too:
Determining Distances to Astronomical Objects
by Björn Feuerbacher
Copyright © 2003 [Last updated: October 26, 2003]
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/distance.html
Relevant quotes:
An often-used argument for the universe being much older than proposed by young earth creationists (YEC) is the fact that we can see astronomical objects which are billions of light years away (a light year is the distance which light travels in one year, approximately 9.5 × 1012 kilometers). Obviously (well, perhaps not so obvious - see section 5), the light from these objects needed billions of years to reach us, and therefore the universe has to be billions of years old. ... For measuring distances to astronomical objects, one uses a kind of "ladder" of different methods; each method goes only to a limited distance, and each method which goes to a larger distance builds (in general, but not always) on the data of the method(s) before. The starting point is knowing the distance from the earth to our sun; this distance is called one astronomical unit (AU) and is roughly 150 million kilometers. I think that even YECs agree on this number, hence I don't discuss here where one gets it from. (Need I mention that one has to accept the heliocentric model, too?)
May I highlight this? Here :
(Need I mention that one has to accept the heliocentric model, too?)
The distant starlight question has caused some people to question cosmic distances. “Do we really know that galaxies are so far away? Perhaps they are much closer, so the light really doesn’t travel very far.”1 However, the techniques that astronomers use to measure cosmic distances are generally logical and scientifically sound. They do not rely on evolutionary assumptions about the past. Moreover, they are a part of observational science (as opposed to historical/origins science); they are testable and repeatable in the present. You could repeat the experiment to determine the distance to a star or galaxy, and you would get approximately the same answer.
RépondreSupprimerThus Jason Lisle.
Answer: it has not been repeated from Mars and it does depend on Heliocentric assomptions about the present. Which are NOT observational science, we have not watched the universe from the outside and seen Heliocentrism (or even Geocentrism) to be correct. Geocentrism is observational, though from an inadequate standpoint to totally absolutify the answer. Heliocentrism is however counterobservational.
Jason Lisle's paragraph is quoted from here:
AIG : The New Answers' Book : Chapter 19
Does Distant Starlight Prove the Universe Is Old?
by Dr. Jason Lisle on December 13, 2007
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/does-distant-starlight-prove-the-universe-is-old/
The paragraph (to complete the quote) ends:
RépondreSupprimerSo we have good reason to believe that space really is very big. In fact, the amazing size of the universe brings glory to God (Psalm 19:1).
The size of the Geocentric universe believed in the Middle Ages is adequate for that purpose.
Psalm 18:2 [2] The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands.
Definitely true of a universe millions of miles or nine hundred thousands of miles from Earth to periphery too.