John Hartnett Pleads Operational Science

Creation vs. Evolution : Responding to Dystopian Science · Part II of Dystopian Science, my answer part A · Part II, part B - CMI on Deeper Waters · HGL's F.B. writings : Carter's Tactics · Back to Creation vs. Evolution : Part III : On Bradley and Bessel · New blog on the kid : Do Lorentz Transformations Prove a Universal Inconditional Speed Limit? · Back to Creation vs. Evolution : John Hartnett Pleads Operational Science · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : With Steven Taylor on Lorentz Transformations, Speed of Light, Distant Starlight Problem, Creation Week, Miracles

Like in, any piece of so called "science" that is not "historic science" is operational, right?

It's a bit like saying "all science which isn't natural science is social science" ... where does that put grammar, all the field of abstract mathematics, history? And then say "oh, it isn't social science, therefore it is natural science" ... this figure in logic is called dichotomy and here is an abusive one.

What science can not safely be called operational?

Science of the past, as past, of the future as future, but also of the hidden and of the distant.

It's corresponding to the Thomistic definition of "quorum non est scientia".

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has resolved the event horizon of a supermassive black hole
by John Hartnett | Published: 16 April 2019 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/first-black-hole-image

On 10 April the globally coordinated announcement was made of the first ever image of the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the distant galaxy Messier 87 (M87) (figure 1). The galaxy is 55 million light-years away and the supermassive black hole was confirmed to have a mass of 6.5 billion suns.

What if it's something else?

Above all, what of it is neither as far away, nor as big?

From the biblical creationist perspective this is, yet again, good operational science. There is nothing new here that refutes the biblical timeline of about 6,000 years because that is subject to historical science considerations. It is not an operational science question. (Modern science in creationist thinking)

Well, John Hartnett linked there.

Modern science in creationist thinking
by John Hartnett | This article is from
Journal of Creation 25(3):46–47, December 2011
https://creation.com/creationism-modern-science

As six-day creationists, can we know what God did when he created this vast universe? If we agree that God created the universe, and it was created in a form that is essentially like we observe today—a mature creation—very large, tens of billions of light-years across—very old in appearance, in terms of processes we observe—then we have two possibilities within the creationist worldview:

• God created everything 6,000 years ago and we cannot know how He did it in Creation Week but somehow we can see the whole visible universe, including “ … events which lie entirely beyond our limited understanding of nature”1; or,
• God created everything 6,000 years ago and we can (in principle) know how He did it in Creation Week as much as we are able to see the whole visible universe.

What God did when He created this vast universe?

What if it isn't as vast as calculated (by the way, a 6 or 7 millennia old world is not very young and a universe one light day or one light year in radius around earth is not exactly small - it's just younger and smaller than uniformitarian scientists want to tell us).

John never questions the "tens of billions of light-years across" part.

His wording should be reformulated:

As six day creationists and heliocentrics holding a vast universe, tens of billions of light-years across, ... we have two alternatives.

And this would reformulate neatly like:

As six day creationists, we have at least three alternatives ....

• God created everything 6,000 years ago and we cannot know how He did it in Creation Week but somehow we can see the whole visible universe, including “ … events which lie entirely beyond our limited understanding of nature”; or,
• God created everything 6,000 years ago and we can (in principle) know how He did it in Creation Week as much as we are able to see the whole visible universe.
• God created everything 6000 years ago, and no distance is equal or even comparable to that in the observed universe, even if this might take Geocentrism.

Now, these improved formulations were not Mr. Hartnett's, here are, once again, his own exact words:

As six-day creationists, can we know what God did when he created this vast universe? If we agree that God created the universe, and it was created in a form that is essentially like we observe today—a mature creation—very large, tens of billions of light-years across—very old in appearance, in terms of processes we observe—then we have two possibilities within the creationist worldview:

• God created everything 6,000 years ago and we cannot know how He did it in Creation Week but somehow we can see the whole visible universe, including “ … events which lie entirely beyond our limited understanding of nature”1; or,
• God created everything 6,000 years ago and we can (in principle) know how He did it in Creation Week as much as we are able to see the whole visible universe.

What John Hartnett did was deftly forget there was any kind of question about how vast the universe is.

And in the exact same article, he has a rubric stating "Operational or historical science" - as if all parading as science were either one or the other.

If we are to make the assumption that we cannot know, or that the laws of nature we test in the laboratory are not the same as those we observe elsewhere in the cosmos (excluding the idea that what we do know is incomplete), then we have no basis to test any hypothesis about the universe. Taking that idea further, since we cannot travel to the nearest star, why not suppose that the laws of nature and the structure of the universe are such that all stars lie within a four-light-year radius of Earth? That idea could never be disproved because it is always possible to say the laws and structure of the universe are consistent with this notion. And we would not have a light-travel-time problem.

This does not even depend on any "we cannot know" nor on any "not the same as elsewhere" hypothesis.

We can test in a lab that bodies are moved by gravitation (actually, space travel is required to illustrate that the gravitation is definitely of the near Newtonian more precisely Einsteinian type, observations on earth only could be interpreted as Aristotelic gravity : heavy matter tends to the centre of the universe). We can test in a lab that inertia plays a role. We can absolutely not test in any kind of lab that voluntarily moving an object cannot possibly play any kind of role. On Atheistic views, planets and stars are too big for any possible voluntary mover. On Christian views, involving existence of God and of angels, they are not. Pleading that "angelic movers" are tantamount to "natural laws work differently elsewhere, so we cannot really know them" is bait and switch tactics.

If position number 2) above is taken, a straight-forward reading of Genesis as true history, we would not need to say that everything in the universe must be 6,000 years old, as measured by processes in their own frame of reference. That is not contradictory of the creation timeline. But those processes measured by Earth clocks must have taken less than 6,000 years to happen. God’s creation is knowable and understandable (at least those aspects limited to the physics we know today) to us as humans. He made the universe in a way that is rational and reasonable, and the efforts since the development of modern science, say, over the last thousand years, have revealed a lot of truth. (Of course along the way we have had to throw out a lot of error.)

Well, what if this view of relativity, that starlight travelled billions of years in its timeframe, but less than 6000 years in ours, is one of the errors to thrown out?

Modern physics, by and large, is reliable; we can test relativity with GPS satellites and even with Earth-bound modern atomic clocks.

• 1) What aspects are we testing?
• 2) On what premisses is it (apart from observations as such) that relativity is tested? Is rejection of absolute geocentrism one of the premisses?
• 3) In the case of atomic clocks, are we testing a dilation of time, or a disruption of the working of the clock?

If we accept all observations about the universe, realizing they are tainted with certain assumptions, which may be wrong, then creationists have a starlight-travel-time problem. This is true if we believe only 6,000 years have passed since the creation of the most distant light sources, and that they were all created at that time, as measured by normal Earth clocks, and we hold to the convention that the timer was started when the star was created. But if the timer was started when the light first arrived on Earth, when someone first saw the event, then this is the Anisotropic Time Convention, and there is no light-travel-time problem. There is nothing to answer. Or if Earth clocks ran slow during Creation Week compared to all other clocks in the cosmos, there would be billions of years of process going on out there, and plenty of time for light to get here in the past 6,000 years. This is a relativistic effect and relates to both Humphreys’ model and mine. In all cases the universe is large, and normal, testable physics applies.

By large presumably meaning billions of light years, and where do you obtain that "knowledge" from, if not from untested assumption of relative Heliocentrism in the "Solar System"?

Back to today's article:

The data was taken from the different telescopes and was assembled and processed over a period of about a year, but those initial observations were taken over a period of 7 days in April of 2017. Over those days the supermassive black hole was ‘observed’. In the same way over the 24-hour period Day 4 of Creation Week about 6,000 years ago all the stars and galaxies (with supermassive black holes) were ’observed’ at the earth as God created them (Genesis 1:16–19). God spoke and “it was so.”

In other words, instead of God creating stars on day 4, God created stars so their light arrived at Earth on day 4.

And elsewhere in the universe, it may be billions of years old.

But God sees all time. And God is truthful.

What would this make of Mark 10:6?

But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female.

Other problem, why would there be an observer on earth on day 4? Angels would be there all through the universe, not limited to earth.

Men were not created to day 6, indeed biological life was not created to day 5, unless stars also have a biology of sorts.

Is John Hartnett arguing Moses was time machined back to the creation days and so Moses was present as observer?

So, the "for an observer on earth" part doesn't make much sense.

Back when I was a 6000 year and Heliocentric creationist also believing billions of light years, I believed in star light created in transit. Novas destroy that theory, unless we accept God as creating images of stars that never existed. Basically - feel free to suggest something else.

Now I am a 7200 year and absolute Geocentric creationist and I do not believe the distances called billions of light years exist. Indeed, I don't believe one can prove 4 light years, since proving alpha Centauri to be that far away involves taking "Earth to Earth" as the known distance in three trigonometric quantities.*



No, claiming billions of light years is very far from operational science. And just because I am in fact somewhat out of my depth with a statement like "we can test relativity with GPS satellites" (the atomic clocks are more like "what if the clocks change speed?") does not mean I am wrong. If John Hartnett wants to prove me wrong, let him try. The statement as it stands is an allegation, not proof.

Note, as I am a Roman Catholic and as my theory has a very clear connection to the Roman Catholic position of 1633 (and to RC astronomer Riccioli, who believed in angelic movers), John Hartnett could have a problem with me. And with my position.

I had a memory he was 7th Day Adventist, turns out I misremembered, probably and at least could not find it, and definitely those who are have an even greater problem than he, then.

He thinks one separate commandment begins in Exodus 20:4, rather than this continuing the previous, that is first commandment.

While the words I saw from internet do not tie her words on astronomic vision to rejecting heliocentrism, it is probable she did, and most 7th Day Adventist would clearly interpret her vision so. Similar to Swedenborg, there are "people" on other planets, which implies kind of human observers who would not experience absolute Geocentrism, which would imply their view of things were as good as ours. This of course is what Enlightenment promotion of Heliocentrism (relative Heliocentrism and multiplication of Solar Systems) was often enough** about. I thought Hartnett's background was reason to bring this up, well, if it isn't, perhaps I was meant to bring it up anyway.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Tuesday of Holy Week
16.IV.2019

* Source, own drawing originally scanned here:

hglwrites : Geo vs Helio
https://hglwrites.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/geo-vs-helio/

** See Euler, of whom I wrote here:

Auf Deutsch (auf Antimodernism und später) : Euler als "Astronom"
https://aufdeutschaufantimodernism.blogspot.com/2017/12/euler-als-astronom.html

Science vs Science, Exegesis vs Exegesis

Creation vs. Evolution: Science vs Science, Exegesis vs Exegesis · New blog on the kid: Already Saw That One, Statham!

Yesterday, I saw Dominic Statham's article:

The truth about the Galileo affair
by Dominic Statham Published: 8 November 2018
https://creation.com/galileo-church

It was nearly all good, unlike some earlier things I had seen. This is the bad part or two of them:

It was only many years later that scientists were able to confirm that he was right. ... It wasn’t until Isaac Newton (1643–1727) that the matter could be settled. Newton’s law of gravity and his three laws of motion made clear that the planets (including the earth) had to orbit the solar system’s centre of mass. Because the sun is so massive the centre of mass can be treated as being at the sun’s centre. Kepler’s model, then, was proven to be the correct one—there was neither need for nor a physical mechanism to produce epicycles.

This is: 98 words. The whole article, skipping images and image texts, is: 4640 words. Is there a third bad part? Not yet seen except skimming what was said of Joshua.

So, for a CMI-article on Geo-Helio-issue, it is really good. It linked to Hartnett's review of a book, let's find the reference ...

Graney, C.M., Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. See also review by Hartnett, J.G., J. Creation 32(1):45–47, 2018.

Now, I will quote one passage from that one too:

In 1651, the Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli published his book New Almagest wherein he outlined 77 arguments against the Copernican system and 49 arguments in favour of it. Most arguments against the Copernican system could be answered, at that time, but Riccioli, using the then available telescopic ‘observations’ of the size of stars, was able to construct a powerful scientific argument that the pro-Copernican astronomers could not answer without an appeal to the greatness of God.

I suspect Graney only read what he thought most relevant and not all of New Almagest. Neither did I. I have not found the 77 vs 49 vs new star size based "by Riccioli himself" (I think it was brought up in Galileo defending his book before Bellarmine, but I could be wrong).

However, I read another part of New Almagest. A passage which answers the above appeal to Newton (which was also basically the one of my physics teacher back in 9th or 10th grade) - in a very elegant Christian way.

New blog on the kid : What Opinion did Riccioli call the Fourth and Most Common One?
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-opinion-did-riccioli-call-fourth.html

Celestial mechanics as per St Thomas Aquinas

God moves the primum mobile (sphere of fix stars, probably, or perhaps just outside it) westward each day. It moves diverse spheres down to sphere of moon and to some extent atmosphere (winds of passage) and seas (oceanic currents at Equator). Each sphere moves the one inside it and is moved by the one outside it except the outermost that is moving which is moved by God. This means movement depends in this ultraobvious example as well as in other ones, in the present, on a finite series of moved movers moved by the unmoved mover, God. Each celestial body within its sphere is moved Eastward by an angelic mover.

Celestial mechanics as per Riccioli

God orders angels to move Celestial bodies westward each day.

He prefers appeal to Anselmian proof over the via prima, at least in its astronomic version. Tycho had disproven solid spheres, meaning celestial bodies move in a void.

Celestial mechanics as per me

God moves the aether westward around earth each day. Celestial bodies and for that matter objects standing still on Earth and those moving at moderate speeds are moving east through the aether, and the celestial bodies are moved by angels, as both Riccioli and St Thomas agree, and more precisely eastward, as on St Thomas' view.

Aether is the medium of place (outside earth and inside Empyreic heaven moving westward), of vectors (that is why an object falling does not move westward with aether, it already had an eastward vector through it, this is also relevant for Geostationary satellites, and of light, meaning that

"no object can move faster than speed of light" is:

True

of movement in relation to aether.

False

about compound speed including that of aether.

Pluto may be moving faster than speed of light locally, but nearly has no movement on a daily basis vectorially through the aether.

I hope you can see how this is tying in with St Thomas Aquinas. Now, in response to the paragraph I quoted from Statham, Newton's two-body problem for earth and football ball if football ball is placed at earth surface = football ball lies still. Whether you mean American football, rugby or the "association football" usually called soccer in English (the usual meaning of "football" in non-English countries), the players are modifying Newton's two body problem. So are angels and God moving aether in relation to the astronomical one.

Oh, yes, one more. While St. Robert was holding up Galileo's book for somewhat adverse scrutiny, he was not moved by a science motivated limitation of freedom of speech as if there were no theological reasons. You see, back then there was no real such thing as "scientific establishment" or at least its beginnings were not as mighty as today.

Cardinals Bellarmarine and Conti, for example, had both agreed that Scripture might legitimately be interpreted differently, allowing for a moving Earth.

For St Robert, Robert Sungenis (who wrote extensively on the affair in Galileo Was Wrong, the Church Was Right) gives a quote which is more negative than just "might", it is more like irrealis modus.

Joshua's long day came up. A line of argument would have been Galileo saying Joshua 10:13 refers to how it looked from earth, while St Robert would reply, why did then the moon stop too?

Another line of argument would of course be, Joshua 10:12 makes Joshua adress sun and moon as the entities which were to miraculously change behaviour. As he spoke inspired by the Holy Ghost, he would not have adressed the miraculous command to the wrong entities.

Now, Newton was one line here, Foucault (mentioned in Hartnett) is already virtually answered by aether being medium of vectors and vector relevant movements, and here is another thing:

Of course, if the stars are so enormously distant and if their ‘measured’ sizes are spurious, then the major scientific argument the geocentricists had against the heliocentrists evaporates. By 1720 Edmund Halley argued that the star sizes were spurious, but some astronomers still maintained the argument. A century later English astronomer George Airy developed a full theoretical explanation for the spurious disk of stars. It explained both the appearance of disks and why they varied in size for different stars. This effect is known as an ‘Airy disk’ and results from diffraction effects in the objective lens of the telescope.

Apart from the fact that Airy is also known from Airy's failure ... in star distance and geocentrism I take the opposite approach.



Without heliocentrism, we cannot know parallactic distances to be true ones, we have no reason to believe α Centuari is 4 lightyears away and therefore, other methods of measuring distances, including the crucial next step of Herschel (applied backwards it is a part of stellar distance, you identify "type", you think you know real size, you measure distance by apparent size), fall with this parallaxis "measure". Hence, no Distant Starlight problem. 2001, night to St Bartholomew (24.VIII.2001), I reached this conclusion. Some of above I have elaborated since and even changed my mind (my early debate material will include attempts to deny Newtonian gravitation totally and I think portal tides are too complex when concretely occurring to be certainly tied down to gravitation, while oceanic ones would be problematic to measure, so they would not necessarily prove its reality either), but angelic movers, I already knew since a somewhat extensive reading of St Thomas under a few years of solitude 1996 to early 1998.

And, this makes Geocentrism one relevant option in exegesis of Mark 10:6. While Galileo in a famous letter to a princess is prefiguring the infamous NOMa of Gould.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Dedicace of Our Saviour's
Basilica in Rome on Lateran
9.XI.2018

Distant Starlight Problem Complicated by Heliocentric Creationist

Citing John G. Hartnett:

A binary pair of black holes were observed to coalesce—the first time their existence confirmed. Their distance, determined from luminosity, is about 1.3 billion light-years. The black holes had masses of 36 M⊙ (mass of Sun) and 29 M⊙ before coalescence and 62 M⊙ after they combined. An equivalent of 3 M⊙ was radiated away as gravitational waves. There is very high confidence that the event seen at two widely separated sites must be real. The quality of the detected signals are high and were the same at each site. This is, in principle, repeatable (with other binary sources) and therefore is operational science. No fudge factors were invoked. From What impact does the detection of gravitational waves have on biblical creation? By John G. Hartnett Published: 16 February 2016 (GMT+10) http://creation.com/detection-of-gravitational-waves-and-biblical-creation

• 1) No fudge factor involved in identifying the two things coalescing into one as black holes, with the implications that usually carries of ultra high density and gravitational blackouting of light coming to close?
  
  Has simple absence of stars been ruled out?
  
  Have angels coming between stars sometimes blackouted by "black holes" and us been ruled out?
  
  Have angels making halos been ruled out for the famous "halo around black hole" phenomenon?
  
  
• 2) No fudge factor involved in determining distance to them as "about 1.3 billion light-years" and that "determined from luminosity"?
  
  Luminosity x around a black hole corresponds to red shift y is not a fudge factor?
  
  And red shift y corresponding to such and such a distance z is very definitely a fudge factor, depending ultimately on step one in "cosmic distance ladder".
  
  
• 3) No fudge factor involved in identifying original "masses of black holes" as 36 and 29 solar masses? No fudge factor involved in identifying new "mass" of new "black hole" as 62 solar masses (rather than expected 65, leaving 3 as radiation, which is of course not a fudge factor, except in guess identifying loss of gravitation with radiation)?
  
  Measuring densities depend on measuring that of the Sun, hence solar masses as unit (abbreviated M_⊙, as per article). But we have no means of directly doing that, we are extrapolating from supposed gravitational only causality of a supposed heliocentric close range of the cosmos. No angels carrying either Sun or Moon or Jupiter or anything around Earth periodically in relation to Zodiac, leaves a gravitational only causality and heliocentrism, leaves a calculation of solar mass.
  
  This is then compared to other supposedly equally gravitation only caused phenomena, in this case perhaps "how much light is caught" - which depends on how much light there would have passed on to us if there hadn't been that black hole, which is speculation.
  
  No fudge factors, seriously?
  
  
• 4) I am not really totally confident about the radiation detected being gravitational waves as opposed to other sort. But I am too little familiar with the construction of apparatus to detect where a fudge factor could be in the apparatus. However, gravitation may be a misunderstanding of what happens when things fall to the ground, either of the two main modern ways of describing it, meaning that we are not quite able to rule out that what was measured and what gravitation is supposed to be are two different things, from each other and from what gravitation really is.

Sure, the event was really an event. It was really observed.

It presumably followed natural laws really put in place by God during creation week. Or it certainly did so, since both miracles and ordinary events follow these laws.

But is the understanding of natural laws applied by the scientists coinciding with these natural laws as they really are? Or is it only coinciding partially, where a gross deviation would be grossly detectable at very close hand (like, not light years away from observer and therefore from only one angle) and therefore end the misunderstanding very quickly?

As to the famous "biblical creationist starlight-travel-time problem", Geocentrism and angelic movers take care of it, since they make what is classified as "parallax" (which is first step of cosmic distance ladder) a misclassification of what is really happening and therefore make furthest away verified distances those which can be verified by detecting angle of sunlight on a reflecting object as well as to us and object's angle seen from us (distance to sun giving the famous one distance needed to work out two more in a triangle, with at least three known values).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Tuesday after
I Lord's Day of Lent
16.II.2016

Wow, John admitted Astrophysics is Not an Operational Science ! (Quote and Link Post)

In my realm of interest there are really only two types of scientists:

1. Experimental physicists carrying out experiments in laboratories,
2. Astrophysicists (or cosmologists) who use the universe as their ‘laboratory’.

Both construct mathematical models to describe their observations. Both test their models against those observations.

However the experimentalists (type 1) can interact with their experiments in a way the astrophysicists cannot. For example, they can send in a light signal and measure the response in the system, i.e. see what comes out. But the astrophysicists (type 2) cannot interact with what they are observing in the universe. The universe is just too large to do that.

It is also too large for us to look at stars or even "solar system" from all sides. But even so, thanks very much for admission!/HGL

Why is Dark Matter everywhere in the cosmos?
A product of the Dark Side
by John G. Hartnett Published: 31 March 2015
http://creation.com/why-dark-matter-everywhere