An overview of the light travel time problem, how creationists have addressed it, and the dasha solution

Nothing is controversial about that I hope.

No.

Everyone brings up Adam. … With stars, things are different.

This is the part that I think you have a hard time defending from Scripture and a hard time showing the necessity for. The text gives no indication these things are different, and while Gen 1 is not a scientific textbook, we do nee to give careful considerations to the kind of dinstinctions we are willing to make without basis.

Again, science is not my field so I don’t know exactly what the answers to some of this is. But if you acknowledge that Adam was created a mature being, what would his body have scientifically shown? Would he have the heart of a newborn? Or the muscle structure of a newborn? etc? Obviously we can’t “do science” on Adam’s body like we can on the stars. But I can’t think of any reason why the stars would not have been created as a mature creation. And if it is a mature creation, it would have had all the hallmarks of a mature creation, including the very thing you are are talking about.

I think there are some difficult things for the YEC position. I think there are difficult things for the OEC or evolutionary positions. There is no easy answer to everything at this point.

Did he make dead people?

Not according to the text.

And by “dark holes” I mean black holes. I had dark matter and black holes in my mind and got half of each of them.

[Kevin Miller]

Mark_Smith wrote:

My point, said as succinctly as I can.

If the universe was created YEC but made mature, then the cost of that maturity is the loss of knowledge of how celestial objects like stars, black holes, quasars, galaxies, operate in a physical sense because to “do science” requires a physical connection with physically produced objects. Physical here means “by natural processes and forces”. Miraculously produced objects and effects do not reflect the operation of physical processes by definition.

So, if the universe is YEC mature, there is no astronomical science to be done, or that can be done

ScottS mentioned Adam’s blood earlier, so I want to see if you apply your logic to the shorter time frame of blood production. Could any science have been done on Adam’s blood before his bone marrow started producing blood by natural processes? Before his bone marrow produced any blood, all Adam had was miraculously produced blood. Was that blood different in any substantial way from the blood that was going to be produced naturally by bone marrow? If miraculously produced blood does NOT reflect the operation of the physical process of being produced by marrow, then is it really human blood? If both miraculously-produced blood and marrow-produced blood contain exactly the same information, then couldn’t knowledge of natural processes be derived from either, since no differences would be evident between them?

The key here I am making is Adam was made mature, let’s say. Then immediately he started living according to natural processes. His muscles worked, processing various chemicals, making blood cells, processing food, etc. You could immediately see that. So from the moment of consciousness on, his body is processing by natural reactions.

With stars, NONE of the light we get from them is natural yet. It is all created! As a scientist I have no miracle light versus naturally produced light to compare. See the difference?

You wrote ” Obviously we can’t “do science” on Adam’s body like we can on the stars.”

But my point is in a YEC Mature creation model we AREN’T able to do science on stars. Science is the study of physical processes. An atom has electrons in an excited energy state. One electron drops to a lower energy level and a photon is emitted. That light travels through space, taking time to do so. It then hits your eye or instrument and you detect it by a natural process.

With a young universe none of this is happening with light from farther away than the age of the universe. Light was made “mid-flight” and did not come from an electron dropping its energy level in an atom. Whatever you do you are NOT doing science.

Hey Mark,

Thanks for your interaction on this thread. This is an issue I haven’t studied for nearly 20 years, and back then I was just a kid in school. I think it’s fascinating to consider just how little we know about the universe, even as our knowledge continues to expand at an incredible rate (from the perspective of human history). What troubles me is the climate of scientific research which refuses to even consider these questions because they are only relevant to “creationists”. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to school for my PhD in astronomy like I had hoped, but I do appreciate the ongoing conversation.

[pvawter]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for your interaction on this thread. This is an issue I haven’t studied for nearly 20 years, and back then I was just a kid in school. I think it’s fascinating to consider just how little we know about the universe, even as our knowledge continues to expand at an incredible rate (from the perspective of human history). What troubles me is the climate of scientific research which refuses to even consider these questions because they are only relevant to “creationists”. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to school for my PhD in astronomy like I had hoped, but I do appreciate the ongoing conversation.

Thanks as well. There are many times I wish I hadn’t earned my PhD in it either. Just isn’t worth it. Christians loathe you and Secularists despise you.

[Mark_Smith]

With stars, NONE of the light we get from them is natural yet. It is all created! As a scientist I have no miracle light versus naturally produced light to compare. See the difference?

I can ask the same type of question about tree rings. God created mature trees, right? Would mature trees have tree rings? If Adam had cut down a tree and counted the rings, would he have been unable to do science on the trees since the tree rings he saw would have been miracle-produced rings rather than naturally-produced rings? Would the miracle-produced rings have given a different type of information than naturally produced rings would give?

[Mark_Smith]

With stars, NONE of the light we get from them is natural yet. It is all created! As a scientist I have no miracle light versus naturally produced light to compare. See the difference?

Mark, you do study light from the Sun, right? Is it substantially different from light from the stars (“miracle light”) in your terminology?

“However, there are is a problem with this solution [the mature creation model]. Our bodies have subtle evidence of things that occurred during our growth and maturing processes. The most obvious of these are small scars of minor injuries sustained while growing up, but there are other evidences, such as the sealing off the ends of our leg bones upon completion of the growth process. Did Adam and Eve bear in their bodies any evidence of a childhood they never experienced? Most supporters of mature creation would opine that Adam and Eve did not. This amounts to an affirmation that while Adam and Eve were created mature, they did not bear any detailed evidence of processes that never happened. Such evidence would seem to be deceptive, which would violate the character of God. The light we receive from distant astronomical bodies is not just illumination. Details of the light often bear evidence of processes. For instance, I have more than four decades of experience observing eclipsing binary stars. An eclipsing binary star is a system of two stars that orbit one another very closely with an orbital plane that lies close to our line of sight to the binary. From the distance we view close binaries, we cannot see the individual stars, so their combined light blends into what appears to be one star. However, as the two stars orbit each other, they alternately eclipse one another, causing their combined light to dim. I measure the brightness of eclipsing binaries as a function of time to obtain their light curves, a plot of how their light varies over complete cycles. We can use light curves to deduce properties of the stars involved. However, if the light of these stars were created in transit so that the light never left the stars, then we would see evidence of events (eclipses, for example) that would have never happened. This is deceptive.”

This is in a nut shell my point about the “miracled” light problem.

[Mark_Smith] “Did Adam and Eve bear in their bodies any evidence of a childhood they never experienced? Most supporters of mature creation would opine that Adam and Eve did not. This amounts to an affirmation that while Adam and Eve were created mature, they did not bear any detailed evidence of processes that never happened. Such evidence would seem to be deceptive, which would violate the character of God. “

This is in a nut shell my point about the “miracled” light problem.

I wasn’t trying to dismiss you I just am trying to get to some starting point with the problem with a Mature Creation Model in cosmology. When most people say “belly button” they are just thinking on the anatomical feature. But a belly button implies a lot of biological processes. How a child in the womb processes oxygen, waste products, get food, etc., is totally different then when they breathe through the lungs, consume food, etc. So in this sense I agree with the belly button.

What I think is most important is the time elapse evidence of cosmology. Clear evidence that time and events elapsed. Dead stars. Planetary nebula. Neutron stars. Accretion disks. Regular novas. Red giant stars. T Tauri stars. Cepheid variables. Protoplanetary disks. Active galactic nuclei. Quasars. Black holes. X-ray bursts. Gamma ray bursts. Radio bubbles around galaxies. Emission nebula. Baryonic acoustic oscillations. Interactions between galaxies. The varied densities of globular clusters due to core collapse. Intermediate sized black holes. Supermassive black holes. The relative proportions of the abundance of elements.The time for photons to escape the dense matter of stars. Cosmic microwave background radiation. Its overwhelming. All of these take time, and a lot of it.

Relativity is one pathway to account for age and time passing with a young creation. Is it perfect? No. Geology (not my field) is a real stumper imho. Relativity does little there.

So, I think an honest person reads the Bible and thinks a young creation is obvious. But an honest person looks at the universe and sees lots of clear evidence for an aged universe. I have no perfect solution. No one on Earth does either.

[AndyE]

I’m more interested in the use of relativity to get around the issue. For YEC’s like myself, does this seem legit? Theologically and exegetically? From the perspective of us on earth, we don’t have a problem with saying the sun rose, even though scientifically it doesn’t rise. Is it ok to say the heavens were created in one day, from the earth’s perspective, but scientifically, we assume some sort of general relativity that allows for deep time for the universe in actuality? I’ve never thought through the implications of that before.

Without being able to understand the mechanics of it all, I’ve more or less held to something like this theory for some time. In many ways it lines up for me somewhat with the “mature creation” view, in that my thinking was that to arrive at a mature creation on each biblical “day,” events that would naturally take immense amounts of time were sped up and compressed into the actual day (or appeared that way due to relativity), so that “natural” processes took place, but at a pace that required the miraculous.

I’m sure there are plenty of holes that could be poked into this by those who understand more than I do, but it suffices for me as an explanation that attempts to unite what we know from scripture with what we see occurring in nature. And with scripture telling us that a day is like 1000 years and 1000 years like a day, not to mention knowing God is all-powerful, then time as we know it is completely mutable by God, and the evidence left behind would fit with that.

However, I don’t particularly have an issue with the “mature creation” theory either, in that I don’t think it would be “deceptive” of God to create things in place with an apparent natural history. He told us that the creation happened in the time it did, and that he put processes in place that are now in operation. Take Mark’s example of the light from the center of a star. For the sake of argument, if we posit that creation is only ~7,000 years old, and it takes 100,000 years for the total process of light to emerge, I have no issue with God creating the entire process in place — what we are seeing now would be light that has gone through about 7% of the process. Starting 93% done (or whatever the correct number) doesn’t seem like a lie at all, again because we were told it happened.

As to studying it, science is about observing things happening in the present (including light from distant stars), even if it also is an indicator of what may have happened in the past. What’s to say that observations of light from the Sun 100 years from now will look like light now? Or light from Andromeda? Or that light that reached the earth 2000 years ago had exactly the same properties as today? Why would science be impossible simply because things may change in the future that result in new information or theories? And why would studying what is observed today be useless if it resulted from “miracled” (to use Mark’s term) events rather than natural ones? I think God could (and did) make all of it work in harmony, where the “miracled” light (or whatever) is exactly equivalent to the naturally produced version, and thus had the same properties, and is still worth studying.

Personally, I think it’s completely reasonable to both accept on faith the biblical account, while still studying phenomena that take enormous amounts of time to happen with natural processes (and understanding that length of time) , knowing that God put those things in place and set them up. Perhaps its an even greater indicator that God was behind it all, because with our studies, there’s no way those things could happen by chance in any amount of time that man can really use or even comprehend.