[asa] Question about inflation theory

Hi, all,

I wonder if someone could advise me on the current status/drawbacks etc
concerning "inflation theory". The reason I'm asking is I'm trying to
engage in dialogue with a friend of mine who recently seems to have become a
YEC. He used to run the Christian group at the science park where I work,
but moved on. He recently sent an email letter to all the people in the
group, explaining that he had researched all this stuff on the Internet, and
had found all sorts of fascinating material at Answers In Genesis (I got the
sinking feeling when I saw that). Apparently this was prompted because of
an "exploring Christianity" course that they ran on the science park. One
of the people who came along to explore Christianity was a girl with a PhD
in molecular biology, who nonetheless declared that she simply did not
believe in evolution (I don't know why - if she'd come to the course, she
most likely wouldn't yet have been a Christian). This prompted him to
research it on the Internet and he seems to have fallen hook, line and
sinker for the AiG propaganda. (I can't criticize too harshly, because so
did I originally!)

However, after a few years harsh education at the behest of the ASA list, I
now know most of the counter arguments. I told him about the failure of
Creationists to solve the "Distant starlight" problem, and explained to him
about Supernova SN 1987 A, and explained that it either implies that God
made a stream of light with photons depicting an explosion that never
happened (because it was 169,000 years ago), or that God created a star with
an apparent age of billions of years, making God a deceiver. He seems to
have been quite receptive to this and had not been aware of it before.
However, he came back with this question:

----
What do you think about the claims that the secular big-bang model also has
'faster than light' travel problems
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v25/i4/lighttravel.asp ?
----
The AiG article describes the "horizon problem" - that the Cosmic Microwave
Background radiation is very uniform, and that information would have had to
travel faster than light to get the homogeneity of radiation.  It mentions
that "Inflationary theory", originally proposed by Alan Guth, was proposed
to explain this away, but that Inflationary theory had its own problems, and
that Guth's original theory was "wrong" in that it made predictions that
were contrary to observation.
AiG concludes that "evolutionists" have no right to criticize them for
having a "Distant starlight problem", with various theories that have big
problems, when they have their own light speed travel problem.
I have replied (to this friend of mine) that the AiG theories are fatally
flawed, in the sense that they make no testable predictions (apart from ones
that have effectively falsified them, like the Humphreys cosmology that
predicts that no stars should be visible between 6,000 light years and 2
billion light years).  Thus the AiG starlight resolution theories are akin
to saying that you had an ingenious proof of a mathematical theorem, apart
from one dodgy step where you said that two plus two was five.  By contrast,
I argued that the inflation theory was only "wrong" in the sense that you
might say Newton's second law was "wrong" in that it breaks down at speeds
where relativistic effects are significant.  As I understand it, Guth's
original model does successfully predict, for example the anisotropy
spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, but there are other
areas where its predictions fail, indicating to me that we just have an
incomplete theory, rather than one that is based on totally false logic. All
the YEC theories seem to predict is that God is a deceiver.  (e.g.  SN 1987A
at creation time was presumably a burnt out feeble white dwarf, 169,000
years on from a supernova bang that never happened apart from what God put
in the photon stream).
But if anyone more knowledgeable than me can give me some info (off list if
you wish) about the status of Inflationary theories, and just how big or
otherwise the difficulties with the theories are, I'd be grateful.
Thanks,
Iain
-- 
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After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
- Italian Proverb
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