Re: [asa] Near Starlight Problem; Adam would never see all of Orion's belt?

I'm quite sure that arguments about what Adam could see in the night sky on the "day" of his creation have been made multiple times. I can't cite chapter and verse without doing some checking, but an internet search could be helpful for this type of thing.

The larger "omphalos" problem (look that up on the web to fill in the blanks if this isn't already clear) is among the most serious problems faced by a YEC position, and YECs generally admit this. Understandably, there is great reluctance to employ arguments from apparent age (vs real age), though in some cases they must still be used--e.g., Adam was not created as newborn babe, so he had to look "older" than he really was. Related questions about whether (e.g.) he had any evidence in or on his body of specific incidents from a past history he never actually had (such as the remnants of yesterday's dinner in his bowel or a slight scratch (which must not have involved any real pain, according to YEC theology) on his left arm from brushing against a tree last week are relevant here, but usually overlooked. Those are obviously similar to questions about historical events revealed by the starlight (such as a magnetic storm on the sun 5 mins before he was created, revealed by !
 the light that arrives 3 and a half minutes later).

In general, today's creationists try to answer at least some of the astronomical questions by appealing to Russell Humphreys' "white hole" cosmology as much as possible. When I attended the planetarium show at the Creation Museum 18 months ago, that model was apparently behind some of the more interesting things that astronomer Jason Lisle said, including his frank acceptance of cosmological distances larger than a few thousand light years (believe me, I was listening for any such and definitely heard it), which creationists traditionally just rejected out of hand. I will admit that I haven't made the effort to understand Humphreys' model in detail; I have forgotten too much physics to plow through some of it anyway. I leave that task to others. The new issue of PSCF, which arrived in yesterday's mail, contains an essay by physicist and philosopher of science Brian Pitts, in which there are some negative comments about Humphreys' model with (apparently) a lot more in the!
  citations, but Pitts' essay (which is mainly about how the RATE project fails to account for the dissipation of the enormous heat they need to "explain" why radioactive dating is just no good) is also just too technical for me to read anymore. A leading Christian astrophysicist, Don Page (a former student of Hawking) has been among the most pointed critics of this view (see e.g. http://www.trueorigin.org/rh_connpage1.pdf), but allegedly the various criticisms have been answered satisfactorily by Humphreys (it always seems to work out this way somehow).

That's enough for now,

Ted

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Received on Fri Feb 20 10:48:34 2009