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

A few years ago here in Tucson Russel Humphreys visited a couple of churches for a YEC conference presentation, where I challenged him directly on his white hole cosmology.? Rather than getting bogged down in all the technical details?of relativity?with the mathematics, I brought up the issue that if the Earth was at the center of a huge gravitational well in a white hole about 6000 years ago, the motions of the stars in the Milky Way, particularly those in our general part of the Galaxy, should still show evidence of a former enormous gravitational field, but they do not at all.? All the stars are moving around the center of the Galaxy in exactly in accordance with the general gravitational field of the Galaxy, aside from modifications of stars in star clusters.? Not only that, there is no other evidence of a white hole that disappeared 6000 years ago without leaving any trace.

Russel Humphreys also states that water was the first substance God created, and all the other elements were created from water by nuclear fusion.? However, the cosmic abundances of the various elements and their isotopes contradict that, and can be well explained by the Big Bang for hydrogen, helium and lithium, and most of the other elements due to fusion in stars.

I also brought up the existence of white dwarf stars in the solar neighborhood.? White dwarfs are the burnt out cores of stars like the sun when they have exhausted their fuel supply.? For those near us the light travel time isn't an issue, but the cooling time is.? Stars like the companion to Sirius take 100s of millions of years to cool down to their observed temperatures.? To claim that God created dead stars 6000 years ago with the appearance of being millions or even billion years old is another appearance of age argument.

It might be useful to point out to YECs that based on scholarly research of Middle Eastern creation stories, the creation story in Genesis is taken from the Enuma Elish which predates it by a considerable time.? As a Christian I am happy with that, as it makes sense that God would reveal to the ancient Hebrews monotheism?using a pre-existing cultural framework.? Incidentally, at http://csharp.com/starlight.html?I have some arguments on distant starlight.

Christopher Sharp

-----Original Message-----
From: Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
To: Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu>
Cc: asa@calvin.edu <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 9:17 am
Subject: Re: [asa] Near Starlight Problem; Adam would never see all of Orion's belt?

Dear Ted,

I was wondering if the Humphreys cosmology would come up here.
Following my talk with my creationist colleague, I looked up some
pages on the Distant Starlight problem, and came upon a page from
"ChristianAnswers" that approached it from a YEC perspective. Right
till the end it did a very good job of debunking the existing ideas;
it showed clearly how c-decay doesn't work, and it explained how the
light could not have been created "in transit" as it would contain
recorded information about events that never occurred. However, it
finished by describing the Humphreys model in some detail, saying that
though it wasn't infallible, it was an exciting approach with
considerable theoretical support.

However there is no support and it was completely sunk by a former
colleague of mine, Bill Worraker, who is also a YEC, and an
accomplished amateur astronomer and a former post-doc researcher in
mathematics.

Bill's simple observation completely sinks the theory without trace.
If one examines the "light curves" from Humphreys's model, the
inevitable conclusion is that the "look back time" for anything
between 6000 LY and 2 billion LY is negative (it just falls out of the
equations and can be demonstrated on a spreadsheet that takes about 10
minutes to construct). In other words, nothing between 6000 LY and 2
billion LY is visible from the earth because the light hasn't got here
yet. Andromeda should not be visible, as a direct prediction of
Humphreys's theory.

Bill wrote and got published a letter to the AiG Technical Journal
explaining this, with accompanying graph from the spreadsheet.

The result was tragi-comic. Humphreys wrote to Bill asking him to try
and get the model to work in different formulations of the General
Relativistic equations (I think with different values of the
cosmological constant). The maths he had to work through was quite
horrendous, but he was well up to it (I'm afraid it was a bit beyond
me). He wrote up the mammoth task in a paper containing over 160
equations, rigorously wo
rked out (I can claim that my input was to
help him to typeset the LaTeX, which I had used to write up my PhD).
His conclusion was much as he had predicted - the model failed in
exactly the same way in all possible conclusions.

He sent his work off to several creationists in the field, including
Humphreys (who had initially helped him by translating a 1920's key
paper by Schwartzschild from the German).

Practically no-one read his work or took any notice of it. Humphreys
simply wrote back and told him not to be so negative; it was his job
to come up with a better model, and until he did this, he would
continue with his own - ignoring the fact that Bill had completely
busted it.

And from what you say, this theory of Humphreys is still being mooted
as a valid approach.

There are some YEC's I respect enormously, and one of those is my
former colleague Bill, who is honest enough to admit that there is
currently no solution to the distant starlight problem that works. He
treats it as an "unsolved problem".

However, all that is pretty hard to understand, GR etc, which is why I
proposed a simpler model about when the stars could be seen following
creation, as a means of getting people to think about the logical
consequences of the YEC interpretation of the bible.

Iain

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
> 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" tha
n 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 b!
 
 y 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 t!
 
 he 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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