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

Hi, Michael,

I think all that needs to be publicised is the original letter that
Bill sent to the TJ, which can be found on the Web at:

http://creationontheweb.com/images/pdfs/tj/j15_2/j15_2_46-47.pdf

It is simple and direct. As Bill's letter begins:

Any possible cosmological model
purporting to provide a solution to the
long-standing creationist problem of
distant starlight in a young universe
must:
1. agree with Scripture,
2. utilize sound scientific principles,
3. be internally consistent, and
4. agree with observation.

He goes on to point out that the first three points are OK, but 4 is a
problem. The graph on Figure 1 shows clearly the problem. The
lookback time is negative for anthing from 6,000 LY to 10 billion LY (
I remembered this incorrectly before as 2 billion).

I think to publish the paper would firstly put Bill in a difficult
position as an active YEC who still writes himself for TJ, and also
that it would add little more; it was a strenuous attempt to make the
theory work with different values of k, the curvature of the universe,
but none of them proved any different from the initial case. The
maths is so difficult that I doubt if even you could understand it,
Michael!

I would also encourage the more vitriolic members of the list who seem
to think it's perfectly fine to "chew out the brethren", to take note
of the courteous tone of Bill's letter. That is the sort of tone I
expect to see on a list like this, of Christians.

Regards,
Iain

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Michael Roberts
<michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> Iain cant you persuade Bill to publish it somewhere ? What about Science and
> Christian Belief or PSCF, or get ASA and CIS to put it on their website. Ask
> Jack Haas for the ASA.
>
> Please do it!!
>
> I could check the maths:):)
>
> Michael
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Iain Strachan" <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
> To: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
> Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
> Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 4:17 PM
> 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 worked 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" 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 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
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -----------
> Non timeo sed caveo
>
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