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

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com> wrote:
> My opinion, being formerly friendly to the YEC position and talking to YEC's, is that a YEC dismisses this problem with the "appearance of age" answer. For example, as soon as Adam is made, he appears to be fully mature- not at all like 1 day old. It is the same exact thing with the stars- of course the light from them would be here and it would look ancient, just as exactly in the Adam case. This is why science will always be frustrated. "What you see is NOT what you get."
>
> My stumper for them- a supernova explosion is observed in which it is located millions of light-years away. It is not simply an issue of starlight anymore- it is an issue of events (did they really happen or not). Did that explosion really happen? If so, the light from it would need that time to get here. If the explosion didn't really happen, then God is "showing us a movie" of something that never really happened.
>

> ...Bernie

But my point is that you don't even need something as spectacular as a
supernova millions of light-years away ( some YEC question the
assumptions behind the calculations that make the stars millions of
light years away). But nearby stars exhibit events that would in
principle be observable in 4004BC if Adam could see all the stars.
For example, the leftmost star in Orion's belt (Alnitak)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alnitak is a triple star. With three
stars in close orbit of each other there will be a gravitationally
induced wobble - a continual shift in the position of the star. Thus
the stream of photons hitting the atmosphere in Adam's day would
depict motions of the star that never happened. Thus either Adam gets
to see photons in which is encoded information of events that never
happened, or he doesn't get to see the star till he's 800 years old.
(And he never gets to see the middle star because the light only gets
here 370 years after his death at age 930).

There is very little that can be done to question positions of stars <
1000 light years away because their position can be determined by
stellar parallax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parralax#Stellar_parallax .

Iain

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Received on Fri Feb 20 18:17:47 2009