What does science know about it?

Date:   8/15/2005 7:47:04 PM ( 19 y ago)

So far we've seen that we can't prove the age of the rocks or the fossils, but what about distant starlight? Doesn't it prove an old universe, since science has "proven" that the speed of light is, and always has been, constant? Are there any factors that can alter the speed of light? Here I will quote two articles from Answers In Genesis, which I highly recommend you read for yourself.

Let's start with excerpts from an AiG response to a scientific paper on the Big Bang:

The secular publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a paper(1) that questions the foundational assumptions of the Big Bang theory.

The standard assumption upon which big bang thinking is built (an assumption is a belief for which there is no proof either way) is that the universe does not have a center or an edge.  Smoller and Temple’s paper assumes the opposite, just as does Humphreys in Starlight and Time.  And just as Humphreys’ model has the universe expanding out of a white hole (a black hole running in reverse) so too does their paper! 

In their model, the event horizon (the hypothetical boundary around a black or white hole at which time slows down dramatically) is still ‘out there’, whereas Humphreys has it touching the earth during Creation Week.  So the Smoller-Temple paper is not concerned with time dilation. 

1- Smoller, J. and Temple, B, Shock-wave cosmology inside a black hole, Proceedings of the National Academy of  Sciences 100(20):11216–11218, 30 September 2003.

9 August 2002 Headlines in several newspapers around the world have publicized a paper in Nature by a team of scientists (including the famous physicist Paul Davies) who (according to these reports) claim that ‘light has been slowing down since the creation of the universe’.1

In view of the potential significance of the whole ‘light slowing down’ issue to creationists, it is worth reviewing it briefly here.

Well over a decade ago, AiG’s Creation magazine published very supportive articles concerning a theory by South Australian creationist Barry Setterfield, that the speed of light (‘c’) had slowed down or ‘decayed’ progressively since creation.

In one fell swoop, this theory, called ‘c decay’2 (CDK) had the potential to supply two profound answers vitally important for a Biblical worldview.

The distant starlight problem

One was, if stars are really well over 6000 light years away, how could light have had time to travel from them to Earth? Two logically possible answers have serious problems:

1 God created the starlight on its way: this suffers grievously from the fact that starlight also carries information about distant cosmic events. The created-in-transit theory means that the information would be ‘phony’, recording events which never happened, hence deceptive.

2 The distances are deceptive: but despite some anomalies in redshift/distance correlations (see Galaxy-Quasar ‘Connection’ Defies Explanation), it’s just not possible for all stars and galaxies to be within a 6000-light-year radius—we would all fry!

But if light were billions of times faster at the beginning, and slowed down in transit, there would be no more problem.

Since most nuclear processes are mathematically related to the speed of light, a faster ‘c’ might well mean a faster rate of radioactive decay, thus explaining much of the evidence used to justify the billions of years of geological hypothesizing. In fact, top-flight creationist researchers involved with the RATE (Radioactive Isotopes and the Age of the Earth) project have found powerful evidence of speeded-up decay in the past. CDK might offer a mechanism.
...
It is truly ironic to look back at the time when some creationists were actively putting forward CDK as a profoundly important hypothesis. The anticreationists, both the anti-theists and their compromising churchian allies, launched their attacks with glee. Skeptics around the world seldom failed to have audiences in fits of laughter at the ‘ridiculous’ notion that what they labeled as a ‘certain cornerstone of modern physics’, the alleged constancy through time of the value of c, was wrong. No matter what comes of his notion as a whole, no matter even whether c has actually changed or not, in that sense at least, thanks to Paul Davies, Setterfield (and those, like ourselves, who supported his pioneering efforts) has already had the last laugh.
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I believe we need to understand, as most physicists really do, how immensely little is yet known about such major issues. What if Humphreys is right, for instance, and the answer lies in the general relativistic distortion (by gravity) of time itself in an expanded (by God who ‘stretched out the heavens’ as Scripture says repeatedly) bounded universe? Would not the world have laughed if such notions (as time running differently under different gravity influences, for instance) had first been put forward by modern Bible-believers? They would have been seen as ad hoc inventions, but they have been experimentally tested.

This ‘secular CDK’ announcement, by one of the biggest names in physics, should really be an antidote to the confident arrogance of long-age big-bangers. So should the recent landmark TJ paper by Humphreys showing observationally that we are in fact close to the centre of a bounded universe.

People need to be aware just how abstract, shaky and prone to revision the findings of modern cosmology really are. To quote Prof. Wanser again:
‘The sad thing is that the public is so overawed by these things [big bang and long-age cosmologies], just because there is complex maths involved. They don’t realize how much philosophical speculation and imagination is injected along with the maths—these are really stories that are made up.’

All in all, it’s an exciting time to be a Genesis creationist. But then, it’s always been an exciting time to take God at His Word.

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