Background Microwave Radiation...does it disprove the age of the earth is 4.54 billion years old

Faith & Science Conversation
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hi guys,
i have this idea that i want to open to scrutiny on this forum. It its roughly true, then this idea Is easy to argue from religious vs atheist views…but i wonder, what about YEC vs TEism?

So here goes…a leap of faith so to speak…i could very well go up in flames here as im venturing into an area i know little about (however, i like to learn new things)

From my elementary reading and understanding…which im sure will regularly have “little scientific grammatical errors and spelling mistakes” so to speak…

The discovery of background microwave radiation appears to me to demonstrate that no matter which direction we measure its wavelength from, the results show that everything in the outermost reaches of that spectrum is the same distance from us? (EDIT…not same distance exactly as that is an extrapolation…same point in time as it is measuring cooling)

If the background radiation is showing similar time/distance from the earth to outmost reaches of the measurable spectrum, and the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and science study on the planet itself tells us the earth is 4.54 billion years old…how can the earth be about 1/3 of the way along the universe’s timeline when the background microwave radiation appears to disagree with the age of the earth?

(13.7/4.54 =3.01…so its near enough to 1/3 for the purposes of this dicussion)

Do you not see a problem in time for the age of the earth in light of the above? (pardon the pun)

I think below reasonable conclusion from the above statement…

If we are 1/3 of the way along the universal timeline as proven by observational science on the ground here, and yet the background microwave radiation says we are for all intents and purposes equidistant from the outmost reaches of that spectrum, then the earth must be much closer to the origins of the big bang than 1/3 of the way out along the timeline!

The above appears to be evidence in support of the biblical model ie that the universe is timeless like God is, and the earth is relatively young…ie less than 10,000 years

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No.

We would see the same observable universe whether the Earth was 10 minutes old or 10 billion years old. The light would arrive all the same.

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can you expand on this with reference to my entire statement in the O.P.

I not sure you statement that all light would arrive at the same time addresses the problem.

First, some of the big bang is behind us in time…if we are observing from our positon, then that means some light must be a different colour…the stuff behind vs the stuff in front of us in time.

Wouldnt the claim it all arrives at the same time suggest we are the centre? Either way, surely that is problematic for 4.54 billiion year old earth in a 13.7 billion year old universe.

EDIT…refer to following image (or one like it)

image

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Matt O’Dowd, who is an actual cosmologist, would do a better job than than me at explaining.

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oh bugger, i was streaming it straight from this forum and it cutout after a few minutes. when i opened it in youtube, it went straight to an advertisment.

Now i might be wrong, but i think that the video stream from the website cutout because youtube went to an ad?

imagine that :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

im watching straight from youtube now.

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No. Your talk of distances traveled by the background radiation makes no sense. The origin of this radiation is not some distant place but everywhere. The big bang was not an explosion in some location far away. It was an expansion of space-time itself.

The only problem I see is if you think life on earth was proceeded by life elsewhere in the universe for billions of years. There was barely enough time for all that needed to happen for life to exist on the earth. We know some of the elements come from neutron star collisions. Neutron “star” remnants come from stars that live only 12 million years or less and which are fairly rare even in the Milky way. In other places such stars are practically nonexistent and you cannot expect life in such regions of the universe. (And a few places like star clusters and near the galactic center where there are many such stars, the radiation would be too high)

Wrong. the evidence that the earth is 4.54 billion years old is overwhelming. Your attempt to fabricate reasons for believing otherwise is not evidence for anything but a desperation which is frankly beyond my comprehension.

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hmmm…ok so if it makes no sense, how then do we know the distance from earth to a planet far away in the universe if not via the colour of the light coming from it?

The background microwave radiation still emits colour…but its in the infra red part of the colour spectrum. That means it has distance because light travels at measurable speed.

My thinking tells me that if say for example we use the colour red to say an object is 1 million light years away, and the background radiation is the same colour red, then it has to be streaming to us from the equivalent position in time of 1 million light years away.

Let me put my thinking another way…

If i were to throw a grenade at you and it landed at your feet and exploded. Between us at various distances are other invidudals.

Would you not agree that the intensity of the burns each individual between us gets is directly proportional to the distance they are standing from the centre of the explosion? So when you say, the measured colour arrives all at once, that is highlighly misleading. The cooling rate is very dependant on the distance from the centre of the explosion. Now, again…

If the universe is 13.7 billion years old

Geology and Radio metric dating tells us the earth is 4.54 billion years old

we cannot be at the centre of the universe…we cannot observe identical background radiation colour from all directions…because we are not at the centre of the singularity.

The above is at odds with the background microwave radiation colour spectrum measurements of cooling. The earth is not 4.54 billion years old because it cannot be 1/3 of the way along the space time equation according to the cooling rates from different directions. The colour only works if we are in the centre because cooling no matter where it is in space takes time…and the resultant light takes time to get to us. So according to the accepted geological and radio metric dating models, in opposite directions the background microwave cooling colours must be different. The fact the background microwave radiation colour is essentially the same means our place in time is far closer to the centre than 4.54 billion years…we are far younger than that.

So which is true…the colour spectrum or geoligical and radiometric dating methods that are subject to the fundamental claim of uniformitarianism (that things now are changing at the same rates today as they have always been)? I dont agree with the uniformitarianism view and this is one reason why.

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That makes sense because those things are in a place far away while the big bang was not. And BTW different methods are used for different distances. For example, Cephid variable stars are useful for a range of distances because the period of luminosity fluctuation tells us the original luminosity of the light emitted.

The CMB is the same from all directions because the big bang was everywhere in a universe which was tiny compared to what it is now.
What the frequency of the CMB tells us is about the expansion of the universe.

Have you actually studied CMB or physics at university? Or… is this all from an attitude that the Bible makes you automatically smarter and more knowledgeable than any scientists and scholars. Is that part of the appeal? Ego and superiority at the cheapest price?

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what did you study?

And your statement above does not address the cooling vs distance problem and my grenade analogy.

The fact is, despite the singularity being all at once, the distance an object is away from it realises different colours and at the very least different intensity of colour…its has to because that is what distance does.

Even if the background radiation is all around the universe, at points further from its origin, the heat intensity has to be different (because that is how heating/cooling works). Given we are not at the centre…the colour should be considerably different in different directions because the intensity is different …thats because we are not in the centre…we are 1/3 of the way out along the timeline according to geology and radiometric dating of the earth.

Another example of this is found is sound as an aircraft for example flies overhead. It appears to sound like the engine rpm is changing based on distance from ones ear. The distortion of light is still there in space because of gravity from objects along the pathway and anything else that may distort it along the way. In this case we are talking cooling obviously…but the analogies are simply additional evidence of factors that also influence observational results.

Someone is going to have to very carefully explain this, because what you are claiming is not working for me. Even when i go to NASA website and see the image of their explanation of Infra red spectrum, it still describes the colour in terms of distance.

Perhaps the only way to test this for sure would be for someone at some point in the future, when space travel allows it, to measure the background microwave radiation from another planet far enough way to make the results statistically valid?

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I got my masters in physics from the University of Utah.

Because your question is nonsensical.

There are no points further from the origin. The origin is in the past of everywhere in the universe. It is the same in every direction because the expansion is the same in all directions.

P.S. using frequency as a measure of distance is far less reliable. It depends on an average increase in the speed away from us due to expansion. But if something happens to be moving towards us at a high velocity then this method would give the wrong result. None of this applies to CMB.

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I can’t make any sense of this. There’s no disagreement between the microwave background and the age of the earth, or between the age of the universe and the age of the earth. In fact it turns out that to get a planet capable of sustaining life, the universe is just the right age and so is the earth.

“1/3 of the way along the universe’s timeline” – what does that even mean? The earth is at the end of the universe’s timeline just as the rest of the universe is. Or are you taking the measurement of the age of the earth as starting from the same point in time as the universe? It’s more like the universe began late last spring while the earth began in late June, so the formation of the earth was at about the seven-tenths mark of the universe’s present age.

You’re mixing and comparing distance intervals with time intervals, and mixing units always indicates the result will be erroneous, or as they say, “Not even wrong” because it makes no sense.

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The trouble here is that distance is not the only reason something will have a particular color – temperature is another. So if something appears red, it may be far away, or it could be right next door with a low temperature.

There’s another misconception: we are at the center, because everywhere is the center – the Big Bang happened at every point in the universe.

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hmmm how interesting…

Thus it should be kept in mind that a CMB Planck spectrum is only seen with the same temperature from all directions of the sky, if in all these directions the same expansion dynamics of the universe took place. If CMB photons arriving from different directions of the sky have seen different expansion histories, then their Planck temperatures would of course be different and anisotropic, destroying completely the Planckian character of the CMB.Remaining Problems in Interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Anyway, moving forward…

i love throwing “stuff up in the air” and seeing where it lands…uncanny how things often work out and here is where i think your dilemma of time in the TEist model now arises…

Why do you subscribe to and therefore throw the supernova dilemma at YEC given that background microwave radiation (according to your claim above) suggests that energy is everywhere all at once?

Does not this support the idea of a mature universe in that light being emitted from all of Gods visible creation in our reality was also created and the distance mature as well…thus the time/distance problem being thrown at YEC is irrelevant by your own admission above?

and then there is this…which suggests a localised creation…

If the standard big bang model is correct, that means the microwave radiation from some cool spots would travel through mostly empty space, would be dispersed by the expanding universe and would look small by the time that radiation reached Earth.

Radiation from other cool spots, however, would pass around or near massive gravity lenses. These focused spots would appear to be larger than the average cool spot.

“But you don’t see this fluctuation,” said Lieu. “There appear to be no lensing effects whatsoever. This lack of variation is a serious problem.”

The most contentious possibility is that the background radiation itself isn’t a remnant of the big bang but was created by a different process, a “local” process so close to Earth that the radiation wouldn’t go near any gravitational lenses before reaching our telescopes.

Although widely accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists as the best theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang model has come under increasingly vocal criticism from scientists concerned about inconsistencies between the theory and astronomical observations, or by concepts that have been used to “fix” the theory so it agrees with those observations. New Look At Microwave Background May Cast Doubts On Big Bang Theory

Could it be that the bible statement regarding the 6 day creation is actually supported by not only the big bang, but also best fits the complaints from naysayers about the legitimacy of it?

To me the biblical claim that our universe was created in the beginning in the first days of creation seems to best fit here. We have background microwave radiation where you claim proves energy appeared everywhere all at once, and the naysayers of the big bang suggesting that the cools spots prove a localised event.

there is of course the idea that dark matter can travel faster than the speed of light and therefore time could be accelerated even by God using science instead of being outside of its bounds?

If God used Dark matter in order to accelerate creation, then absolutely the evolutionary view of origins could be true…but God did it in 24 hours for each of the 6 days of creation.

However, it still wont fit the creation of man…the bible specifically says God physically did that and then breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. so we have a creator who used evolutionary processes to produce everything with the exception of the forming of Adam. It is very clear that a “potter forming from clay” is an appropriate and accurate analogy in the bible for the forming of Adam.

The creation of man was not done from a distance. If one is going to attempt to find biblical support for such a claim, one wont find it. To insist on such a belief is to insist on a non Christian view of origins.

food for thought.

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I have no such dilemma, and TE doesn’t start for another nine billion years after the start of the universe.

Um, no – it supports the idea that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the light has been traveling from the sources we see. The cosmic microwave radiation is something totally different than distant starlight, so there nothing “irrelevant”.
And if you’re saying that God made the light already “in transit” so it was made of photons that didn’t actually come from those stars then your god is a deceiver and I want no part of him.

Why is it that every time scientists come up with a new question YECers think that’s evidence for a 6-day Creation? That’s like thinking that every time you find a mud puddle it was made by a dog because your dog once made a mud puddle by digging in the rain.

… is pure nonsense; the idea fails to grasp that the “speed of light” isn’t something about light, it’s something about the “shape” of the universe. And even if it did, how would that “accelerate” time?
You’re grasping at things and throwing them at a wall to see if they stick, and it would class as very bad science fiction.

What does that even mean?

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Unless I am missing your point, the issue you bring up would only be a problem if Earth and the universe formed at the same time which they didn’t. Earth is about 1/3rd the age of the universe but it also only formed 2/3rds of the way into cosmic history when the universe was already ~9.2 billion years old. Thus, there is no issue with light from the most distant universe being able to reach Earth in time since, although the universe is older than Earth, Earth and the universe did not form at the same time.

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Distance does not realize different colours; that is not what distance does.

Please do your own digging to inform yourself of the basic mechanism of red shift.

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how is He deceiving you and therefore you want no part…"?

Honestly, you are just making ■■■■ up to suit whatever jumps into your head St Roymond. I am really struggling to find a rational position in what you have just stated above.

Despite your claims to the contrary, we have a binary choice…you either want salvation or, you do not!

Its a philosophical choice. When following a philosophy such as Christianity, one cannot choose to accept or deny those things which reality doesnt explain…and yet you seem to go to great lengths to find a way to discredit the very philosophy that offers eternal life!

I really find it strange that individuals are so consumed with realities…they are willing to call God a liar in order to prove to themselves they must be right despite any philosophical statement to the contrary and despite an enormous amount of historical evidence that supports the narrative.

That is an incredibly negative approach to salvation St Roymond…i would call that a fool’s errand.

A Christian chooses miracles because we cannot explain them any other way other than faith. Whether or not you wish to complain about it, we are faced with Pascals Wager. If you do not exercise faith (indeed even Childlike faith), the possibility of eternal life is not yours if it turns out to be true!

There is no middle ground here…the bible specifically says…you must choose wholly one or the other…you cannot sit in the middle (lukewarm is biblically considered to be in the negative).

As best I can figure, there is no way to theologically support the Darwinian model unless perhaps we play around with the notion of dark matter + 6 day evolutionary creation and thats a different topic.

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If God created the universe in a mature state it would mean we could see evidence of past events, such as galaxies colliding, that didn’t actually happen. It would be a false event, or in legal terms fabricating evidence. And it would be for no good reason other than tricking us into believing something that isn’t real. A God that could do that couldn’t be trusted.

BTW, this idea of creation in a mature state leads to Last Thursdayism.

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How and why would we see evidence of this? And where is the factual (vs theoretical) proof that actually occured? Wouldnt that merely suggest that they werent formed this way rather than discredit the idea? Wouldnt that just alter the way we string together the scientific interpretation. Also, irrespective of how they are formed, the meging of galaxies is an after they formed discussion…its happened later. I dont quite see the relevance of your question to the forming/creation part of the narrative?

Note the title of the following …https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/webb-telescope-finds-evidence-of-massive-galaxies-that-defy-theories-of-the-early-universe

It doesnt seem to be unusual for a need to change the accepted belief…even within secular science interpretation. Apparently it happens all the time or havent you noticed?

Have you not noticed that one of the most common complaints about religion from atheists is that it is not allowed ro change its mind. Because science interpretation is generally theory, it is not bound by the same restriction. The bible is the infallible word of an allknowing God, its theology and the narrative cannot be alterred or chsnged…i deduce from this complaint that even secularists agree that the bible if true is self revealing. A Christian cant change his mind because he is following the word of God…like the 10 commandments, its set in stone! That is the point.

Surely you had noticed this Bill? If not, it might help if you were to immerse yourself in watching some youtube debates on morality in christianity vs atheism. There are a few pretty well known ones lying around the web.

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By making light already in transit, the creator would be making it appear that the stars are billions of light years away and thus billions of years old. Creating light in transit is directly deceptive because light sources send out light so any light coming from there plainly ought to be from that source. By making light that appears to come from a source but didn’t, the creator would be deceptive.

Excrementum tauri.

YECists saying that God created light that appears to come from stars but doesn’t are the ones making God to be a liar – that would be counterfeit light just as fake money is counterfeit.

Linking fake starlight to salvation is the kind of thing a cult does; it’s a sort of Gnosticism where you have to agree with all the cult’s opinions or you’re damned – the exact thing the Roman Catholic church did for centuries (and in actuality still does, they just sugar-coat it).

What does Darwin have to do with fake starlight? Darwin made conclusions from observing Creation; fake starlight is something invented to try to support a theology based on twisting scripture to fit a modern worldview – so in terms of honesty, Darwin is superior to those YECists who hold that idea.

You really need to learn basic logic so you will recognize when you’re doing sloppy thinking as with fake starlight, and to get a handle on your attitudes that lead you to cult-like reactions.

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