Hi Jonathan,
By “the first half of my post,” I take it you mean this:
My first response is that I’m glad you’re being honest about what you do and do not know. What really annoys me is the kind of YEC who thinks that they know more about science than “secular scientists” because they haven’t been “brainwashed” by a science degree, and then go on to trot out a whole lot of hearsay, urban legends and other painfully bad arguments against evolution that just prove that they haven’t a clue what they’re talking about, and then question your faith and even your professional integrity if you aren’t acknowledging that Noah had dinosaurs on the Ark. But you’re clearly not in that category.
The second thing I have to say is that you don’t need to be an expert in cosmology to understand where we’re coming from. All you need is a very basic understanding of the core principles of how science actually works — in particular, that it’s built on a foundation of measurement and mathematics. (My A level physics teacher when I was at school actually described the subject as “the art of measurement.”) With that in mind, the yardstick that I use — and no doubt many other people on these forums — when assessing YEC claims is, “how well does it handle measurement and mathematics, and how well does it respect uncertainties and error bars?”
For example, the Answers in Genesis article that you cited doesn’t include any equations whatsoever. It doesn’t even include any back-of-the-envelope calculations to show that the claims it’s making are even plausible — only a couple of vague statements that “creation scientists are actively researching the problem.” But then it starts comparing the distant starlight problem to the horizon problem. The distant starlight problem, obviously, concerns distances of six thousand light years or more. The horizon problem only comes into play when you talk about billions of light years. That’s a difference in size of a factor of a million. It’s like comparing a grain of sand to a mountain. The claim that the two are even remotely the same is just patently absurd.
