I suppose a YEC could fit star formation and stars being born, living, and dying over billions of years into Russell Humphreys’ time dilation cosmology where time travels faster farther from Earth than nearby due to gravity slowing down time, something that does happen. Therefore, there could be old stars in galaxies millions or billions of light-years from Earth but not in our galaxy where only ~10,000 years have elapsed. This approach is creative and I appreciate Humphreys’ attempt to present a scientific model of creation that doesn’t deny the philosophical foundations of science the way that Omphalos hypothesis does (namely, that our observations can lead us to understanding the true history of the universe). The major flaw with this time dilation cosmology of course, as I understand it, is the question of where this gravity is supposed to come from. As far as I know, the mass in our cosmic neighborhood is not any greater than the mass at the edge of the observable universe. The mass distribution in the universe is uneven on a local scale, but its pretty uniform on a cosmic scale. It also doesn’t explain why stars appear to be forming in our galaxy anyways. Humphreys time dilation model, like flood geology, is built upon assumptions that only make them preferable to mainstream-consensus theories if you are already predisposed to being a young earth creationist.
Thats correct, however, the gas seeks to then return to its former state of pressure…it doesnt stay compressed. Again, what creates the pressure vessel here where it can form a solid mass? there isnt anything there yet
Personally, i dont have a time issue with the universe. If God is timeless and exists, then space must also be timeless. I dont see any problem here. What the universe looked like prior to Genesis we are not told, we just know that the earth was formless and void, thats it.
The problem i think is in the way we rearrange genesis. It starts of by saying that in the begining God created the heavens and the earth, however that tells us nothing about the universe/multiverse. It could be that there are different layers of existence…we simply dont know.
Oh i forgot to answer one part of your post…
Death and destruction prior to the fall of mankind is unbiblical. That is a major philosophical problem for YEC when it comes to exploding stars. It suggests a world has died in order to be reborn…this is a secular evolutionary belief that is the complete opposite of Christianity. God did not kill or destroy anything to create this world…the bible clearly says he spoke everything into existence (except Adam and Eve who he physically formed).
God only killed after Adam and Eve sinned (when he made them clothes out of animal skins)
Now we can either ignore the bible destription, or accept it. Its a binary choice, there isnt anything in between despite the TEist attempts to redraw and rewrite the narrative.
Moses spoke face to face with God and he recorded what God told him. Moses was a highly educated Egyptian royalty, not a complete dumbass…one cannot claim a higly educated Egyptian didnt understand what God was describing to him!
Fair enough about the universe potentially being eternal but only Earth being 6,000-10,000 years old, though if that is the case, what about all the evidence from radiometric dating that Earth is much older? I suppose you could say that Earth is billions of years old but God created all life 6,000 years ago. If you say that, however, what about the fossils that appear millions of years old? You can try to come up with convoluted explanations to try to explain how the universe, or Earth, or life, is only 6,000 years old but that doesn’t change the fact that the mainstream-consensus view requires far fewer assumptions and proverbial epicycles to work. That is what led me to eventually leave young earth creationism myself. You have a right to your theological views, but a survey of the early church fathers and Christian thought over the centuries makes it far from obvious that a literal six-day creation a few thousand years ago is the only theologically orthodox position. It is also interesting that Jewish interpreters over the centuries also never made a big deal about a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2.
One problem there is that one way we know all those galaxies are spreading away from us is that the light from them actually does undergo time dilation – in the opposite direction. In the farthest galaxies where we have observed a nova the events last five times longer than they do when close to us, indicating that relative to Earth times there is much slower.
It does with with your breath and smoke because the surrounding air damps motion down till it matches the ambient temperature. The pressure wave in an interstellar cloud is thin enough it beats most results from a vacuum pump as a vacuum, so the ambient pressure/temperature is negligible. Once there is a portion of a gas cloud that is denser the gravitational attraction of that denser portion increases, and since it is generally in motion it begins to pull more gas to itself. If it draws enough, the denser cloud will begin to collapse under its own weight. What happens next depends on a number of conditions but when those conditions are right, the collapse continues and the result is a new star.
Interestingly the shock wave that initiates the collapse can come from an existing star passing through a gas cloud; the “bow wave” made by the star’s magnetic field and stellar wind can be enough to trigger a collapse – which since the collapse of something a significant fraction of a lightyear across takes a long time, that star will be gone once the illumination from the heat of collapse begins.
Space was created if we go with standard theology. That case can’t be made from Genesis, but overall the scripture’s theme is that if it exists, it was created; thus the line from the Creed:
“Maker of heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible” – i.e. everything in our realm, everything in God’s realm, everything we can see, and everything that we can’t see.
The problem only arises if you’re trying to make Genesis talk science. God didn’t care about the questions people three millennia later would be interested in, He was generating lessons for the people back there and then. He shapes His message in terms we can understand, which ultimately culminated in a Man we could understand; as Lewis put it
I turn instead
To the appointed place where you pursue.Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one
Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing
So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade;
Why? There’s no basis for that argument anywhere, so it’s actually quite unbiblical. Human death prior to the Fall might be unbiblical, but destruction? Eating and digesting living things is destruction; for that matter, stumbling and bruising a knee or twisting an ankle is destruction, and we are given no reason to believe that our racial parents were immune to accidents!
We can either ignore your description or accept it – that’s the binary choice here. The choice is between your insistence that the Holy Spirit was more interested in making modern YECers happy than actually talking to the people then and there and recognizing that He moved men, not machines, and that He inspired, not dictated, so that they wrote with and from what they knew in terms of worldview and literature.
The only thing we know that Moses wrote is . . . not a thing. The claim that he wrote what God showed him is actually a Jewish tradition – and one that is (and long has been) disputed by other Jewish tradition.
Where does it say that God described things to Moses? That’s actually another Jewish tradition, and is also disputed by other Jewish tradition. We know that there are various things God told Moses, but those don’t even make up the majority of the Pentateuch.
Not even Jesus tells us Moses wrote it; mostly all we know is that He referred to the Torah the same ways the second-Temple Jews did – there is no endorsement of the whole as Moses’ work.
there is a rather simple theological answer to this…
- Christs atonement - ie physical death on the cross was foretold immediately after the fall of mankind into sin.
- The consequences of sin are directly related to the difficulty that Adam would face after the fall in tending the fields…ie the ground would produce weeds and tares
- God killed an animal to clothe Adam and Eve
- Isaiah 11:6 and 65:25 describe how predators and prey will once again lay beside each other and feed together (this is clearly after redemption and restoration…not before)
In Isaiah 11:6 there is no amount of Genre claim that will change the very specific meaning of what Isaiah wrote. Its very obvious here that destruction and death are not the future that Isaiah saw in vision. We know biblically that the inhabitants and the earth are to be restored…its is universal among Christian theology and doctrine that salvation and restoration are a common goal. Its obvious what the entry of sin into this world did to it and its inhabitants. Isaiah is foretelling a return to a state of perfection that was the earth immediately after Creation!
6The wolf will live with the lamb,
and the leopard will lie down with the goat;
the calf and young lion and fatling will be together,a
and a little child will lead them.
7The cow will graze with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8The infant will play by the cobra’s den,
and the toddler will reach into the viper’s nest.
9They will neither harm nor destroy
on all My holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the sea is full of water.
BTW this passage of scripture is also referenced by Paul in Romans 15 in his discussion of taking the gospel to the gentiles…so Isaiah is clearly prophesying about the kingdom of heaven and the new heavens and new earth!
there is one final issue i need to raise…
Christ died for mankind who, in a state of sound mind and conscious choice, disobeyed and fell into sin. Salvation is only for the sinners. I struggle to conceptualise how an individual who probably didn’t have the ability to communicate in language can fall into sin and need salvation. Given the bible says that this world is corrupt, that means everything in it is affected and needs salvation and restoration. I would argue the evolutionary model of Theism is left with no choice but to accept that God is racist and will condemn those outside of the garden and who came before Adam and Eve, to destruction. I also very much doubt that God will have class separation of intellectual ability in heaven…so primative hominids without our intellectual abilities don’t make sense there.
The coldness of space is certainly a factor. We see water vapor, a gas, condense on a cold glass or even turn to ice on AC coils. H2O is polar and those qualities make the molecules stick together a bit more than some, but even then, condensation is a thing.
Due to gravitational lensing producing different path lengths for supernova, you can actually watch the same supernova multiple times in the right conditions.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-see-supernova-twice
The issues for an Omphalos-like universe are numerous.
If it disagrees with their interpretation of Genesis then it is secular, according to them.
That’s the upper limit on the possible mass of a photon. In other words, their experiments could measure really tiny masses, but they still could not measure the mass of a photon so they put an upper limit on it. If photons did have mass then they couldn’t travel at the speed of light.
The same thing that keeps this gas giant together.
For that matter, the same thing that keeps this glowing hot gas ball together.
Earlier in this thread, I quoted Jason Lisle’s comment
“Gas is very resistant to being compressed. On earth, gas always fills its container. In space, there is no container. So gas expands indefinitely.”
and as we have seen in this discussion, the idea that gas clouds in space can collapse can be very unintuitive for laypeople to accept, which plays into Lisle’s rhetoric. People’s common experience with the very air they breathe and pressurized gas aligns with what they are being told. That experience, however, is far removed from conditions of gas clouds, characterized by extreme cold, sizes measured in light years, and aggregate material measured in solar masses. So when they hear “gas”, they feel they are familiar with the concept, but in a way that is actually misleading. They are then easily persuaded that gas, without a container, would disperse.
What Lisle does not mention, is that he is more Biblical than he might prefer.
That is the idea of the firmament, the ANE conception of a rigid domed shell covering the plane of the Earth, which is of course necessary to hold everything in. From the perspective of people prior to Greek geometry and Newton’s gravity, this made intuitive sense. To them, the firmament is not the atmosphere - the breath of life is not solid, birds do not fly through solid - the firmament is the forged container for the clouds and the wind. This idea of a hard shell is preserved from the Hebrew, through the Greek LXX, and into the King James Version choice of an English word derived from “firm”. That is the clear meaning.
The Firmament of Genesis 1 is Solid but That’s Not the Point
That notion is common with Lisle’s proclamation that gas in space would disperse apart from a container. Without gravity, a firmament is necessary to keep it together. We have had at least one guest on this forum who argued that without a solid firmament, our air would escape. But just as gravity is understood to prevent the Earth’s atmosphere from being sucked away, so does gravity account for the formation of structures and stars in space.
There are three other points worth noting.
The first is that the fact that a cloud of gas is capable of forming its own gravity well is observational science, not historical science. Even if th “were you there” argument had any merit (and it doesn’t), you would not be able to use it to deny this fact. It is a straightforward consequence of phenomena and properties that are observable, testable and repeatable even by YEC standards of “observable, testable and repeatable.”
Secondly, it involves understanding some basic maths. This is the point at which many, many young earth arguments break down, because they treat even the most elementary, basic maths as irrelevant if they can resort to some nebulous, hand-waving analogy instead. Never mind that their analogy is on a completely different scale where different factors predominate and the relevance of the analogy breaks down completely, or even that their analogy is to something entirely different in every respect.
Third, the maths involved is very, very basic and elementary. Concepts such as Newton’s laws of gravity and motion, and the fact that gas has mass and is thus capable of forming its own gravity well, are things that get taught to teenagers at the stage at which science education is still compulsory in most schools.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If young earthists want to establish a case that stars cannot form from gas clouds, they MUST quote the relevant equations, they MUST put the actual numbers they are talking about into them, and they MUST show their working. Anything less is just meaningless waffle and wilful ignorance of basic stuff that everybody should know cold before even attempting to step into debates about science and faith.
One of the false intuitions I often catch myself making is thinking a vacuum pulls air in. This is false. It is the higher pressure air pushing into the area of lower pressure.
The pressure gradient in the atmosphere should give things away. The air pressure at the peak of Mt. Everest is 30% of what it is at sea level, so we have a 70% reduction in air pressure in just 9 km. If we were in a container with no gravity this pressure gradient could not exist. Also, the difference in air pressure between space and the edge of our atmosphere is miniscule, much less than the 70% difference between sea level and 9 km up.
And the physical evidence from the rocks?
And what allowed the few students I knew who left YEC behind yet remained Christians to survive in their faith.
I get a kick out of the fact that they use a calendar supposedly dating from Adam yet make no secret that they don’t regard it as literal – they regard it as a tradition passed down that they remain faithful to. Indeed Jewish thinkers have held that an uncountably ancient Earth is only fitting to the Supreme Majesty – it was a Jew who decided that the Creation must be a “myraid of a myriad of myriads”, i.e. 10,000 x 10,000 x 10,000, which comes out to a trillion, years old.
None of that has anything at all to do with destruction before the Fall – you’re reading that into the text, not out from the text.
There’s not a word in there about a “return” to anything – not in Isaiah 11 or 65. Isaiah is describing an improvement; there is no reference to anything more than that.
I’ve asked before and not gotten an answer" where is that in the text? It’s not in Genesis, and not in any of the prophets that I can recall. In fact historically that idea crept in from outside sources such as Manichaeism with its stark dualism.
Resting anything on “our intellectual abilities” is a dalliance with Gnosticism. We are not saved by intellect but by faith, and we know that faith does not require intellect – the best example is how a screaming infant can be handed to its mother and it immediately quiets; it knows its mother and trusts here and so feels safe. That’s the very same relationship we have with Christ; we know our Shepherd and trust Him and so actually are safe – and that’s not intellectual knowledge as the two dogs in the house last evening demonstrated when someone started setting off fireworks; they both dashed to each be with his particular human and there remained calm, thus demonstrating that they both know their protectors and trust us.
You really need to stop imposing a post-Enlightenment worldview onto the scriptures; it inevitably warps them.
The irony being that the basis of YEC is a set of secular beliefs.
Weird how the LaTeX format didn’t carry over in the quote . . .
I decided to go looking and found two other mass determinations for the photon, one at 1 \cdot 10^{-64}kg and one at 1 \cdot 10^{-50} – if I reasoned the way young-earth and flat-earth folks do I would claim the photon is getting heavier!
One article had a long paragraph on the problem with mass and the speed of light that made by head throb – one of those things I’ll think I understand while reading it but the moment I finish reading I couldn’t try to even explain it to myself.
trivia: that’s an actual level of comprehension. something like thirty years ago some researcher decided to check to see if the old adage that you don’t understand something unless you can explain it to someone else is true, and the matter turns out to be more complex than that because there’s the matter of integrating a concept into one’s mental structure, so it’s quite possible and even common for a person to be able to read and understand something but not be able to explain it to anyone else, or not even to one’s self, or not even to understand it once finished reading – and there’s a level in there where the ability to explain it to one’s self endures for a brief period but not long-term (though if during that brief period the concept is read again with understanding, and again after that, long-term understanding can be achieved [at least by some subjects]).
The way I understand it is that acceleration adds mass, and mass approaches infinity at the speed of light meaning you would need infinite energy to get to the speed of light. The only way to overcome this is to not have mass to begin with which is the case for the photon.
Relativistic mass (mrel) for a particle of non-zero rest mass m moving at a speed v relative to the observer:
This becomes a very real thing in particle accelerators where they are pushing particles close to the speed of light.
When did Jupiter get a mole? It’s round and evenly dark, so it probably isn’t cancerous.
One might wonder why the U.S. Congress hasn’t collapsed into its own ball of hot gas.
I remember my sister explaining to my niece that the vaccuum cleaner didn’t suck, the air pushed . . . to which the then-little-tyke responded wondering why it pulled on her cheek!
Nice image. If they’d set the scale a bit different it could have matched the mountain slope fairly well.
There was an article a while back about some research that found that Earth’s atmosphere actually extends beyond the moon; I forget how far out it was that it tapers to regular “empty” space.