Since YECs think the Earth is 10k years old or less, what about the rest of the universe? Doesn’t it take starlight millions of years (light years) to reach us here? Do they have any sort of “explanation” for this?
There’s all sorts of evidence the Earth is billions of years old.
A YEC however can choose from:
- God planted the evidence to test our faith
- atheist commie scientists are liars
- you’re all going to Hell for doubting the Bible
I’ve heard the explanation that god created the universe already “in motion.” i.e. the light from distant stars was already almost to earth when it was created.
Why need an explanation? Those scientists change their minds on things so often, maybe next year they will admit that they are wrong about this light-speed thing or the absurd notion that things so far away could have any bearing on Salvation here on Earth.
Or, if the speed of light is one of God’s absolutes (and the Bible is silent on this as far as I know), then He made the Universe with all that light on the way. Omphalos, y’all.
Astronomical distances do create problems for YEC. They believe the whole universe was created 6,000 years ago.
Not exactly. What we’ve measured is that stars are millions of light years away - the YEC rebuttal is that either our measurements are wrong, or that light doesn’t take millions of years to reach us. This can be a combination of:
- “The speed of light has changed over time.”
- “Distant stars are painted on a 6,000 year old sphere.”
- “God made old light.”
- “God made redshifted light.”
I won’t bother addressing these, althought I believe the first was a reasonable counterargument until people measured the change in c and found that in 6,000 years it could not have changed measurably.
In addition, there are a few arguments which bear closer scrutiny because they’re almost valid arguments:
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“Parallax can’t measure stars further than 6,000 LY; further distances are measured by redshift, but redshift is measured by distance, which is a circular argument.” Each of the first three sentences by itself is true - we can only directly measure the distance of things 4,000-5,000 LY away (although there’s a new satellite going up in 2010 which will solve this limitation); large distances (beyond our galaxy) are measured by their redshift; and redshift was originally determined with distances of known supernovae. What is untrue is that the argument is circular - Type 1a supernovae are used as measuring sticks because we can independently derive their absolute magnitude. With parallax, we can measure enough Cepheid variables to determine a period-luminosity relationship, and using that relationship, we can determine other Cepheid variables to be further than 6,000 LY - hence, with only one indirect measurement and no invocation of redshift, we can easily disprove the young Earth.
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“The observed redshift can be gravitational redshift rather than cosmological redshift.” This could be true, but unless we make an assumption that we’re surrounded by a large-scale anisotropic gravitational field (an assumption NOT born by observation), then we should see isotropic Hubble relations (which we don’t). I also believe that the mass required for such gravitational redshifting would have to be unreasonable, but I’m not quite sure.
“Light year” is a distance, not a time measurement. It takes exactly as many years for the light of a star to get the earth as it’s distance is from earth, measured in “light years”. It would only take “millions of years” for those stars that are millions of light years distant. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter, so it won’t take millions of years for any star you see in the sky to get to earth.
Your point is well taken, but poorly worded. 
Yep…I knew what I wanted to ask, but did not have the appropriate terminology.
I was remembering a guy in my now-defunct writers’ club who used to write science fiction (I use the term loosely) in which he often incorporated his YEC views. Then he’d send the stories off to magazines which would reject them, prompting him to accuse them of being against his religion.
This is, on a practical level, how all YEC’s end up rationalizing their view. If only the liberal, anti-God, anti-family, media-fueled, ACLU-funded, Democrat pedophile scientists would stop conspiring against Christians, people would see that true science supports a young Earth. :rolleyes:
If you ever end up in a protracted scientific debate with a YEC, it’s good to set the rules ahead of time: reject any paper not published in a neutral peer-review journal (the Journal of Creation Research, run by the Institute of Creation Research, does not count), for instance. Also disallow any conspiracy claims (any claim that contradictory evidence has been planted, thus enlarging the conspiracy).
Since we’re nitpicking, you probably should have said …see with the naked eye. We can see things much more distant with the aid of telescopes, including individual stars, especially if they blow up.
The first was never a reasonable argument. If light slowed down in transit, we’d be seeing distant events occurring in extreme slow motion.
But one could have argued that we were seeing things in extreme slow motion, and that supernovae (as an example) expanded at different rates in different parts of the universe. It’s a little like a person driving on the wrong side of the road arguing everyone else is driving on the wrong side of the road, but I think it’s a point worth taking the time to answer well if it were brought up. (As opposed to “God made redshifted light” which requires no more than a glib dismissal)
Since we’re nitpicking, you forgot to mention how much fun it is to watch things blow up! 
If one starts from the premise a Young Earth is necessarily true as a matter of faith, because the Bible is the work of God and therefore infallible, it’s not hard to neutralize arguments such as this. See, e.g., Answers In Genesis. Notably, there’s little attempt here to prove the Old Earth cosmology is wrong, nor that the Young Earth one is right. Rather, it’s a matter of creating the appearance of ambiguity, so faith may enter and supply the answer.
This is nitpicky, but nitpicky for a reason - you mean inerrant instead of infallible. Biblical inerrancy holds that the Bible is literally true in all matters of morality, faith, historicity, and science. Biblical infallibility holds that the Bible is literally true only on matters of morality and faith. The two words are specifically used to distinguish those two positions. Many more Christians hold to Biblical infallibility than Biblical inerrancy; furthermore Biblical inerrancy and Young Earth Creationism are not synonymous.
Some of them do…
ETA: Setterfield proposes that the speed of light was a lot faster early on in the universe’s existence and it slowed down to the current constant.
He bases this, as far as I recall, on the less than precise measurements in the past.
But once you go down that route of explanation, it’s so obvious you’re making it up as you go along, that you might as well just say it’s all blobs of paint on the sky canopy.
“Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.”
Stranger
There is no way of disproving the assertion that god created the universe 6000 years ago, giving the earth all its dinosaur and other fossils, all the geologic evidence in place, all the stars with their light already red-shifted and so on. An omnscient entity can do a lot, after all. And all this was done by god to tempt us into disbelief. Only (blind) faith can show the true way. This is a self-consistent belief and it is pointless to get someone who believes it into an argument. You can’t win. Scientific knowledge is always provisional, possibly errant, and always subject to change. If certainty is what you require, go for religion.
aptronym, as you must know, YECists consider the Bible infallible as well as inerrant. In the context of the sentence I wrote, which was intended to convey their self-described position, infallible is the word I would expect one to use, for the simple reason that it fits the sentence better. If you must have a clarification (and I wonder why), the place to put it would have been to say “the Bible is the literal, divinely-inspired word of God.” But, really, I think the original sentence was clear enough.