No Progress on Young Earthism's Biggest Problem: Starlight. Part 3

This is the third part of a series where I have been following young earthist attempts at solving their star light problem. Part 3 is well over due: I  published part 1 in July 2017 and part 2 in July 2018. I have to confess that I feel that refuting these clowns clever people wastes so much time and therefore my motivation is not high given that I could be doing stuff that's more interesting and constructive.

I've been using the Answers in Genesis Star Light page to follow their (lack of) progress. See the following link  for  the AiG  Star Light page.

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/

I had intended in this part to look at John Hartnett's star light "solution" which tries to build on Jason Lisle's sequential creation model of ever decreasing concentric creation circles with the Earth at the centre of this concentric sequence*. However, I've recently come across an AiG article by Danny Faulkner, Ken Ham's very tame astronomer. This article charts the (lack of) progress by young earthists on the star light question and lists the very disparate salient "solutions" to date....so I thought I had better take a look at this stock taking exercise. From Faulkner's list of "solutions" it appears that his own proposal is still among the latest and AiG favoured answers (see part 2) and it has picked up the name "Dasha".  See here: 

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/what-about-distant-starlight-models/

Faulkner tries to put the best possible complexion on the catalogue of disparate and desperate failed endeavours: Viz: Young earthists have lots of irons in the fire with more to come so perhaps one day someone will come up trumps. In his own words Faulkner concludes:

When all is said and done, this alleged problem of distant starlight does not seem as problematic for the biblical creationist. Researchers have several options that can solve this problem, so it is not a problem for a young universe. Furthermore, we want to encourage researchers currently working on these projects.

But from a big-picture standpoint, no one outside of God completely understands all the aspects of light (or time for that matter). It acts as a particle and in other instances acts as a wave, but we simply cannot test both at the same time. This dual behavior is still an underlying mystery in science that is simply accepted in practice. The more light is studied, the more questions we have, rather than answers.

Such things are similar in the theological world with the deity of Christ (fully man and fully God). Even the Trinity is a unique yet accepted mystery (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one God but three persons). And in science, there is the “triple point” of water, where at one temperature and pressure, water is solid, liquid, and gas at the same time.

Light is truly unique in its makeup and properties, and with further study perhaps we can be “enlightened” to understand this issue in more detail. Regarding the distant starlight issue, there are plenty of models that have some promising elements to solve this alleged problem, and we would leave open future models that have not been developed yet (and we would also leave open the miraculous).

But as we consider the light-travel-time problem, we frequently overlook the immensity of the creation itself. The sudden appearance of space, time, matter, and energy is a remarkable and truly miraculous event. This is something that we humans cannot comprehend at all. Compared to creation, the light-travel-time problem is not very big at all.

This is basically the kind of distracting bafflegab which seems to be effective on Faulkner's science challenged audience, an audience who are by and large so dependent on AiG's gurus. In essence Faulkner's conclusion amounts to this: We don't understand God and the Trinity and we don't understand light and light is so mysterious anyway. But never mind your young earthist science gurus have the matter in hand and have got plenty of promising (but mutually contradictory!) irons in the fire and there may be many more irons to come. And in the last resort we can scrub all that and fall back on the miraculous. Star light is not really a very big problem at all. So just keep hanging on in there! As I have remarked in part 2 I have not been very impressed by Faulkner's work. See part 2 for my reasons. His best work seems to be that of disproving flat earth theory.**

Faulkner, like other young earthists, uses the technique of distraction to redirect attention away from these failed models by claiming that young earthism's star light problem is on a par with Big Bang's horizon problem: 

The Secularists Have the Same Sort of Problem. The opposition rarely realizes that they have a starlight problem, too. In the big-bang model, there is the “Horizon Problem,” a variant of the light-travel-time problem.4 This is based on the exchange of starlight/electromagnetic radiation to make the universe a constant temperature. In the supposed big bang, the light could not have been exchanged and the universe was expected to have many variations of temperature, but this was not the case when measured. Such problems cause many to struggle with the bigbang model, and rightly so.

But Christian old earthists don't have to subscribe to Big Bang and inflationary theories which attempt to solve the horizon question: Just as an example: It is possible for an old Cosmos Christian creationist to simply postulate that the background microwave uniformity we see in the heavens is simply a consequence of a God ordained boundary condition on creation i.e. an initial dense quasi-uniformity - a consequence if the cosmos is initially randomly but densely distributed. The horizon problem doesn't exist in an old-cosmos-random-boundary-condition model and of course in this old cosmos model star light arrival isn't a problem. But for the young earthist the star light issue remains serious and as I have remarked before it is a very basic problem, one that even a naive naked eye astronomer becomes aware of when (s)he looks up and sees the Andromeda galaxy. Big bang problems apart, the young earthist star light conundrum remains outstanding even for the local universe let alone for more distant parts: How did the light from Andromeda traverse 2 million light years of space? The young earthist star light problem exists for local objects as close as Andromeda where the horizon question isn't an issue. One doesn't have to have any views on the exact nature of the "t ~ 0" creation to understand the young eathist's headache. In drawing attention to the difficulties with inflationary theory Faulkner seems to forget the old adage that two wrongs don't make a right.

Anyway I'll leave it at that for moment. In the meantime to make up for the deficiencies in young earthist thinking Ken Ham will no doubt persist with his religious bullying and continue to intimidate, misrepresent and smear all those Christians and people he disagrees with. See here, here, and here, He will also continue to convey a distorted view of  young earthist history. See here.

Postscript

There is one aspect of the young earthist's efforts that I can applaud and this is the whole rationale behind their strenuous attempts to solve their star light problem; that is, most them accept that positing an in-transit-creation of light messages transgresses creative integrity. Danny Faulkner puts it like this:

The reason many do not accept the light in transit idea is that starlight contains a tremendous amount of detailed information about stars. For instance, stars have been known to blow up into supernovas like SN 1987a. Had this merely been starlight in transit, then what we saw would not have represented a star or a supernova, but instead merely light arriving at our eye to appear as a star and then a supernova. In other words, the star that was observed before the supernova could not have come from the actual star. If the light in transit idea is correct, then the light was encoded on the way to earth to make it look like an actual star. In that case, the supernova itself did not really happen but amounted to an illusion, sort of like a movie.

Many have suggested that if this were the case, then most stars are not stars. The implication is that God would be deceptively leading us to believe they were stars, when in fact they are illusions of stars. The idea of light in transit was widely popular among creationists for some time, but now many reject this idea because it seems far too deceptive.

Footnotes:
* Hartnett's work here is somewhat of a departure: Usually young earthists clear the ground and start over again with a new solution that branches out into a completely different direction.
** But see here where Faulkner comes out on the side of establishment science regarding the distribution of quasars and the expanding universe.